Crunch Time (5 page)

Tom nodded. Presumably, he knew all of this already. He was testing Yolanda, asking the same details over and over, to see if she’d stick to her story.

John Bertram seemed pensive. “Did Ernest say anything to you before he left?”

“Nothing special,” said Yolanda. “I was doing the dishes. Ferdinanda was out on the patio on the lower level. That’s where she likes to sit, when the weather’s nice.” Yolanda gestured impatiently. “It was so she could smoke her cigars. Ernest would”—she pressed her lips together, then composed herself—“he would usually say a few words to her before he left. You can ask her.”

“We will,” Tom promised. He waited a beat. “Now, could you tell me if you knew whether Ernest had any enemies?”

“He had his cases, but he didn’t talk much about them.”

“Do you know if one of the people he was investigating had it in for him?” Tom asked.

Yolanda looked away. Not for the first time, I thought she was hiding something, or not telling the truth. Or something.

“Yolanda?” Tom said. “What was he working on?”

“Well, it would be in his files,” said Yolanda. “They’re in his study.”

Tom raised his eyebrows. “How do you know where his files are?”

“Because he called me in there once,” Yolanda replied, her tone steely, “and asked me to bring him a sandwich.”

“Did you ever open the file drawers, say, when Ernest wasn’t home?” Tom asked, his voice deadpan.

“Oh, Tom, will you stop?” Yolanda cried. “When Ernest worked at his desk, he sometimes had one of the drawers of his file cabinet open. It was a handmade wooden cabinet, really pretty, not one of those ugly metal ones. I asked him if he made the cabinet. He said that he had. He could build anything.”

“Did you open the file drawers when Ernest wasn’t home?” Tom repeated.

Yolanda crossed her arms. “I don’t remember.”

There was a silence. Tom gave John Bertram a small nod.

“So,” said John, “do you know what he was working on?”

Yolanda looked very tired. “I know a bit. Someone was running a puppy mill, I told you. A woman named Hermie needed Ernest’s help with proving neglect or some such thing. She’s an older woman.”

“Older?”

“Midforties, or maybe fifty, I’d say, but she looks sixty. She came over once, and I noticed she’s missing a couple of fingers,” Yolanda added. “I didn’t ask her what had happened to her hand. She did tell Ferdinanda and me that her son thinks she’s crazy, with her closing-down-of-puppy-mills crusade. She said her son didn’t want to hear her stories anymore. He said she cares more about dogs than she does about him.”

“You don’t know her last name?” Tom asked.

“No.”

“Um,” I began, but Tom held up his hand. I knew someone named Hermie. Hermie Mikulski was a tall, buxom, gray-haired woman. This Hermie did have a son, and he went to the Christian Brothers High School. But I was pretty sure she had all her fingers, because she ruled the Saint Luke’s Altar Guild with two tightly clenched iron fists.

To Yolanda, Tom said, “Anything else?”

“Ernest was working on a divorce case. I think there was a lot of money involved.”

“The people getting the divorce?” Tom asked.

“I don’t know,” Yolanda said dully. “There was another thing. Ernest was looking for something for someone. I don’t know the details.”

“You have no idea what he was looking for?”

“No. And I don’t know who the client was.” She glanced at the clock, which read ten to five. “I need to be leaving soon, to go get Ferdinanda.”

“Where is she again?” asked John Bertram.

“The Roman Catholic church. Our Lady of the Mountains. She’s at the monsignor’s house. She didn’t want to stay at Ernest’s place today, because he hadn’t come home, and she, well, she said . . .”

“She said what?” Tom asked sharply.

Yolanda rubbed her forehead. “She said Ernest looked very bad to her yesterday morning.”

“You already said that.” Tom prompted her. “Are you talking about health or something else?”

“Ferdinanda says these things sometimes. She believes in Santería
.
” I wondered how Tom was going to explain Cuban voodoo to his captain. Well, the captain could listen to the tape.

Tom asked, “Was there anything
you
saw that would make you think Ernest looked particularly bad?”

“His house frightened me,” Yolanda said.

“Yolanda!” Tom’s voice made me jump. “What scared you about Ernest’s house? Were you worried he’d discover the money under your mattress?”

Yolanda pressed her clutch of tissues to her eyes. When Tom tried to ask her another question, she just shook her head.

I said to Tom, “May I see you in the living room for a moment, please?”

Tom turned off the recorder. “Let’s take a break.”

Once Tom and I were standing in the living room, I asked, “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing to my friend?”

“Since she won’t go down to the sheriff’s department, I’m interrogating her here.”

“Yeah, well, they’ve discovered that torture doesn’t work, you know.”

Tom did not smile. “You stick to catering, and I’ll stick to interrogation techniques that I have used for years, and that do in fact yield results.”

“Why are you being so mean?”

“Mean? When I’m mean, Miss G., you’ll know. At the moment, I want Yolanda to tell us about Humberto Captain. His father, Roberto Captain, brought Ferdinanda, her brother, and the brother’s wife over on a boat from Cuba. The brother and his wife were Yolanda’s grandparents.”

“The Captains?”

“Roberto Captain was a good guy. His son, Humberto? Not so much.”

I groaned. “This is one of the people Yolanda hangs out with, that you don’t like?”

“This is
the
person,” Tom said. “Listen, I don’t for one second believe that Yolanda asked Ernest if she and her aunt could stay at his house just so they could clean and cook for him. I think the real reason she asked Ernest if they could bunk in with him was so that she could be paid by Humberto Captain to spy.”

“To spy on Ernest? Why? And what kind of guy has
Captain
for a last name?”

“Roberto’s original last name was something Spanish, but he legally changed it to Captain, because that’s what everyone called him, since he was the skipper of a boat that made frequent trips bringing exiles over from Cuba. Roberto, El Capitán, became Roberto Captain. Roberto’s dead now, but he ferried folks like Ferdinanda’s family to Miami, after they became disillusioned with Castro.” Tom tilted his head. “You don’t remember Humberto Captain’s picture in the
Mountain Journal
?”

“Remind me.”

“The paper did one of those quizzes, ‘Can you tell whose view this is?’ The first ten people who guessed right got five bucks. The next week, the paper would run a picture of the owner, sometimes with other people, in front of the view. One of those was the view from Humberto’s big living room. Then the next week, the picture was of Humberto, with his arm around a young woman, in front of the view.”

“Wait. What does Humberto look like?”

“Like a guy who stepped out of a casting call for
Miami Vice
. He’s in his fifties and is shaped like a Brazil nut, narrow at the ends and wide in the middle. He has orangey skin that looks as if he takes daily naps in a tanning bed. Is this sounding familiar?”

“Yes. I’ve seen him at parties I’ve done.” Humberto Captain’s shock of combed-back salt-and-pepper hair went well with the beige, yellow, and light blue tropical suits he wore—despite all the snow and mud we lived with in Aspen Meadow. The newspaper picture of him had made me shudder, and maybe that was why I’d blocked the memory. Humberto’s pale suit seemed to match the light window casement. His tanned skin looked bizarre. His pearly whites were more brilliant than the chandelier he’d been standing under. I asked, “What does this guy have to do with Yolanda?”

“Everything, I’m sorry to say. Humberto is a thief, and Ernest was working on the case. You’re going to have to let me tell you more about it later.”

“But you think Yolanda is working for Humberto?”

“Yes.” Tom ticked off the points on his fingers. “Ferdinanda is beholden to the Captain family for bringing her to this country. And Yolanda has covered for Humberto in the past. He had a big dinner for his cronies, including someone we were looking for, a smuggler. She catered it, but she would not say Word One about who was there, even when we showed her a photo array. We got the guy eventually. But Yolanda was singularly unhelpful.”

“Why would she act that way?”

Tom cocked his head at me and raised his eyebrows, his gesture when he thought I was being naïve. “She keeps saying how scared she is? I think she’s afraid of Humberto, Goldy.” He ticked off another point. “She won’t tell us where she got that cash under her mattress. Oh, and did she tell you why she had to leave her rental?”

“She was afraid of her ex-boyfriend.”

“Yeah, right. The rental house burned to the ground.”

“
What?
”

Tom shook his head. “Yeah, funny how she didn’t mention that, huh? The fire was set, as in arson, okay? Accelerant was all over the place. Luckily, Ferdinanda and Yolanda were at the doctor. And near the house? We found a green and yellow Unifrutco oil can, the kind the United Fruit Company used to store fuel for their vehicles. It’s also the kind of can Fidel and Raul Castro, and their people, filled with oil and dumped on the sugarcane fields of their American oppressors, before burning the cane to the ground.”

I stared at him. “You really can’t believe Yolanda burned down the house she was living in, can you? I mean, if Ferdinanda came over in a little boat from Cuba, why would she make sure to bring an oil can with her? And keep it all these years? That doesn’t make sense.”

“No, Goldy,” Tom said patiently. “We don’t think Ferdinanda in her wheelchair burned down a rental when she was at the doctor. But we do think
Humberto
burned the place down.”

“Why would he do that?”

Tom glanced at the kitchen door. “Our theory is that Yolanda wouldn’t play ball and go spy on Ernest, whom she was making dinners for. Ernest, for his part, was working on a missing-assets case I’ll tell you about later. That’s what he was looking for, that Yolanda is being so vague about. As a private investigator, not a sheriff’s department employee, Ernest wouldn’t have had to bother with intrusive things like search warrants. Yolanda was already involved with Ernest in the dinner-making enterprise, so Humberto Captain must have figured, why not get her to do more? Why not have her ask Ernest if she could live there with Ferdinanda? And why not tempt her with cash in the bargain?”

“But then—”

Tom held up his hand. “We think Humberto found out Ernest was onto him. Humberto may have had Yolanda lift the file, destroy evidence, who knows what. Then, we think, Humberto killed Ernest.”

“That’s just beyond—”

“Beyond what?” Tom asked. “Let me tell you, Miss G. You shouldn’t believe everything you hear from Yolanda Garcia.”

3

T
om walked out of the living room.

“Tom!” I called after him in a harsh whisper. “Why didn’t you ask her about Humberto Captain?”

“I’m trying to, if I ever can get back to the kitchen.” He paused. “Tell me about this Breckenridge character.”

“He wanted to know if you were here, then he wanted to know about Ernest McLeod. Has it been on the news?”

“Yeah, ’fraid so.”

“Look, what if Yolanda stayed here with us? And brought Ferdinanda? It isn’t really safe for her to be at Ernest’s place now, do you think? I mean, you don’t know exactly how this was set up and you don’t have a motive. So . . .”

Tom put his hands in his pockets. He said, “You want Humberto to come gunning for us, here?”

“Of course not. I just want Yolanda and Ferdinanda to be in a place that’s safe for them, that’s all. The rental’s gone, Ernest’s house will be off-limits for a while, and they certainly can’t afford to stay in a Denver motel.”

“With all the cash we found? They can afford the Ritz.”

“Tom. I doubt she’ll want to cater with me tomorrow. Arrangements will have to be made for Ernest. His AA group will have to be called. Someone will have to phone a church and plan a memorial service. All I’m saying is, we have more alarms on our house than a bank does. I want Yolanda and Ferdinanda to be safe. Please?”

He considered, then said finally, “Let me talk to my captain.” He turned and pushed through the front door. Outside, the wind whipped the ornamental grasses Tom had put in. Another gust bent the Boulder Raspberry bushes, their white roselike blooms long gone. At the side of the house, wind-tossed pine branches slammed the shingles. Tom, who never seemed to be bothered by weather, pulled out his cell, punched in numbers, and began to walk up and down the porch as he spoke.

As Tom continued to pace, I watched him carefully, trying to figure out how the conversation was going. Tom looked into the living room. When he saw me glaring at him, he turned away. The kitchen was quiet, so I turned my attention back to Tom, who was stabbing the air with his free hand as he talked. Eventually he came inside and gave me a thumbs-up.

Only ten minutes had gone by, but it was now five o’clock. In the kitchen, Yolanda looked wrung out. Her normally glowing skin appeared ashen, papery, with a darkness under her eyes like bruises. She seemed fragile, very unlike the commanding presence she’d been in the Gold Gulch Spa kitchen.

Yolanda announced, “I
really
need to go get Ferdinanda. She worries about me.”

“Just a couple more questions, Yolanda,” said Tom. To John Bertram, he said, “Could you call the Catholic church and tell the priest we’ll be picking up Yolanda’s aunt presently?”

“You have to call his private line.” Yolanda again rummaged in her purse, an intricately knotted beige bag, until she located another card, which she handed to John. “Please,” she implored Tom, “don’t make me stay here and talk to you. Ferdinanda may seem tough, but she’s . . . not. She’s easily disoriented. She claims she doesn’t hear well, either, and I know her body has weakened since she’s been in the wheelchair. I don’t want you to scare her, the way—” She clamped her mouth shut.
The way you’ve scared me
hung in the air. She said suddenly, “You don’t suppose Ferdinanda has heard from someplace else that Ernest’s been killed, do you? Has it been on the news, I mean? She loves television and the radio. . . .”

“If she’s visiting with the priest, she won’t be watching TV or listening to the radio. Will she?” asked Tom.

“They might be watching television,” said Yolanda. “He and she do that sometimes, when she’s worn him out.”

“I’m sorry, but the newspeople do know,” said Tom, his tone a bit kinder. “Ernest’s only kin is his ex-wife, who lives with her new husband in Denver. The news outlets wanted information, and once we notified her, they got it.”

“Oh, God,” Yolanda whispered.

Tom turned the recorder back on. “You don’t know of . . . anything that had been going on between Ernest and his ex-wife, Faye?”

“What do you mean, ‘anything that had been going on’?” Yolanda asked. Her shoulders slumped.

“I mean, anything that would make her a suspect in his death,” Tom said, his tone matter-of-fact. He brought his face a fraction closer to Yolanda’s, which made her shrink back. “Did they talk? Did they argue? Like that. Anything you can tell us would be helpful.”

“I don’t think they had much contact, if any. He told me that Faye had an affair with some doctor in Wyoming, a while ago. The doctor wouldn’t leave his wife. But then the doctor’s wife died of cancer, the doctor moved to Denver, and the doctor and Faye got married. Aside from Ernest telling us he insisted on getting the house in the divorce, that’s all he ever, you know, shared.”

I knew the story of Ernest and Faye, the story of the house. But still Tom jotted a few words in his notebook.

“What?” asked Yolanda, her tone accusing. She eyed Tom’s notebook. “Don’t you believe me?”

“Should we
not
believe you?” Tom shot back.

“Tom!” I interjected. “You know what she’s saying is—” But again I was stopped dead by Tom’s look.

Yolanda muttered to herself in Spanish, something I didn’t catch. I’d only occasionally heard her speak Spanish. Back when Yolanda and I were working at André’s, she’d told me that she’d studied it in the Denver public schools, because she was tired of Ferdinanda talking to her fellow Cuban-Americans in a language she didn’t understand. Now, I supposed, it came in handy, when you wanted to curse at someone without them knowing what you were saying. One of the few French words I remembered was
merde,
and just about everyone knew what that meant.

“Yolanda?” Tom prompted her. “Are you telling us the truth?”

“Of course I am.” Yolanda looked at me for verification, and I risked Tom’s wrath by nodding. “But you know what, Tom?” Yolanda said, turning her gaze to the window over the kitchen sink. “You can believe what you want. Can we go get Ferdinanda now?”

“Just tell me what you know about Humberto Captain.”

Yolanda threw up her hands and narrowed her eyes, first at Tom, then at John. “You guys are always asking me about Humberto! Why?”

“Some months back? You catered a meal for him and his cronies, down in Lakewood,” Tom replied evenly. “And you couldn’t identify even
one
person who was there.”

Yolanda protested. “That wasn’t ‘some months back.’ It was over a year ago! And I was concentrating on the food, not the faces. Give me a
break
.”

“Did Humberto give you the cash under your mattress at Ernest’s house?” John Bertram took over the questioning so smoothly, I wondered if Tom had signaled him in some way. “Seventeen thousand bucks? That’s a lot of money for an out-of-work chef to have saved up and hidden.”

“Oh,” said Yolanda drily. “I see. You want to talk about my money again. Did you do my laundry, too? Did you feed the dogs and clean up their poops?”

“You want to go get Ferdinanda,” said Tom. “Tell us if Humberto gave you all that money under your mattress.”

Yolanda clenched her teeth. “
Yes.
”

“Why?” asked John.

“Why did he give me the money?” Yolanda asked. “Or why did I put it under the mattress?”

There was a long silence. Finally Tom said, “Both.”

Yolanda’s fingers tapped out a drumbeat on the table as she looked out the back windows. “Humberto is a friend. His father brought Ferdinanda and my grandparents over on the boat from Cuba. So Humberto gave us the money because he knew we were having
problems
. I didn’t have a job. We didn’t have a place to live. He came around when we were packing up what we could salvage from the rental—”

“After it mysteriously burned down,” Tom supplied.

“Yes, Tom. We didn’t have insurance for our stuff. Our landlady, Donna Lamar?
She
had insurance. So why don’t you ask her if she torched the place?”

I said, “Wait. Since when is Donna Lamar a
landlady
? You said before that she was an owner/agent. I thought she was just a, you know, rental agent and property manager.” I pictured Donna Lamar, her dark blond hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, her gray sweatshirt frayed, her jeans unfashionably faded. She was a member of our church, but we went to different services, so I rarely saw her there. Invariably, though, I ran into her at the local hardware store as she absentmindedly pushed a cart loaded with cheap cans of paint.

Yolanda said, “Surprise, surprise, Goldy. Donna owns most of those little houses she rents out. Over the years, whenever somebody had a problem getting rid of a small place? Say the owners were going through a bad divorce, or the house was real remote, or it needed major repairs, and the owners had just been transferred? After the house sat on the market for a year, but before a short sale or foreclosure, Donna would creep in and offer half the asking price. If the owner or the bank refused her offer, she’d move on, buying houses after foreclosure or at auction. She wouldn’t fix and flip, because nobody wanted that house in the first place, right? She’d fix and rent. On the low end of the market, renters aren’t demanding. If Donna does have a difficult tenant, she just doesn’t renew their lease. If you’re renting at the low end? If you’re desperate and you’re just one step removed from sleeping in your car? Donna’s your woman.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

Yolanda shook her head. “I got to know Donna real well when I was renting from her.”

“But she always looks so—”

“Poor and downtrodden? That’s part of her shtick. Or it was. Lately, she’s cleaned up her act. Maybe she’s putting that insurance money to good use.”

“How did Humberto know you were having problems?” Tom asked, giving me a dark,
stop interrupting this interrogation
glare.

Yolanda cocked her head at Tom. “You ever tried to keep something secret in this town?”

“Goldy didn’t know your house burned down,” said Tom. “Goldy wasn’t aware of Donna Lamar’s circumstances.”

Yolanda gave me a puzzled look. “Well, I haven’t got a clue as to how you didn’t hear the news about our rental, and about Donna.” I stared at my friend. Somehow, her answer seemed . . . calculated. Was I picking up on Tom’s distrust of Yolanda? That afternoon, my friend had told me all kinds of details about her relationship with Kris. And yet she had not told me that her rental house had burned down, or that her landlady was a jackal. Why not?

Before I could ask her some questions, Tom intervened. “So Humberto, your family’s friend, somehow knew you were having problems, and he came around and offered to help you.”

“
Yes.
”

“He just showed up out of the blue.”

Yolanda shook her head. “He heard it someplace, I don’t know where. Maybe the news. You don’t believe that he heard it through the town grapevine, then ask him how he knew. You want to hear the story or not?”

“I wouldn’t believe a single word that came out of Humberto Captain’s mouth,” Tom replied.

Yolanda placed her hands palm down on our kitchen table. “Yes, Humberto showed up, out of the blue, as you said. He asked if we needed money. I said we did. He gave me that seventeen thousand. He wanted to know if we had a place to stay. I said I could ask someone I was working for if we could stay with him. At Ernest’s, I put the money under the mattress because I couldn’t think where else to put it.”

I stood up and looked for something to do. This whole conversation was making me uncomfortable. First I was on Yolanda’s side, then I was on Tom’s, then back again. I’d be useless on a jury.

“But you didn’t go stay somewhere Humberto supplied,” Tom was saying now. “You asked Ernest McLeod if you could stay with him—”

“
Yes.
” Yolanda’s eyes flashed. “So
what
?”

Tom leaned across the kitchen table. “You went to stay with Ernest McLeod, after your rental mysteriously burned down—”

“Would you quit saying the rental mysteriously burned down? I’ve only talked to sheriff’s department investigators sixteen times about that stupid house, which was a firetrap, by the way. And no, I still don’t know how somebody would go about getting a Unifrutco oil can these days, and using it to spread accelerant—”

“—and you had no place to go,” Tom said, continuing as if she hadn’t spoken, “despite the fact that you had a rich boyfriend with a big house who would have loved to have you back, with no conditions. But then Humberto Captain showed up while your rental house was still smoking. He appeared unannounced, wanting to give you money. And, let’s see. I’ll bet he was wearing one of his beige tropical suits. Makes him look like a Miami gangster.”

“Gee whiz,” said Yolanda, “I’ve heard of cops doing racial profiling before, but I’d never actually experienced it. And they’re called duck suits.”

“I was joking,” said Tom, but he realized he’d made a mistake. “Sorry.”

“Yeah,” Yolanda muttered. “I’ll
bet
you’re sorry.”

Tom went on. “And Humberto said, ‘Here, Yolanda, take seventeen thousand bucks, and by the way, I don’t actually have a place for you to stay, but I have an idea. To earn this money, could you and Ferdinanda go live with Ernest McLeod, because he’s
investigating
me, even though he’s not a cop anymore?’”

Yolanda said, “Ernest was investigating Humberto?” Once again, I detected a note of . . . what? Dishonesty?

Tom said flatly, “Don’t try to convince me you didn’t know that Ernest was looking into Humberto’s affairs.”

Yolanda closed her eyes. She said, “Okay, I knew.”

John Bertram was summoned by his cell, and I found myself blinking rapidly. I was surprised by what Yolanda had admitted, but I still felt sorry for her. When my business had been closed after someone tried to poison a guest at an event I was catering, I’d been subjected to Tom’s questioning. In fact, that was how we’d met. But I hadn’t enjoyed the interrogation one bit.

Tom pressed her. “Did you know anything about the investigation?”

Yolanda took a deep breath. “Something about gold and gems.”