Tahoe Ghost Boat (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller) (4 page)

The woman was more relaxed now that we were talking about dogs. She’d finished with the roller and put it back in her purse. She sat down in one of my chairs. I sat down behind my desk.

“Why do you think the woman was following you?” I said.

Instant change of mood. Eyes darkened. The fear came back.

“I’m being blackmailed. I need you to catch him and put him in jail. I can pay you whatever you charge.” She looked down. It wasn’t about looking at her lap. It was about avoiding my eyes. “It might take a while. But money is no object once I get my insurance settlement. My husband died ten days ago.” She paused. “I assume your fee is reasonable.”

I explained my per diem and other expenses. She waved her hand in the air like it was nothing.

“Tell me about the blackmail,” I said.

 “I got an email. I can’t remember the exact words, but it said something like, ‘We know about your husband’s life insurance policy. We know who you are and where you live.’

“Then it said, ‘If you want to live, you will pay us the money your husband owes us. Two million dollars. We will contact you with payment instructions. Commit them to memory because our emails are self-deleting.’ Then the email vanished. I went back to my inbox, and it wasn’t there.”

“Do you remember the sender?”

“No. I just saw the subject line. It said something like, ‘Your future is in our hands.’ I opened it and had just enough time to read it before it vanished.”

“Tell me about your deceased husband.”

She nodded. “Ian Lassitor. He drowned. They found his body out in the lake. His boat was broken in two with only the front part still floating, and he was on that. He had on a life vest, but it couldn’t protect him from the cold water.”

“Did he tell you he was going out on the lake?”

“No. But Ian was impulsive. He had a restored woodie, and he liked to do bold things like take it out in a winter storm.”

“Pardon my saying this, but you don’t seem very upset,” I said.

 “I was very upset when it happened. But what you’re really asking is if we were close. And the answer is no. We were cordial and accommodating and respectful of each other. We had appreciation for each other’s efforts. But we weren’t close or especially caring. Not romantic at all.”

“Have you been married a long time?”

“Four years. Long enough for us to realize that our initial attraction was more about hopes than reality. You know how it is. Some people really like each other at some deep level. They actually like to talk and be together. Other people never find that. They just get the thrill of initial attraction. Next thing you know, you’ve planned a big wedding. But after you’re married, you realize that you put more planning into the wedding than the marriage. Then you find out you’ve married a jerk.”

“Ouch,” I said.

“Well, it’s true. Ian could be a real bastard. I won’t deny it. He was often rude to me, to his employees, to his customers. Even so, having him die was very traumatic.”

“Right. He was thoughtful to leave you with a hefty life insurance policy,” I said.

“Yes. The payout is two million, just like the email mentioned. I wonder if the blackmailer killed Ian to make the insurance company pay out.”

“Always a possibility,” I said, wondering if she could have done so herself.

“When they called me up to identify the body, the cop I talked to said it looked like he’d been in a collision with another boat. How else could his boat have broken in two? Maybe it was an accident. Or maybe it was on purpose. Either way, there was no sign of the other boat. They said he drowned. But I’ve heard that Tahoe water is so cold even in the summer that it can kill you. So wearing a life vest did him no good.”

I nodded. “That’s true.”

She looked at me, over-painted eyes holding a slow and steady gaze but imbued with something like sadness. But I couldn’t tell if it was the genuine kind or the manufactured kind.

“Do you have a picture of Ian?”

She nodded, reached into her little purse and pulled out a tiny wallet. From it she pulled out a small newspaper picture of Ian. It was so small that it was hard to see much.

“What kind of business was Ian in?” I asked.

“Tech stuff. Down in Silicon Valley.”

“Hardware or software?” I asked.

“I think software, mostly. He was writing some program about facial recognition. And he was involved in patents. Patents for inventions about the Internet. That’s all I really know. He would rarely talk about work, but when he did, the words would just go through my head. None of it makes sense to me. It’s like lawyer talk. I understand real stuff. Like clothes. And cars. And iPhones. I use my computer for shopping. But the behind-the-scenes computer stuff, the Internet stuff, I don’t get it. I don’t even know what a patent does.”

“Who’d Ian work for?”

“His own company. Symphony TechNation.”

“The company produced software?” I asked.

“Like I said, I don’t really know. I actually think that most of the money Ian made was from lawsuits.”

“I don’t understand. He sued people?”

“Companies, I think. A few times that I know. Maybe lots. Something about patent infringement.”

“You mean, he invented stuff, patented it, and then sued someone who illegally used his invention?”

Nadia frowned. “I don’t think he ever patented anything. If he did, he would have bragged about that. He was pretty insecure, and that made him boastful. I’m not sure how it worked, but I think he bought a bunch of patents on the cheap when a company was going out of business. Then he got lawyers to sue companies for infringement about really complex stuff. I think the companies usually thought that it was cheaper to pay him than fight the lawsuit. I know that sounds really bad.”

“It sounds like a kind of legal extortion.”

Nadia nodded. “Yeah. I’m sorry to say it. He said someone once called him a patent troll. I don’t know what that means, but it’s obviously not good. So maybe the blackmailer was one of the companies he sued, and they had to pay him, and now they want their money back.”

Nadia blinked one eye as if a piece of dust had gotten in it. She reached up her little finger and, with surgical precision, used the point of the nail to get the dust.

“Ian wasn’t your typical tech guy who just wrote software,” she said. “He grew up in the poor part of San Jose like me. We went to the same high school but never were friends. Years later, after I divorced my first husband, we found out how similar we were. That we had ambition. That we’d always looked at the rich kids and thought it wasn’t fair that they got all the breaks.”

“Ian’s ambition was to be a software engineer?” I said.

“Not so much software, although he was good at it. Mostly, he just wanted money.”

“What was your ambition?”

“Me?” Nadia looked surprised. Maybe no one had ever asked her before. As she hesitated, I thought that maybe she didn’t know.

“My ambition was to pull myself out of poverty, to make money, to live a good life and not be trapped. Kind of like Ian.”

“What kind of career did you want?”

More hesitation. “Well, my ambition wasn’t about a career so much as a quality of life.”

She stopped at that as if satisfied that it provided a good example of ambition.

“Was Ian ever combative? Did he make enemies?”

“Of course. He had to force his way in the world. No one ever made it easy. He was like me that way. If no one will give you a break, then sometimes you have to push people aside. I’m sure that some of them would have become enemies.”

“The people he sued,” I said.

“Well, yeah. But Ian always pointed out that it’s just business. He wasn’t suing them personally. He was just suing them as a... as a prudent business move.”

I thought about people who might be destroyed by a lawsuit against them. It might not just take them down financially, but emotionally, too.

“When you first called,” I said, “you said that I shouldn’t call the cops. Why?”

“Didn’t I tell you? The email said that if I went to the cops, I would die.”

“Did your husband have any other family?”

“Just his brother William who died when he was in middle school. Some kind of infection, I guess.”

“Do you have family? Or anyone you’re close to?”

“My parents died a few years ago. I was an only child. The people who are closest to me are my friends. I do have some cousins back in Hawaii. And my neighbor lady in Los Altos who is very dear. Oh! I also have a daughter.”

“A daughter. And she’s not at the top of your list of people you’re close to?”

“Well, she lives with her father, my ex. They’re in Sacramento. That’s a long way from my world. Even though I drive through there on the way to Tahoe, I’ve never visited them there. And she’s... She’s very different from me. She doesn’t like what I like. She doesn’t even like me. She’s pretty much told me she doesn’t want me in her life. We never bonded. Even when she was a baby, she wouldn’t nurse. It’s like from point A, she was telling me that she didn’t care for me.”

“This was her decision, not a reaction to anything you did.”

“Of course! I just told you. My daughter rejected me. I’ve been suffering ever since.”

“And she rejected you from the time she was a helpless baby.”

“That’s what I just said.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought that parents of newborn babies were in charge. Not the other way around.”

Nadia squinted her eyes at me as if I’d suddenly become her enemy.

“I guess I never had a good family experience,” she said. “My mother was mean. She never missed a chance to tell me that I was homely. Two or three times when I was a kid and I put on something nice and did my hair and tried some makeup, my mother said, ‘What’s the point? You could never make yourself look good. Why bother trying?’ One time, she even told me I was ugly.”

“So you’ve been trying to make up for those slights ever since,” I said.

“Yeah.” Nadia seemed to look inward. “For most of my life, I believed what my mother said. I had self-contempt. I would wear ratty clothes and not comb my hair. In high school, the other kids would taunt me. Especially the kids who had new clothes and their own cars. They were the worst.”

“And now you are beautiful and you have a great car, right? So you can move past that.”

FIVE

Nadia stared at me.

“What’s your daughter’s name?” I finally asked.

“We named her Gertrude. You know how old-fashioned names are back in style. Merrill, my ex, calls her Gertie, but I call her Trudy.”

“Is Trudy your only child?” I asked.

“Yes. I have visitation rights. But Trudy doesn’t want me to come.” The woman used a pleading tone in her little speech, but it felt flat to me.

“It doesn’t sound to me like you ever liked your daughter.”

“What do you mean?!” Nadia said. “I love her dearly!”

“She was last on your list of people who are close to you. Maybe the truth is she’s just the victim of two parents who don’t care about her.”

Nadia squinted at me. Her cheeks colored a shade of burgundy. “Merrill and Ian weren’t the only bastards I have to deal with.”

“Were they bastards for the same reason I am? Because they made you face your real feelings about your daughter?”

Nadia’s eyes moistened. Tears thickened and spilled over her lower lids. She cried soft at first, then harder. Eventually, her lungs heaved as if she couldn’t get enough air.

She reached into her purse and pulled out a tiny designer handkerchief that had a stitched logo and wouldn’t be sufficient to blot the tears of a distraught parakeet. She used it on her eyes, but tears escaped and fell onto her pantsuit.

Spot was worried. He looked at her, turned to me as if to see if I was going to do something, then turned back to Nadia.

I reached a box of tissues off the little sidebar that held the coffee maker and handed it to her.

Nadia reached her fingers into the box and pulled out most of the tissues in a bunch. She held them against her eyes.

In time, she calmed a bit, sniffled, blew her nose.

Spot and I waited a long time.

When she could breathe well enough to talk, she said, “Do you have a powder room?”

I wondered how much of her reaction was sincere and how much was for dramatic effect. “In this building, we just have restrooms. Even the ones for women are just restrooms. Bad light. Tiny mirror.”

She stood up. Even though she held the tissues in front of her face, I could see that her makeup had smeared. The pretty eyes were now more Halloween than beauty queen.

“May I use your window for light?” she said, a little catch in her voice.

“Certainly.” The only window in my office was behind my desk. Spot and I were blocking it. I stood, pushed my chair to the side, took hold of Spot’s collar, and took him to stand by the door with me.

Nadia walked behind my desk, pulled a little makeup case out of her purse, and flipped open the mirror. She stood at an angle to the window, looked in the tiny mirror, and made a gasp.

Eventually, she focused. She patted and blotted with the tissues. She found a cotton ball in her purse and rubbed it around her eyes. She used a miniature brush to draw with blue pigment. Then she pulled out a little tin and an applicator to dab at what looked like light chocolate parfait. She rubbed it on her cheeks and under her eyes. The cotton swab came out once again for touch-up. Then came a Q-tip for fine tuning. She blinked hard. Blotted some more. It was a long time before she put her tools back in her purse.

I’d once had two rusted fenders repaired and the entire Jeep repainted with less work.

Nadia went back to the chair and sat down, her back to Spot and me where we were still standing at the door.

I let go of Spot and went back to my desk chair. Spot tried to sniff Nadia’s face. She held her hand up and ducked.

“Spot, c’mere.” I patted my thigh.

He didn’t even look at me.

“C’mere,” I said again.

Spot glanced at me, then looked back at Nadia. His head was taller than hers when she was sitting. She kept her hand up as a barrier.

Spot walked over to the rug by the door, turned one and a half circles, lay down, and sighed, no doubt wondering why people put on strange-smelling stuff and then didn’t even let him smell it.