The Body in the Bed (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 5) Read online

  The Body in the Bed

  By Jerold Last

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright 2012 © Jerold Last

  Cover design Copyright 2012 © Caitlin Harley

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I want to thank all of our very special friends in Montevideo who made us feel like it was home while we lived there and have enriched our lives since then with their continuing friendship. My wife, Elaine, helped with countless rounds of editing and refreshing my memory about details of places and things we did. Thanks also to Caitlin Harley who suggested the right image for the cover of the book and helped with her skills in graphic design. Suzanne, Roger, Eduardo, and I want to especially thank DARPA (not Al Gore) for inventing the Internet. It was an invaluable research source for much of the background material about the trade and other political and economic relationships between Uruguay and Iran.

  The book is a work of fiction, but much of the plot is extrapolated from a background of the current news. Uruguay is a politically mature democracy that has every right to choose its trade partners by whatever political and economic criteria it selects. It has no obligation to cooperate with our sanctions against Iran. None of the events in the novella, real or fictional, is intended as criticism of a sovereign country (Uruguay) whose policies do not always align with those of the United States. I've twice been a visiting Fulbright Professor for a semester at the Facultad de Quimica in Montevideo, the first time in 1982 during the military dictatorship and the second time in 1999 (accompanied by my wife Elaine) after the current democracy had come to power. I've been back to visit there and collaborate on research with my Uruguayan colleagues several times since 1999 with generous support from the National Institutes of Health’s Fogarty International Center. Any resemblance between the fictional characters and situations in this novella and real persons and events is completely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter1. The fateful e-mails arrive

  Chapter2. The body in the bed

  Chapter3. Lunch and a bit of sightseeing

  Chapter4. Dinner with the top cops

  Chapter5. Forensics, strategy and job assignments

  Chapter6. We do some detecting

  Chapter7. Searching for a crooked cop

  Chapter8. International connections and baiting a trap

  Chapter9. Cleaning up the mess

  Chapter1 . The fateful e-mails arrive

  My wife, Suzanne, and I both had the same e-mail on our computer, an ultra-fancy invitation to next week’s gala event in Montevideo, the capital city of Uruguay. In the most formal of Spanish, The Intendencia de Montevideo invited us to a dinner hosted by the Mayor and Police Chief to celebrate the upcoming promotion of Martin Gonzalez to the rank of Chief of Detectives. Martin was a special friend of ours, and this was a very significant and well earned career advancement for him. I was tempted to say yes to the invitation if Suzanne agreed to join me for the occasion.

  I waited until our dinner at home in the huge house in Beverly Hills, California that Suzanne had inherited from her father after his murder, when we first met, to ask her. She looked surprised for a moment before putting down her knife and fork and replying.

  “I was looking for an excuse to suggest that we go to the celebration, but thought you might be too busy or just not want to do all the formalities they'll expect. Let’s do it! But I have to admit, there’s a nitpicky little voice inside my head asking whether we’ll be able to get as far as the hotel in Montevideo before we discover the first dead body.” Suzanne rolled her eyes and grimaced as she obviously remembered discovering the grisly scene of the dismembered body in the park the first time we had come to Montevideo and first met Martin.

  That earned a smile from me, probably because I've gotten so used to seeing dead bodies in my former career as a homicide detective on the Los Angeles Police department and my present work as a private detective. “Well, so far we’ve gotten registered at the hotel once before we found the body and we’ve been told about the body before we ever got to the hotel the other time. I guess that makes the answer to your question that it’s a 50-50 chance either way.”

  We'd been looking for an excuse to leave Robert, our now almost 1-year-old son, alone for a few days with his nanny Bruce, a former Navy SEAL, just to see how Suzanne and Robert handled being separated. This seemed to be the perfect excuse for us to get away for a few adults only days by ourselves, so we RSVP'd that we were coming enthusiastically.

  The last time we'd flown to Montevideo our entourage included Robert, Bruce, and a whole lot of big suitcases containing baby essentials. This time we actually managed to pack for the trip with a single suitcase that would conveniently fit in an overhead bin during the flight for each of us despite having to pack semi-formal attire for the gala dinner along with casual clothes for the rest of the trip. Add backpacks for both of us for laptop computers to keep up with work and e-mail and we were ready to go.

  About twenty hours after we left Los Angeles International Airport, known locally as LAX, Martin Gonzalez met our flight at the Carrasco International Airport in Montevideo in his own car and drove us to the hotel, grateful that we had so little luggage to cram into the small trunk of a small car. He chose the quickest route downtown, via the Ramblas along the broad Rio de la Plata River that formed the border between Argentina and Uruguay. He dropped us off at the hotel after explaining that today was a working day for him despite the festivities scheduled for later on that night.

  Chapter2 . The body in the bed

  Neither of us won the bet about when the first body would appear. Or maybe we both did. Clearly it turned out to be a bit less than a 50-50 chance whether we'd find it before or after we had been in our hotel room for a while. When we got to our hotel room in Montevideo the supine body of our old acquaintance, Bernardo Colletti, was lying dead on the bed. As usual, Bernardo was dressed expensively and well, in a suit and tie that had obviously cost a lot of money, which he could afford as a practicing physician.He looked a lot like a much older, deeply suntanned, copy of Clint Eastwood, 60-ish, tall, with chiseled features that had begun to sag with age. He was obviously on display to make sure we got the message, whatever the message was intended to be.

  I saw the body, recognized who was there on the bed, and quickly turned to Suzanne who stood just inside the room holding on to the door. She looked startled but completely in control of the situation. If nothing else, our experiences in South America had gotten both of us used to seeing dead bodies.

  I'm afraid that I spoke ill of the dead, who was definitely not a friend of ours, in those first few seconds. "This is the best I've seen that bastard look since we met him. Let's get out of here without touching anything else."

  Suzanne had already grasped both the situation and the bellboy and was hustling the now gagging bellboy, who had frozen just inside the room and quite literally turned green, out into the hall. Now he was able to vomit without contaminating the crime scene, and he proceeded to do just that.

  I took a longer look to memorize the scene in front of me, followed Suzanne and the shocked bellboy out of the room, closed and locked the door, and called Martin Gonzalez, who was still only a few minutes away from the hotel on his way to his office. Martin took care of the formal report to the police and hurried back to get a careful look at the crime scene before the room got too crowded or the case became too territorial for him to take charge of it. Suzanne and I shared a sense of deja vu as we stood next to a mutilated corpse being interrogated by Martin Gonza
lez as suspects in a murder; that was exactly how we had met him for the first time. The only thing that was missing this time was his former partner Detective Gonzalez (no relation), who had been killed just before our last visit to Montevideo, taking notes of the questions and answers.

  Suzanne and I had first met Bernardo and Martin during our initial visit to Montevideo when we found the Ambivalent Corpse’s body lying in a park less than a couple of miles from our current hotel room. We met both of them again during our recent visit to Montevideo when we solved the Matador Murders. Bernardo was far from being a friend, but finding the dead body of someone you know is always a shock. When the corpse has obviously been murdered, as was the case here since his throat had been cut from ear to ear and he’d bled out all over the bed, it’s an even bigger shock. Bernardo was no great loss to society; in fact, he was probably at the top of the very short list of people I’d least regret to discover dead in my bed in Montevideo. But, there was a principle here. Someone was trying to scare us or misdirect us away from something else, and that wasn’t acceptable.

  I thought about the logistics of the killing for a while before pulling Martin aside.

  "I assume we can agree that this scene was carefully prepared for our benefit, right?"

  With a grim look on his face and tensed muscles standing out on his lean jaw, Martin nodded his ascent.

  "How do you imagine that we got handed the keys to the only room in the hotel with a dead body in the bed?"

  "I think we have to interview the clerk at the desk who gave you the keys, Roger."

  "Yeah. Let's go downstairs and do it now." We walked over to the elevator and rode down to the lobby. The lobby was long and narrow with the elevator in the middle along the east wall, the entrance from a driveway leading off the broad avenue to the north, a back entrance onto San Jose Avenue to the south, and a small bar against the west wall. The two clerks stood behind a small reception area behind the bar to the south.

  Jose, the clerk who had given us our room, was one of two clerks manning the desk. He was short, thin, balding, nervous, and shifty-eyed. He wore a rumpled sport jacket over a badly stained tie on top of a badly stained and wrinkled shirt. He did not radiate an air of affluence. In fact, if there were hotel clerks who looked to be susceptible to a bribe, Jose was a poster child for the stereotype. He did not look at all happy to see us.

  "Can I offer you a different room, Sir?" he stammered, keeping his eyes averted from mine.

  "Yes, I think so," I replied. "But first you need to answer a few questions from my police detective friend here."

  Martin, who looked almost exactly like the actor Peter Falk playing the TV detective Columbo, complete with a badly fitting and well worn trench coat, stared at Jose silently and steadily for a long moment to increase his discomfort.

  At his menacing best Martin finally asked the question. "How much did he pay you to borrow the room for a few minutes and to make sure my friends got the keys to exactly that room? You have two choices, Jose: tell me the truth now and I promise that I won't arrest you. If you try to lie, I promise you several years in jail as an accessory to murder. Take your time, but be careful that you make the right decision. You're only going to get this one chance."

  "He gave me 2,500 Pesos, Senor". Jose was sweating visibly now and still avoiding eye contact.

  Martin leaned forward over the desk, deliberately invading Jose's space. "Describe him to me".

  "I can't. I never met him. He made all the arrangements over the phone and left me the money in an envelope." This time he looked Martin in the eye as he answered his question and seemed to be telling the truth.

  Martin looked directly at the clerk. "Did you see Bernardo Colletti, the murder victim, come into the hotel?"

  Once again, Jose looked Martin directly in the eye. "Yes I did. He passed my desk about half an hour before Mr. Bowman here and his wife arrived at the hotel."

  All of a sudden, Martin looked like a hound on a scent. "Was he alone or was he with someone?"

  "He was with a woman. I don't know who she was. All I can tell you is that she was very beautiful and she has never been a guest at the hotel."

  The hound was on the scent now. "Can you describe her to me?"

  "Small, dark hair, beautiful face, nice body. Well dressed. She could have been a very high priced whore."

  "How did she interact with Dr. Colletti?"

  "Like she was his lover. She touched his arm a few times as they walked past the desk and she stood very close to him in the elevator."

  Martin thanked Jose for his help.

  We walked back towards the elevators while a very, very embarrassed desk clerk made hurried arrangements for us to get a new room with a cleaner and better made-up bed.

  "What do you think about this killing, Martin? At first glance, it looks like a message to Suzanne and me. But, given who Bernardo Colletti was, it could also have been meant as a message for you." Bernardo was the former husband of a colleague of Suzanne's and had been deeply involved in both of the big cases that Suzanne and I investigated previously with Martin here in Montevideo.

  "Bernardo was one of your most important confidential informants, Martin. Do you think someone is trying to implicate you in a killing? They could be trying to interfere in one of your investigations, or trying to keep you from learning some particularly valuable information from Bernard."

  "I haven't the slightest idea at this stage of our investigation. But I'll certainly give it some thought. I have to get back to work now, but I'll see you and Suzanne later tonight at my party."

  Our next room was on a different floor, a lot nicer, and we didn't have to share it with a freshly killed corpse. We just about had enough time to eat a late lunch, do something in the afternoon, and get dressed for a semi-formal dinner. Martin was busy, so we were nominally on our own for lunch, at least until the house phone rang and Eduardo's booming voice told us to meet him in the lobby in 5 minutes. Our friend Eduardo is Eduardo Gomez, a high-ranking Paraguayan police officer in Asuncion, the capital city. He's also a high-ranking federal police officer in the Paraguayan Secret Police, the equivalent of our FBI. In his remaining time he is also a very senior spy who works all over South America on behalf of Israel's famed intelligence agency, the Mossad. Suzanne and I had the opportunity to demonstrate our considerable skills in martial arts on the occasion of our first meeting with Eduardo and several of his subordinates in Paraguay while solving the case during which we first met Martin Gonzalez and Bernardo Colletti.

  Chapter3 . Lunch and a bit of sightseeing

  He was hulking by the elevators when we got downstairs. I got an abrazo, the universal South American unisex hug, while Suzanne got a real hug and kiss from one of our best friends, the Paraguayan policeman Eduardo Gomez. I'm 6'2" and 190 pounds, but next to Eduardo who is also 6'2" but weighs about 275 pounds of solid muscle, I look small. Eduardo took a long look at Suzanne, who was completely back into shape after her pregnancy a year ago. At 5'8", with a lean athletic body and long blond hair, she was worthy of a long look or two. She and Eduardo had a brother-sister type relationship, so he was free to stare at Suzanne and tease her.

  "You two really know how to make an entrance, don't you? Are you trying to upstage poor Martin on his night of glory?"

  Eduardo took Suzanne's hand, which looked tiny between his two huge paws. He led us to a corner of the lobby where we had some privacy before he continued, speaking directly to Suzanne.

  "I assume I've been with you on all three of your cases before where you had a chance to make this kind of enemy, right?"

  "Except for our first visit to South America, which actually makes it four cases, when we investigated a murder in Salta, Argentina, that's right."

  "Could you have made this kind of enemy when you were in Salta?"

  Suzanne thought about the question for a few seconds while she fidgeted with her hair. "I don't know. We did get involved with some drug dealers in Northern Argentina and in
California during that case. But that was a few years ago and quite a distance from here. And there's no way they could have known we were coming here far enough in advance to plan this little greeting party. No, it almost has to have been someone local who could organize this on very short notice."

  When Eduardo was thinking deeply or concentrating on something specific, he tended to forget his enormous bulk and move into the personal space of whomever he was talking to. Suzanne stepped back from him to continue.

  “For starters, we need to think about people from Montevideo who hate us because we interfered with their profitable drug dealing the last time we were here, or neo-Nazis from Montevideo who hate us because we got several of their colleagues arrested the first time we were here, or another different batch of drug dealers from Salta, Argentina and Los Angeles whose path we crossed the first time we were in South America. That’s already a big list.

  "We've also got to think about what if we weren’t the target here, but that someone who is out to get even with either Martin or you could be using us as part of an elaborate scheme to get at a high ranking police official? Or, Eduardo, in your case not only an important police official in Asuncion, but also a top spy for both Paraguay and for the Israeli Intelligence Agency, The Mossad.”