No Hiding Behind the Potted Palms! A Dance with Danger Mystery #7 (38 page)

“Jaime Blandon of Banco
Pacifico?” Bob was leaning back against the vanity desk, trying to
look unruffled, but there seemed to be a tension in him that he was
trying hard to hide.

“You’ve heard of
him?”

“I have. Did you tell Henri
about the conversation you had with Conchita?” he asked. I shook my
head. “Why not?”

“I was afraid Jaime would
harm her.”

Bob sat down again and I
noticed his demeanor had changed. No longer distant, he focused all
of his attention on me.

“Tell me something, Mariem.
After Henri died, did anything unusual happen?”

“Other than the Prevenue
investment going bad? There was an incident at the train station. I
was assaulted as I was leaving. The police said it was a routine
mugging. Before I could heal from that, a car collided with mine on
my way to my sister’s house in Maryland.”

“Were you seriously
injured?” the former Treasury agent demanded, with a sense of
urgency.

“I saw the car coming up
behind me and I swerved at the last minute. It was mostly bumps and
bruises, but it shook me up. That’s when Declan told me I would be
safe if I married him.”

“Really? He said that to
you?”

“Yes.”

“And now there is a CPA
pretending to be someone else and asking you out for a drink, even
though he has a very pregnant wife and kids with him on the Beauty
of the Seas. This comes on the heels of someone trying to kill you
last night. As Shakespeare would point out, something’s rotten in
the state of Denmark.” Bob summed up the situation
succinctly.

“Can I tell you something?”
I asked.

“Go ahead.”

“This may sound odd, but
I’ve always had my doubts about Henri’s financial dealings. When I
shared my concerns with Declan, he kept telling me that people
would assume I was another Ruth Madoff. He said people would think
I was always a part of it, so I should be quiet and let him deal
with it. But now it seems like things have gotten out of hand. I’m
beginning to think that staying quiet wasn’t a good
thing.”

“Tell me about your
fiancé.”

Over the next half hour, Bob
asked a lot of questions and I answered them as best I could. And
then I told him of my decision.

“I can’t marry
Declan.”

“Because?”

I took a deep breath and let
it play inside my lungs, bouncing around before exiting. I exhaled
slowly, carefully, before answering.

“Because I’ve come to
believe that Declan’s only interest in me has to do with protecting
Henri’s terrible secrets from becoming public.”

“You don’t think he loves
you?” Bob gave me a slight smile. “Mariem, you are a beautiful
woman. Most men would find you irresistible. Why do you think
Declan doesn’t worship the ground upon which you walk?”

I scratched my cheek as I
pondered the question. I thought about the many times we spent
together. And then I found the missing piece of the
puzzle.

“It’s always about Henri. My
late husband is the common bond between us. Conversations are
always about Henri, not about us. It’s as if we would not exist if
I had not been married to the late Henri Dufours. Does that make
any sense to you?” Even as I said those words, I realized the
veracity of them. It felt as if I was reaching deep inside myself
and grasping the illusive shadows that had plagued my life since
Henri died. Declan Dowd was only interested in me as Henri’s
lawyer. The romance had nothing to do with me as a woman. Once that
came into my conscious mind, I knew there was no going back. I
would have to see this through until the end, even if the end
wasn’t neat and tidy.

“Well,” Bob sighed. “You’ve
certainly given me a lot to think about. And now it’s going on
eleven. I think you should take some time and relax at the pool.
From what you’ve told me, I suspect that Steve Kablinski is likely
to seek you out. I just want you to know one thing, Mariem Dufours.
I’m going to get to the bottom of this mess. Don’t you
worry.”

“What if Henri was really a
bad man and I never knew it?” That was a question that had worried
me for the last few years, especially after Conchita’s
death.

“What if he was?” Bob stood
up, his matter-of-fact words feeling like a slap across the
face.

“My life has been a fraud.”
I wanted to see something in those mahogany eyes, something that
would assuage the guilt I felt for having married a man I now
believed had been evil. But Bob didn’t help me with that. If
anything, he made me feel worse.

“You’re not trained as a
financial genius. You’re not trained as an investigator. You are
what you are.”

“Stupid?”

“No.” Bob patted my arm
awkwardly. “Not stupid, Mariem. Naive. I suspect that Henri had to
work hard to keep you in the dark. Maybe that’s why he always
deflected attention away from his business deals and back onto you,
making you feel inadequate and insecure. You turned out to be too
smart and too ethical.”

“But what if he was a money
launderer?” It was a relief to finally say those words to someone
who wasn’t interested in protecting Henri’s memory.

“What if he was?”

“Maybe that was a reason
that Prevenue failed.”

“I don’t follow you,” Bob
admitted. “Why do you think there’s a connection?”

“Because every time I tried
to get Maura to explain what she was doing with my insurance money,
it felt a lot like what Declan did whenever I talked about Henri’s
business deals.”

“They both distracted you to
protect Henri?” As soon as he said that, I knew that was my fear.
Maybe I allowed them to lead me astray because I was afraid to find
out the truth

“What if it was some kind of
Ponzi scheme, to defraud clients of Grenois Financial? What if
hard-working people lost money on Prevenue because the cartel
wanted to punish me for Henri’s decision to cooperate with the
grand jury?”

“Let me give you a very
important piece of advice, Mariem. You are not Henri. You are not
responsible for what Henri did. Even if you had concerns, you never
had any actual proof that he committed any crimes, did you?” Bob’s
strong hands gripped my shoulders and he leaned his face close to
mine.

“No,” I sighed, frustrated
that Henri’s business always remained in the shadows of our
marriage. It made it that much harder to leave him.

“All the suspicions in the
world are not enough to convict someone. You need proof. You need
evidence. If you’ve got any, I’m more than happy to review it. But
if all you have is guilt, fear, and suspicions, take yourself off
the hook. If Henri really was laundering money for drug cartels, he
went out of his way to keep you out of it. Either he loved you and
did it to protect you, which makes him a wise man, or he used you
for cover, which makes him a fool. Either way, Henri was the wrong
man for you. You deserve better. You have a conscience and that’s a
good thing, but now put some perspective to the equation. Henri and
his friends hid things from you, probably not because they cared
about you, but because they cared about not getting
caught.”

Chapter Five --

“I’ve got to get going.
We’ve got a couple of pickpockets on the ship and they’re working
the passengers. They get busy with the lunch bunch,” Bob announced,
squeezing my hand. He gave me an encouraging smile. “We’ll meet up
again later and talk some more. In the meantime, we’re keeping an
eye out for you, so just enjoy the cruise, okay? If you get the
chance, can you give Steve Kablinski a chance to reveal why he’s so
interested in you?”

“I can.” It was true. I had
an ally on the Beauty of the Seas. Suddenly all things seemed
possible.

In the time since Henri’s
death, and even long before, I had felt like a tiny boat adrift in
a big, unruly sea, victim of choppy waters, unable to chart a
course because I knew not how to navigate. There was something
about Bob that made me believe my instincts had not been wrong,
only my decisions. My doubts about Henri had often been squashed by
the power and intensity of my husband’s personality. I had put
myself aside so many times because I had been intimidated by
Henri’s anger. Bob didn’t seem to find my concerns unreasonable. He
didn’t treat me as a fanciful woman, prone to attacks of
imagination. He considered my words and tried to decide if they
made sense. Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, I found
the woman I had been before that fateful day on the Paris metro,
but she was older now and much wiser.

The sun was hiding behind a
smattering of rain clouds when I arrived in the Sanctuary, an
intimate indoor pool area reserved for adults, tucked away on the
lido deck. The sunroof was closed to the sky, but the pool was open
and there were a handful of bathers scattered around it. I put my
tote bag down beside an empty lounge chair and headed to the water,
to check the temperature. Warm on my skin, it felt good. Swimming
had always been one of my favorite activities. Growing up, my
mother had always called me her water baby. There was something
therapeutic about floating in water, and I had every intention of
taking advantage of the opportunity.

I went back to my lounge
chair and pulled out my new copy of “Till Death Do Us Part”, John
Ransom Brody’s latest novel about art critic Harry Munsen. I had
read the other two in the series and was looking forward to the
latest adventures of the debonair amateur sleuth. This time, the
subject was the heist at the Orchard Museum, where three
Impressionist masterpieces were snatched from their frames in the
middle of a tour by armed men in masks. It was pure escapism, and
now, in the daylight hours, while I was surrounded by fellow
passengers and attendants, I was not afraid to read it.

So wrapped up in the story
was I that I lost track of time. When I had read five chapters, I
forced myself to stretch and take a swim break. With my room card
tucked into my paperback as a bookmark, I laid it down on the small
side table. My tote bag was sitting on the cement floor, out of the
way, with a bottle of spring water, a small packet of tissues, some
sunscreen, and my little makeup case, all the typical things a
woman like me brings to a pool. There was nothing unusual about any
of the items, nothing mysterious. That’s why, when I returned from
my swim, I was shocked to see that the tote bag had disappeared.
And then I remembered what Bob had said about the
pickpockets.

“You’ve got to be joking!” I
exclaimed with exasperation.

“Miss?” A pool attendant
hurried over.

“Someone snatched my tote
bag!” I thought about the contents. There wasn’t much I couldn’t
purchase once we got to Bermuda, but I hated the idea of walking
around a luxury cruise ship without makeup. “Damn!”

“I will notify security,”
the attendant promised. Sure enough, a few minutes later, a
uniformed man in a crisp white shirt, tie, and black slacks, with a
name tag that said “Bufumo”, walked through the automatic doors and
up to the now-nervous attendant, who pointed to me.

“You reported your tote bag
is missing?” said the man with a craggy face who looked anywhere
from fifty to sixty. He wore frameless glasses perched on his nose
and a tiny American flag on his shirt pocket.

“Yes,” I told him. He asked
for a description of the bag and its contents. “Let’s see. It’s a
Monet bag from the Louvre, with a scene of red poppies in a
field.”

“In other words, it’s
distinctive?”

“I guess you could say that.
I don’t think you can buy one like it in the States, if that’s what
you mean.”

“That is what I mean. But
you still have your room key?” I nodded. “Could you just make sure,
please?”

I flipped open my book to
the last page of Chapter Eight. There was a room card there, but it
was for Cabin 657A.

“This isn’t mine,” I
declared. “I’m in Room 819!” I handed the card to the man, who
examined one side of it and then the other.

“Well, ain’t that a kick in
the seat of the pants.” Mr. Bufumo picked up his radio and spoke
into it, using a lot of phases I didn’t understand. When he
finished, he asked me to accompany him to the security office, to
fill out a report. I slipped back into my gauzy beach cover-up and
sandals, suddenly self-conscious about showing so much skin away
from the Sanctuary. I was going to ask if I could stop at my cabin
and change first, until I realized I could no longer get into my
cabin. With a shrug, I followed Mr. Bufumo, my fingers tightly
clenching “Until Death Do Us Part”.

“This doesn’t seem like just
an ordinary theft,” I offered, making conversation with the
taciturn man’s unresponsive back. He grunted something in return.
“Excuse me?”

“It’s not. Someone was
watching you.”

“How do you know that?” I
wondered.

“Your room key’s
gone.”

“So?” We were entering the
employees-only maze of passageways.

“How did the thief know to
take your bookmark unless he was watching you? And why replace it
with a different room key?”