Dos Equis (27 page)

idea how hard it is to get your hands on fifty-five thousand dollars in a matter of days?” Frances asked. They’d settled on the couches in the outer rotunda, freshly made mojitos in hand. I was well hidden behind a column. No mojito.

“However did you do it?” Sereena wondered aloud, shaking her head in mock admiration.

“Well, keep this under your hats,” she said, shooting a look in the direction of the just departed maid and mojito-maker as if she might be a potential thief. “I always keep some of the green stuff handy. You know, just in case. This is Mexico, after all, right? You never know what might happen. Or when you might need some cash to buy your way out of here. If you don’t

already, you two should really do the same.”

Toraidio’s face froze in a rare show of distaste for a female in his company. He quickly rallied, and gallantly said nothing.

“Oh dear,” Sereena moved in to cover the awkward silence. “I hope this doesn’t leave you too short.”

Frances smiled. “Fortunately, I’ve just landed a lucrative new business contract. My coffers will fill up very soon.”

“How nice for you.”

“Speaking of crazy things happening in Mexico, you won’t believe it when I tell you what happened last night.”

The air in the room seemed to disappear. What’s this? Did she know something? Did she suspect Sereena and Toraidio were

involved?

“That Gatt fellow came charging into my house!” she crowed, thrilling herself with the telling of the story. “I don’t even

know how he knew where I live. He might have been stalking me, for all I know.”

Phew. I watched Sereena and Toraidio’s faces visibly relax.

“He wanted me to sell him the painting! Can you believe that?”

“Well,” Sereena said smoothly, “it just goes to prove what a good decision you made to buy it. And what a good deal it is.

Imagine, your purchase has driven a world-renown collector to such extremes. Not many people can say that, Frances.”

“Yes,
Senora
,” Toraidio agreed, somewhat recovered from his earlier revulsion for the woman. (Although I noticed he was now using the more matronly
senora
instead of the youthful and playful
senorita.
) “You should be very pleased by this.”

Frances puffed out her chest and congratulated herself with a healthy swig of mojito.

A short silence, with Sereena and Toraidio both looking at Frances expectantly, led to Frances pulling a thick envelope from her purse. She handed the package to Toraidio. He accepted it with a small bow of his head.

“Are you free for lunch?” Sereena asked. I smiled to myself. There was nothing Sereena wanted less than to have lunch with

this viper. But she already knew that Frances Huber was otherwise engaged.

“Oh darn. I’d like that. But I already have plans for lunch. My life is just so busy right now, you know. But how about

dinner? Tonight? Maybe someplace nice and clean, in Ixtapa?”

Sereena smiled. “Of course.” She rose, signalling an end to the meeting. “Call me later?”

And with that, Frances left to kill my mother.

Chapter 20

It was a rare cloudy day in Zihuatanejo. The temperature was still in the high seventies, but something about the sombre

colouring of the sky and a flicking wind made the early afternoon feel considerably cooler. We were back at Amuleto. There

was only one other table for two finishing up lunch. A lone hotel guest sat at the bar nursing a cocktail. Mom was down on the pool level, alone, near the precipitous edge, pretending to admire the foliage. No one from the dining level could see the pool area. And because of the weather there were no sunbathers. The setting was perfect for murder. All Frances Huber would have

to do was give Mom a quick and forceful shove. Down she’d go, rolling down the rocky cliff, likely ending up bloody and

broken near the hill’s base, or lost in the roiling waters of the Pacific. Of course, I would never let any of that happen.

At ten minutes after the appointed meeting time of one o’clock, I was getting worried. Was she not coming? Had she found us

out? Had something else gone wrong? I could see that Mom was getting a bit antsy. It was tough pretending to look at flowers and greenery when you knew that a murderous hellcat was scheduled to jump out of the bushes and push you off a cliff. But she was doing okay. Mom was, if nothing else, a tough old bird. I’m pretty sure that if I left her to her own devices, she’d take on Frances Huber without hesitation. Who exactly, between the two of them, would end up at the bottom of that mountain, was not exactly a given.

And then she was there.

The devil in a blue dress. Frances had dressed up for the event. How thoughtful.

I was taking no chances. Just as she made her appearance, so did I.

“Frances,” I called out to her.

Her eyes whipped away from my mother and hooked into me, like a prowling hyena distracted from its prey. She gave me a

surprised, questioning look. My mother turned around and said something in speedy Ukrainian. Although Frances didn’t know

it, Mom was complaining about her bunions, telling me her feet were sore, and wondering if she could sit down soon?

“Frances,” I said again, ignoring my mother. “Could I talk with you? Please?” I dosed my tone with sufficient urgency to get her attention.

She simply stared at me, then my mother, then back at me.

“Just for a minute. Maybe over here?” I indicated a narrow pathway that led away from the pool area toward the guest

rooms.

Frances gave my mother an icy smile. Although my mother rarely uses profanity, she took the opportunity to smile back and

describe a female dog (in Ukrainian).

Oblivious to the insult, Frances followed me into the passageway. Once there, she immediately jumped all over me. “What

do you think you’re doing? We had a deal. If the situation was right—which it is—I would fulfill our contract today. Now look what you’ve done. You’ve messed everything up. There’s no way I can go ahead with things now.”

“I think…I think I may have changed my mind. At least for now. I’m just not ready for this yet.”

“In case it wasn’t clear, Mr. Quant, I don’t do this for fun. This is a business. I provide a service. I get paid. I was fully prepared to provide that service today. I expect to be paid for that. Today.”

“A business…?” I needed Frances Huber to say more than she was. All this talk about contracts, business, a service, would

mean nothing to anyone. I needed her to say she was there to kill my mother.

“That’s right. A business.”

“You call what you do a business?”

“What would you call it?”

Uh uh. That wouldn’t work. “I can’t pay you for nothing.”

“Then wait right here,” she said, an ugly pitch in her voice. “Where did your precious mother get to? Maybe I’ll just go

finish what I came here to do after all. I expect you to be waiting here with a cheque when I get back.”

“No!”

Frances crossed her arms over her prodigious chest and stared at me.

“I need to go over this again. What will you do? To her. Exactly.”

Frances sighed impatiently. “We’ve talked about this. I don’t like being dicked around. Is this happening or not?”

I hesitated, trying to think of a way to steer her into an admission of what she did for a living.

“Tell you what, big shot. I’ll give you two choices. Either (a) we postpone and I try again at a later date. But that will cost you more, just because you pulled this little stunt. Or (b), I’ll call it off, for a reduced fee. So, which is it?”

“How much are we talking about?”

“You pick (a) and it’s going to cost you two-seventy-five…”

“To do what, exactly?”

Frances stepped back. Oh jeez. Had I gone too far? Her piglet eyes were burning into me. Either she thought I was trying to

frame her, or that I was a mindless wing nut who couldn’t remember exactly what our original deal was.

“Are you fucking with me?” she finally asked.

“Of course not. I just want to make sure I understand the deal. I’m a businessman too.”

She snorted. “Somehow I don’t think your mother would agree with that assessment.”

I frowned at the insult, but said nothing to defend myself.

“If you decide to go with (b), which I’m guessing you will…” She said it as if I was much less of a man for calling off my

own mother’s murder. “I’ll take two-hundred and we’ll call it a day.”

“Two hundred! That’s only fifty less than what you were going to charge me in the first place.”

“Then consider it a down payment, should you ever decide to resurrect this little arrangement.”

“You mean…you’d consider killing my mother again?” Someone had to say the “k” word.

And in the worst timing known to man, that is when Saskatoon’s finest, Darren Kirsch, along with several of Mexico’s

finest, came bursting into the passageway from both ends.

Stupido! Stupido! Stupido!

I almost had her! I almost had her admitting that she was going to kill my mother. That’s why the men in blue (or in this case, a dirty brown) were hiding in the wings in the first place. We needed Frances to incriminate herself. With all the information we had tying her to the other murders she’d committed having been lost—somewhere at the bottom of Bahia del Palmar— this

was all we were left with. And now we had nothing. Not once during our confrontation did Frances say anything that made it

sound like she was doing anything more than selling Mary Kay cosmetics.

We were foiled.

And by the look on Frances Huber’s face as she took in the situation, she knew it too.

“What’s all this?” she asked innocently of the authorities who had surrounded us. “Is this man in trouble?” She meant me.

Ballsy, I have to say that for her.

“Frances Huber,” Darren said in his tough guy voice, a voice that sends shivers down most women’s and some men’s

spines. “I am Detective Darren Kirsch of the Saskatoon Police Service. I must inform you that I have no jurisdiction here, but my colleagues are allowing me to translate for them until an English speaking police officer can attend the scene.”

“The scene? What scene?”

“Frances Huber, you are under arrest for suspicion of the murders of Sally Ann Coontz, Agatha Dunwoody, Mary-Jane

Johnson, Mary Anne Knoble, Gertrude Steinbock, Constance DeRochers, Delores Schenectidy, Pramila Chopra, Henrietta

Tannin, and Hilda Kraus.”

As Darren sang out the names, each louder than the one before it, although I did not personally know any of these women, my

heart soared. Justice. Justice was being served here today in Zihuatanejo. In memory of these ten elderly women. Women to

whom fate had delivered evil children who caused them to be murdered in cold blood by an immoral woman named Frances

Huber. As an added bonus, with each name recited, I had the joy of watching the smugness on Frances’s face slide away, to be replaced first by disbelief, then horror, then fear.

As I witnessed the drama unfold in front of me, I pushed back with all my might the one feeling that threatened my rejoicing.

The feeling that maybe, just maybe, Errall and the others were right.

There was one more victim of this horrible woman.

JP.

If this past year of meandering the globe, deep introspection, trying to understand the world and my role in it, had taught me anything, it was that sometimes bad things happen to good people. As they had to me when my new family of Ethan Ash and

daughter Simon were pulled away from me. You had to grieve it. Learn from it. Move on.

But I couldn’t think about that now. I simply wouldn’t be able to hold it together. And now was a time when holding it

together was of paramount importance. Yes, bad things happen to good people. But right now, bad things were happening to a

very bad person. I wanted to be fully present for that.

Yet, there was something else concerning me. How could Darren Kirsch be making such lofty accusations? Our proof had

disappeared with JP. The police had jumped the gun. What did we really have to prove Frances was guilty?

By this point our large group had moved out of the tight quarters of the corridor. We were in the bigger pool area, which had the added benefit of giving my mother a front row seat to all the action. I know she was thinking this was finally good payback, for her having to miss her daytime soap operas to be here in Zihua.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Frances said, regaining some of her bravado. “I don’t know any those women you

just mentioned. You must have the wrong person. I’m a consultant.” “I’m afraid we have compelling evidence to the contrary,”

Darren calmly responded. “Evidence pointing to your presence at each and every…Ending…event.”

Frances bristled at the use of her self-coined term. If he knew that, what else did he know? “That’s ridiculous,” she

announced, sounding more confident than the quivering hem of her blue dress attested to. “And, I must warn you Detective, if what you’re talking about has anything to do with papers or documents stolen from my home last night, well, I’m not sure how it works in Mexico, but in Canada and the United States, I’m pretty sure the police cannot use
stolen
evidence to obtain a conviction against anybody.”

I suspected Frances watched too many episodes of
CSI
and
Law & Order
, but she was also probably right. What the hell was going on here?

“Stolen?” Darren responded, sounding a little confused by the very idea. “Who said anything about anything being stolen?”

“I did! Just last night my security guards chased down a petty thief who was rifling through my
private
papers in my
private
house, which sits on
private
property! That, in case they didn’t teach it to you in police school, is against the law.”

Darren shook his head sympathetically. “Well, I’m sorry to hear about that, Ms. Huber. Did you report the incident to my