Crunch Time

Tom nodded. Presumably, he knew all of this already. He was testing Yolanda, asking the same details over and over, to see if she’d stick to her story.

John Bertram seemed pensive. “Did Ernest say anything to you before he left?”

“Nothing special,” said Yolanda. “I was doing the dishes. Ferdinanda was out on the patio on the lower level. That’s where she likes to sit, when the weather’s nice.” Yolanda gestured impatiently. “It was so she could smoke her cigars. Ernest would”—she pressed her lips together, then composed herself—“he would usually say a few words to her before he left. You can ask her.”

“We will,” Tom promised. He waited a beat. “Now, could you tell me if you knew whether Ernest had any enemies?”

“He had his cases, but he didn’t talk much about them.”

“Do you know if one of the people he was investigating had it in for him?” Tom asked.

Yolanda looked away. Not for the first time, I thought she was hiding something, or not telling the truth. Or something.

“Yolanda?” Tom said. “What was he working on?”

“Well, it would be in his files,” said Yolanda. “They’re in his study.”

Tom raised his eyebrows. “How do you know where his files are?”

“Because he called me in there once,” Yolanda replied, her tone steely, “and asked me to bring him a sandwich.”

“Did you ever open the file drawers, say, when Ernest wasn’t home?” Tom asked, his voice deadpan.

“Oh, Tom, will you stop?” Yolanda cried. “When Ernest worked at his desk, he sometimes had one of the drawers of his file cabinet open. It was a handmade wooden cabinet, really pretty, not one of those ugly metal ones. I asked him if he made the cabinet. He said that he had. He could build anything.”

“Did you open the file drawers when Ernest wasn’t home?” Tom repeated.

Yolanda crossed her arms. “I don’t remember.”

There was a silence. Tom gave John Bertram a small nod.

“So,” said John, “do you know what he was working on?”

Yolanda looked very tired. “I know a bit. Someone was running a puppy mill, I told you. A woman named Hermie needed Ernest’s help with proving neglect or some such thing. She’s an older woman.”

“Older?”

“Midforties, or maybe fifty, I’d say, but she looks sixty. She came over once, and I noticed she’s missing a couple of fingers,” Yolanda added. “I didn’t ask her what had happened to her hand. She did tell Ferdinanda and me that her son thinks she’s crazy, with her closing-down-of-puppy-mills crusade. She said her son didn’t want to hear her stories anymore. He said she cares more about dogs than she does about him.”

“You don’t know her last name?” Tom asked.

“No.”

“Um,” I began, but Tom held up his hand. I knew someone named Hermie. Hermie Mikulski was a tall, buxom, gray-haired woman. This Hermie did have a son, and he went to the Christian Brothers High School. But I was pretty sure she had all her fingers, because she ruled the Saint Luke’s Altar Guild with two tightly clenched iron fists.

To Yolanda, Tom said, “Anything else?”

“Ernest was working on a divorce case. I think there was a lot of money involved.”

“The people getting the divorce?” Tom asked.

“I don’t know,” Yolanda said dully. “There was another thing. Ernest was looking for something for someone. I don’t know the details.”

“You have no idea what he was looking for?”

“No. And I don’t know who the client was.” She glanced at the clock, which read ten to five. “I need to be leaving soon, to go get Ferdinanda.”

“Where is she again?” asked John Bertram.

“The Roman Catholic church. Our Lady of the Mountains. She’s at the monsignor’s house. She didn’t want to stay at Ernest’s place today, because he hadn’t come home, and she, well, she said . . .”

“She said what?” Tom asked sharply.

Yolanda rubbed her forehead. “She said Ernest looked very bad to her yesterday morning.”

“You already said that.” Tom prompted her. “Are you talking about health or something else?”

“Ferdinanda says these things sometimes. She believes in Santeria.” I wondered how Tom was going to explain Cuban voodoo to his captain. Well, the captain could listen to the tape.

Tom asked, “Was there anything you saw that would make you think Ernest looked particularly bad?”

“His house frightened me,” Yolanda said.

“Yolanda!” Tom’s voice made me jump. “What scared you about Ernest’s house? Were you worried he’d discover the money under your mattress?”

Yolanda pressed her clutch of tissues to her eyes. When Tom tried to ask her another question, she just shook her head.

I said to Tom, “May I see you in the living room for a moment, please?”

Tom turned off the recorder. “Let’s take a break.”

Once Tom and I were standing in the living room, I asked, “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing to my friend?”

“Since she won’t go down to the sheriff’s department, I’m interrogating her here.”

“Yeah, well, they’ve discovered that torture doesn’t work, you know.”

Tom did not smile. “You stick to catering, and I’ll stick to interrogation techniques that I have used for years, and that do in fact yield results.”

“Why are you being so mean?”

“Mean? When I’m mean, Miss G., you’ll know. At the moment, I want Yolanda to tell us about Humberto Captain. His father, Roberto Captain, brought Ferdinanda, her brother, and the brother’s wife over on a boat from Cuba. The brother and his wife were Yolanda’s grandparents.”

“The Captains?”

“Roberto Captain was a good guy. His son, Humberto? Not so much.”

I groaned. “This is one of the people Yolanda hangs out with, that you don’t like?”

“This is the person,” Tom said. “Listen, I don’t for one second believe that Yolanda asked Ernest if she and her aunt could stay at his house just so they could clean and cook for him. I think the real reason she asked Ernest if they could bunk in with him was so that she could be paid by Humberto Captain to spy.”

“To spy on Ernest? Why? And what kind of guy has Captain for a last name?”

“Roberto’s original last name was something Spanish, but he legally changed it to Captain, because that’s what everyone called him, since he was the skipper of a boat that made frequent trips bringing exiles over from Cuba. Roberto, El Capitan, became Roberto Captain. Roberto’s dead now, but he ferried folks like Ferdinanda’s family to Miami, after they became disillusioned with Castro.” Tom tilted his head. “You don’t remember Humberto Captain’s picture in the Mountain Journal?”

“Remind me.”

“The paper did one of those quizzes, ‘Can you tell whose view this is?’ The first ten people who guessed right got five bucks. The next week, the paper would run a picture of the owner, sometimes with other people, in front of the view. One of those was the view from Humberto’s big living room. Then the next week, the picture was of Humberto, with his arm around a young woman, in front of the view.”

“Wait. What does Humberto look like?”

“Like a guy who stepped out of a casting call for Miami Vice. He’s in his fifties and is shaped like a Brazil nut, narrow at the ends and wide in the middle. He has orangey skin that looks as if he takes daily naps in a tanning bed. Is this sounding familiar?”

“Yes. I’ve seen him at parties I’ve done.” Humberto Captain’s shock of combed-back salt-and-pepper hair went well with the beige, yellow, and light blue tropical suits he wore—despite all the snow and mud we lived with in Aspen Meadow. The newspaper picture of him had made me shudder, and maybe that was why I’d blocked the