The Poisoned Pawn (22 page)

“I am frankly more worried that others may die before we find out what’s causing this.”

“What time is your flight back to Cuba?”

“Just after nine, but I need to be at the airport by seven. A little earlier if I have Rey Callendes with me, so I can arrange for his ticket.”

“When is Corporal Tremblay supposed to let you know about the transfer?”

“He said he would call me by four. But I have to check out of my hotel room right away, and I won’t have a number where he can reach me.”

Ramirez glanced anxiously at his watch. He’d be charged for another night if he didn’t check out soon. The Cuban government was already paying six hundred dollars a night for his visit. Added to that would be an extraordinary amount for the edible contents of the mini-bar, which he intended to empty into his carry-on bag, along with the tiny bottles of shampoo, the wrapped squares of soap, the plastic shower cap, and anything else he could pilfer.

“I know this sounds inappropriate, Ricardo, but I’m still on holidays if you feel like going over to the Rideau Centre before you leave. You did say you wanted to buy soap for your wife.”

“I’m afraid I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm for shopping, Celia. By the way, I forgot to tell you, I brought Señora Olefson’s camera with me.” He picked up the camera he’d placed on top of the hotel dresser. “It should be returned to her. Can someone pick it up?”

“You can always leave it at the hotel’s front reception desk in an envelope with her name on it. The staff are very good at taking care of things like that. You can get an envelope from the business centre in the hotel. But listen, if you have to check out anyway, why don’t we go over and give it back to her in person? She lives
in Sandy Hill, which is pretty close to your hotel. And I have a cell phone, if anything comes up. It’s better than you sitting around the lobby just waiting. Dr. Hollands has my cell number; so does O’Malley. We can give it to the hotel switchboard, too. How about if I pick you up in fifteen or twenty minutes? It sounds to me like you could use a little company. After all, it’s your last day in Canada.”

“That’s very kind of you, Celia.
Gracias
. And I have to give you back the clothing I borrowed, anyway.”

“Keep it until we get you to the airport. You’ll need it, believe me. I’ll get it back later.”

Ramirez quickly finished packing. He walked down to the business centre in the hotel’s lower lobby, where he photocopied the file of documents he got from Corporal Tremblay. He charged the cost to his hotel room along with the price of a large brown envelope. He slid the copies inside the envelope and wrote a name in large letters on the front.

“May I leave this here for someone to pick up?” he asked the clerk upstairs at the reception desk as she tallied up the hotel room bill on her computer.

“Of course,” the clerk smiled, accepting the package. “I hope you enjoyed your stay.”

I enjoyed it far more than the Minister of the Interior will when he sees this bill, thought Ramirez. It totalled over fifteen hundred Canadian dollars. He folded the receipt and put it in his pocket.

FORTY - ONE

Candice Olefson wrote crime mysteries, Celia Jones explained, as they drove to the author’s townhouse. They drove past the University of Ottawa campus and parked on a wide, treed street lined with snowdrifts. They climbed over one of them and walked up the narrow path to Olefson’s home.

“I still can’t get over how cold it is in this country,” Ramirez said. He was shivering, despite the borrowed toque, mitts, coat, and boots.

“I know. When it gets milder, it actually feels worse because of the dampness in the air. Believe me, it gets to us, too. Canadians spend most of the winter despairing that it will never end.”

Ramirez thought of Cuba, where there was only one season, and where so many Cubans despaired year-round.

A woman in her thirties opened the door when they rang the bell. She reminded Ramirez of his wife. She had a round, intelligent face, unlined with worry. Open, friendly.

“Oh my God!” she said, when she saw the camera. “Thank you so much for bringing this back. I never thought I’d see it again. It has so many great photographs that I need so I can
finish my book. Please, please, come in. It’s nice to see you again, Celia.”

The woman shook Celia Jones’s hand. Jones introduced her to Inspector Ramirez.

“I’m absolutely delighted to meet you, Inspector,” Olefson exclaimed. “I have a character in my books who is a Cuban police detective. Listen, I brought back some coffee with me last week. Along with some very good
añejo
. Nine-year-old Havana Club. Do you have time for a cup of coffee? We can doctor it up with the rum and take the edge off the cold. I’m sure the sun must be over the yardarm somewhere in the world, even if there’s no sign of it here.”

Ramirez looked at Jones longingly. She nodded, smiling. “Sure. We have time.”

“I would love some,” said Ramirez. “I have missed Cuban coffee almost as much as my family and friends.”

Olefson’s house was filled with art, much of it Cuban. An Andy Warhol–style silkscreen, of the type Ramirez had often admired in the Old Havana farmers’ market, hung in the kitchen. It was a red-and-white “Cuba Condensed Soup” poster. The label on the Campbell’s-style soup can read “America’s Favorite Revolution” instead of “America’s Favourite Soup” and displayed a photograph of a cigar lady wearing several strands of Santería beads. It was a clever poster. The artist was well-known in Havana, but his work was too expensive, at twenty CUCs per print, for most Cubans to own.

“You collect,” Jones said, admiring the pieces.

Olefson stood on the other side of a granite-topped kitchen island. She poured water into a stainless steel coffee maker. The kitchen alone was the size of Ramirez’s apartment.

“I love Cuban art. I was lucky enough to visit the National Museum of Fine Arts during my last visit.”

Ramirez knew the museum well. The collection of pre- and post-revolution Cuban art was contained in two buildings not far from the police station in Old Havana. One of the buildings, the Palacio del Centro Asturiano, had housed the Supreme Court of Justice for years after the revolution. The other, a much smaller building on Trocadero, was drab and air-conditioned until it was almost as cold as an Ottawa winter. The smaller museum was the inspector’s favourite.

“Now, you’re someone who might be able to answer a question for me,” Olefson said. “One whole room was dedicated to an artist who stuck a sharp-beaked bird’s head on all the people he painted. Does that mean something in Cuban culture?”

“I’m not sure, but it may refer to one of our gods, Eshu, who can change his appearance.”

“I’ve heard of Eshu before. He’s also a Catholic saint, isn’t he?” Ramirez nodded. “Santo Niño de Atocha, although he has many names. He is responsible for all journeys, so he is the god of travellers and highways, as well as the messenger between the living and the dead.”

“Fascinating. Tell me more.”

“Well, he carries a hooked stick called a
garabato
, for clearing brush, which he sometimes uses as a cane. He is said to be extremely small and good at medical diagnosis: he saved another
orisha
’s life when he was only a child. But he can be petulant, and he isn’t always popular with the other
orishas
. He is a god, some say, who never really grew up.”

“A Cuban Saint Christopher,” Olefson smiled. “Funny, Saint Christopher is often portrayed with an animal’s head as well. Now I’ll have to find out why. You know, I loved that little museum. There was one painting in particular I’ll never forget. It took up an entire wall. It was a gorgeous mural of Indians and conquistadores. With a priest who looked like he was
imploring them to do something, although it wasn’t clear what.”

“Ah, yes, the Tainos. It’s a very old painting. The artist captured their images just before they were slaughtered by the conquistadores. The priest was trying to convince them to convert to Christianity before they died.”

“Oh, my, I didn’t know that,” said Olefson. “It does add a certain pathos to the painting, doesn’t it?”

“It’s too bad there isn’t time to take you to our National Gallery, Ricardo,” said Jones. “I didn’t know you liked art. It’s only a few blocks from the Chateau Laurier. It has some amazing exhibits.”

“I’ll say,” said Olefson. “There’s one there right now of a giant baby’s head made entirely of resin. Maybe ten or fifteen feet across. Completely accurate in every detail, right down to the eyelashes. Incredible, really. It’s so lifelike, you expect it to cry.”

She brought over two mugs of coffee.

Ramirez sipped the fragrant brew and almost sighed with relief.

Olefson opened the bottle of Havana Club and raised her eyebrows. Ramirez nodded. She poured an ounce or two in his mug. He took a sip of the hot drink. For the first time in days, he felt warm.

“Let me ask you something, Señora Olefson,” Ramirez said. “If you had a character in one of your books who wanted to kill someone from a distance, how would he do it?”

“A hired assassin, that kind of plot line, you mean?”

“I’m thinking more of a situation where the two people are together in one place before one leaves. The murderer is in another country altogether when his victim dies. What plot device would you use?”

“Let me think,” Olefson said, sipping from her mug. “I guess I’d use a slow-acting poison. Arsenic, perhaps. I might put it in
tea bags, something the victim drank every day. Herbal, probably. Organic. Something seemingly benign always adds a nice touch.” She grinned.

“Suppose it is the victim who leaves the country, and the poison acts very quickly. And that the killer has found a way to leave it behind so that it is consumed later on, when he has a strong alibi. Any ideas?” Ramirez asked, interested in her answer.

Celia Jones raised her eyebrows. She pulled her stool closer.

“Alright, I’ll play this game,” said Olefson. “Hmmm, this is a challenge. It would have to be in something that the victim used regularly. Something so obvious that anyone looking at it would miss it altogether. Perhaps something that could be absorbed through the skin, like soap or shampoo. Is it a man or a woman who’s the intended victim?”

“A woman.”

“Then something only a woman would use, and wouldn’t be likely to share. Like mascara. Or lipstick.”

That made sense, Ramirez thought. The CIA had once tried to kill Fidel Castro by contaminating his favourite cigars with a botulinum toxin. They tried to poison his personal scuba-diving equipment as well. They had even recruited one of Castro’s mistresses to murder him. They gave her poison tablets to conceal in a jar of face cream, but the pills dissolved.

Legend had it that Castro knew of the plot and handed her a pistol so she could kill him directly. “I can’t do it, Fidel,” she reportedly said. And then they made love.

“It would definitely have to be something that only the victim had access to. You wouldn’t want to accidentally kill the wrong person,” Olefson said, putting her mug down on the granite countertop. “Do that, you’ll get caught.”
Inspector Ramirez drank his coffee slowly, savouring the taste. He let his mind wander back to the Parque Ciudad Hotel as Jones and Olefson discussed the author’s extensive art collection. “I’ve run out of space,” he overheard Olefson say. “Once you start collecting something, you can never have too much of it.”

According to Apiro, Hillary Ellis and Nicole Caron had stayed in the same hotel room as Michael Ellis, but Señor Ellis never became ill. Was it because he’d put something there to kill his wife that he knew to avoid? Or was there something toxic already in the room that didn’t affect him because he was a man? But Apiro said chemicals didn’t discriminate by gender.

Ramirez mulled over Olefson’s comment that she would put poison in something so obvious that anyone looking at it would miss it.

Had he missed something obvious? He had personally searched the hotel room. And Hector Apiro and his team had processed it as a crime scene.

Ramirez tried again to remember what the room looked like when he and Sanchez first walked in. The drapes were pulled tight. There was a pair of men’s trousers on the ground and a suitcase in the closet; the wall-safe was locked.

Sanchez had pretended to search beside the bed, sliding the evidence that framed Ellis under the mattress while Ramirez was looking in the bathroom.

What was in that bathroom?

Ramirez shut his eyes and walked the crime scene again in his mind.

Shampoo and scented soap. He remembered the soap. He had smelled it, surprised to find out that tourists were provided with perfumed soap.

A man’s shaving kit. Toothpaste. Those could be eliminated
easily. Michael Ellis’s personal belongings would have been gone by the time Nicole Caron moved in.

Soap and shampoo would be replaced every time a tourist checked out. And the maids would hang fresh towels.

Charlie Pike said that people on some Indian reserves drank only bottled water because their water was deadly. Could the two women have died from drinking tap water from the faucet?

Not likely, or other hotel guests would have become ill as well.

Something nagged at him. What else was in that hotel room?

A chest of drawers. A television. A mini-bar. Ramirez had opened the small
frigo
’s door and closed it again when he saw it held only the usual contents. Rum, Coke, bottled water. Cans of orange juice and beer.

He thought of the mini-bar in his own hotel room, of the bottles of
agua
sitting on top, and of the little dead girl who’d placed a flower before it, like a grave. She’d provided him a clue, one he’d missed.

“May I borrow your cell phone, Señora Jones, to call Cuba?”

“Oh, heavens,” said Olefson. “You’ll be charged a small fortune in long-distance fees. There’s a land line in the den. I have a plan that makes it almost free.”

The den was a handsome room lined with wooden bookcases and more paintings. Ramirez picked up the phone. He dialed the police headquarters switchboard in Havana and asked Sophia to transfer his call to Hector Apiro.