Clint Faraday Mysteries collection A Muddled Murders Collector's Edition (64 page)

Two days later he was still moving between
the café and one across from the main entrance. He also spent some
time making friends with some men working on building a large fence
to one side. He put on a cap and old shirt and blended in with
them. He told them he was looking for his wife to show up with her
boyfriend. He wouldn’t cause any trouble, he just wanted to know if
she was actually seeing the guy. He didn’t care about her anymore.
This wasn’t the first. She wouldn’t get anymore support money from
him if she was whoring around again.

Gloria
was easy enough to follow. She didn’t go far and spent most of her
time in the 8
^th
floor
apartment. Clint had her checked by a man who did private detective
work and was both good and discreet. She wrote articles for a
travel magazine.

She did go to an ATM once the second day to
take out a few dollars. The third day she took out the maximum
after going to an exclusive shop called “Maxie’s Max” where she
bought a couple of things. The packages were little boxes that were
bright red, blue and green. The place sold perfumes and such. Very
expensive for an article writer.

The morning of the fourth day she again took
out the maximum. She seemed to have two cards and took out the
maximum on both. Clint could watch her to an extent with a pair of
binoculars he bought in a camera shop.

The maximum on regular accounts was $500 per
day. On bigger accounts she could take out more. What Clint saw her
stuffing into her purse was certainly more than that.

Where would a writer for a travel magazine
get that kind of money? It was obvious how Amanda planned to get
new financing. She’d opened an account in Peru with a few dozen
thousand, minimum. He had twenty two thousand three hundred from
her campsite.

She was coming in a day or less. She would
have the cash waiting for her and wouldn’t have to worry about
Clint knowing about the account and tracing where the money was
withdrawn. Gloria was getting it and would be the one seen on the
camera using the machine. Maybe the accounts were in her name.

Whatever, she would still have to meet Gloria
to get it. Clint would be there.

Gloria didn’t leave the place all day. Clint
had noticed a delivery boy coming and going from the hotel
regularly carrying packages and taking them on a bicycle to
deliver. About four thirty he was leaving with some packages. He
placed a small red, blue and green box in the basket. He had
several other small packages that he put stick-em tags on, but not
that one. It wasn’t big enough to carry that much cash. Maybe
someone else in the place shopped at Maxie’s – or maybe it would
have worked if she’d used a larger package. He was supposed to
follow the boy? Be away from the hotel for a few minutes? Be
chasing after a bright little box that anyone would logically put
in a sack or something?

Clint
grinned and sat back.
Nice try! I thought you’d be smarter than
that!

About seven the boy came again. This time he
brought a sack and three packages. He dropped the sack into the
basket, then stood to put the stick-em tags on all the other
packages before he rode off.

Dilemma time! This could be the real thing or
another diversion!

The boy rode toward the Central Park area.
Clint felt he could go that far and return before she could get in
and out if she only stayed ten minutes. He followed the boy to the
park where he sat on a bench for five minutes. Clint was standing
behind some statuary by the Hotel Central entrance where he could
see him clearly.

Two people stopped to speak with him. He
seemed to know them – then Amanda came from the Hotel Central
entrance and passed not more than ten feet from him. She was intent
on the boy and stood for a minute watching him, but didn’t go
closer. A beggar came to say something to the boy. The boy had him
repeat something, shook his head and pointed to the government
building across the park. The boy got on his bicycle and headed
there. Amanda watched as several people walked in that direction
(as many would be doing anyhow) and started toward Gloria’s
place.

So. If he was there he would follow the boy.
She would have at least fifteen minutes to meet Gloria. He could
beat her to the apartments.

She turned the wrong way at the corner. She
was going around the park.

I thought she thought that I thought so I stopped one ‘she
thought’ back.
He was
supposed to rush directly to the apartment to beat her there. It
was purely by chance he’d decided to watch from the Hotel Central
and probably the smartest so far to not rush ahead before she ever
got to that corner. He did have sense enough to watch from a place
that couldn’t be seen easily from the entrance. He wasn’t about to
rush across the park to beat her to the government building! He
would simply follow her.

She stopped three times to idly look around
as though she were looking for a street sign or location. She
didn’t miss a thing that was visible, but she wasn’t used to being
followed by a pro-fess-shee-un-al. She went into the apartments.
Clint would have his police backup waiting when she left. He called
for them. She would leave by either the side or back entrance, but
she had made a big mistake: The back and side gates were locked at
night. She had to come out through the front gate or the garage
gate.

Did Gloria have a car? Did he miss that?

The two police arrived. He had one go inside
to check to see if Gloria had a car there. She did. A black
Mitsubishi in space 878, level 3. Clint told the police to stop
that car if it came out or to stop Amanda, who looked like the
picture, if she came out.

He headed for the parking garage and to level
3 where Gloria and Amanda were just getting into the car. Amanda
saw him and pulled a little pistol from her purse to snap a shot
over his head. She didn’t shoot at him (he didn’t doubt she had
learned to use the thing – and well). It was a warning that the
game had gotten serious. He dodged behind a concrete support post
and the car headed out. He raced up and came to the gate to see the
car caught in the tire claws. The police had heard the shot and
raised them. Amanda was standing beside the car looking mostly
amused while Gloria was having hysterics in the car. The police had
their sidearms pointed at Amanda.

“
Very
DAMNED good show, Clint! I think I underestimated you all along!”
Amanda said. “I won, anyhow. I got them all. There’s nothing you
can do to me that’s half of what’s already been done.

“
I know
I’m crazy as a loon and don’t care. No matter what, I won. I had to
take a chance here. It was fifty-fifty that you would follow the
boy across the square and I’d have time to be gone. I knew you
would be there. I didn’t think you’d be at the Central, though. It
was planned that you’d watch from the information booth. You can
stay there and not be seen from anywhere.

“
Well,
luck had to run out sometime! I like to have shit when I saw you
there outside the hotel. I didn’t think you’d know I’d seen you,
though.

“
C’est la
vie! I’ll go quietly. I’ve had enough excitement the past couple of
weeks to last ten lifetimes.

“
You want
to cuff me now, Officer?” she turned to the policeman and held out
her hands.

“
She IS
crazy!” the officer cried.

“
No shit!
Clint would have told you that!” she said, “I’ll never understand
why anyone would question it.”

“
The
game’s over, but I suppose they’ll have to follow protocol,” Clint
said.

She grinned. “Naturally!”

They took her and Gloria to the police
station. She was amused at the booking process. Gloria was NOT!

“
Carlo
(Tavares, the jefe of homicide dept.), let Gloria go if she gives a
true statement with a warning that she can be charged for as long
as you can here. If she gets into any other trouble in that time
she gets charged with all of it,” Clint requested.

“
At your
request. She is an accessory to a number of very serious
crimes.”

“
Oh, she
was damned easy to use,” Amanda said. “There’s no one in the whole
world who knows more about using and being used than me. I’ve had a
whole lifetime of living it and’ve been practicing for the past
month. She didn’t do anything except help me get here and hold the
money for me. She didn’t know about the other parts.

“
Honest.
I won’t lie about anything or deny anything.”

Carlo shook his head and shrugged. He sent
her with a recording secretary and interrogator to a booth, then
turned to say to Amanda. “I don’t quite know how to proceed with
this kind of thing. You will certainly plead insanity in Peru.
Perhaps I should simply send you there for your statements or
whatever.”

“‘
Whatever’ would suit me,” she agreed with her grin. “Why
Peru?”

“
Frank
Lindsay is alive, he just wishes he weren’t,” Clint
replied.

“
Oh, I
figured you’d get there barely in time to save the lousy bastard
son-of-a-bitch. I didn’t want that one to die for a lot of years.
He won’t ever rape a little girl or anyone else again! They’ll run
screaming when they see his face even if he physically could. It’ll
hurt every time he moves. He was the only one in my life worse than
Pops.”

“
I can’t
argue that point. You had one hell of a lousy life.”

“
Up until
I was eight – spelled a-t-e – it was a fairly good life. We even
had fun sometimes. I had given it a twenty five percent chance you
wouldn’t find the Cali place. I would have stayed there the rest of
my life if you hadn’t. I love that place because I was truly happy
there for a couple of hours now-and-then.

“
Could
you leave this for Peru or wherever? I’m dead tired.”

Clint asked Carlo, who said he was tired,
too. If she would sign an agreement they would do that.

They did that. Clint went to sack out for ten
hours (of which he actually slept six. He never slept more than
that) and packed to go to Peru with Amanda and an officer that was
being sent to take her back. Gonzalo said he would try to get her
sent directly on to Panamá as soon as she was booked in Peru. He
did NOT want her in Peru!

“
I think
you’ll even like her,” Clint warned.

“
After
that Lindsay person? I really don’t think so!”

“
We’ll
see.”

“
Well,
here’s a copy of her statement. She didn’t leave out anything,”
Gonzalo said. “You were right. It scared the piss out of me to see
that I actually was beginning to like her. She’s totally honest and
knows she’s crazy.”

“
She has
some kind of charisma or something,” Clint agreed, taking the
statement forms. “You sent this on to Bocas?”

“
Yes.
You’ll arrive there at about eight thirty tomorrow
morning.”

Sworn
Statement

Amanda
Beatrice Lesley

18/12/2008, Celinas, Peru,

Dt. Gonzalo Gonzalez

I,
Amanda Beatrice
Lesley
, present this
statement as a true record of events. I swear under penalty of
perjury to the truth of the following to the best of my
knowledge.

I suppose this started when I was eight years
of age. We were living in Switzerland on the Lesley Horse Farms. My
father had become friends and business partners with Dr. Orison and
Karl Rasmussen, a lawyer from Norway. They were, at that time,
residing on the ranch. Father had a brother who died in an accident
in California, USA, and left some very valuable properties to
him.

That was a fairly happy time. The ranch was
successful and was bringing in a large income. Father and the
partners bought land parcels in several countries.

Father had always been, shall we say, too
affectionate with me, but I didn’t know anything at that age. You
can’t know the horror when it extended to him raping me.

That continued until I was sixteen years old
when he shifted his attention to my younger sister, Wanda. He was
already using my brother, Donald, at that time. Some times he would
have all three of us in the ... I will leave that to your
imagination. It was horrible.

I had experiences in my mind that told me
something was radically wrong. My mother tried to help us kids, but
didn’t have a clue as to what to do. Father had started seeing
Frieda Helmut.

I was planning, even then, to kill my father
very slowly and painfully. When he stopped raping me and turned to
Wanda, Frank Lindsay, the trainer at the California farm, had seen
us several times in the barn when Father didn’t know it and he
started doing the same things and worse with me. Frieda knew or
suspected it and protected him from being caught. Mother was
getting very sick and was terrified of what Father had become. She
didn’t ever know about Frank. Frieda, I later learned, forced Frank
to marry her so she could run things. She was the most evil person,
outside of my father, I ever knew. Maybe worse than him.

Father started getting worse. He was with Dr.
Orison a lot and I was able to hide in the trophy den a couple of
times when I heard him talking to Father about his cancer and about
the treatments that may be able to arrest it. He told him the
cancer was incurable. He started giving him morphine and some kind
of chemical therapy.

Mother died. I heard Dr. Orison talking to
Razzy, that’s Rasmussen, and Frieda in the den during the funeral.
Dr. Orison said he hated to have to do that to Mother, but their
plan with father demanded that they do it. Frieda said she knew
damned well it would come to that, but what about Father?