Project Moses - A Mystery Thriller (Enzo Lee Mystery-Thriller Series) (8 page)

It had been an emotional meeting. He could never fathom nor totally forgive the abandonment of his mother. But, when he saw his grandmother, small and weak, in the hospital bed, he couldn’t help but feel compassion for her. Then she showed him the scrapbook. Pictures of his mother growing up. A report card from the fourth grade with straight A’s. A newspaper clipping announcing his mother at age 13 as the featured dancer at a Chinatown benefit. Pressed flowers from her prom night.

She described how she had hidden the book from his grandfather, saying that she had thrown it away. Then, his grandmother had shown Lee a second scrapbook. It was filled with clips of newspaper stories that Lee had written. She had been having friends and relatives in Florida and New York collect them for years. He quickly realized the only words his grandmother could read in the stories were his name.

“Your mother and your grandfather were the same,” she had told him. “Very strong will.”

Afterward, Lee had felt a kinship with his grandmother that was based on more than common blood. He guessed it was the way people felt when they discovered someone else who has lost their loved ones to the same war.

She had recovered from her illness. Now, his grandmother was physically well but her mind wandered, leaping decades in a moment.

His grandmother abruptly looked up at Lee.

“What stories you work on, Enzo?” she said.

“Oh, the same old thing, grandma,” he replied. “A little bit of this. A little bit of that.”

“I’m sure they very good, Enzo,” she said. “I so proud of you. I see you name in paper alla time.”

She suddenly handed Lee the melon and pushed herself out of the chair.

“I will cook this later,” she said. She went to the dresser and pulled out a scrapbook and began turning the pages.

“Your mother. So beautiful,” she said.

Chapter 9

JORGE MASVIDAL HAD watched the numbers grow daily in the small camp in the middle of the vast sugar plantation he supervised. Most of them came with a bag or two. Some came with nothing more than a paper sack carrying a clean shirt, underwear and a couple of pairs of socks. Invariably, they came ill prepared for the back-breaking work they faced.

He wasn’t surprised. Nothing surprised him in the state controlled economy of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. With the breakup of the Soviet Union and the reduction in aid to Cuba, he had witnessed the technological regression of the country’s agricultural industry with increasing dismay. First, the new tractors due the year before had never arrived. Then, the replacement parts to keep the old machines running failed to materialize. Finally, the gasoline and diesel oil needed to operate all of the machinery on the farm ran out.

Instead of machines and fuel, Masvidal was getting men, hundreds of them. Buses brought more each day, soft-handed urban dwellers conscripted into work gangs and forced to work for the glory of Cuba for 90 days at a time. It had taken all of Masvidal’s resourcefulness to keep them all decently sheltered and fed, much less turn them into a labor force capable of plowing, planting, irrigating and fertilizing the fields.

Now, Masvidal was facing a problem even greater than overseeing the substitution of man for machines. Something was destroying his fields. It had started with the most southern plantations, a brown powdery growth that first attacked the leaves and then spread into the precious sweet cane itself. It had spread northward at the rate of twenty miles a week. Finally, it had reached his plantation.

Like the other plantation supervisors, he had tried to fight back. He had burned the worst fields, hoping to spare the others. It hadn’t worked. Nothing did. The small supply of fungicides he had on hand was exhausted almost immediately. Now, he was trying to salvage what he could. Maybe 15 percent of the plants resisted the disease. At least he could harvest that much in the fall. The disaster was solving his other problem, however. Now, Masvidal could start sending the laborers back to Havana.

•   •   •

LEE WAS SURPRISED when Sarah Armstrong called him at the newspaper earlier in the day. He knew that the simple funeral for Judge Gilbert had been the day before. He had intended to call her in the next day or two. He wanted to see how she was recovering from her injuries. Lee also wondered whether Sarah could shed any light on the events of the past few days.

When Sarah asked if they could meet to talk about her “accident,” he suggested dinner that night and Sarah agreed.

After returning from Berkeley in the late afternoon, Lee had stopped at his flat, spent a half hour with his grandmother in the rest home, and then drove to Sarah’s. He found his leather jacket in the trunk of the Fiat. Sarah buzzed him in, and as he trudged up the interior stairway, he could hear her shuffling footsteps off somewhere in the flat.

“I’ll be right there,” she said as he reached the top. He walked down the hallway to the large living room that looked out on the street, and again admired the beautifully finished hardwood floors, maple paneling and tall white walls that curved into the ceiling 12 feet overhead.

Sarah came in through the dining room moving slowly on her bad leg. She was wearing black corduroy pants, a beige cashmere turtleneck with splashes of red and blue, a black suede jacket and hand-tooled cowboy boots.

“Hello,” said Lee. “No ballroom dancing tonight, huh?”

Sarah smiled at him. “I’ll take a rain check. You wait. I’ll be back on my rollerblades in another week.”

“Are you a big rollerblader?” he asked. Lee couldn’t help associating rollerblades, neon clothes, zinc oxide and Walkman tapeplayers with the decline of Western civilization.

Sarah shrugged.

“I’ll do anything that involves spending time in Golden Gate Park,” she said. “Bike, run. Even ride those stupid paddleboats in the lake.”

Sarah directed Lee to the nearby Hilltop Cafe on Filmore Street, a small restaurant with dark polished wood and elegant lace tablecloths. They found a parking space in front. Lee was famished and immediately ordered fried calamari to go with his Samuel Adams beer and her camomile tea.

After he put down his menu, Lee had a chance to study Sarah more carefully than he had earlier. He noticed her hair had a hint of auburn in it. Aside from lipstick, she wore little makeup. Her face was well tanned. She must have spent a lot of time outdoors. He could imagine her in ski goggles, slaloming down a mountainside in perfect, no-nonsense form. Sarah’s menu was flat on the table, her hands palm down on either edge. She was studying it carefully. She sat with her shoulders squared but leaning slightly toward him.

“You’re staring,” Sarah said, without looking up.

“Oh. Yeah. I’m sorry.” Lee looked at his hands and realized he had been unfolding and refolding his napkin. He put the napkin down and took a gulp from his beer.

Sarah looked up and studied him for a few moments with a considering gaze.

“So,” she said. “How did you end up at the News? I understand you used to work in New York.”

“Quite a change, huh? So, you’ve been checking up.”

“I have my sources. I want to know who I’m dealing with.”

“It’s not a particularly interesting story,” said Lee.

“That’s all right. Tell it anyway.”

Lee could see that he was going to have to give her at least part of his story so he retraced the early years of his journalism career. He started with the years in Florida, learning the craft, moving to various newspapers in the itinerant lifestyle of a young journalist. He didn’t try to describe exactly what he wrote about. He glossed over the New York years.

“So what made you leave New York?” Sarah asked.

Lee finished his beer. Set down the bottle and ordered another.

“Change of climate,” he said. “I just couldn’t stand the cold anymore.”

They were silent for a minute. Lee studied his thumbnail, irritated that he had lied. It must be the guilt. He was still paying for that original story about Judge Miriam Gilbert. He took a sip of water.

“Anyway,” he said. “I needed a change.”

“And has it been a good one?”

“The jury is still out. I have a city editor that I am ready to murder, though. So I may just kill him and get it over with. It would simplify my life. The only drawback would be the food on Death Row, speaking of which…I’m starving.”

Lee ordered salmon filet in a creamy sauce with minced ginger and mango. Sarah opted for New York strip steak. While they waited for their food, Lee demanded equal time.

“You know that I’m an attorney, right?” said Sarah.

Lee nodded while he speared another lightly crusted circle of calamari. “Second in your class at Hastings. You went to work for some big law firm, right?” Sarah nodded.

“But you left after two years,” he went on. “I guess the money was too good. See. I have my sources, too.” Lee flashed a smug grin.

Sarah lifted an eyebrow ever so slightly. “Your intelligence is remarkable,” she said. “You must have honed those investigative skills working for Newsday.”

Lee munched the calamari slowly. It had suddenly turned rubbery. He eyed Sarah thoughtfully.

“All right,” he said. “I get the message. Tell you what. I’ll fill you in on all the sordid details of my past. Just not today, okay? I don’t want to ruin my appetite.”

“Besides,” Lee said through another ring of calamari that was starting to taste better, “I want to hear your story. Tell me why you left and what you’re doing now. That part I don’t know and I am curious.”

“Well, as I guess you know, I spent the first two years out of law school at Flowers & Myce. It was a very prestigious law firm, or so they thought,” said Sarah. “I hated it. I just wasn’t ready to spend my entire life making and saving money for rich people. I need more suspense than wondering whether the kids will make it into Stanford.

“So, now I work at a small firm of lawyers that specializes in prosecuting lawsuits against employers, mostly accused of discriminating against women, minorities or the elderly,” Sarah continued. “I like the work. I run my own cases. I get into court. I have a lot of fourteen hour days but it’s good.”

“Is that why you were so close to your aunt? I mean the fact that you were both lawyers?” asked Lee.

Sarah nodded. “Yes. There was that. Actually, it was more. My family…our family…was not what you could call full of professionals or academics. Aunt Miriam blazed the trail. She really inspired me. And, she helped me along the way. It was a lot of things.”

At the mention of her aunt, Lee could see Sarah’s mood darkened perceptibly. Fortunately, the food arrived on cue and Lee fell back to a safe discussion of their favorite restaurants.

They skipped dessert and Sarah proposed that they return to her flat for coffee and more privacy than was available at the tightly packed restaurant. They still hadn’t discussed what had happened earlier in the week outside the News’ building.

Chapter 10

THE MAN IN the blue Ford station wagon had been waiting outside Sarah Armstrong’s flat for two hours before Enzo Lee had arrived. Abdul Hassan had followed Lee’s Fiat when they drove to the restaurant, parking farther down on Filmore Street and then walking back up Filmore where he could watch them through the large windows of the Hilltop Cafe.

When he saw that they were ordering dinner, Hassan returned to Sarah’s flat. He parked the station wagon a block away and walked back to the flat. Hassan was Egyptian by birth, although he had moved to Queens as a teenager. He had short black hair and a thick, well-trimmed mustache. He was wearing jeans, Reebok running shoes, and a gray sweatshirt with the hood drawn over his head.

When he reached the front of the house, Hassan leaped quickly up the outside stairs. It took him 20 seconds to pick the lock to Sarah’s flat and let himself in. He locked the door behind him.

Once inside the flat, Hassan moved methodically through the rooms. In the bedroom, he took a pillowcase off a pillow and emptied the contents of a jewelry box on the dresser into it. He pulled open all of the dresser drawers and pulled everything out, looking in the places where people ordinarily hide their valuables. He found a wad of $20 bills in Sarah’s underwear drawer. He added that to the jewelry in the pillowcase.

Hassan pulled Sarah’s hanging clothes out of her closet and pulled out the boxes stacked on the upper shelves. He pulled off the tops but found nothing except a Nikon camera that he added to his stash.

In the office, he went through the file cabinet and pulled most of the files from the drawers. He put them on the floor quietly. He didn’t want the tenants below to hear anything alarming. He didn’t find anything worth stealing in the office and just left the files scattered about.

In the living room, Hassan removed the books from the built-in bookcases and piled them on the floor. He knew it was a place where many people install wall safes. As he expected, he didn’t find one. It didn’t really matter. He just wanted to leave the trail of a half-way competent burglar. He decided to bypass the kitchen. The noise would have been too great a risk.

He made a quick survey of the rooms, thinking about how they would look to the police. He left the pillowcase with the meager booty at the top of the stairs. Hassan made a mental note to take it with him when he left. Afterward, he would dump it someplace where it would likely be found and, hopefully, reported to the police. He would leave the camera and some of the jewelry inside.

The last thing he would do is take the girl’s purse and the reporter’s wallet, if he returned with her. In a few days, he would try to use one of the credit cards or bank cards, making sure that he couldn’t be identified in the process, of course. That should convince anyone that he had been a burglar, surprised in the act, who had merely killed the people who walked in on him.

Hassan moved a small chair in the living room to the front bay windows. He would have to return it to its original place when he saw them drive up. He was careful to position it in the shadow, where no one outside would see him sitting. Then, he took his .38-caliber Glock out of a holster in the small of his back. He toyed with it, popping the magazine out and then pushing it back into the handle of the gun, over and over, while he waited.