by K C Ames
“It’s a lot of cash to be throwing around over something that seems trivial,” Benny said.
“Especially in his line of work. Stories of out-of-control reality TV stars make for good ratings, like that woman who flipped that table over in a restaurant a few years ago.”
Even though both of them didn’t watch that show, they both remembered the table-flipping incident because the producers used the clip over and over to promote the show.
“What’s he trying to hide?” Dana wondered.
“He has a dead cast member. One that appears to have been killed on set. You worked PR, he’s probably trying to salvage the show and his reputation.”
“These kinds of NDAs with this kind of hush money being tossed around town go beyond a regular PR campaign. Something happened on that island and now Russ is trying to cover it up.”
“That’s a lot of jumping to conclusions,” Benny warned.
Dana shrugged, but she didn’t reply. She knew it was the truth. Maybe not in Costa Rica, but in the States, companies didn’t offer big-money NDAs unless there was something they wanted hushed up tight, and Dana would find out what Russ Donnelly wanted to hide so badly that he was willing to spend all that money.
“I know what you’re thinking, Dana,” Benny said, looking at her.
She smiled sheepishly. They were getting to know each other so well.
“What?”
“When you get all quiet like this, it usually means you will do something you shouldn’t be doing. Dangerous stuff.”
“Base jumping is dangerous. I’m not doing that, but I will try to find out what happened on the island and to Rose Budd.”
Twenty-One
The next morning, Dana was at the bookstore slash cafe. It was slow, as it usually got by ten o’clock a.m.
She kept looking out the window towards Big Mike’s Surf and Stuff, which was located next door.
The last time she had talked with Big Mike, he told her how he had been hired as a consultant for the reality show. He had boarded Don Gerónimo’s boat with the rest of the production crew and headed out to Santa Rita Island.
She assumed that since the production had come to a screeching halt because of Detective Picado’s investigation, he would be back in town and in his store on that morning. She wanted to talk to him.
Carlitos Moreno, who worked for Big Mike, always opened the store at nine o’clock a.m. Big Mike usually arrived between nine thirty to ten o’clock.
At 9:46 a.m., she heard his car whirring by. Dana looked out the window to confirm it was Big Mike’s orange 1970s Volkswagen microbus, which it was.
She wanted to bolt outside and run over to intercept him, but figured she better check her craziness a bit and give him a few minutes to park, walk to his shop, and get settled in.
She went back into her office to bide time. After about five minutes of tapping her fingers on the desk, she figured that was more than enough time for Big Mike to get settled in, so she headed over next door.
Big Mike was talking with Carlitos when Dana walked in. “Hi, Big Mike.”
He turned around and smiled. “Oh, hey neighbor.”
“Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure thing, give me a sec,” he replied. He turned his attention back to Carlitos. “Okay, mate, finish up with the count. I’ll be right back.” He turned back to Dana. “Let’s step into my humble abode,” Big Mike said, pointing towards his back office.
Just like her shop, Big Mike’s shop wasn’t one of the original ark boats that were brought in from the water. Each of the merchant shop cottages had the same layouts, so Dana’s store and Big Mike’s store looked similar. Just like at her place, Big Mike had a private office in the back. Dana followed him there.
Big Mike was in his forties, but he was pushing twenty-one in his mind and in the way he dressed and talked.
As usual, he wore surfboard shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. Come to think of it, Dana thought, she had never seen him wearing anything but shorts in the months since she had moved to town. The thought made her smile. He was such a free-spirited and kind man.
The only variance in his attire was the print on the T-shirt. On that day, he was wearing one of his custom shirts. Big Mike had an amazing drawing talent. Dana was certain he could have become a professional cartoonist had he not chosen the beach bum lifestyle. But then again, she couldn’t imagine Big Mike in school or working for anyone but himself.
“Is that a new print?” Dana asked as she sat down. She was eager to ask him about the show, but figured she’d be polite with a little chitchatting first.
She pointed at his T-shirt. It was the side view of a cool-looking sunglass-wearing toucan with a surfboard under its wing. The background was the red, white, and blue colors of the Costa Rican flag.
“Yeah, you like it?”
“I do.”
“The tricky part was to draw the bird to not look like Toucan Sam so Kellogg can’t sue me,” Big Mike said, laughing. He had a wheezing laugh that reminded Dana of Muttley, the snickering dog from the Hanna-Barbera cartoons. But it was courtesy of his pack-a-day Delta cigarette addiction.
“Your bird is cooler than Sam, that’s for sure,” Dana said.
Big Mike’s desk was made from old surfboards, and he sat on a large blue exercise ball, which he bounced on like a kid.
She sat on a papasan chair across Big Mike’s desk. The large, bowl-shaped chair seemed an odd choice for an office chair, but she smiled because that was Big Mike... odd.
“What’s up, D?”
“I was curious about what happened on the island with Rose Budd and the police shutting down the production.”
Big Mike fidgeted on the big bouncy ball and he looked around nervously.
“The producers made me sign an NDA agreement when they hired me.”
“I’m familiar with their NDAs. Russ Donnelly gave me one yesterday that he wants me to sign.”
“Huh? Why is trying to get you to sign one? He hasn’t hired you for anything, has he?”
“No. But I witnessed some appalling behavior from Rose Budd and her boyfriend. So I guess he’s worried that I’m going to sell it to TMZ or something.”
Big Mike seemed puzzled. “I can believe that you witnessed some bad behavior from Rose Budd. Not to talk ill of the dead, but boy, she was a mess, poor girl. But from her boyfriend... I can’t believe it. TJ is a nice guy. A real straight shooter.”
Dana felt like she had sunk in about ten feet deeper into the papasan chair, and her look must have showed her surprise, because Big Mike asked her, “What, girl?” It reminded her that she had a terrible poker face, so it was good she didn’t like to gamble.
“I was talking about Robbie Gibbons. That’s who she was having dinner and a nasty fight with. And she said it was her boyfriend.”
Big Mike wrinkled his nose and shrugged.
“I take it that’s news to you?”
“Yeah, well, she and TJ were all lovey-dovey, man. Sure, they were an odd couple—beauty and the schlub—but those two were in love.”
Dana wasn’t expecting to hear that from Big Mike, but perhaps he was reading into things. It’s not like he really knew them, and he probably only saw them a handful of times during the week he worked for the production company before they shut it down, so how much could Big Mike really know about Rose and TJ?
“How can you be so sure?”
“I got tight with TJ, him being part of the crew and all, and that’s where I was relegated to crew status. They kept the crew and cast separate. The producers wanted the cast to carry on like the crew didn’t exist, since that made for better television. TJ would have been sent packing if Russ had found out about them two, so although they didn’t hide it from the blue-collar crewmembers, they hid it from the producers, especially from Russ.”
“How does Robbie Gibbons fit into all this, then?”
“TJ told me all about that. They manufactured it. Reality, my foot. Russ Donnel
ly is behind everything, pulling strings. He chooses the cast members. He decided who will last the longest and which cast member will be the star, the villain—all of that reality television stuff is all made up.”
Dana didn’t doubt that reality TV shows were baloney for a New York minute. And now she thought what TJ said the night before was the truth, not what he said the following morning.
It now made sense to her. After all, that was exactly what TJ had told her and Benny the other night on the beach. Then he showed up the next morning to walk back everything he said about him and Rose. Then Russ Donnelly showed up with his NDA.
He had seemed sincere in his heartbreak and sadness on that night, and the truth usually came out when a person was drunk—at least, some version of the truth.
It seemed plausible to Dana that Russ Donnelly forced TJ to lie, but why?
Twenty-Two
Dana walked out of Big Mike’s store and started to walk back towards her bookstore slash cafe with her mind racing a mile a minute. What TJ had told her when he was drunk was the truth, and Russ Donnelly seemed determined to keep it a secret.
She had been so lost in thought that she didn’t see that there was a person walking towards her until she bumped into him.
“Excuse me,” she said before looking up and even knowing whom she had crashed into. She looked up, and it was Detective Picado. As usual, a scowl was present on his face.
“What were you doing at Mr. Pavlopoulos’s store?” he asked, referring to Big Mike by his actual surname. He sounded angry.
Dana was taken aback by the question. How dare he, she thought.
“Excuse me?” This time she said it feeling insulted, not as an apology. He looked at her. “He’s my retail neighbor, friend, and surfing teacher. We chat all the time,” Dana replied, trying hard not to control her temper while Picado eyed her suspiciously.
“You have an uncanny ability to stick your nose into official police investigations. Getting into the middle of situations that do not concern you. I see you coming out of Mr. Pavlopoulos’s store, him being a key witness, and I have to wonder if you’re up to your old tricks again.”
“You have some nerve,” Dana said, and she stormed off.
She had her back to him as she made her way back to her shop, but she heard him talking towards her. “Stay away from my investigation or I’ll have you detained for obstruction of justice.” Dana stopped and turned to face Picado, who had said it loud enough for Big Mike to come out from his store just when she was about to go off on Picado.
“What’s going on, man?”
“Same thing goes for you, Mr. Pavlopoulos. Don’t discuss anything about this investigation with anyone,” Picado turned to give Dana the stink eye, then he turned his attention back at Big Mike, “or I’ll detain you for obstructing. Trust me. Neither of you will like Sebastián Prison.”
Big Mike recoiled. Dana wasn’t sure if it was from the threat or from being called Mr. Pavlopoulos, which he hated. He was just Big Mike.
It was Picado’s turn to storm off, leaving Big Mike and Dana standing there, looking confused.
“What just happened?” Big Mike asked.
“He’s a blowhard, that’s all.”
He scratched his long, stringy hair and shrugged, then he went back into his shop. Dana did the same.
Dana’s encounter with Detective Picado left her shaken up, as usual, for the rest of the day. She was drinking coffee in her office when Mindy came in. “Heard the hubbub out there with Detective Picado,” she said sheepishly.
“He’s such a jerk.”
“He is, but you better listen to him, honey. That man has it out for you since you got here with that ugly mess that went down during your inheritance fight and your cousin’s murder. He’ll lock you up on a three-month prevention hold just to get his revenge on you making him look bad during that investigation.”
Dana sat back in her chair and sighed. She knew Mindy was right, and she held her hands up in surrender. “I know, I know. Benny tells me the same thing.” She shouldn’t be so stubborn, but she couldn’t help it because her mom had told her she was since she was seven years old.
Mindy smiled. “It’s because we care for you and don’t want to see you get thrown in jail over something that really doesn’t concern you, anyway.”
Mindy smiled and headed back to the front lines to prepare for the mid-afternoon caffeine rush.
Dana sipped on her coffee. It was nice to have friends who cared for her, but as a former journalist, she had a lot of experience going up against intimidating people—far more intimidating than Picado—so he didn’t scare her much. He just made her mad.
But deep inside, she knew Benny and Mindy were right. It wasn’t her business to get into. She moved to Mariposa Beach to slow down, so she should do just that and live a more chilled life. She had enough to keep her busy with her bookstore to stick her nose where it didn’t belong.
She had decided. She was done playing junior detective.
She had just processed that thought when she glanced at her computer monitor and the security video feed and saw Big Mike running into her store, frazzled.
She exited her office as she heard Big Mike calling her name loudly.
“What’s going on?” Dana asked. Mindy, Leo, Amalfi, and several customers were all staring at the commotion.
“They arrested TJ.”
Twenty-Three
Dana had always been a big-city girl. She was born in San Francisco. Like many San Francisco Baby Boomers, her parents fled down to the peninsula, where she grew up in San Mateo. And like many children of these San Franciscans in self-exile, she felt the urge to move back to the city her parents had left for the quieter suburbs.
After she was done with her college education, she was no different. She moved back to the city of her birth.
She had spent her adult life living in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where people kept to themselves, their eyes glued to their smartphones. All she knew about small-town life was what she had read about in books like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. Like many San Francisco residents, she would escape the city up to the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range or camped out in the National Forests near the California–Oregon border. But she had never experienced small-town living, and she was amazed how similar things could be in the fictional small town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota in the Sinclair Lewis book to the very real Mariposa Beach in Costa Rica.
It didn’t matter that these were two very different countries with their own cultures. A small town and its loose-lipped people were similar, and word spread fast like a wildfire.
The news about TJ’s arrest wasn’t any different. Just about everyone seemed to have their take on it.
“He was stalking that poor girl,” Doña Amada, de facto leader of the Gossip Brigade, had told Dana when she stopped for coffee and a lox bagel.
“No, no, he made a move on her on the island, she turned him down, he got furious, and killed her in a blind rage,” fellow gossip brigadier, Doña Evelyn, corrected her.
“Have they taken a good look at that truck driver that was making deliveries to the restaurant?” Gerónimo Díaz asked.
“The one Dana saw on that morning she found the body?” Dana heard someone else pipe in. Dana didn’t even know who that was or how they knew she had seen that delivery driver with Julio at the Qué Vista Restaurant.
“Yes, him, he’s from Nicaragua, you know,” Gerónimo Díaz replied ominously.
“Oh, the Nicaraguan boogeyman. You’re awful, Gerónimo. My grandfather was from Rivas,” Álvaro López, an artist that owned an art gallery a few doors down from the bookstore slash cafe responded, sounding upset.
“Okay, everyone, we don’t know anything for sure, and all this speculating isn’t doing any good, so let’s not get too carried away with our imagination,” Mindy said loudly.
Dana was glad she was trying to nip the innuendo in the bud.
“Besides, I heard it was just an acc
ident. He didn’t mean to kill her,” Doña Chilla added, as if Mindy had said nothing.
An exasperated Mindy rolled her eyes and sighed loudly.
“What about innocent until proven guilty?” Dana said out loud to everyone that was going on about TJ killing Rose Budd.
There was silence for a moment, then a cackle of laughter.
“Oh, you idealistic Americans. In this country you’re guilty until proven innocent.” Doña Amada brayed with laughter.
Dana had gotten to know all about the differences in the judicial systems between the United States and Costa Rica.
She knew that in Costa Rica, if you were arrested, you did not have the presumption of innocence, and while it wasn’t exactly “guilty until proven innocent” like Doña Amada claimed, the judicial system in Costa Rica was definitely set up to favor the prosecution, wherein in the States, the burden of proving guilt was on the prosecutor.
Another big difference in the two justice systems was that in Costa Rica, there was no bond system unless the court allowed it—which they rarely did—and that was done on a case-by-case basis, and it was solely up to the court’s discretion. And in Costa Rica, the fiscal—the prosecutor—could request preventive detention while they built a case against you, which meant they could stick you in jail without officially charging you with a crime for months and even up to a year, even longer if the court allowed it. Once in jail under preventive detention, you couldn’t bond out using a third-party bail bondsman like you could in the United States. You were stuck in jail. And it wasn’t pretty.
Dana had learned that had happened to TJ: they arrested him on suspicion of killing Rose Budd, and since he was an American with a passport, they deemed him a flight risk, so he was placed under preventive detention.