The Dark Tango Part III

The morning was better then the previous but still shy from great.  Polly was already making coffee when I got to the office and she had messages waiting on my desk, none of them having anything to do with the day before.  The outer office door opened and I knew by the way Polly said hello it was Franz.  I didn’t know or want to know what they did on their off hours but I was sure it’d make a nun blush.

         “You come here to see me or her?” I said through the open door.  Polly giggled and Franz came through and sat down where Gabriella had sat twenty-four hours ago.

         “You got my message last night,” I said.  I got up and gave him the letter Gabriella gave me.  Franz took his time reading it.

         “She already agreed to do it,” I said.

         “You think this has anything to do with Gregorio?”

         “Does it matter?”

         Franz shrugged.

         “What about Salazar?” I asked.

         “We’ve got his place under watch, so far nothing.”

          I looked at my watch.  “We have two hours.  I’ll go to Gab - Mrs. Domingo’s house and get her ready.”

         Franz raised an eyebrow.  “Anything I should know?”

         I smiled.  “I’ll let you know when I do.”

         The maid let me in as usual and I waited for Gabriella in the parlor.  This time I didn’t sit but walked around, looking out the windows.  There was the copper across the street, watching the house but other than that no one out of the ordinary.  They still hadn’t seen neither hide nor hair of Salazar and Franz wondered if he’d be stalking Gabriella.

         I didn’t hear her come in; I must have been too wrapped up in my thoughts.  She cleared her throat and I almost reached for my gun.  I didn’t normally wear the thing, but since everything that happened, I thought it best to be prepared.

         Gabriella smiled at me and came across the room to where I stood.  She looked up at me with her doe eyes and I could smell her hair.  She didn’t go for perfumes and I liked that.

         “You ready?” I said, breaking the tension.

         She kept staring at me, a smile playing on her lips.

         “What if I’m not?”

         “We don’t have time for that.”

         “Then I’m ready.”

         It took everything I had to walk away in that moment, to not take her in my arms, to not kiss her with the passion of a lonely man.

         I let her out of the car a block from the drop off point, one of the carousels in a park in her neighborhood.  We could have walked the whole way but I wanted to keep a close eye on her as best I could and next to me in the car was a close as I could get.

         Gabriella was to leave the envelope of money under the bench being held up by two elephant statues.  We had one copper as the ticket attendant, Franz and me flanking opposite sides and two more keeping an eye on the paths that led up to the carousel. 

         I watched her walk up to the attendant, buy her ticket, and get on the ride.  It wasn’t moving and I had a perfect view of the drop off.  She sat down, slyly put the envelope underneath and then stepped off the ride and left the area.  I lifted my arm high to uncover my watch and looked at it, the signal for the drop off being complete.  Franz tipped his hat and then we waited to see who would come for the package. 

         That’s the thing about having a drop off be so damn public, it’s hard to monitor.  Group of mothers with their children mobbed the line, mucking up my view and before we could change our positions the carousel started up.  It was hard to count how many people were on the ride and animals traveling up and down their respective poles now obscured the bench.

         We were lucky though; one of the other coppers was able to spot a man trying to leave the ride surreptitiously.  Unlucky that he started running as soon as he realized we were watching him.  I’m not the most athletic man but I wanted answers and damn if I was going to let him get away.  Dodging between the children and their mothers, the ice cream vendors and dog walkers, I almost lost him.  My loafers weren’t made to pound the pavement but his weren’t either.  He skidded around a corner and I took it slower, good thing too.  He crashed into a stroller but it didn’t stop him, it barely slowed him down.  The stroller hadn’t tipped so I kept going, certain the baby inside was probably fine.  We were on the sidewalk now and rounding another corner.  I was catching up to him and he looked back to see what distance we had between us.  Like a wall Franz stepped out in front of the man and by the time he turned around to look where he was going, Franz’s body stopped him in his tracks.

        

         “He’s not talking.”  Franz had been in the room for the better part of an hour and the man wouldn’t speak.  “Holden and Lodeau just got back from searching the guy’s place.  Found these.”  He handed me some photographs.  A quick look through them showed Gabriella and Salazar in a compromising situation.  Not something I really wanted to look at but something I knew I’d have to study.

         “Your boys already go through these?” I asked.

         “Why?”

         “Can I take ‘em with me?”

         “They’re evidence, you can’t give them back to Mrs. Domingo.”

         “Just a couple of hours.  They’ll stay in my possession.”

         “Couple of hours, that’s it, and it wasn’t me that said so.”  Like they wouldn’t know anyway.

         There wasn’t much for me to do and hanging around a police station was never my idea of a good time so I headed back to the office.

        

         Polly sat at her desk, typing away on the old Remington.  God knows I wouldn’t survive without her and I smiled at her.

         “What are you pretending to work on now?” I asked.

         “You’re latest report; the Blair case?  You were supposed to submit this a week ago.  His attorney’s called everyday for the past three days.”

         “Well bless your little cold heart.”

         “Better a cold heart than a cold bed.”

         Better to walk away when your secretary is smarter than you.

         The bottom drawer of my desk always has a bottle of rye.  Always.  This is due to Polly’s diligence; I don’t think I’ve ever had to ask her to run out and buy a bottle.  If I empty it, a new one appears.  I took out the bottle, a new one, cracked it open and poured some into my coffee mug.  I put my feet up and head back and had a little think.  Sometimes when it’s back to back action one doesn’t get the whole perspective of things.

          I took out the photographs Franz let me borrow.  Salacious to be sure but there was something that bugged me about them; the fact that they were taken through an open window.  So unless the photographer could levitate, how did he get such clear pictures from a third story window?

          I closed my eyes and thought back to that street.  I parked the car, walked back to the hotel and leaned against a building until I heard Gabriella scream.  The building, what was it?  A Restaurant?  No, restaurant noises had been dim, farther way.  Another hotel?  No, I would have noticed a sign or a name.  Apartments, they had to be apartments.  Was it a tall building?  Yes, with a third floor at least.  I opened my eyes, downed the rye and grabbed my coat.

         Polly looked up from the typewriter but didn’t have time to say anything.

         “Call Franz, tell him to meet me at the hotel in La Boca. I’m going there now.”

         I was in a hurry but could still hear Polly’s inappropriate joke down the hall.  Delicate women are for suckers and bankers.  Fortunately, I’m neither.

        

         Franz was only ten minutes behind me, long enough for me to smoke a cigarette.  Without waiting for him to say anything I went into the hotel.  The proprietor recognized us immediately and stood to attention like a soldier. 

         “The woman, from the other night.  You told us they met often for a period of time, then stopped coming?” I asked. 

         “Yes, like I said before, the man, he’s been coming here with regularity for years, sometimes with women, sometimes alone.  But the woman from the other night, she would consistently meet him every Tuesday and Thursday for roughly six months.”

         “Did the man always ask for the same room?”

         The proprietor nodded.  “I leave that room open for him always.  He pays me monthly for it.”

         “Can we see that room now?”

         The man nodded again and we followed him up the stairs.

         I went straight to the window.  Looking down I noticed there wasn’t a fire escape.  Looking across the street, I noticed there was a window almost perfectly aligned.  Franz stood at my side.

         “What are you thinking?” he asked.

         I showed him the pictures.

         “See, unless the guy had a scaffold in his pocket how would he take these pictures?  There’s no fire escape on this side of the building.”

He looked across the street and realized what I was thinking.  He turned to the proprietor.

         “What’s the building across the street?”

         “Apartments, small ones.  Not as nice as my building.”

Franz headed out of the room and down the stairs with me on his heels.

He rang the buzzer to the apartment manager’s flat a few times in a row and we could hear the cussing of someone’s day being interrupted.  The manager was an old, stocky woman, with an apron she probably never took off and a ring of keys she probably always carried.

Franz flashed her his identification and told her to let us in.  Grumbling she opened the door and let us into the foyer.

         “We need to see the apartment that has the window that directly faces that one of the hotel,” said Franz and he pointed to the window across the street.

         “What is this nonsense?  How do I know which one it is?” said the crabby old lady.

         “We don’t have time vieja.  Which apartment does it belong to?”

         “All right all right, let me think a moment.”  With a look like shed sucked on a lemon, the old woman thought for a minute.

         “If I’m right, it’s a younger man’s apartment.  Goes by the name of Eberstark.”

         “We need to get in,” said Franz.

         “Well, now, I can’t just let anyone in!  He pays good money…”

         “He’s also in jail.  Let us in.” 
The woman gave us a scowl but turned and led us to the old elevator where the gate-like-door groaned as she shut it. As it took us a few minutes to get to the third floor, it occurred to me we could have gotten to the room faster going up the steps.

         The apartment was sparse, in fact all there was in addition to a bed and a dresser was a filing cabinet.  Franz went to the cabinets while I checked out the window.  Yes, this was the right room and I went to join Franz.

         “What can you tell me about this Eberstark?” asked Franz.

The woman shrugged her shoulders, not too keen on police interference.

         “Has he lived her long?” asked Franz.

         “A few years,” she said.

         “Did he have many guests or friends?”

         “ Some I suppose.  He is always hanging out across the street.”

         “In the hotel?” Asked Franz.

She nodded.

         “Thank you.  We’ll let ourselves out,” he said.

Offended, she walked out of the room in a huff, grumbling about the police and the over reaching into good citizen’s lives.

         The filing cabinet was locked but that never stopped Franz or me.  It were filled with photographs, each with a name on a label and organized like as if Polly had been here.  Meticulous is what I mean.

         There was one interesting aspect in all of the photographs; there was only one man featured; Salazar.  The pictures were all taken from the same vantage point, they were all of the same room, and of the same man, only the women were different.

         “What’d you think of this?” I asked Franz.

         “Either he knows or he’ll lose his temper when he finds out.”  He said this as he pulled out another file.  This file was different because it wasn’t marked with any name.  Franz opened it with me looking over his shoulder.  They were all pictures of Salazar but not in the room, they were pictures of him driving, entering his home, and even at restaurants.  There were even a couple of him, Gregorio Domingo and a third man outside a warehouse.

         If Salazar was in on this blackmail scheme, he didn’t know about this file.  I took the one of him in front of the warehouse.  It could have been any warehouse in any city in any world so I looked closely for any surrounding identifiers.  It was by the water, it was dark, and very faintly in the background I saw what might have been a sign for a boating company.  I pointed this out to Franz and before I could say pink martini, he was headed down the stairs.  We had to go across the street to use the telephone; the old manager lady didn’t have one.  Franz asked that a patrol car head over to that district and begin looking for the sign of the boating company.

         We took Franz’s car and got to the area shortly.  The hard part was to go up and down the streets until we found the sign.  We passed the patrol car along the way, stopped and discussed out plan.  There was only another handful of streets to go.  They headed the opposite way as us and two streets later I spotted the sign.

         We got out of the car and looking at the photograph we deduced which building Salazar was coming out of.  We waited for the patrol car to circle back and leaned against the car, quietly smoking.

         “I’m not one to get mixed up in other people’s affairs…” I started.

         “Yes you are.  That’s your living,” retorted Franz.

         “This thing with Polly, she takes good care of me.”

Franz didn’t respond right away but studied the smoke leaving his mouth.

         “Don’t worry boss.  She likes me and I don’t come across that very often.”

         “I’d just hate to have to pick sides.  You might not like who I pick.”

         “Point taken.  I wouldn’t blame you either.”  Franz smiled when he said this and just then the patrol car pulled up. 

         They parked behind Franz’s car and quietly we advanced to the front of the building while the patrolmen went around back.  We counted to twenty quietly and tried the door.  Locked of course.  This is one of the reasons Franz likes to work with me, I know how to open locked things and if he’s looking away, well then, how’s he to know how it opened?  Thirty seconds later we busted through the door.  There was a small anti room that opened into a big room.  We went through and ended up in what could only be a make shift laboratory.  From my left I heard a crash as a cart on wheels got shoved in our direction and a man, the third man in the warehouse photographs, went running towards the back.  Franz and I split up heading towards the back, hoping to corner our man.  The good thing about corralling anyone who isn’t an athlete is that he is not an athlete, especially the ones wearing lab coats.  The patrolmen came in from the back just as Franz was cuffing him.