Levon's Night (3 page)

“The actors came in by sea. We have a shit-ton of witnesses north and south and no one saw anyone strange on their private beaches that night,” Ben Greco started. He had a PowerPoint set up in a vacant house they were borrowing with the permission of the absent owner and the local Costa Rican law who were sitting in. The group was seated in a media room using the big screen for the presentation. On the screen were the images on Greco’s laptop with windows for a layout of the home, map of the coast and pictures of the crime scene.

Tony Marcoon stepped in, prompted by notes in an open book before him.

“One neighbor was having a party on the adjoining beach to the north. An all-nighter. Lots of potential witnesses. Nobody saw anything. To the south we have a paranoid dude with credentials almost as shaky as Blanco’s. He has motion lights on his house that are set to light up if anything bigger than a dog passes by. No lights that night. And he has cameras that caught nothing but surf and sea gulls.”

“They came in off the ocean. By boat or raft or what?” Bill asked. He was seated by Captain Salas who was trying to hide his enthusiasm at being included in the fast moving briefing. His English was strictly grammar school and Bill was providing translations
sotto voce
as things went on.

“They could have used a fucking submarine. The local coast guard are doing what they can but you have to understand there’s a lot of pleasure craft in these waters. These guys could have hopped on a Zodiac off a yacht or fishing boat and come ashore and no one would have seen or heard a thing,” Ben Greco answered.

“The actors gained entry to the property. We have no clear count on how many we’re talking about here. They either took care of the two guards first then entered the house or there could even have been enough of them to split up and perform the two tasks simultaneously,” Tony said.

“The alarms were bypassed but they may not even have been on. Estimated time of death on the guards, and they were the first to die, is early evening. Just as it was getting dark. So the house probably wasn’t buttoned down for the night. Time of death for the others was several hours later, estimated. Four hours inside. Seven hours outside,” Ben said paraphrasing his notes.

Up on the screen was a slideshow of photographs taken by Sala’s team. Corey Blanco with his head slumped forward as though he’d merely dozed off in his chair. His wife was limp in her chair against the duct tape restraints. Her mane of blond hair hid her face inside the tight confines of the plastic bag secured over her head. The house maid’s face was mottled black with broken blood vessels, and her swollen tongue protruded against the suffocating plastic like a snail looking to escape. As bad as they were, it was the photos of the children that made even the most hardened agents turn their heads away. One of them, a T-man (woman actually) whose days were spent examining counterfeit currency for flaws and patterns, rushed from the room to get noisily sick in another room. One tough US Marshal motherfucker had tears on his face as he forced himself to look at the garishly lit photos projected on the state-of-the art big screen.

“Yeah,” Tony said. “These are sick fuckers we’re looking for. But they’re pros. This was professional start to finish. Ex-military or established gang. A tight crew that doesn’t take naps in the getaway car or brag to strangers in a bar about scores. No DNA. No prints. None of these guys took a dump or a piss while they were in there.”

“Make no mistake. We
want
these guys. We want their
asses
. Our masters in DC and Quantico may have a stiff prick for the Blanco cash but it’s
these
assholes we want. They are the key to finding the cash. Find them,
any
of them, book them and press them and we’ll find the money,” Ben put in. Iron and fire in his words. He had kids of his own from two marriages. The man was outraged.

“That’s just it, guys. Did they get the money?” Bill Marquez said, holding one hand over the other on his lap to keep from raising it like a second grader in math class.

“What’s that mean?” Ben said without rancor.

“I don’t think they got jack shit. I think they walked out of here with blue balls is what I mean. Put the house diagram up again,” Bill said, standing. Tony tapped keys. Bill walked up to the screen and began pointing to spots on the house layout that reappeared, much to everyone’s relief, in place of the murder photos.

Bill said, “They had Blanco open the safe for them. I think he did it first thing. Maybe thinking this was just a home invasion. But what they wanted isn’t in the safe. What they wanted is the big bundle. So they take Blanco back to the big room where his family and the housekeeper are already strapped down. They make threats then they start to make good on the threats.”

“On the kids. So does Blanco still hold out a while?” Tony Marcoon asked.

“We’ll never know. The man was hard-hearted enough of a son-of-a-bitch to take the life savings away from old people and families. But you have to think that was all business. They start on his own children and maybe he wants to fold, wants to give them anything to make it stop. In any case, I think his heart gave out before he could give them anything.”

“Then the
señora
,” Ramon Salas spoke up from his seat.

“Yeah. I shared some of this with the Captain before. They keep working on the kids hoping that the mother knows what they want. She doesn’t. It’s hours of this but she has nothing to give them. They finally kill the remaining four and then leave, going back out to sea the way they came. Empty handed.” Bill showed his audience the palms of his hands.

“That’s fucked up. For us and for them. There’s no angle for us. If they got something then we could be on the lookout for large sums of cash being moved. If what you’re saying is what happened then there’s no handle,” Ben Greco said with disgust.

“Maybe they didn’t get Blanco’s secret,” Bill said. “That doesn’t mean Blanco didn’t leave something somewhere. Just not here in the Costa Rica house. Maybe not the hard cash but a way
to
the cash. This house is loaded with leads if we know where to look. If we find what they were looking for we can get to it before them. We can be waiting for them.”

“He’s right,” the female agent with the twitchy stomach said, returning to the room, a damp washcloth held against the back of her neck.

“Nancy Vargas. Special agent, Treasury,” Ben Greco said by way of introduction.

“I work forensic accounting. This murder shit is too real for me. But what we have here is numbers and paper trails. Corey Blanco dropped off the grid a decade ago. We’ve never been able to pick up a thread on him. But this house is a start. Even paying with cash there’s legalities to consider. He had to use a name and that name ties to other names and other places. It’s the first square on the board. We just need to find the rest of the squares and figure out what the board looks like.” She took a cautious sip of ginger ale from the glass by her seat.

“I sucked at math,” Tony Marcoon said, grinning.

“Blanco might have other properties. We need to find out if he moved around at all and where he went and who he had contact with. We don’t know what the assholes we’re looking for know now. Maybe they learned something, the location of the next square,” Nancy said.

“You think he has other houses somewhere? You think the money’s there?” Bill said.

“I think he left himself options. Back doors. Escape contingencies. Blanco was smart. He got away with it and he knew he’d have to hide the rest of his life. He’d have planned for that,” she said.

“Find his hiding place ahead of these fucks and we’ll be waiting for them when they stick their hand in,” Ben Greco said.

“There’s something else to think about,” Nancy Vargas said.

“Tell us, teacher,” Tony Marcoon said.

“The money might be squirreled away in banks. The quiet kind of banks. What we’re looking for might be account numbers and Swift codes. A list,” she said.

“A single piece of paper that could be anywhere in the world,” Bill said.

“Yeah,” she said and took another tentative swig of Canada Dry.

7

A Range Rover was parked on the opposite side of the island. A man stood with hands in the pockets of a woolen coat while the tank filled. The Rover was new but covered over in a patina of salt.

“I will be done in a minute, okay?” The man stood stamping his feet almost in time with the dinging bell on the pump. The pump had one hose. An old Texaco with the flying horse symbol faded pink on the steel hood.

“I need to go inside anyway. I’m Mitch,” Levon said putting out a gloved hand.

“Sascha,” the man said smiling. Levon couldn’t see through the fogged over glasses to see if the smile reached his eyes. He wore corduroy pants and sandals over thick woolen socks.

“Short for Alexander?” Levon said, giving the man’s limp hand a single pump.

The man hesitated before nodding.

Levon left him stamping and pumping to cross the gravel lot, avoiding the puddles of slush that gathered in the depressions. The door of the store banged open and a woman stamped toward him, head down. She nearly walked into him on her way to the pump.

“Excuse me,” he said.

She looked up, eyes goggling through thick glasses misting with condensation. The bitter expression twisting her face turned into a beaming smile. An explosion of red hair was barely contained by a red and white striped knit tosh.

“I am sorry. That woman, she…” she said, turning her head toward the store with a wince.

“Cecile? Some days I’d rather run into a bear behind the counter. I’m Mitch.” Levon nodded and offered his hand.

“Lily. You live on Mohawk Road? With your family?” she said, giving his hand a firm grasp in a wool mitten decorated with reindeer.

“Just my daughter and me. Do you have kids?”

“No. Only Sascha and I. We are artists.”

“Painting?”

She squinted at him.

“What kind of art do you do?”

“Oh. Concept art, Graphics. It looks like we are ready to go.” She nodded to where Sascha was replacing the nozzle on the hook.

“Well, see you around the lake then. Merry Christmas,” he said and watched her pick her way around the slush puddles. She also wore sandals over socks. They were in the Rover and gone across the county road and hooking a left to Mohawk Road without a wave or word of farewell.

“Wanted to know if I had the
New York Times
, if you can believe that,” Cecile said by way of greeting when Levon entered the store, muggy and warm after the bitter cold outside.

“Well, they’re artists.” Levon shrugged.

“The goddamn
New York Times
,” she huffed behind the counter. Cecile was a woman of indeterminate age who gave the impression that the store she stocked and managed simply grew up around her one day. It fit her like a turtle’s shell.

A grocery store with two rows of mostly empty shelves in the off season. A pair of coolers stood against the back wall loaded with sodas, beer, lunchmeats, dairy, cheeses and bacon. The longest wall held racks of chips and candy bars. A spinner rack of dog-eared paperbacks was the town’s unofficial public library. Behind the counter was a wall of cigarettes and cigars. A broad arch at the rear of the grocery opened into a reasonably well-stocked hardware store filled with necessities for emergency repairs and simple DIY jobs. During the summer the place was hopping with tourists coming north and south on the county road. Cecile had the only gas, smokes and snacks for thirty miles in either direction, with signs alerting drivers to that spotted all along the shoulder in either direction. In the winter her customer base was limited to the locals and anyone who was wintering around the lake.

“I told her that after Thanksgiving even the mail doesn’t come every day. I’ll be damned if I’ll stock a newspaper that I’ll never sell anyway. I told her, ‘you want to know what’s going on in New York you should Google it,’ ” Cecile continued.

“Artists,” was all Levon could bring to the exchange.

“I suppose.”

“Did that PVC pipe order come in, Cecile?”

“It did. You can find it in back. The joins are in a box with your name marked on it.”

“Great. I’m going to work on the Hoffert kitchen over the holidays,” Levon said.

“And where’s that darling little girl of yours?” Cecile leaned on the counter, her entire demeanor changed. The wrinkles on her face deepened to allow a toothy smile to open.

“Home with her studies.”

“This close to Christmas?”

“She has to finish her language and math sections then she gets to take two weeks,” Levon said as he picked up a fistful of Merry’s favorite candy bars. Mallow Cups and Snickers.

“Those for her?”

“Stocking stuffers.”

“Nothing for Dad?” she said with a conspiratorial wink.

“This,” Levon said, holding up a Payday.

“I think Dad deserves something better than that,” Cecile said and bent to root around under the counter. She came up with a black cardboard tube embossed with gold and silver letters.

“Glenfiddich eighteen-year-old Scotch. Picked up a case at an estate sale. One fifty,” she said.

“One hundred. Cash. When did you get a liquor license?”

“Call the cops. They’ll be here in a week maybe. And you always pay cash anyway, Mitch. One twenty.”

“Sold. I need something for Nate Fenton anyway. Forty for the pump and whatever I owe for the PVC pipes and candy,” Levon said and counted out twenties on the counter.