Clint Faraday Collection C: Murder in Motion Collector's Edition (28 page)

They soon filed out. Clint got on the bike
and rode around back until they got in taxis and left, then went
back to Doc’s office.

“
Do you
believe those people? Can anyone be that totally devoid of
character?” Doc asked. “I get them like that. Not usually so
extreme.”

“
Want to
try to talk with Morris?”

“
Can
he?”

“
He’s a
lot better. I think he’ll be alright.”

They went to his room. He was looking a lot
better.

“
It was
Clinton? Frank Clinton?” Robert asked when they came into the
room.

“
Close.
Clint Faraday.”

“
I’m
still pretty confused about a lot of things.”

“
Let it
come naturally. Don’t try to force it,” Doc suggested. “I have to
get back to work. If you get tired, tell Clint to take a
hike.”

Robert grinned and waved. Clint pulled a
chair close to the bed and asked what he remembered.

“
I was
doing something down by the dock and suddenly there were lights
exploding and a lot of pain, then nothing except little flashes
until I woke up here this morning. I seem to remember a boat and
... Pancho! Pancho was helping me and someone was trying to hit me
again ... who I couldn’t see. There was someone in another boat. A
blue one. One of those tour boat things.

“
That’s
about it.”

“
Fatty?”
Clint asked.

“
Fatty? I
don’t think ... he was in the other boat! He was trying to tell me
something about money and ... that some people were going to ...
try to do something.”

“
Nothing
else? No one else?”

“
Some
Indios. They were arguing with Sarah about making her go to the
hospital or something on that order.”

“
Pancho
and some of the others were trying to get Sarah to let them bring
you here. She refused. I had to go out there and take you out of
the house and bring you here. Pancho came to me and said you were
in bad shape and she wouldn’t let you get to treatment.”

“
Pancho
is a friend, I think. I don’t think my dear wife is. All she cares
about is making money and impressing all her snotty friends. I
begin to think she doesn’t give a shit if I live or
die.”

“
To tell
the truth, that was my impression.”

“
She’ll
give you nothing but trouble.”

“
Oh,
she’s very impressed and it was all somebody else’s fault she acted
like she did, but, you see, everyone was after her money and she
didn’t have any idea of who she could trust! She just
knows
she can trust
me
!”

“
What?
You’re a multimillionaire recluse or something and she found out
about it?”

“
The
Greenwoods, Auermonds and Fatty Grossman were here. Doc wouldn’t
let them see you. All they could talk about was money – which we
peons without a pot or window wouldn’t understand. Doc said I
understood a little about money. I’d donated six million or so to
the hospitals.”

“
Did
you?” he asked.

“
Uh-huh.
What he didn’t tell them was that I only arranged for the funds
because of cases.”

“
She
didn’t piss in her pants when he said ‘six million’ did
she?”

“
She
might have. She looked like she had.”

He laughed. “Spread it on thick! I think just
maybe she’s the one who hit me. She’s worried that we can’t pay
back the money the others put in the project. I want to be rid of
her.”

“
If you
die the bills are all paid – but not if it’s murder. She has to
arrange for you to die by what can be called natural
causes.”

He looked very thoughtful, then suddenly was
asleep. Clint left, went to the morgue and told Doc about the
conversation, then headed home.

He Finally Saw the
Light

“
Clint?
Sergio here. What happened with that Morris thing?” It was two days
later. Morris was scheduled to get out of the hospital today. He
was going to stay in an apartment he’d rented with Clint’s help. He
didn’t care to go back to Popa. He could say the doctor ordered
that he come to the hospital for checkups every day for five, then
every other for six, then once a month if all was well.

“
Nothing
new. He saw the other partners for about fifteen minutes yesterday
afternoon. Doc said they could stay ten minutes because it was
business. If they came because they gave a damn about the patient
they could have stayed a half hour. He had arranged that with
Morris.”

“
Those
people... have no respect for anyone. They are
not
liked by the staff at Swan’s Cay. They’re
demanding and nothing is ever what they wanted. You would think, at
the price they were paying, they could get a little service now and
then.

“
I said
to tell them they’re getting every service promised in the
registration. If they wanted more they could arrange for it at
their own expense. They seem to have enough money to pay for extra
services.”

“
They
don’t have, as they said about me, a pot or window. It’s costing
them more than they can afford to be here at all. It’s just a
front. It’s all on charge cards.”

“
Some
German tourists were asking Elyn and Jorge how people could
accumulate so much money and never learn how to act in public.
Where they could overhear. They also managed to let them know they
were German when they were at the next table having dinner with
Marty Gold, the lawyer. That would send them a mixed
message!”

“
What
does Marty think of them?”

“
He’d
like to slow-fry the lot.”

They talked a bit, then Sergio asked that
Clint make a report about going out there to forcibly take Robert
to the hospital. They had asked if he really was working with the
national police. A report would make it official. “Just something
like; went to Isla Popa and transported a crime victim, Robert
Morris, to the hospital in Bocas del Toro, Isla Colón. Wife and son
objected strongly. Needs investigation. That will scare the piss
out of her!”

Clint agreed, sat down to write a short
report, then went to the station and filed it. He then went around
town talking to friends. He met Marty Gold at the Golden Grill, who
said those people had tried to hire him to check on Clint and the
police.

“
Take the
money. I filed a report about it.”

“
Deal!”
he said, grinning. “How about two hundred bucks per hour, one hour
minimum.

“
Oh, give
them a break. Seeing they’re new here, only ninety bucks an
hour.”

They laughed and he went on. After awhile he
decided to go fishing for an hour or so to relax. When he got back
he got a call from Sergio. He said Marty had gotten a copy of the
report. He had put a stamp on it before making the copy and had put
Clint down as being a “Special consultant and deputy, Clint
Faraday, Bocas del Toro” on the report identification line. They
laughed about Marty letting them wheedle him down to seventy five
dollars. It was the kind of thing lawyers did for twenty to twenty
five dollars regularly.

Clint and Judi went to El Ultimo Refugio for
dinner and to hear Dave and his friends perform some music. Judi
met a friend she dated on a semi-regular basis and Clint met a
woman from David, a friend of Dave’s, who spent the rest of the
night with him.

He went to visit Robert the next morning to
find him a lot better and in good spirits. He was going to tell
Sarah and William they could go back to the states, but he was
staying in Panamá until something could be worked out about the
project. The Greenwoods and Auermonds were yelling about suing him
for the loss and Grossman was trying to find a way to get his money
back. He, at least, knew there was no way to sue anyone because of
a bad investment.

“
I still
think it was Sarah who hit me, though it could as well have been
William.”

“
I
wouldn’t be surprised at either or both,” Clint agreed. “Trouble
is, we can’t get any proof, even as to who gave you the poison.
They can claim there was antifreeze there and you must have gotten
something that was contaminated by accident. Any path of
investigation without more is a dead end. There’s simply not enough
proof to present for a denunciado.”

He nodded. The way that whole bunch was
fixated solely on money, it might have been a cooperative effort to
get the insurance money. William had even said that it was a good
thing Clint brought him to the doctor because there wouldn’t be any
insurance if he’d died from a murder attempt.

“
He had
miscalculated that, too, hunh?” Clint asked.

“
I would
say! I can’t believe I let her turn my son into that ... thing. I
hope I never see either of them again. That goes for the rest of
them. I have enough income from royalties on ads I produced to keep
me going pretty well here. There’s the house and dock. It’s
comfortable.”

Clint agreed and went back home, then took
his boat past Chiriqui Grande to visit friends on the comarca. He
spent the night and headed back to Bocas Town. As soon as he was in
range his phone buzzed. Judi. It seemed there had been an accident.
Sarah and William had somehow turned off the main road to David and
had run over the end of the short road there for heavy equipment
used in repairs. They didn’t read Spanish so didn’t know it was
marked as a private road and unauthorized access was prohibited.
When the equipment wasn’t there the paved lot dropped directly into
a little valley seventy meters below.

“
Talk
about a dead end!” she finished.

“
I think
it’s not quite that simple. Now I have to investigate what really
happened.

“
Are the
Grossman crowd still there?”

“
The
Greenwoods. The rest went to Panamá City yesterday.”

Clint chatted a few minutes, then turned in
at Chiriqui Grande and caught the David bus. He knew the road into
the lot up in the mountains at Palo Seco. There was no way anyone
wouldn’t know that was a service road.

“
I’d like
to know exactly what happened with the accident in Palo Seco. The
gringos?” Clint asked at the checkpoint at La
Mina/Hornitos.

“
I went
up there. Ask me, it was no accident. That kid – or somebody else –
drove off the lot deliberately.”

“
The kid
was driving?”

“
Strapped
in behind the wheel. She wasn’t strapped in, but that would hardly
matter. Air bags aren’t much good when you hit upside down after a
drop of seventy meters.”

“
I guess
not! Thanks.”

“
Want to
know something else? I can tell you as a fellow cop.”

“
What?”

“
We’re
looking into a few little things like the fact the transmission was
in neutral, for one small example.”

“
Anything
to identify who did it?”

“
We have
a handprint, but couldn’t prove it had anything to do with that,
even though there’s no other reason it would be over other prints
on the transmission shift lever.”

“
Whose?”

“
We don’t
know. We have one like it from an accident three years
ago.”

“
Pro.
Somebody hired him.”

“
I’d
say.”

Clint went to look over the site, then back
into David. It looked like the insurance would pay double if they
died in an accident. The fact he could bring the “accident” part
into serious question meant it wouldn’t pay at all. He might just
do that!

He went to Dave’s apartment in David for the
night. He knew the places to look for the kind of person who would
make an “accident” happen like that. There was a little bar near
the David fairgrounds that he’d been in before, then there were the
places like two near Pedrigal. He got a couple of hints, but it
wasn’t quite the type of thing they did. They usually would make it
seem a mugging that got out of hand or a house fire that trapped
someone inside. If the hit man was hired in Bocas it wouldn’t be
known here except through those in the same business. He went back
to David and sacked out, then caught the bus back to Chiriqui
Grande at 7:00 in the morning, picked up his boat and was back home
by two thirty. He went to talk with Sergio, nothing, and to Morris.
Morris said he didn’t know anything except that they had taken a
dive off a cliff in the rented car and William was supposed to be
driving.

“
He might
have been, but he’s just seventeen and recently got his learner’s
permit. He drove too fast and much too carelessly the two times I
allowed him to drive with me in the car. It seems suspicious, but I
don’t really care much. I think I was finally over her ever since I
woke up in the hospital here. I haven’t gotten along with William
since he was thirteen and she began to treat him like the
undisputed king of the household. Most of the trouble I had with
her was over him.

“
I guess
it’s a good part my fault. I was working ten hours a day and was
dead tired at night. I let her take total control over him. She let
him rule her.