Clint Faraday Mysteries collection A Muddled Murders Collector's Edition (94 page)

Dangerous Curves

What to Do

What to do today?

Clint Faraday, retired detective from Florida
now residing in Bocas del Toro, Panamá, sighed, stretched, took a
sip of the special coffee and leaned on the wood rail of his deck.
The bay was peaceful and pleasant today. He looked over to see Judi
Lum, his only neighbor with a view of his deck, watering her
orchids. She wagged a finger at him and waved. He didn’t bother to
put on anything until he decided what he was going to do. He went
fishing and diving yesterday. He had his computer work done. He
didn’t feel like doing anything but laze around. He’d do that.

He put his coffee on the rail and dove into
the cool water for a quick swim to loosen up, climbed on deck
again, finished the coffee and went in to rinse and put on shorts.
He’d go into town and sit around gossiping a bit. The talk was
mostly about the stupid strike against the water taxis and such.
The negativity against the union was growing by leaps and bounds.
This would, if the people had any sense at all, damage the union
for years to come. These tactics had always led to grief in the
states so long ago that people had forgotten most of it. Now it was
here.

Don’t think about it. People are collectively
stupid and always will be. A bunch of thugs and worse would make a
lot of money and the people would be that much further behind.
Tourism would be hurt.

The comp dinged that he had e-mail. Probably
advertisements.

Clint went in and clicked on the message. It
wasn’t e-mail, it was a chat. He answered that he was available.
Gossip here was as good as at the grill, usually.

“
Twistedgrip17"? Who was that?

“
You got
audio?” came on the screen.

Clint clicked on the audio circuit. He had
been paying for it for months and had never bothered to use it.

“
Yeah?”
he asked.

“
I met
you in Las Tablas about a year and a half ago. You were working on
that phony gold mine scheme?”

“
Phony
mine?”

“
It was
sulfur that was supposed to be silver or something.”

“
Oh. A
sulfur dome that was supposed to be oil,” Clint said. “Sort of
stupid. Anyone who ever read a sonic recording could tell the
difference and oil isn’t found in that kind of place.”

“
Whatever. I need a bit of help. Something is strange here –
well, not here. In Santiago, but I came here to get away from it.
You’re a detective, so maybe you can find out what the hell is
going on!”

“
Tell me
about it,” Clint suggested.

“
Oh! I’m
Ed Granger. The overweight ex-boxer from Arkansas. I didn’t stop to
think that you wouldn’t have the foggiest idea of who I
am.

“
It’s odd
things that happen. I got some weird e-mails and a few letters in
my box. I have a P.O. box.

“
Listen.
I’ll pay for a ticket and you can fly out to meet me in Santiago
tonight? You can see what happened and what kinds of things come in
the mail and so forth. I also had my brakes fail in my truck in the
mountains. If I wasn’t such a good driver I’d be dead.

“
That
wouldn’t be so strange, because a lot of brakes fail in those
mountains. They get damned hot coming down with a load.

“
There
was some kind of thing on the master. I don’t know what it did, but
think it blocked the fluid or something. I don’t know how it was
timed.”

That was getting interesting! “I’ll catch the
four o’clock,” Clint promised.

Clint put a few things in a bag and made a
curry for lunch, then met with friends to gossip awhile, then went
to the airport at three. The ticket was there. He boarded at a
quarter to four and was in Santiago at ten to five.

Ed Granger wasn’t overweight, except in his
own mind. He was still hard-muscled and in good health at fifty
two. He had a very slight paunch that he was working to lose. He
had the scars and such of a boxer. His nose was a small bit slanted
toward the left. His ears showed the normal damage of a
heavyweight. His hair was thick and mostly black with some greying.
He was affable and nervous. He was with a Panamanian girl. She was
very goodlooking, in a cheap sort of way. She had a shape that was
on the edge of being overdone. Granger introduced her as Toñ?a. He
said he was the novio of her sister, Nilsa.

Clint wondered what Nilsa looked like.

They went to the Bocas del Toro Hotel, where
a room was already paid for Clint to stay. Toña went to the
almacen, then would go back to the finca. Nilsa would come to pick
Ed up about six and they could go to a restaurant or whatever.

Clint put what little he’d brought in his
room and he and Ed went to a trucking company that Ed owned with a
couple of partners. All of them had their own trucks and drove
them, plus they would hire local haulers for anything more than
they could handle. They weren’t getting rich, but were comfortable.
Ed liked to make long hauls. He had the eighteen wheeler rig.

He showed Clint his truck, then went into his
private office and took a device from the safe there (explaining
that anything not locked up disappeared). It was a simple solenoid
with a battery and little comp board. Clint looked it over and
noted the imprint on the circuit board.

“
It’s a
cell phone board. The way it works is that the number to the SIM is
called and it sends a pulse to the solenoid. What was the solenoid
hooked to?”Clint asked when Ed gave him the look about saying it
was from a celular. He took a piece of the tape off the board and
showed him the SIM card. It was a Mas Movil, so Clint carefully
took the chip out and put it into one of his phones, then punched
the number of his other phone. It rang and he gave Ed the number on
the ID. Ed shook his head.

Ed said there wasn’t anything attached that
he could find.

“
It was
the truck out there?”

“
Yeah.”

Clint went out and looked at the spot the
device had been attached, after asking the secretary, Donna, a few
questions. She didn’t seem to know anything.

There was a small piece of nylon fishing line
hanging from a brake line below and behind the unit. He fished it
out to find a strange shaped piece of metal on the end. He
shrugged.

Ed checked it, studied the hexagonal hole on
one end, then slipped it down to fasten on the end bolt of a tiny
valve.

“
I’ll be
damned! It opens the pressure end on the calibrator nut. It
adjusted the pressure to zero, so the brakes didn’t work. When it
came off the valve closed itself on a little spring. As long as I
tried to use the brakes it made them not work. When I let it just
stand for a minute the spring readjusted the release. If you hadn’t
found that string we could never know what happened!”

“
The
string and wrench were supposed to fall off on the road. It caught
on a brake line behind ... because you were moving and the wind
stream blew it back and it wrapped on,” Clint said.
“Clever.”

“
Can we
find who ... I guess not.” Ed said. “I want to know why anyone
would do that!”

“
It’s
possible we can find that easily enough,” Clint replied. “They
handled the circuit board.”

“
Yeah!
And you only touched the edges of the SIM card! Neat!”

Clint carefully removed the card from his
phone by the edges and dumped a fine powder from a vial in his
pocket onto it, then lightly blew most of the powder away, leaving
what appeared to be a thumb print showing on the card. He took some
Scotch Tape to lift the print.

“
Now we
have to find whose phone it was, though I figure it was stolen or
bought for this one purpose. We might have the print of a clerk on
the card.”

He slid the battery off the card and checked
it, but it had been wiped.

“
Now we
have to learn why any of this crap is happening,” he explained.
“I’ll try to trace that tomorrow morning. You can give me some
background tonight.”

They went to dinner. Nilsa was much like her
sister, who came with her and kept making a play for Clint, who
wasn’t interested in the type. Clint met Andres Gomez, one of the
partners.

After a decent meal of chicken done
rotisserie style, Clint went to the finca, a two hectare plot with
a nice house very close into town. He learned what little Ed could
tell him.

Ed had come to Panam when he retired as a
boxing coach. He was a truck driver for a time in the states and
wanted to establish something to do here. He was not allowed, as
non-Panamanian, to drive commercially, but there is a way around
almost anything in Panamá. He was an employee of his own
corporation and could drive so long as he had a Panamanian driver
with him. He had hired a man with a license as a copilot and
helper. On timed runs he could drive a few hours, then his copilot
would drive a few. They could make a trip that took most of the
night that way.

Interesting. He said Nilsa and Toña set the
deal up.

“
I want
to see the corporation papers,” Clint demanded. “I think I see
what‘s going on.”

Ed looked surprised and took a copy from the
safe. He spent some time studying the contract, then said he could
almost figure it.. He had to check a few things, but Ed was to be
very careful. He then went back to the hotel, where he talked a few
minutes with the woman running the place. She knew the Gomez
family. Nilsa and Toña were sisters.

And Andres is their brother
, Clint thought.

He went across the street to the popular
little bar and talked with a few people. Two Indios came in and
Clint went to speak with them. He introduced himself in their
dialect. That identified him as a friend. He talked awhile with
them before asking if they had ever worked for the trucking
company. They hadn’t, but knew some who had. They were alright.
Some of the people there treated them like people, but one was an
ass and the women who hung around were worse. They would like the
work, but not if they had to put up with the shit.

“
Yeah,
that Andres person and his sisters,” Clint said. “I heard.” They
agreed, but they didn’t think they were sisters. Just
cousins.

Same difference, so far as Clint was
concerned.

He went back to the hotel and studied the
corporation papers very closely. They were fairly standard through
the first four pages and on the last, but had a clause on page five
stating that an insurance policy was to be kept on all partners,
payable to the others in case of death and that all assets become
the property of the survivors. Exactly what he expected.

He got a good night’s sleep and went out to
breakfast to find the secretary, Donna, waiting there. She said she
was worried about Ed and that she maybe knew something, but she was
scared for her own sake if she told.

“
I’ll see
that no one knows it was you who tells me anything,” Clint
promised.

She took a deep breath and said, “Some of my
friends, indigenos, used to work for Andres when he owned another
trucking company with a man called Sergio Bannister. He was
Panamanian on his mother’s side and gringo on his father’s. He died
in an accident where his truck went off a mountain on a dangerous
curve. They don’t know why he was going so much too fast coming
down the mountain.

“
That is
where Andres got the money and truck to go into the business here.
There was a big insurance policy no one knew anything about or
something.

“
Well, Ed
had the same thing happen, but he knows how to handle it. It did
damage the truck a little, but nothing serious.

“
Nilsa
and Toña were on the company papers with Bannister. Now the same
thing almost happens with Mr. Ed. Andres said to not say anything
about anything to you because he doesn’t trust you – but he never
saw you until you came to the yard. I know that because he asked
who you were and what you wanted when you talked to me.”

“
Thanks,
Donna. I knew some of it, so you didn’t really tell me anything,
except for one thing. I’ll say you don’t know anything to tell if
anyone asks.

“
One
thing, the sisters aren’t on the corporation papers. I’ve read
them.”

”
It’s a
different contract. They made it when Mr. Ed said he would live
with Nilsa.”

“
That
ties up another important little detail. Thanks, Donna.”

She nodded, said thanks and left. Clint
called Ed. He asked why Ed didn’t tell him there was a separate
contract that put the Gomez sisters into the corporation. He said
there wasn’t. He would never sign that kind of thing. He might not
be particularly bright. That didn’t mean he was abjectly stupid!
You did NOT let that kind of person onto a corporation because they
could get a crooked lawyer and steal the whole thing from you.

At nine, Clint went to the records department
and checked over the contracts registered in the corporation name.
It was there, so he paid the three dollars for a certified copy and
called Ed to meet him at the MacDonalds. He walked over, five
blocks, and waited about twenty minutes for Ed to come in,
accompanied by Nilsa.

He didn’t say anything, just tossed the
contract on the table. Nilsa squealed, then tried to look
innocent.

“
I’m a
detective. You had to guess that I’d find that as soon as I came
here.”

She said it wasn’t her idea. That Andres had
suggested it so she would be taken care of if there was an accident
or something.