that she was going to have to reexamine her whole attitude about tea.
Navarro pushed his chair away from the table and crossed his legs. “I don’t have any real proof, you understand. Common wisdom-now there’s an oxymoron for you-has it that Marilyn’s husband killed her because of her affair with Aaron, but I’ve always felt that poor Mr. Schuler was set up by that young man, and that the young man himself was Marilyn’s killer.”
Gail recoiled. “Why would he do that?”
Navarro’s face twitched. It looked like equal parts smile and wince. “I hope you have time for a long story,” he said.
As Navarro unfolded his tale, it seemed obvious to Gail that he’d been thinking a lot about this over his years in exile.
“Sometimes I found myself in the position of shuttling money,” he explained. “I was never entirely sure what it was for, but you get a feel for these things over time. The amounts were always large. Tens of thousands of dollars. And of course nine times out of ten, the money was flowing toward Mr. Bell’s operation. Rarely away from it.”
Gail detected subtext. “Except sometimes?”
He stabbed a finger toward her nose. “Exactly. Except sometimes. Like, for example, the three days before my life as I knew it was forced to end. We handled an outgoing payment of two hundred fifty thousand dollars.”
Gail gasped. “Yowsers.”
Navarro smiled. “My thoughts exactly. We handled the payment in two parts, about a week apart. Half one week and half the second week.” His eyes narrowed. “So, Ms. Private Investigator, what does that sound like to you?”
“Half on contract and half on delivery.”
Navarro gave a conciliatory bow. “I left out a detail. There was no delivery of goods. Just a payment followed by another payment.”
Something clicked in Gail’s head. “A hit?”
He jabbed his finger in the air again. “That’s what I concluded. It’s the only thing that made sense. For that amount of money, it’s somebody damned important. And it certainly makes sense to have a completion bonus. There’s also the fact of the dead drop. I forgot to mention that, too. We weren’t supposed to deliver either payment to a person. Instead, there was a dead drop at a rest stop along the Jersey Turnpike. Lots of money, anonymous recipient.”
Gail found herself nodding. “Definitely a hit.”
“Right. Murder. Cold blood and all that. Be honest with you, that was way beyond anything that I signed up for. Scared the bejesus out of me. It’s one thing to risk disbarment and maybe a year or three in prison, but now we were talking big time.”
“Did you say no?”
He gave her a don’t-be-an-idiot look. “The ‘say no’ ship had sailed long before then,” he said. “I was in far too deep to play that kind of game. So I swallowed hard and made the first payment. Then, on my way back, about three miles from making the drop, I got pulled over for speeding. Seventy-eight in a sixty-five. Funny how some details just stick with you, isn’t it?”
Gail stole this thunder: “That created a record,” she said.
“It did exactly that. It was just a routine traffic stop, I know. Nobody’s going to think twice. But then if someone gets hit, they’re going to start checking records.”
That’s exactly what they’d do, Gail thought. After a murder, one of the first investigative tasks is to check moving violations in the area. “Did you have a criminal record?”
“No, but I had a high profile. When you’re a mobster’s lawyer, people notice. You’d be surprised how many people are jealous, in fact. So that next week, I was a basket case. I scoured newspapers and the Internet looking for something about a murder, but I never saw it. Then I got the order to make the second drop.”
“But no one was ever killed?”
“Not that I knew of. Still, I was spooked. I didn’t want any more blood on my hands, so I sent Marilyn Schuler to make the delivery. She wouldn’t do it unless I told her what was in the package, and when I did tell her, she sort of freaked out. She didn’t know what it was for, of course, but it was still a lot of cash. She insisted that she’d only go if I let her boyfriend come along to protect her.”
“That would be Aaron Hastings?”
“Right.” He leaned forward. “Only the money never arrived. Marilyn and Aaron disappeared. I didn’t realize that things didn’t happen until over a day later when I got word from Arthur Guinn that there was one very pissed off, very bad man who wanted his money.” Navarro closed his eyes and cocked his head, as if the memory had become painful.
“You didn’t tell him about Marilyn?” Gail said.
He shook his head. “Looking back on it, it’s hard to believe I was that stupid; but telling him would mean confessing that I had given the job to my assistant, and God only knows what would have come from that.” He sat straight again and spread his arms wide. “Besides, I didn’t think she could be so stupid as to steal from the Slaters. Then she turns up dead, and the money and Aaron are both missing. Only nobody knows about him. Just like that”-he snapped his fingers-“I’ve got the mob and this ‘very bad man’ looking for me, and I’ve got nothing to give them. So I disappeared.”
Gail scowled as she listened. “You’re a rich guy. Why didn’t you just make up the difference out of your own pocket?”
“Because I was convinced that I was dealing with a professional killer. I’m still convinced that I was dealing with a professional killer. Every scenario I ran through my head ended up with me dead. Especially because I didn’t come clean with what happened in my very first phone call from Arthur.”
“So you panicked,” Gail summarized.
Navarro shrugged. “I prefer to think that I reacted the only way that made sense at the time.”
Gail took a moment to catch her notes up and then to review what she’d written.
“There’s more,” Navarro said, interrupting her thoughts.
He had her attention.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think through all of this,” he said. “Thank God for the Internet. The amount of the payment I shuffled gnawed at me like an ulcer. That kind of money means something way bigger than any mob hit. That’s special money, requiring the services of a special killer. Expertise is expensive in any line of work, right?”
Gail nodded. “So the Slaters wanted someone dead in a big way.”
Navarro looked horrified. “The Slaters? Oh, lord no, this kind of hit wasn’t ordered by the Slaters. They were merely the middlemen. Someone wants someone else dead, you go to your local crime family and you work out a brokered deal. I laundered the money that they had already laundered once. Presumably, the contractor on the other end of the transaction laundered it a couple more times to make it damn near untraceable.”
Gail was lost. “So why are the Slaters even looking for you?”
“Well, they had to cover the loss, didn’t they? They had to make good on the transaction, or else the very bad man would have an issue to settle with them, and no one needs that kind of heartache. But to cover their hind parts, they’d want to make sure that every stakeholder knew that I’d fumbled the ball.”
Pieces still were not fitting for Gail.
“That’s your government connection,” Navarro said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. When she didn’t get it, he sort of growled in frustration. “The government was the customer.”
A glimmer of comprehension now.
“Well, not the government, per se,” Navarro corrected himself, making a twitchy wave-off gesture. “More like a powerful individual within the government.”
Gail found herself leaning forward in her chair.
“Remember when I said that when they asked for the second payment, no one had been killed? Well, I realized that I wasn’t looking at a big enough picture. I’d been assuming that the hit would happen near the site of the money drop. Then I realized that for that kind of money it could have been anywhere. That’s when it got scary.”
