Without further preamble, here is Chapter 1 from The Empanada Affair:
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CHAPTER
1.
It was a sunny day in November, one of those days the
Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce tries to convince the tourists is typical of
our weather all year round. I was
sitting at my desk waiting for a client to walk in and hire me. I had been sitting at the same desk for
a day or two, and was getting bored with nothing much to do. It had been a good year for me and I
had been working hard until the end of last week. That meant I was sitting on a nice bank balance and could
afford to be without a client or a job for a while longer. On the other hand, I didn’t
particularly enjoy doing nothing and thought about taking the rest of the
afternoon off and making a quick trip to work out at the new Gracie Jiu Jitsu
gym I had seen written up in the local news section of the L.A. Times. A moment later the decision was taken
out of my hands.
There was an assertive rap on the door, which opened
and she walked in. About 5’8”, on
the good side of 30 years old, lean athletic body, Scandanavian looking face,
long blond hair, and an aura of success and good breeding. Wearing $300 jeans
and Bruno Magli heels, her look was casual but at the same time Los Angeles
sophisticated. Maybe it was pheromones, maybe it was
just how beautiful she was, but somewhere deep in my mind a little voice was
shouting, “Wow, this could be the one for you!”
I introduced myself and made a gesture; she sat on
the client chair facing my desk, crossed her long legs, and leaned forward.
There was a pause while she decided what to say. I could read the letters on my door backwards; they still
said “Roger Bowman Investigations”.
I glanced around the office seeing again the desk with a computer
monitor on top, the computer tower and a laser printer under the desk, the
client chair in front, and a couple of file cabinets against the wall. The opposite wall featured a large
window with a great view of the smog hiding the Tehachapi Mountains to the
north, and a sprinkling of my various martial arts competition trophies on
shelves on the walls, an overall image far less elegant than my potential new
client.
“Hello. I assume you are Roger Bowman”, she said.
“Yes, I am” seemed to be the right answer.
“My
name is Suzanne Foster.”
“What
can I do to help you Ms. Foster?”
“I’m being followed”, she told me, “and there seem to
be at least two people taking turns doing the following. This has gone on for more than a week
that I am aware of, and I don’t know for how long before that until I realized
I was seeing the same two men behind me over and over”.
“Do you have any idea why someone would want to have
you followed?” I asked.
She sat back in the client’s chair and waited for me
to answer.
“The Los Angeles police department certainly has more
manpower and resources to solve a murder than a one-man detective agency like
mine. What makes you think I could
succeed when they can’t?” I asked reasonably.
“The killing didn’t happen in Los Angeles” she
replied.
“Maybe you need to start at the beginning and tell me
your story”.
She moved forward in the chair and started to
explain. I listened carefully
without interrupting, and took a few notes as she spoke.
“My father was Robert Foster, an amateur winemaker
and a wealthy retired businessman who had made a ton of money importing hand-
made crafts and furniture from all over the world, especially South America,
and selling it to buyers from stores who dealt with the public. He dreamed about buying some land of
his own and having his own vineyards and winery. About a month ago he went to Argentina to buy some property
and start his new career growing grapes and making wines. I heard from him shortly after he
arrived, just to let me know he had gotten there, then nothing until the U.S.
counsel in Argentina called two weeks ago to let me know that his body had been
found laying on a street in Salta, and that he had been beaten to death.
Apparently the police in Salta didn’t do much of
anything to investigate after the body was found and identified. They function on a cash economy down
there, with minimal use of credit cards, so the assumption is that he was
carrying a lot of money that was missing when they found him. His killers left his passport and his
wallet with no cash in it on the body, which was why identification of his body
was so easy. The police are
convinced that it was a random robbery, and they have no clues as to who did
it.”
“Why do you think this has anything to do with your
being followed?” I asked.
“I think his killing had its roots here in Los
Angeles and that the killer or killers followed him to Argentina and murdered
him for reasons other than stealing a few thousand pesos he was carrying in his
wallet. I want to hire you to go
to Argentina with me, help me to find out as much as we can about what
happened, and try to identify who killed him and why.”
“You may be asking for the impossible”, I replied,
“you are asking me to solve a murder over a month after the killing, in a
foreign country where I have no contacts and no connections to the local
police, no status as a private detective, no clues, and nowhere to begin. This will be very expensive and maybe a
total waste of our time, Miss Foster.”
“I know all of this. But I can’t just leave things as they are. I need to know who did this and
why. Money is not an object, and I
think that if someone who has an open mind and only this one case to
concentrate on looks into it with fresh eyes, there could be some answers. And I’d be there with you, so as far as
your standing with the police in Argentina is concerned, I think my status as
next of kin will extend to you and we’ll get their cooperation.”
“Let me ask you a few questions before I say yes or
no. First and most important, what
did you mean when you said that you thought his killing had its roots here in
Los Angeles and that the killer came from here?”
“Dad was far too wealthy to have made his money as an
honest import agent. I think he
was mixed up in something illegal over the last 10-20 years that helped him get
rich. I don’t know what---drugs,
smuggling, something bad---but I do know that he did a lot of traveling abroad
for his work, especially to Argentina.
This trip to buy land for a winery could have been a combination of
business with pleasure for him, and I think we need to find out what the
business part was all about. If we knew that, we might find links to Los
Angeles, and I think that is where the answers will finally end up being found. And my being followed for the last week
or two makes me even more convinced that there is a strong connection between
something criminal in Los Angeles and my father’s murder in Argentina”.
“My next question may be a little harder for
you. The answers you’re looking
for may be ugly and reflect badly on your father. Are you prepared for that?”
“Yes”, she said. “I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few weeks and I
would rather know the truth than spend the rest of my life wondering whether
Dad was a victim or one of the bad guys.”
I thought about it for a minute or so. There were several pro arguments for my
getting involved. I had nothing
better to do right now, at least professionally, and I was being offered the
equivalent of a very well paid vacation to an interesting and somewhat exotic
part of the world that I would likely never go to on my own. The case was a real challenge and I
like challenges. My Spanish skills
consisted of whatever was left over from four years of study in high school,
but was serviceable enough to handle chasing missing kids and wives in
Tijuana. My companion would be a
beautiful woman who I was already fantasizing having sex with, and who I sensed
would be an interesting and intelligent travel companion. My current social and sexual life was
nonexistent, and something was going on that suggested there were possibilities
here with Suzanne, whose pheromones were calling out to my libido. Strangely enough, that little voice
deep in my mind was telling me that it thought that my pheromones were having a
similar effect on her libido. It
seemed to be worth a week or two of my currently idle time to find out if we
really were connecting.
To be honest, from a professional point of view my
conscience was telling me that if the client had been a 73-year old man I would
have found a dozen reasons to say no to this case. But the client was a beautiful woman, not an old man, and
the trip would be a most welcome change in my routine. There weren’t any con arguments with
Suzanne as a client except that the chances of success were slim to none.
I made up my mind. “OK, I’ll do it, but with a few conditions. You will pay me double my usual fee for
as long as I’m working on this case, plus all of my expenses here and in
Argentina, and we’ll set a time limit of no more than two weeks on how long we
can stay in Argentina. This is a
one-man agency and I can’t afford to be away from my potential clients longer
than that. And I will need a
retainer of $2,500 today. A check
will be fine.”
She stood up, reached out her hand for a firm
handshake, and agreed to all of my conditions.
“I’ll take care of all of our travel arrangements”,
she said. “Do you have an up to date passport?”
“Yes, I do”.
“Good.
Argentina doesn’t require visas for Americans to enter the country, just
a fee to leave the country at the airport. Here’s the check for your retainer. You have a new client. And thank you very much for hearing me
out and agreeing to help me.”
“Thank you.”
“We’ll leave for Argentina in two days. Our flight to Miami leaves from the
American Airlines terminal at LAX.
We can meet there at 7:30 in the morning and be on time for the flight. Don’t forget that Argentina is on the
other side of the world, as far south as you can go before you get to
Antarctica in the Southern hemisphere. The seasons are reversed from here in
the Northern hemisphere. It is
November here in Los Angeles, the autumn season. That means it will be spring in Argentina, the equivalent of
May. In northwest Argentina, where
we’re going, it will be sunny and warm during the days, much like Southern
California in May. We’ll just be
two more tourists visiting an interesting and out of the way part of a country
half way around the world. Don’t
forget to pack light and casual and to bring your passport.”
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