John Gilstrap - Hostage Zero

The teakettle whistled, and he turned to tend to it.

“What sort of things did you end up doing?” Gail asked.

He killed the flame under the kettle and let it sit while he dumped the water from the preheating pot and cups. He wiped them dry with a dish towel and then measured two teaspoons of loose tea from a tin into the dried pot.

Gail had never seen all this pageantry for a cup of tea, and she found herself oddly fascinated.

Navarro poured water from the kettle into the pot and put the lid in place. “Three minutes,” he said. “No more, no less. In America, we tend to oversteep our tea. Where were we?”

“You were about to tell me what sort of services you performed for Sammy Bell and company.”

“Ah. Well, toward the end, I was the handler of cash. The trusted middleman.”

“For what?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“But you knew.”

“I suspected at first; but yes, sooner or later I knew. I handled payments for services rendered. With my fingerprints on the transaction-literally and figuratively-it all became subject to attorney-client privilege, and therefore untraceable.”

“What was the money for?”

He hesitated. “Just about anything you can think of.” He busied himself with a search of the kitchen drawers.

Gail sighed heavily. “Please don’t make this more difficult than it has to be.”

His head snapped up at that. “It is difficult, Ms. Bonneville. It is extremely difficult, and I’m doing my best not to just shut up and send you on your way.”

Gail looked away, inexplicably embarrassed.

He wasn’t done. “Have you ever done anything you’re ashamed of?”

She felt heat rising in her ears. Lord yes, she thought; but she would never share the details with others.

“If you have, then you know how easy it is to push the awfulness aside.” He closed one drawer and opened another. “I’ve built myself a cozy little life here in exile. I have very nearly reached the point where I can look at myself in the mirror and not feel nauseated.” This time he slammed the drawer in frustration, and went for a third. “So if I am somehow frustrating you by not baring my soul quickly enough, I’m afraid I’ll just have to beg your pardon.”

This time, he slammed the drawer hard enough to shake the floor. “Where the hell is my tea strainer?”

Gail stood to help and saw it right away. “Is that it? There on the counter?” She pointed next to the sink, to a spot in plain sight.

He followed her finger, and his shoulders slumped. “Yes,” he said. “Thank you.” He picked it up and rinsed it in the sink. “As I’m trying to introduce you to the wonders of tea, I can’t very well leave it unstrained, can I?”

His voice cracked at that last part. Gail returned to her seat and just watched while he finished the pomp and circumstance. He carried the cups easily, each balanced on its saucer with a spoon on the side. “Sugar’s on the table,” he said. “Would you like lemon or cream?”

I don’t even want the damn tea, she didn’t say. “No thank you.” She opened the sugar bowl and was not the least surprised to find cubes. She helped herself to two lumps and stirred them in, while Navarro took three. She sipped, and was delightfully surprised. The flavor was like no tea she’d ever had. “This is good,” she said, the surprise evident in her voice.

“Let this be a lesson,” he said. “Life is too short and filled with disappointments to deny yourself the best.” He took a sip of his own and savored it. “Tea bags are a sin.”

Gail laughed. She felt as if she’d stepped through the looking glass, tea party and all. This man savored his brew as Jonathan savored good scotch. She allowed the moment to stretch a little more, and then came back around to business.

“A young boy is awaiting rescue, and people are trying to harm him,” she said. “We have to get back to the subject at hand.”

Navarro bowed slightly from the shoulders. “Please,” he said.

“Tell me about Marilyn Schuler,” Gail said. “How does she fit into all of this?”

Navarro sat taller in his chair and shifted his eyes to a spot over her shoulder. She followed his gaze, but there was nothing there.

“Marilyn was a lovely woman,” Navarro said. “Lovely in every sense of the word.” He looked back to Gail and made his eyebrows dance. “Perhaps too lovely for her own good.”

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.”