The Devil to Pay Read online

  Nor did I. “How much in total is this going to cost?”

  “In round terms, you can figure about three hundred. You’ll also have to set bail, probably in the half-million range. You can cover it with a bondsman for ten percent down, fifty thou, but the bondsman needs a security interest in more than a half mil in real property or certificates of deposit before they’d make bail for you.…”

  He droned on with me only half-listening. Including the bail, which would have to be put up in its entirety because I didn’t have assets to get a bondsman to take the risk of covering it for me for just 10 percent, the figures Berger threw out added up to the million-dollar range.

  I had a few hundred dollars in the bank, $2,286 in the top drawer of my dresser I was saving to cover business expenses, and a credit card with a few thousand left on the credit line.

  He asked me a question and I jerked back online with him. “I’m sorry; what did you say?”

  “I said, the fees quoted don’t include the federal case.”

  “Federal case?”

  “Ho Lung was imported talent. Right now this is a local case, Evans is a Seattle cop, but the Feds can file on the basis Ho Lung came across the border to do the job.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you could end up with two cases, one in the state courts and one in federal. The Feds are bastards to deal with, much nastier than the locals; the judges are tougher and the sentences are longer. So costs go up if the case goes federal. What are your assets? Bank accounts, real estate?”

  I took a deep breath. “I have an extensive holding in real estate, but it’s out of state.” Way out of state. Maybe several thousand miles south of the border with Mexico, down below the Panama Canal …

  “Make sure it’s not too far away; you won’t be able to bail out without surrendering your passport.”

  “Surrendering my passport?”

  “To make sure you can’t leave the country. Even if you make bail, the judge will order you to give your passport to the prosecutor before letting you walk out of the courtroom.”

  I felt like someone had a pillow over my face and was pressing it down, smothering me.

  I said, “I need to contact someone about my property; I’ll get back to you.” I hung up.

  I lay quivering for a while, trying to keep my mind in my head. Finally, I dialed Colombia again. And got the same recorded voice apologizing for the fact my call could not be completed. I put the phone back into the cradle.

  Standing up, a little unsteady from the pill, I said, “All right, you have to get it all together. You can tackle this just as you tackle a business problem. You’ve done this before; it’s a piece of cake.”

  I sat back down and cried.

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER, I stood at the balcony and stared down at the dark street below. I was too bummed out to even turn on my own apartment lights. Fog had dropped onto the city, turning the night gloomy, blurring lights. My eyes were red and swollen and my head buzzed from the sedative and some wine I’d added to the cure.

  I wanted to call someone, share my misery, but no one was in my life I could reach out to. For the first time, I felt the upshot of always going it alone. Now I had nobody to turn to. They say women need other people more than men, that in an emotional crisis a woman needs to talk when most men are too uptight to express their feelings. It was true, because right now I needed someone.

  On the dark street below, a man stepped into the light of the street lamp on the corner. He paused and flipped away a cigarette.

  I had the impression he looked up at my window as he stepped off the curb.

  I moved away from the window and pulled the curtain over the balcony door. For added measure, I stuck a wood chair under the handle of the front door. It probably wasn’t Scar I had seen, he had said “mañana,” but a disturbing thought had crept out of my wine and sedative haze.

  The police officer said the thermostat had turned on the basement furnace after the arsonist had inadvertently created a big gas leak. I could picture what happened.

  Not having a key to the place, he either broke in this morning or entered with a key stolen from the spares I kept in my office. Before going down to the basement, he would have first shut off the thermostat. The control was in the entryway at the back of the store.

  What he didn’t know was that I’d been having trouble with the thermostat, that the gadget had developed an annoying mind of its own. I’d been so broke I’d lived with the problem rather than getting someone in to fix it.

  Suspecting that I had rigged the thermostat to kill the man after hiring him to torch the store was a natural conclusion for the police. But since I was innocent, the fact the thermostat would turn on the furnace and create an explosion raised an even grimmer prospect.

  The arsonist’s intent was to create a small leak, let gas accumulate in the basement. Heavier than air, the gas would accumulate on the concrete floor.

  Each morning, I had the same routine as I entered. I turned on the lights and set the thermostat higher to get the furnace going. I dropped by my accountant’s this morning, but I still would have made it to the store before opening time.

  If Woo/Lung hadn’t botched the job, I would have been the one to enter and turn up the thermostat, turning on the furnace—creating a flame with a basement full of gas under my feet.

  Now that was an unnerving thought.

  Could someone dislike me enough to kill me?

  How did it happen that my store blew up on the same day that I was told I’d inherited a coffee plantation in Colombia?

  Who was on third? Or was Who on first?

  My mind was too blown to remember the punch line. Or see through the layers of deceit that I had become entangled in.

  5

  Analyzing the situation and coming up with a solution for my problems wasn’t difficult for me. “There are logical patterns to problems and one merely has to use an analytical approach, consider all options,” was the mantra of the business think tank where I had worked.

  A logical analysis led me to one conclusion: Follow the money.

  I don’t remember where I heard the phrase, whether it was something someone said when I worked at the think tank or if I had picked it up from a TV crime show. But it was the logical place to begin when my business had been trashed by a hired arsonist. Someone had paid good money to import the arsonist from Canada. Someone with a motive.

  I had no personal enemies, at least no one who hated me enough to want to destroy my business. Well, maybe a couple people—my ex-fiancé and his costar in the Christmas video would have cheered if my business failed. And I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt their feelings if I died soon, either. However, I eliminated them—they both had motive, but neither had the guts nor imagination to blow me up.

  No, it wasn’t personal; I was sure of that. Someone set out to drive me out of business—and perhaps even kill me. I couldn’t be sure that I was meant to die in the explosion; maybe Woo/Lung would have set the gas leak to explode before I arrived, but I couldn’t dismiss the idea, either.

  Contacts in the criminal milieu would also be needed—one didn’t put an ad in the local paper for an arsonist or ask the bartender at your favorite watering hole whether he knew someone who could blow up a business.

  The bottom line was that there had to be a financial motivation behind the destruction of my business. And following the money, there was only one suspect I could come up with: my landlord.

  Coincidentally, like Woo/Lung, he was Chinese. Unlike Woo/Lung, my landlord was not the emigrant variety but one whose family had settled in Seattle generations ago.

  A further “coincidence” was that I knew my landlord had relatives in Vancouver, British Columbia, which also had a large Chinese population. That didn’t mean much; Seattle was only a couple hours’ drive from Vancouver, many people had friends and relatives there, but I didn’t like my landlord, and he didn’t like me.…

 
Worse than possible coincidences, he was also a greedy shit, a common character trait for most of the big-city commercial landlords I had dealt with during my business career. I had gotten a long-term lease at a good price because the last two tenants for the store space had failed, with one dragging my landlord into an expensive bankruptcy proceeding.

  When he saw my specialty coffee business take off like a rocket, he had tried to buy in. I turned him down because, unlike a venture capitalist, he would have been a constant annoyance in running the business, tapping the cash register every day under the guise of keeping the money out of the hands of the tax man.

  If you followed the money, the person who would have profited most from the insurance proceeds would have been my landlord. I didn’t just insure my business; the lease had a standard clause insuring his building and loss of rental income if it was destroyed.

  If I hadn’t dropped the ball with the insurance company, he would be looking forward to a fat check from the claim.

  I shuddered. He probably didn’t know my insurance policy had lapsed. If he didn’t want to kill me before, he’d certainly want to once he found out I was fresh out of money and insurance.

  The fact my landlord could have rigged the arson raised my ire and the hair on the back of my neck.

  The weirdest coincidence was the news of the inheritance and the ominous offer to buy the coffee plantation. I couldn’t make a connection between what happened here with a Chinese arsonist from Vancouver and a Colombian—which I assumed the man with the scar was—wanting to buy my inheritance.

  It was a strange coincidence, for sure, that I learned of the inheritance the same day my business was destroyed, but I couldn’t conjure up a motive for someone connected to the plantation to destroy my business or kill me. It would make more sense if I had a prosperous business in Seattle that I didn’t want to leave.

  Killing me didn’t make much sense, either. Scar, or whoever hired him, wanted to buy the plantation. If I was dead, they’d still have to deal with my heir. I didn’t have a will and Christen once told me that if I died, my estate would go to my closest relative, a cousin in Cleveland I’d only met once.

  If I followed the money, the trail went back to my landlord, not Scar—as ominous as he seemed, he wanted to give me money, not take it.

  The ten-thousand-dollar offer caused me to draw another conclusion: The plantation was worth much more. Scar probably believed since the plantation was thousands of miles away in a country more dangerous than the FBI’s Most Wanted List that I would sell cheap.

  With my mind working clearer, another grim scenario was too obvious to avoid. I was going to be arrested. If I couldn’t raise bail—and I couldn’t—I would sit in jail for months until trial. And if I didn’t have the money for a good legal defense—which I didn’t—I would spend the rest of my life in jail.

  I couldn’t remember if they had a death penalty in the state, but even if they didn’t, I’d kill myself before I’d spend the rest of my life in closed spaces rubbing shoulders with crazy women who had killed their babies, while I satisfied the lusts of diesel dikes and earned extra privileges by giving blow jobs to prison guards.

  “Follow the money,” I told myself.

  This time I meant money for my defense.

  And there was only one place to get it.

  * * *

  JUST BEFORE THE crack of dawn, I left my apartment. My car was parked on the street in front, but I went out the building’s back door, down the alley, and up the street to a bus stop. I was wearing a bandana for a disguise and had on a long coat that was designed for severe storms, but I figured it provided some camouflage for me to hide behind. I carried a small carpetbag valise that looked as much like something I could be taking to work as it did a travel bag. Under my coat, I wore a double set of clothes so the bag stayed thin. I’d put the extra clothes into the bag later.

  I took the bus downtown to within walking distance of the Hilton Hotel and climbed into a taxi lined up in front of the hotel.

  “SeaTac,” I told the driver.

  I settled back in the seat for the ride to the Seattle-Tacoma airport.

  Years ago in college, I learned in Psychology 1A that children commonly either followed their parents’ footsteps or went in the opposite direction. “The preacher’s daughter syndrome,” my politically incorrect instructor had called it—the preacher’s daughter would turn out to be either a slut or a prude.

  My mother had been a rolling stone. We moved continually as her restless spirit took her to a different job and different city almost annually like a migrating bird. As her only child, I suppose I could have ended up as someone with her feet permanently cemented or the proverbial rolling stone that never grew moss.

  Luckily I didn’t go from one extreme to the other but had landed somewhere in between, not quite the migrant my mother was but always ready to cut my losses and burn bridges when the need arose. I was not like some people who never wanted to move because they feared change or who felt content to stay in the same place and had no urge for adventure. I enjoyed traveling to new places, meeting new people. And I wasn’t afraid to pack up and head out if the situation warranted. I was used to moving.

  Besides, change was good for you. It brought you whole new experiences and adventures. My mother used to say, “Don’t be afraid to reach out and experience new things, embrace life, try new adventures, take chances. What’s the worst that could happen to you? You’ll be a stronger person for it.”

  She was right, of course—up to a point. It took time to build relationships and careers. My mother had a career that permitted her to migrate and she avoided permanent relationships, so having a bag packed worked out well for her. I had the ability to grab a bag and run but only opted for burning bridges when everything was going to hell—like now.

  I thought about my mother as the taxi carried me to the airport.

  My mother, Sonja Marie Novak, was born in Cleveland. Her own parents both had a Slavic background, second-generation from Yugoslavia. Her father had been a machinist for the railroad and had died when my mother was a young teen. She left home at eighteen and never looked back or went back to visit.

  I never really understood what the situation was between her and her mother. My mother didn’t really talk much about those times. I never met my grandmother; she died when I was five. I knew my mother was down on organized religion and radical in her politics, and I got the impression both attitudes might have played a role in the estrangement with her mother.

  In the late fifties my mother moved west to California and enrolled at Berkeley, a time before the riots caused by the Vietnam War and burning bras of the war between the sexes. She was a free spirit, hip and cool way before the hippies came on the scene. She joined the Peace Corps as soon as it opened its doors and was sent to Colombia to help educate the rural poor. There she worked on a coffee plantation to be closer to the people she was sent to help.

  Which, of course, was why I had concluded that Carlos Castillo, my mysterious Colombian benefactor, could be my father.

  The notion that my father was a coffee plantation owner worked out perfectly for the father model I had mentally constructed: He was a charming and handsome son of a proud old family, a man who rode his horse across his great estate, looking much like a Latin movie star. Naturally, he had to give up my mother despite the fact that he loved her to marry a rich, stupid girl to save his family from financial ruin.

  I’m sure I missed something from not having a father figure, but because of my mother, I didn’t think of it as a void in my life.

  If nothing else, there was no time to dwell on not having a father in your life when you were always traveling and getting used to new surroundings. If there was a time that I wanted the merry-go-round to stop, I certainly don’t remember it. The hardest part was making new friends and leaving them, walking into another school, and having to start all over again. But my mother would always say that I would meet them again.
/>   “Life is a journey,” she would say, and there were always going to be ups and downs. “Everything happens for a reason.”

  After I had lost my mother, I began to think more about the fact I might have a living father somewhere, with Colombia topping the list. But I did nothing about looking into it because I was busy and Colombia was a long ways away.

  I remember questioning my mother about him when I was little. I was curious about my father because when I went to school all the other kids would always talk about their fathers. It was probably in the third or fourth grade that I came home from school and asked my mother why I didn’t have a father. I recall I would even go up to strangers and ask if they had a father. It must have always been in the back of my mind. Maybe it bothered me more than I realized—or wanted to admit. Every couple of years the question would come up, casually, not in arguments.

  Sometimes she would get exasperated with my questions and get impatient and she would blurt out whatever was in her head at the time. One time she’d say he’d been a revolutionary who faced a firing squad because he fought for social change; another time he would be a big-time drug dealer who died in a shoot-out with the police. Another time she claimed she had been raped by guerrilla fighters in the jungle.

  In other words, my mother had been totally evasive about who my father was. I never understood why.

  “Don’t ask any more questions; we’ll never see him,” she finally said to me. “I got knocked up by a South American prince. He got deposed by a revolution and was hanged by the little people he’d lorded over.”

  Knowing I would never get a straight answer from her, I finally gave up asking. But there were a few clues I picked up. She would talk about what she did in the Peace Corps and how she worked on a coffee plantation in Colombia to really get close to the people, how she worked the same hours as other workers, ate the same food, and slept in a worker’s hut.

  Her eyes lit up when she talked about those times, but she never spoke of a relationship with a man that resulted in her coming back to the States pregnant with me.