The Poisoned Pawn Read online

  Directed by a young woman in a burgundy velvet jacket, they found their seats.

  “Explain something to me, please,” said Ramirez, as they sat down. “Charlie Pike told me that the internet is mostly used to circulate pornography. If the rest of what’s on the internet is full of misinformation, why do people here rely on it so much?”

  “It’s an instant source of news and articles. In a few seconds, you can find out almost anything,” said Gonsalves. “It’s a great tool.”

  Ramirez nodded. “In Cuba, when we want to know everything about something, we take the more traditional route.”

  “You go to a library?” asked Jones.

  “No,” Ramirez said. He smiled. “We ask our wives.”

  Inspector Ramirez was tired when he got back to his hotel, although the opera had been a marvellous distraction.

  Love, murder, and jealousy. Not a whodunit, as Celia Jones pointed out, since the operatic murder of Canio’s wife and her lover was committed in front of an audience within the opera as well as the real one.

  Leoncavallo wanted Pagliacci to be a story about the downfall of a complicated man, one who was wrongly viewed as a clown instead of as a person with feelings. Every time Canio spoke of his jealousy, the fictional audience laughed. Even when Canio discovered that the wife he adored had betrayed him, he had to put on his clown face and perform as if nothing had happened.

  Each character was flawed and yet human. One could feel sympathy for everyone involved.

  Michael Ellis wears a mask, thought Ramirez. Every day, his mutilated face conceals his true thoughts. Did he, like Canio, take out his anger by murdering his wife? And in seeking his revenge, did he accidentally kill two other women as well?

  Ramirez opened the small frigo and pulled out a tiny bottle of rum. He winced when he looked at the price list on top of the mini-bar. A month’s wages for a single drink. He poured it into a glass he found wrapped in paper on a shelf in the bathroom.

  Ramirez sat on the bed and leaned against the plump pillows. He sipped the rum, willing his fingers to settle down, to stop shaking. He tried to concentrate, despite his fatigue after a long day in an unfamiliar setting. If it was hyperthyroidism he suffered from, his condition was getting worse.

  The search, he thought. There was something in our search of Señor Ellis’s hotel room that ties into his wife’s death. Something that shouldn’t have been there. I need to remember what it was.

  But nothing came to him.

  He put down the empty glass and undressed. He crawled beneath crisp, cool white sheets and a warm down comforter. As he slid into sleep, Ramirez glimpsed a dull blue mist in the shadows of the heavy drapes.

  A dignified middle-aged man in a Victorian-style suit with a high-necked collar emerged. A piece of kelp was wrapped around his neck, forming a dark-green cravat beneath his beard. Water dripped slowly to the floor from his sodden clothes. A small girl in a gingham pinafore peeked shyly at Ramirez from behind the man’s jacket. In her small fingers, she held a gladiola.

  The man leaned against the wall as the small girl walked out. She kneeled before the mini-bar and gently placed the flower on the carpet, as if it were a grave.

  She stood up again. The man nodded to Ramirez as if to wish him well. The little girl raised her hand.

  They turned their backs and vanished from Ramirez’s vision as magically as if conjured from Apiro’s Luminol.

  THIRTY - EIGHT

  Ramirez called Hector Apiro in the morning to find out if he had made any progress. He found the small man at the morgue.

  “I’m afraid I have more questions than answers,” said the pathologist, “but at least I was able to sleep for a few hours. Getting some rest has helped enormously. I was becoming a menace. Good thing my patients don’t care,” he cackled. “The poison that killed Rita Martinez and Nicole Caron was fluoroacetate, Ricardo, not cyanide. It’s even more deadly.”

  “What is it?”

  Apiro explained. “It’s been used in the past here to kill wild dogs and small mammals. It interferes with the citric acid cycle in animals and in plants.”

  “You say it’s deadlier than cyanide?”

  “Cyanide, depending on the amount, isn’t always fatal, as I mentioned before. But even tiny amounts of fluoroacetate can kill. Three thousandths of an ounce is enough. I have no idea how these two women could have come into contact with it. I checked with the Office of the Historian to see if it had been used in Old Havana for rat control. They tell me it hasn’t been on the island for decades because of the embargo.”

  “Is it something that someone could make? Or perhaps purchase on the bolsa negra?”

  “No,” Apiro said. “Unless one lived in Africa. It comes from a South African plant called the poison tree. Not very creative, the Africans, when it comes to naming deadly plants.”

  “Is this the same drug that killed Señora Ellis?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I have found something odd. I can find no link whatsoever between Señora Caron and Rita Martinez, and believe me, I’ve tried. But I have found a connection between the two Canadian women, and a strong one at that. Señora Caron stayed in the same hotel room at the Parque Ciudad Hotel that was occupied by Señor Ellis and his wife during their visit. Room 612. In fact, Señora Caron moved into Room 612 on New Year’s Eve, the same day Señor Ellis checked out.”

  “That is a strong link,” said Ramirez, puzzled.

  “I can’t figure it out. We thoroughly searched that room before he was arrested.”

  Something nagged at Ramirez even as Apiro said it. The hotel room held the key, he was sure of it. He retraced the room’s contours in his mind.

  A king-size bed, an upholstered chair, a chest of drawers, a locked wall-safe in the closet. The hotel staff opened it for Apiro’s technicians after Ramirez and Sanchez left; it was empty. Ramirez sighed. He had no idea. These women’s deaths were giving him a headache.

  “At least one good thing will come out of this. Rita Martinez left a signed consent form,” Apiro said. “She carried an organ donor card.”

  “Her organs weren’t affected by the poison?”

  “No. We have had successful transplants even after poisonings by cyanide and methanol without any hemorrhagic complications. It is not an absolute contraindication, not at all.”

  Everyone in Cuba was expected to register in the “voluntary” organ donation program Castro initiated in the early 1980s. “Let’s see if one million citizens will agree and we can deprive the worms of their food,” Castro said, as he became the first volunteer to sign the forms.

  Ramirez wondered which lucky Cuban would get Fidel Castro’s kidneys or heart. With the amount of rum he had consumed over the years, it was doubtful anyone would want his liver.

  But the program had run into problems. There was often no place to store donated organs, given the chronic problems with electricity and refrigeration. That, and the lack of proper medical supplies, meant little Beatriz Aranas was likely to die young.

  Which reminded Ramirez: he had completely forgotten to tell Apiro that Celia Jones and her husband wanted to try to arrange the child’s medical transfer to Canada so she could be treated. He summarized what he had in mind, remembering the promise he’d made to the couple after dinner.

  “It might work,” said Apiro. “The embargo has interfered with our ability to get immunosuppressants. Mycophenolate, for example, should be taken daily by transplant patients, but it is hard to find these days. We could argue for a medical transfer on the basis that without the drug she could die. Besides, most transplants are done on turistas.

  “The real money these days is in foreigners, as you know. The hospitals can charge the extranjeros several hundred thousand CUCs for an operation. We had a regional workshop in Holguin last October where participants discussed the ethical issues around it. The consensus was that at the moment the income outweighs the disadvantages.”

  Interesting, thought Ramirez. Something about tha
t information tugged at him, something about the dead cigar lady, but it slipped away before he could grasp its importance. He looked at his watch. “I’m supposed to fly out this evening, Hector. This worries me. That travel advisory could be issued soon.”

  “I agree, Ricardo, time is short. And it is much harder to find a toxin in a hotel that has hundreds of people coming and going; there are so many things we need to check, so many items to cross-reference. The Parque Ciudad Hotel is not happy, but I’ve quarantined Room 612 while we search for answers. I just wish that Hillary Ellis’s body had not been cremated. I certainly hope the Canadians tested it for fluoroacetate when they had a chance. The chemical is so rare, the test for it is often not done.”

  Ramirez shook his head. Apiro was right. Who in their right mind would be so anxious to cremate the body of a loved one?

  As soon as Ramirez got off the phone with Hector Apiro, he called Celia Jones.

  “Celia, Hector needs copies of the autopsy and laboratory results from Señora Ellis’s death. We have to find out if they tested for fluoroacetate in her system.” He explained Apiro’s findings. “We don’t have time to work through official channels. The travel advisory is only hours away.”

  “I’ll do what I can, Ricardo. But as I explained before, Canadian laws are a problem when it comes to personal information. Almost fanatical. I’ve asked them once already and they refused.”

  “It could be a matter of life and death. Hector has found a connection. Nicole Caron stayed at the Parque Ciudad Hotel around the same time as Señora Ellis.”

  He didn’t tell her they had stayed in the same room. He didn’t want to accuse Michael Ellis of murder a second time, unless he was absolutely sure. Not after the first mistake.

  “Oh, wow, I stayed in that hotel, too. That can’t be coincidental.” “I don’t think so. But we need to get those reports to Hector so he can find out for sure.”

  “Let me think.” A long pause. “Alright. Listen, O’Malley knows the chief medical examiner really well. He and Ralph Hollands are good friends; they always golf together. I’ll call O’Malley right away and see what he can do. Maybe he can get them through a back channel, once Dr. Hollands knows what we’re up against. What exactly does Dr. Apiro need? Let me get a pen.” He heard her shuffling through papers. “I’m back. Go ahead.”

  “The toxicological reports from Señora Ellis’s autopsy and the analysis of her tissue and blood. Gas chromatography test results. If they were done, he says they should have them by now.”

  “The Chief Medical Examiner’s Office is going to be really concerned about the link he’s found to that hotel. The Canadian Public Health Agency won’t be able to defend itself if another Canadian dies because it hoarded information. The authorities here got hammered for that a few years ago, after the Walkerton crisis. It’s a long story, but there was a commission of inquiry into deaths from tainted water and the federal and provincial governments withheld information from each other. But if it’s something in the hotel that’s poisoning guests, there’s no reason for a general travel advisory, is there? Couldn’t you just close down the hotel until your people find out what it is?”

  “All we know so far,” said Ramirez, “is that Hector has found a link to the hotel, but only between the two Canadian women. We have to assume the problem is more widespread because of Rita Martinez’s death. So far there’s nothing to connect her to the other women or the hotel.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  After he hung up, Ramirez called the Minister of the Interior’s office.

  After consulting with the minister, the minister’s clerk confirmed she would prepare a letter to the Canadian Attorney General for the minister’s signature stating that Rey Callendes would not be executed if convicted in Cuba. Apparently, the minister didn’t care if that was true or not, as long as there were no political obstacles to the transfer. That made things simpler. She promised to fax the letter to the Canadian authorities as soon as it was signed.

  Then Ramirez called Corporal Tremblay.

  “We’ll have a response for you as soon as the Justice Department confirms receipt of the minister’s letter,” said Tremblay. “Things should move quickly. I’ll call you one way or the other before my shift ends at four. Where will you be?”

  Ramirez looked at his watch. It was a quarter to one, and he was supposed to have checked out of his room by noon. “I’m not sure. I’ll have to get back to you.”

  THIRTY - NINE

  Detective Fernando Espinoza signed out a police car. “I’m sorry you had to wait so long,” the mechanic said, wiping his hands on a rag. “I had to change the oil filter. Actually, I had to invent one.” He grinned.

  Detective Espinoza nodded. Mechanics were like babalaos. They worked magic, transforming bits of wire and cutlery into replacement parts. Very few new cars had been imported into Cuba in forty or fifty years, and yet somehow these wizards managed to keep the old ones running.

  Espinoza checked the tank to make sure he had enough fuel for his trip. Nothing would be more embarrassing than to run out of gas the first time he drove an unmarked police car. He didn’t want to have to hitchhike back to Havana.

  But it was early in the New Year and the tank was full with the month’s rations. The young detective was grateful. He did not have sufficient funds to purchase a tank of gas: three pesos was almost a week’s wages.

  After leaving Havana, Espinoza put on the right turn signal and exited the autopista. The highway was almost empty except for clusters of tired Cubans waiting beside the road to catch rides. It was illegal for a vehicle to drive by the botellas, the underpasses where hitchhikers waited, without picking up a passenger. Only turistas and police were exempt from this rule of polite behaviour.

  The hard-packed dirt road wound up the hills to Viñales. He passed the occasional truck loaded with stalks of sugar cane.

  The Viñales Valley was a World Heritage Site situated in the Sierra de los Organos. It was surrounded by mogotes, small mountains that looked like slightly flattened pincushions. Turkey vultures circled high above the mountains. The occasional mongoose and dozens of tree rats scurried through long grasses at the side of the road.

  Espinoza drove past the mountain called Dos Hermanas, or the Two Sisters. The Mural de la Prehistoria painted on its side was commissioned by Fidel Castro. Leovigildo González, a student of Diego Rivera, completed it with the help of twenty or thirty locals, but even then it took years to finish. Castro thought the display would attract foreign tourists. Which it did. They came by the busload to laugh.

  Four hundred feet high and six hundred wide, it was supposed to show the evolution of man: a tribute to Cuba’s indigenous people, the Tainos. It depicted how snails had evolved into red and yellow dinosaurs, and finally into two long-haired Taino Indians, a man and a woman, their skin bright red. Espinoza thought it was fortunate there weren’t any indigenous people left in Cuba to complain.

  Oxen worked in the fields below, and the scent of tobacco teased the air. The barns were stuffed with tobacco leaves, drying from the harvest. A slight morning mist curled around the road.

  Espinoza drove by the entrance to the Cueva del Indio, an impressive limestone cave with a river running through it. Once occupied by the Tainos, and now by thousands of bats, it was filled with stalactites and stalagmites as well as ancient cave drawings. One had to take a boat to go all the way through it. A local legend suggested that if any water fell on the nose of a visitor, he would have good luck. Espinoza hoped there would be time to explore the cave before he returned to Havana. After what happened to Rita Martinez, he could use a little luck. He felt terrible that she had died.

  Three hours after leaving Havana, he entered Viñales. All the houses in the village were painted in different colours. They were neat and trim, one of the benefits of so much tourism in a small village.

  He found the orphanage easily. It was on the main road, a low building, surrounded by a metal fence. But he wasn�
��t really sure what he was looking for.

  Inspector Ramirez had told him to find a little girl in a wheelchair, but that, and a child’s crumpled drawing, was the only description he had. “That picture was in the cigar lady’s apartment for a reason, Fernando,” Ramirez had said. “I’m sure of it.”

  Espinoza was doubtful, but it was a nice day to be in the country, in the fresh air, away from the choking diesel fumes of Havana. He pulled the police car over to the side of the road.

  Espinoza opened the iron gate and walked into the yard. He had assumed that children would be outside playing, but the grounds were empty. He walked up the path and rapped on a heavy wooden door.

  “Yes?” said a woman, opening the door tentatively.

  “My name is Detective Espinoza. I am with the Major Crimes Unit, Havana Division. I would like to visit one of your charges. A child in a wheelchair. A little girl.”

  “Oh, thank God. I didn’t think he was going to call you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I would have contacted you directly,” the woman said, “but the priest said I should leave that to him. I thought it should be turned over to the police. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Because of my complaint?”

  “What complaint is this?”

  “A complaint I made to the Ministry of the Interior. About my suspicion that the children here were being abused. They transferred my call to someone who told me he would follow up. I told him about the time I saw the former administrator going into the dormitories at night when I was doing the laundry. I heard a little boy crying in the morning, and saw him rubbing his private parts. The church sent an elderly priest to look into it. He was a charming man. He said I must be mistaken but assured me he would look into it. Is that why you are here?”