Clint Faraday Mysteries collection A Muddled Murders Collector's Edition (32 page)

“
I was
brought in because of the funny-money you thought was being
imported by Paulo Lariez. It was a huge mistake to have the
Cartworthys waiting in Frontera to accidentally meet me on the bus
and start their act. They simply have no ability whatever, so far
as acting goes.

“
Well,
Batty learned a little lesson there. You haven’t got a clue as to
how those people are going to react. He was with Sally when she’d
had a few and was running her mouth. He’d made a few statements
about the paper, but had enough sense to shut up about it. She
brought it to a head and they got cut up a little. I solved that
part for you, which is the real reason I’m here at all. I earned
the fee. It wasn’t Paulo, it was the Smith creeps from
Colón.

“
That
brought my friends into the equation to far too much of an extent.
They’re innocent in this mess, and you’ve managed to start a war
between the Indios and the Colón cruds.

“
It’s all
a silly fantasy land. What I’m trying to find now is if it’s a
deliberate scam among a few of you against the others or if you
really think you’ve found something that’s going to make you all
even richer. Money does strange things to people who can’t think
past the moment in a realistic way. The trouble with living in a
dream world is that you eventually have to wake up.

“
There
are small deposits of a lot of things here. You don’t even have to
salt a mine. There are hundreds of small lodes of any number of
things that look good on the surface, but are in places and amounts
that make it a losing proposition before you start. Paulo found one
lode of ore that will actually make a profit, but that’s damned
rare.

“
The
other caveat is that the government owns a lot of types of those
things. You have to get a permiso to extract stuff. Gringos have to
include Panamanians. Carlos here is in a very shaky position with
that point because he’s actually Colombian with a permanent
residency, not Panamanian. I already have a permanent residency and
I’ll apply for citizenship here as soon as I can. I love
Panamá.”

Several of the gringos were showing a very
uncomfortable reaction to that news. Carlos slid down in his seat.
Clint filed in his mind that they definitely thought Carlos was
Panamanian all the way. He hadn’t bothered to tell them he wasn’t.
He was running a bit of a scam himself. Did that mean he knew what
was going on?

Maybe. Maybe not.

“
Be that
as it may. You will NOT involve the Indios in this scheme! I can
and will put a stop to it! I personally like some of you, but it’s
known far and wide here that you don’t involve the natives in this
stupid greedbag kind of crap no matter who you are.”

“
Paulo
Lariez, sitting right over there, can probably have any of us he
wants taken out with one word, huh?” Vern said with a happy
grin.

“
Probably. I think you’d get along pretty well with him.
Want to meet him?”

“
Sure!
We’re soon going to be neighbors. I’m not leaving
Panamá.”

“
Your
wife was MURDERED here!” Monica cried.

“
Yeah.
That wasn’t even a Panamanian who did it. It was your socalled
watchdogs. I’m perfectly well aware of what I was to her. There’s
no love lost. I’m a little sad, but mostly because I’ll miss all
the travel and such the money brought. She was never very good in
bed. Too spoiled.

“
C’est la
vie! I can live damned cheap here!”

Clint grinned to himself and waved for Paulo
to come over. He came to be introduced to everyone. Only Vern
seemed to get any joy from it. He said, “Nice to know a real
godfather! It’s quite a trip!”

Paulo looked quizzically toward Clint, who
suppressed a giggle. Paulo said, “Whatchala! You maybe got a beef
with what I do for a livin’ turkey?”

“
Do you
actually do anything?”Clint asked.

“
Well, I
first shave in the morning then hang around all day scaring the
piss out of people who don’t know me. It is, as my new friend here
says, quite a trip!”

He looked directly at Clint when he said he
shaved in the morning. It immediately lightened up considerably.
The night was really much more pleasant after that. Paulo refused
to hear a word about money. “I have money up the ass. It isn’t good
for anything after a certain point. I’m over the part where I want
to get all the money in the world. It buys hell, not paradise.”

That made most of them uncomfortable for a
while, but changed the subject. They talked about Panamá. Most of
them found it too laid back. They liked the dynamism of big cities
and would go crazy if they had to stay in the small town atmosphere
much longer.

“
You
don’t have to stay,” Vern pointed out. “Batty got out. He’d be the
city type.”

“
Oh,
he’ll be back tomorrow,” Yvon said. “The ones he was ... er, afraid
of have been caught.” She’d said too much by the look on her
face.

Very interesting! The look on Carlos’ face
was even more interesting. Did anyone in that gaggle have the least
idea of what anyone else was up to?

This could be fun except that the types
involved in this one made it dangerous to everyone else around.
Acting on suspicion too often led to acting against the wrong
person and bringing enmity where there should have been at least a
bit of cooperation.

“
Wanda”
came in in full drag and greeted all of them like long lost
friends. He gave Clint a very meaningful look when Carlos was
trying to explain that he had the best connections here to get
things done, that he never told anyone he would do it himself. He’d
always delivered on anything he said he would do.

Probably true – and he raked off a bunch on
each deal.

Later, Wanda got Clint aside and said Carlos
had been smoozing Andrea Barrios from the interior department and
Benet Norenda from natural resources so he was very likely doing
his job. He simply let them think it was him and not a bunch of
corrupt government flunkies.

Clint left early for San Andres. It was just
past Frontera and the Arriba Blanca part was just past Frontera
toward Puerto Armuelles, but near the Costa Rican border. Frontera
was, of course, right on the border and had a checkpoint. A big
one. A lot of truck commerce crossed there.

He found Juan and his wife, Yajaira, working
in the large palm oil grove they had made a good living off of for
years. Orisa was down by the stream doing the laundry. It was her
job to take care of the house.

The Indios have assigned tasks around the
house. They start working at 6 or 7 years of age. They were taught
cooperation and responsibility from a very young age. Clint thought
about the way children were raised in the states and among the
white and black population here. The children sometimes had
“chores” to do – for which they got an allowance. If they didn’t do
the chores they would be penalized – like watch the TV in your room
for an hour. They would whine and still get the allowance.

The Indios were each a part of the family. A
family works together and doesn’t complain. There is a
responsibility that is natural to them.

Orisa was in the creek up to her waist,
beating the clothes on a large rock. Clint greeted her and she came
out to talk.

“
Orisa, I
have to know about something. I know you made a promise to keep a
secret, but that was to keep it from your family and friends,
right?”

She thought for a minute or two, then
agreed.

“
I
promise to keep it a secret from your family and friends. I will
not betray your word.”

“
It was
my family and friends and people from the government.”

“
I
wouldn’t tell them anyway. I’m not with the government, but I do
work with the policia, sometimes. I won’t tell them. It’s something
I have to know because a person in the group might cause problems
for all Indigenos if it isn’t what he’s been telling everyone. He’s
a mentirosa. Mala!”

“
I didn’t
trust him and I knew the woman was a mentirosa. Her eyes told me
that. They would look over my head or to the side when she said all
those things I could have if I didn’t tell anyone about the dirt,”
she replied. “I don’t know how they even knew about it, but they
said it was poison and they had to clean it up before people
started getting sick from it. I said it had always been there and
everyone knew you could get sick if you were around it
much.”

“
Did you
learn their names?” She didn’t, except maybe he called her Mon or
Von or something.

“
Where is
it?”

“
Not far.
Just go down the quebrada for about a kilometer and there is
another one that comes from over that way. When there’s lot of rain
the dirt comes on top of that one. The place it comes from the
rocks is maybe three hundred meters up that one.”

“
Thanks!
I’ll keep your secret. I just want to be sure they’ll clean it up
and not make it spread all over,” Clint started down the
creek.

“
Should I
call them and tell them you are here? They gave me a celular that
only calls them and said I should never let my family know about
it. It’s part of the secret.”

“
I’m not
from the government so I don’t think it’s what they meant.” She
nodded and went back to the laundry.

Clint climbed down the little ravine to where
the other quebrada joined it. There was a bit of oily residue on
some of the rocks. He didn’t need to know where it was exactly, but
went to find oil slowly oozing from a little crack in the bedrock
the stream ran across a little above the present level of the
creek. It was a very slow ooze and the water wouldn’t reach it
unless a rain swelled the rivulet. The one below where Orisa was
doing the wash was living water (never dried up), while this one
was a run-off creek. Clint thought for a few minutes, then went
back to continue following the main quebrada down into the valley
where it met the river.

The river wasn’t navigable in the normal
sense, but would be used for whitewater kayaking and rafting in the
rainy season.

He took a long time getting back to the road.
He felt he knew pretty definitely how the discovery was made. Orisa
had been exploring and found them there doing something.

He went to the stream, then to the casa,
where she was cooking dinner. She invited him to stay, but he said
he had to get back out to Puerto Armuelles.

“
Orisa,
what were they doing there when you found them?”

“
They had
some kind of machine. They would make a little bomb – I heard that
and went to see – and the machine would make a kind of
map.”

“
It made
the map right there?”

“
Jon. It
had a printadora.”

He thanked her and went to the road. The bus
came along about twenty minutes later and he went to the main
highway, then on to Puerto Armuelles on the next bus to there. He
got back to town just in time to see Batty going into his office
with Yvon.

Von or Mon. Seeing it was with Batty and
Batty had been used to get him here, it would be Yvon.

But Yvon was pretty tight with Monica. Maybe
Batty was using the two of them. Whatever, he was getting closer.
He would like to see readouts of those sonic maps they’d made out
there. Was it a standard scam where a bunch would invest in what
looked good on paper? A sort of naturally seeded oil well they
could phony up some sonic maps of ... that wouldn’t be necessary in
most cases. They could be taken to where the oil was oozing up
through the rocks and show them the actual sonic maps they’d made
of their “find.” Odds were tremendously that they couldn’t read
them and would be easy to convince there was a huge pool of oil
down there that would only take a bit of extra drilling to get.

He decided he’d like to talk to that
engineer. Bill Arnold. Then he’d want to talk with a couple of
these people. One thing was certain. This was a volcanic area.
There wasn’t any large pool of oil there.

His cell phone buzzed and he answered. It was
Marko.

“
I tried
to call you for about two hours. Was your phone off for some
reason?”

“
I was in
the mountains. No signal until about half an hour ago. What’s
up?”

“
Just
thought you’d like to know that Bathner is back. He left that
engineer, Arnold, in the Hotel California in Panamá
City.”

They chatted a moment more. Clint rang off
and got a little grin on his face. Talking to Arnold was going to
be a lot easier than he’d hoped!

He went to his hotel, packed a small bag and
headed for the bus station. David had a bus every hour to Panamá
City. He just had time to make the last one if it wasn’t full. If
it was he’d stay in David and take an early bus in the morning. Or
see if the midnight bus was full.

He got the bus about ten minutes before it
left. It was a luxurious double-decker and had several seats open.
He took out a phony moustache and sprayed a little reddish color on
his hair when they were getting close to Santiago. Wanda (not that
one), a friend at the terminal in Panamá City, reported that there
were four people boarding the David bus who didn’t seem to quite
fit the bus tourist type. He took out some glasses that were just
yellowish enough to make his eyes unclear. He looked like an older
brother or something.

The stop in Santiago was interesting because
the bus for David had those four gringos who were going to Puerto
Armuelles to look it over. They’d heard it was beautiful there, and
cheap.