Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (39 page)

“Arianna, he’s out of control.
They’re
out of control. Someone has to stop them. And,
between us, you and I seem to hold all of the keys: all of the
things that put these pieces together. That’s why we have to go
find that sheriff again and tell him everything we know. The police
have to be involved in this. If we don’t tell them, Paul and Ernie
are going to get away.”

You don’t know the condition of your moral
fiber until something like this happens. Not really. I hadn’t had
the opportunity to check mine in a long while, so it surprised me
how badly I now wanted this thing done. It would no longer be
enough for the stock price to ooze back up and for things to get
more or less back to normal. I thought of Arianna’s poor cooked
lover. I thought about me trekking through the forest in a panic
after watching what had been merely a display. And distraught
pensioners in Urbana? They had
nothing
on this. I wanted
Ernie and Paul behind bars — forever if possible — and if my hand
was partly responsible for their apprehension, so much the
better.

I guess, though, that if Arianna was doing
her own moral fiber check at this point, she saw something
different. “It would be better,” she said in a surprisingly calm
voice, “for me, anyway, if they did get away. As long as they got
far away and never came back.”

I was mystified by this for a moment. I
studied her closely and she suddenly looked very young to me. Young
and vulnerable. And I thought about what all of this would mean to
her. The way things stood — the way Ernie had set things up — she
would be the beautiful, bereaved widow of one of the most
interesting businessmen in the country. A businessman who died
tragically, more or less, in the line of duty. A hero, almost.

However, if the truth was what she and I
suspected, and that truth became known, she would be a social
pariah, at least for a while. The wife of a disgraced — and likely
imprisoned — con man. I could imagine the Hamptons rippling with
whispers already. And it would all come out: the markets he’d
manipulated, the companies he’d “helped.” The fiscal fallout alone
would be tremendous.

And I thought about the burned corpse we’d
come down here to identify. Arianna’s lover. He represented both a
promise and a threat from Ernie. Marcus’ body had been disfigured
in a way that would make him difficult to identify. If Arianna left
it alone, agreed that — yes — this was her husband, there was a
good chance that Marcus would be buried as Ernie, which meant the
real Ernie would have to disappear. Forever. So the promise: Don’t
say anything and you’ll never hear from me again. The threat was
also in that horribly disfigured corpse. It said as clearly as
anything: Look what I am capable of.
Anything
. Silence is
the best course.

I reached over. Smoothed Arianna’s hair as a
mother would a child’s. Then I pulled her, gently, to her feet. She
didn’t resist. “I know it would be better, Arianna. But we have all
the missing pieces, you and I. We have to tell them what we know.
We
have
to.”

She studied her lap, tears streaming quietly
down her cheeks, and said, “I know.”

And when we got to our feet, we did so with
resolve. We both knew there were things that had to be set in
motion.

* * *

I don’t think the sheriff ever really knew
what hit him. One minute he thought he had a resolution: the
kidnapped CEO of a corporation found dead in his jurisdiction. A
door closed, a case wrapped up. The next minute he had nothing but
questions, plus a potential John Doe on one of his slabs. While we
talked to him you could see a rough day getting rougher. I felt a
little sorry for the guy.

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
he glared at Arianna accusingly.

“We weren’t sure,” I cut through the glare.
“And what we’ve been telling you must sound so outlandish, we felt
we had to be certain.” One way or another, it was the truth.

“You’re right about one thing: it certainly
is
outlandish.” The hat was back off, and he ran his fingers
agitatedly through his hair. “But if what you’re suggesting is true
— and I’m not ready to concede that it is — but
if
it is, it
seems very likely that your husband and his compatriot are no
longer in my jurisdiction.” What he didn’t say: Why the hell didn’t
you take this to the LAPD and make it
their
problem?

“That’s true,” I said. “But, once we felt we
knew what was going on, we thought we’d best go to the authorities
right away. And we were here,” I pointed out. “So that was
you.”

More hair-raking. “What a mess. I’m not even
sure where to start. I’ll contact LAPD right away, of course. But —
again — if what you say is true, we don’t even know where the hell
the two of them might have gotten to.”

I started to agree, but Arianna surprised me
again, saying in a quiet voice, “I... I think I may know where
they’ve gone.” Both of our heads turned towards her. “Ernest took
up flying recently. He said it calmed his nerves. Eased his
stress.”

“Does he have a plane?” I asked.

“No. But he has access to them. At Santa
Monica airport.”

The sheriff looked pleased for the first
time. It was a good expression on him. I thought he should wear it
more often. “I would suspect, then, that that’s just where he’d
go.”

I was not in a position to see things play
out. Not really; not up close. There are things in life you need to
know, other things you don’t care to find out. Truthfully, this
situation was neither of the above. Not that it mattered. Sometimes
resolution comes whether you’re looking for it or not.

Chapter Twenty-Three

It’s very warm here. The water, like the
sky, is very blue. Sometimes, from a distance and when the sun hits
it at just the right angle, the sand looks like ice. When Steve
first suggested Ensenada, I thought he was kidding. To a Pacific
Northwesterner who’d come to LA by way of the East Coast, Ensenada,
Mexico sounded incredibly exotic, not to mention unbelievably
expensive, something I’m really not into right now, all things
considered.

“No, it’ll be fun.
And
cheap,” he
assured me. It was only about a four hour drive, he said. He had
the use of a friend’s seaside
casita
. The little house
usually gets rented out by the week to rich Americans for
astronomical amounts of money, but there’d been a last minute
cancelation which had resulted in a call to Steve: did he want it
for two weeks, at a rock bottom rent-it-or-it’ll-be-empty rate?
Steve said yes. And then he called me.

I’ve decided I like Ensenada. I could stay
here a long time: it almost makes even Malibu look like the rat
race. Yesterday we went horseback riding on the beach — I felt like
we were in a movie — and then we went to Hussongs Cantina for
dinner and drinks and to commiserate with each other’s sore rear
ends from all the riding. I think Steve was a little more sore than
I was, which we determined probably had something to do with the
fact that boys generally have less fatty padding on their
posteriors. Not that mine is huge, but it’s not as bony as his.

Today we haven’t done anything. At all.
Well, nothing that could appropriately be included on a postcard to
my mother. We rolled out of bed around one in the afternoon, Steve
scrambled us some eggs for breakfast — I made the coffee — and then
we worked off our breakfast by sitting in the jacuzzi.

After our grueling hottub-sitting, Steve
said he was going into town on an errand. He was all mysterious:
said there was something he had to get. He came back with an emery
board and three different shades of nail polish. He plunked me into
a lounge chair on the terrace, gave me a pedicure and then painted
my toenails. Painted is an understatement: when he was finished,
each nail looked as though it had a leopard pelt. Ten little
masterpieces. Very strange and strangely relaxing. Steve looked
pleased with himself. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” he smiled,
admiring his work.

“You are
too
weird,” I told him, but
I was smiling. And my nails look amazing. I wish Emily was here
just so I could show them off. Maybe I can take a picture, send it
to her in e-mail.

I love Ensenada. One of those things I
didn’t know I needed until I was here. I haven’t even missed the
markets. Though, with most of my money tied up in LRG stock for the
foreseeable future, there’s really not a lot I can do right now.
I’ve made a couple of phone calls since we’ve been here. Scanned a
couple of newspapers. Now that all the shit has hit and the
business writers have had a party with LRG, the stock is beginning
to recover, but it’s going to take a while for it to even get back
to where it was.

Steve has been helping with that,
indirectly. It’s funny how things work out. While the coast guard
was fishing Ernie out of the waters off Baja — not far from where I
am now, when I think about it — Steve was doing what he does. That
Thursday, Steve signed the biggest contract of his career. Even as
we cavort in sunny waters just a few steps from the little house,
Langton’s factories are gearing up to produce all of the jars for
Doctor Gelkii’s International Jams and Jellies. And I mean all of
them. The Sultry Single Malt Marmalade from Scotland, the Sassy
Saskatoon Berry Jam from Canada, the Luscious Lemon Curd from
England and the Grab Your Grape Wine Jellies from Napa. And others,
all with names too ridiculous to remember.

Closing the sale meant a bonus for Steve
and, the sale coming as it did at a critical time in the company’s
history, Langton agreed when Steve asked for a couple of weeks off.
I saw the Langton news release come down the pipe about an hour
before Steve called me:

LANGTON REGIONAL GROUP CLOSES DOCTOR
GELKII’S DEAL WORTH $18.9 MILLION

Since all of the recent news around Langton
had been doom, gloom and scandal — and the stock had been
appropriately rocked — closing this deal at that moment meant a lot
to the company. And it was reflected in a happy and immediate
little hike in the share price, despite the fact that, while the
ink was drying on the Doctor Gelkii’s contract, the newspapers were
beginning to choke with stories about the CEO who never got to the
office.

For a couple of minutes it looked like Ernie
had gotten away. Later on, when I lined up all the dates and times
and did a little figuring, I realized that about when Arianna and I
were driving down to San Bernardino to view what turned out to be
her lover’s body, Ernie and Paul were taking off from Santa Monica
airport in a chartered plane. It surprised me that he could file a
flight plan and everything without it alerting anyone, but it turns
out that when you’ve been kidnapped and are in the process of being
pronounced dead, it’s just not the same as when you’re plain old
wanted by the police. I guess people don’t generally check to see
if you’re still among the living. Go figure.

They had chartered a Piper Arrow Retractable
in Paul’s name at Santa Monica Airport and filed a flight plan
indicating Las Vegas as their destination. Of course, they never
made Vegas, but — it later turned out — they left the plane at
Fallbrook Community Airpark, a field so small they don’t even sell
fuel. The whole plane/Vegas thing must have been a smokescreen: to
put the watchers off if they happened to be looking in their
direction.

Ernie and Paul had a car waiting at
Fallbrook which they drove to a marina in San Diego where a boat
had been purchased in Paul’s name two months before. The money had
probably come from Ernie, one way or the other, but it didn’t show
up on paper that way and, in the long run, it turned out the paper
trail was all that mattered.

The boat was a 37-foot Sea Ray Sundancer.
There’s been speculation in the news about why it was
that
boat and not something bigger, which they could certainly have
afforded, especially if everything had gone as planned. Which it
didn’t.
The Times
reporter suggested that, since the 37-foot
Sundancer is a “handy little boat” — that’s the way she said it,
although to most of us it would be considered a small yacht — it
could be piloted easily by only one person without a crew and it
was small enough to not attract attention in most marinas. But the
boat had been equipped with digital satellite and all sorts of high
tech equipment. Paul
could
have completed his trades from
that boat quite easily. They had e-mailed a couple of crime
reporters anonymously, telling them about Ernie’s “demise” in San
Bernardino — it had to have been them, no one else would have known
to do it. The pair of them would have been counting on the news of
Ernie’s death to rock the stock price just a little lower, then —
before anyone could get organized enough to start DNA testing
Marcus’ body — the two of them, safely at sea or in some southern
port — could start buying LRG stock, covering their positions and,
basically, completing their deal. So they
could
have done
all of that from the boat. They just didn’t get the chance.

San Diego in general, but the area where the
marinas are in particular, is close enough to Mexican waters to
throw stones into. Paul and Ernie — or perhaps Paul alone — would
have taken trips in the boat to get a feel for how easily an
American-registered yacht could pass into Mexican waters. On those
test runs it would have been ridiculously easy. Rich Americans are
welcome in that part of Mexico and their boats ferry them to
various marinas and resorts on the Pacific with a sort of carte
blanche. Boat owners spend big bucks, it kind of goes with the
territory.

But those test runs would probably have been
during the day, maybe even on the weekend. Rich American yachters
don’t try to slink out of port in the middle of the night. When
they do, the authorities surmise that said boat owners are up to no
good and, in the waters between the US and Mexico, there’s plenty
of no good that boaters can get up to. Because of this, the
watchers are sophisticated and experienced. While you might think
you’re running in and out of various ports undetected, there are
forces on both sides of the border keeping their eyes on you. Or
maybe, for Paul and Ernie, it was just plain bad luck.