that old Dad was running what looks to be a money Laundromat out of his construction business.”
“The plot thickens,” said Morales. “These guys were skimming, and the Colombians whacked them.”
Paz shook his head vigorously. “No, no, try to follow me here, Tito, because it’s important. The Colombians are involved, but not in the two murders. It’s the Indian who’s doing the murders. The Colombians are trying to nail the Indian.”
“How can you know that?”
“I don’t know it, Tito. It’s my operating theory. It’s part of my flair, why you guys wanted me involved. The Indian is part of the structure of weirdness, and Colombian mobsters are not. They’re probably as confused as Finnegan.”
“What? Jimmy, give me a break! You tossed out my ninja assassin, and now you tell me some little guy with a Three Stooges haircut got in there and did all that damage? How do you figure that?”
“If I tell you, you’ll say I’m nuts.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“The little guy knows how to turn himself into a four-hundred-pound jaguar and back again.”
Morales stared at Paz, laughed out loud, stared again when Paz didn’t join in the laugh, saw something in Paz’s eyes he had not seen before, something deeply disturbing, and said, “That’s nuts.”
“See? I told you you’d say that,” said Paz with a laugh. “Relax, I’m just jerking your chain. But I had you for a second there, didn’t I?”
“Fuck you, Paz,” said Morales glumly. “So why are the bad guys after the Indian? And how did he do the murders? Or was that a joke, too?”
“I don’t know how he did it yet, but that’s the way it has to be. Tito, I have seen, with my own two eyes, a man with a certain kind of training walk away from a whole SWAT team and out of a locked police car containing two veteran police officers, me being one of them. This Indian could be that kind of guy, you understand what I’m telling you?”
“Deeply weird,” said Morales.
“You got it, and the truth will emerge in its own good time. Meanwhile, we need to do two things right away. You have to go by the Florida Defenders of the Environment and find out what local group uses a logo like that and get whatever information they have on it, personnel, activities, location. And you have to drop me off at my mom’s place. I need to talk to her.”
“We’re supposed to stick together, Jimmy.”
“Yeah, but I’m with my mother,” Paz replied. “How much trouble can I get into? Come on, Tito, we got to play catch-up. Those chuteros could wipe out that whole organization and then we’ll never find the Indian.”
Grumbling, Morales put the car in gear and headed toward Eighth Street and the restaurant. “They could take out the Indian, too,” he said. “Then we could all go home.”
“I don’t think so, man. I don’t think it’s going to be so easy to take out the Indian, not for them and not for us. That’s what I need to talk to my mom about.”
Fourteen
On Sunday night Nigel Cooksey told Rupert Zenger that there were Colombian gangsters in town with an interest in the Forest Planet Alliance. By Monday afternoon Rupert was gone, off to an important conference in Bhutan about the mountain forests of that nation, taking Luna Ehrenhaft with him and leaving Scotty in charge of the property, and the name of his attorney with Cooksey.
“Gosh, that was fast, just like you said,” observed Jenny at the gate of La Casita as the airport limo pulled away. “How come he took Luna?”
“Oh, Rupert needs a little entourage. And Luna, despite her bravado, has nearly as strong a sense of self- preservation as Rupert.”
“You’re kidding! Poor Scotty! No wonder he’s been moping.”
“Yes, but moping has always been part of Scotty’s demeanor. I think Luna was growing tired of it. She has something of an instinct for the alpha male.” He drew the gate closed and barred it. “He asked me to come as well, you know.”
“Really? Why didn’t you?”
“I prefer it here. Bhutan is utterly fascinating I’m sure, but I feel obliged to stay with my collections and… things. Nor am I particularly fearful of gangsters.”
“Do you really think they’ll come?”
“Oh, they’re here already.”
Jenny couldn’t help a quick scan of the surroundings. “What do you mean, ‘here already’?”
“Well, as you must know, Rupert’s tower provides the only view of the road over all our foliage, and while I was up there last night discussing this and that with him I happened to notice a large black van cruising by, more slowly than the empty road would require, and then it came by again and stopped briefly. We’re fortunate that there’s no road verge wide enough to park such a machine on Ingraham across from this house, but in any case, the van returned about an hour ago and is now parked just beyond the curve of the road.”
“Are you going to call the cops?”
“I think not. After all, what would we tell them? That an illegal alien bush Indian suspect in two murders intimated that, via mystic powers, he has sensed danger from a group of men innocently parked by the side of a public road? No, I believe we’re on our own for the present. However, they’re likely to wait until nightfall before making any attempt to interfere with us, and we are not without resources.”
They walked back to Cooksey’s rooms. Jenny felt somewhat stunned by these developments and silently wondered why Cooksey seemed so cheerful. Then she thought of something. “Oh, God, we should call Geli Vargos. They might go after her.”
“I’m sure Miss Vargos knows more about it than we do.”
“What do you mean, she knows?”
“I mean that your friend is the granddaughter of Felipe Ibanez, one of the principals of Consuela Holdings. Rupert told me last night.”
“I don’t understand. She was, like,spying on us?”
“Not at all. Rupert thinks it was something like guilt, a subject on which I believe he is by way of being an expert. Wealthy people who have grown rich from various forms of exploitation often have the urge to recover their self-respect through good works. Rupert, who as you may know was in public relations for a large oil company, is one such, and Geli Vargos seems to be another, although in her case it was the family fortune that bore the curse.”
“So she’s still on our side.”
“In a manner of speaking. I’m sure she still wishes us well, but now that there is real danger afoot, I doubt if she’ll go out of her way to help us if it’s to the detriment of her family. Or so Rupert believes.”
“He knew about this all along?”
“Oh, yes. He was quite upset when we all found out about the Consuela company’s plans for the Puxto from our little friend. Geli gave quite a lot of money to the organization, you know.”
“But the point for all of us was to save the rain forest,” Jenny cried. “How could he take money that came from cutting it down?”
“You’d have to ask Rupert that, and I’m sure you’d get a good temporizing answer. In any case, we have little time and we have to prepare this property to resist intrusion.”
“How? By throwing grapefruits?”
“Not quite. Scotty has a shotgun and a full box of shells. I think we can prepare some surprises for anyone creeping about in the dark. We’re in Scotty’s workroom if you’d like to join us.”
“Yeah, but first I got to tell Kevin about all this,” said Jenny, and she hurried off.
Kevin was lying in bed with the headphones on. The stink in the room made it clear that he had ignored Rupert’s clean-up-dope command. She obtained his attention by yanking his cable and, after the usual snarling from him, told her story, which he thought was hilarious, and he got in some zingers about how he’d been right all along
