Hostage Zero

Gail waited for it.

“You know she was having an affair with another young man on my staff.”

She played dumb.

“A fellow named Aaron Hastings. I never did like him much. Never trusted him, really; but he was a recommended hire from my biggest client.”

Gail’s ears perked. “Sammy Bell?”

“The one and only. And it never behooves to disappoint one’s largest client.”

“Especially this one,” Gail said.

“Indeed.” He took another sip. “If only Mr. Bell knew the truth of his friend.”

“What truth is that?”

Navarro looked concerned. “Alice didn’t tell you?”

“You’d be shocked-or maybe pleased-to know how little she shared with me about anything.” Gail told herself that she was going to have to reexamine her whole attitude about tea.

Navarro pushed his chair away from the table and crossed his legs. “I don’t have any real proof, you understand. Common wisdom-now there’s an oxymoron for you-has it that Marilyn’s husband killed her because of her affair with Aaron, but I’ve always felt that poor Mr. Schuler was set up by that young man, and that the young man himself was Marilyn’s killer.”

Gail recoiled. “Why would he do that?”

Navarro’s face twitched. It looked like equal parts smile and wince. “I hope you have time for a long story,” he said.

As Navarro unfolded his tale, it seemed obvious to Gail that he’d been thinking a lot about this over his years in exile.

“Sometimes I found myself in the position of shuttling money,” he explained. “I was never entirely sure what it was for, but you get a feel for these things over time. The amounts were always large. Tens of thousands of dollars. And of course nine times out of ten, the money was flowing toward Mr. Bell’s operation. Rarely away from it.”

Gail detected subtext. “Except sometimes?”

He stabbed a finger toward her nose. “Exactly. Except sometimes. Like, for example, the three days before my life as I knew it was forced to end. We handled an outgoing payment of two hundred fifty thousand dollars.”

Gail gasped. “Yowsers.”

Navarro smiled. “My thoughts exactly. We handled the payment in two parts, about a week apart. Half one week and half the second week.” His eyes narrowed. “So, Ms. Private Investigator, what does that sound like to you?”

“Half on contract and half on delivery.”

Navarro gave a conciliatory bow. “I left out a detail. There was no delivery of goods. Just a payment followed by another payment.”

Something clicked in Gail’s head. “A hit?”

He jabbed his finger in the air again. “That’s what I concluded. It’s the only thing that made sense. For that amount of money, it’s somebody damned important. And it certainly makes sense to have a completion bonus. There’s also the fact of the dead drop. I forgot to mention that, too. We weren’t supposed to deliver either payment to a person. Instead, there was a dead drop at a rest stop along the Jersey Turnpike. Lots of money, anonymous recipient.”

Gail found herself nodding. “Definitely a hit.”

“Right. Murder. Cold blood and all that. Be honest with you, that was way beyond anything that I signed up for. Scared the bejesus out of me. It’s one thing to risk disbarment and maybe a year or three in prison, but now we were talking big time.”

“Did you say no?”

He gave her a don’t-be-an-idiot look. “The ‘say no’ ship had sailed long before then,” he said. “I was in far too deep to play that kind of game. So I swallowed hard and made the first payment. Then, on my way back, about three miles from making the drop, I got pulled over for speeding. Seventy-eight in a sixty-five. Funny how some details just stick with you, isn’t it?”

Gail stole this thunder: “That created a record,” she said.

“It did exactly that. It was just a routine traffic stop, I know. Nobody’s going to think twice. But then if someone gets hit, they’re going to start checking records.”

That’s exactly what they’d do, Gail thought. After a murder, one of the first investigative tasks is to check moving violations in the area. “Did you have a criminal record?”

“No, but I had a high profile. When you’re a mobster’s lawyer, people notice. You’d be surprised how many people are jealous, in fact. So that next week, I was a basket case. I scoured newspapers and the Internet looking for something about a murder, but I never saw it. Then I got the order to make the second drop.”

“But no one was ever killed?”

“Not that I knew of. Still, I was spooked. I didn’t want any more blood on my hands, so I sent Marilyn Schuler to make the delivery. She wouldn’t do it unless I told her what was in the package, and when I did tell her, she sort of freaked out. She didn’t know what it was for, of course, but it was still a lot of cash. She insisted that she’d only go if I let her boyfriend come along to protect her.”

“That would be Aaron Hastings?”