Lucy's Money: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 4) Read online

  Her last few days prior to leaving, worrying about the money had been overshadowed by prepping for the trip, and so it had stayed in the back of her mind, gnawing but none too fiercely. Now, sleepless as she soared over the dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the money loomed large. She’d squeezed in a little reading about Costa Rican real estate. She’d googled “investment in Costa Rica” on the web, and found thousands of sites touting everything from boutique hotels to banana farms. The possibilities were there, but the gang seemed to think she’d just stroll out on a beach, point at some cute little resort, and say, “I’ll take that one.” Au contraire: this was a major headache, handling other people’s money. The hundred grand occupied prime terrain in her brain, and in her big black suitcase, currently in flight somewhere between Florida and Tierra del Fuego. It was front page, bottom line, top of the marquee: MONEY. Why did money always do that to her, to them all? Take the front row seat and not go away, even for a minute?

  Her eyes shot open. Ogling surfers and birdwatchers had to be better than this self-flagellating anxiety routine. She dared a glance at her seat-mate, a 22-year old Florida boy on a wave-hunting mission. Incarnating to perfection the post-millennial surfer look, he displayed the scruffy beginnings of a beard, dark wraparound sunglasses, a matty mop of singed-looking blond hair crawling out from under a black wool watch cap, high-topped black tennies, red socks, black shorts, a black t-shirt with several artfully-sited holes, and white earbuds. Though his foot tapped in time with the music, he was fast asleep with the I-Pod rock n’ roll volume turned up so loud her seat vibrated along with the bass line.

  She wondered where he was headed. Probably Tamarindo, with its Euro-California party vibe and access to Playa Grande, Roca Bruja, Playa Negra, and the other northern Nicoya Peninsula surf spots. Lucy intended to spend at least a week on that northwestern coast herself, in an effort to improve her surfing before she got too creaky.

  Between guidebook writing, whitewater rafting, volcano climbing, and windsurfing on Lake Arenal: they said in one guidebook that you could watch the volcano erupt at one end of the late while sailing thirty knot wind at the other end. Now that sounded interesting.

  Lucy opened her carry-on backpack and fished out the four guidebooks to Costa Rica she’d been studying, along with her own, and began page-skimming again, looking for inconsistencies—in room counts, phone numbers, prices, addresses, whatever—from one book to the next. When she found one she made a note in her copy of Grunwald. Along with everything else those inconsistencies would have to be eliminated, and even though this kind of writing qualified as little more than grunt work, she wanted to do it right. She got out her notebook and contemplated her itinerary, trying to squeeze in a little more free time. After a moment she put down the notebook and opened one of her guidebooks to a chapter called Investing in Costa Rica. Within five minutes the book dropped shut in her lap as she fell fast asleep, her seat vibrating gently from the bass line still throbbing out of her neighbor’s earbuds.

  Lucy woke to the sound of a male flight attendant speaking Spanish softly, then switching to English. She pushed up the shade on her window to let the early light in. The flight attendant announced their imminent arrival at Juan Santamaria International Airport in San Jose, and gave instructions on what to do when they landed. The light streamed through a heap of golden pink clouds blanketing medium-sized mountains to the east. As the plane banked west to make an approach, Lucy could see ahead, where San Jose and its suburbs and neighboring towns sprawled across a green valley and climbed the surrounding hills.

  The plane touched ground, bounced into its slow-down groove, and soon taxied to the terminal, a long, pale, two-story building on the east side of the airport. Within minutes they had deplaned into air that washed like balm over the skin. San Jose was said to have a nearly perfect climate; Lucy could feel it. They cross the tarmac and entered the terminal building to check in and wait for their luggage.

  Ten minutes later, after a jolt of anxiety—where was that stinking money-stuffed suitcase?!—Lucy spotted it, wedged between a couple of silver surfboard bags. Her seatmate from the plane grabbed one, gave her a look, and said, “See you at the beach?” with a vaguely sexual smirk.

  She gazed back at him, putting on an inscrutable face. With recently cut short blonde hair, she was tall and thin and pretty in an athletic sort of way, in nearly perfect shape and well-preserved at 34. But, at 34, even if she didn’t quite look it, she had ten years on him. She said, “Tamarindo?” with just the slightest hint of flirtation in her tone, and he nodded with a grin, then went off to join his surf pals. Lucy shook off the brief encounter and grabbed her bag.

  Weary but buzzing with arrival energy, the troop of travelers lined up to fill out the usual paperwork. Reading over the customs form, Lucy realized that a moment of truth loomed: among other things the form asked how much money you were bringing into the country. This was where she felt compelled to lie, and in doing so enter the land of illegality. There would be no turning back.

  Not that the customs inspectors in Costa Rica would ever search her bags. Harrassing incoming tourists was not the deal here. They just wanted to make sure the Norteamericanos had money to spend and a ticket out of town. But answering the question—she wrote in the figure of $1,000, a reasonable amount for a three week trip for a credit card-carrying North American tourist—reminded her that her black suitcase contained not one thousand but one hundred thousand dollars, in packs of crisp new twenties. Now that she was on the ground in the Third World, it seemed like a lot of money.

  She got through the entry shuffle and headed towards the doors. Outside she could see the usual chaotic horde of taxi-drivers and tour operators and airport scroungers waving signs and clamoring for attention. She stopped short, looked around, and spotted a bank of phones. She went over and after a moment of haggling in broken Spanish managed to get an international operator to ring up her loft. Harry answered on the first ring. “Hey, that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me,” she said. “How’s Claud?”

  “The dog? He’s fine. He misses you. So do I.”

  Here we go, she thought. Our little minefield. “Hey. I miss you too, but Harry, it’s nice to be elsewhere for a change.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I noticed. You needed a break.” He paused. “I guess I was hoping that maybe I’d be in on the break.”

  “Sorry, Harry. I just felt the need to—you know, I vant to be alone,” she vamped.

  “Hey, no sweat,” he said, but she could tell he wasn’t happy. “I’ve been known to disappear a while myself, now and then.”

  “That you have.” She sighed to herself. Their relationship did not include vacations together. So far anyways. Investments, perhaps, because she trusted him that way. Nights together, definitely, because she loved sleeping with him. Vacations, no. Not since Jamaica, when they’d met on a press junket. Not just yet. This was a working trip, and the idea of Harry showing up for a little r&r after she’d done the guidebook work just hadn’t felt right. Plus as too frequently happened he had drunk too much at the farewell dinner party, and she’d ended up shipping him home in a cab, in a state of maudlin near-incoherence.

  “Well, in any case, Luce, I hope you have some fun.”

  Too weary to contend with subtextual accusations, she changed the subject. “So tell me again what I’m supposed to do with this money, Harry. I need some inspiration.”

  “There’s a small hotel on a beach in Guanacaste. Two Germans own it but they miss their bratwurst and Kraut beer so they want to sell out and head home to the fatherland. They’ll like your style and you’ll make an amazing deal. I can feel it.”

  “I wish I shared your confidence.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “Hope so.” She shifted gears again. “Well, listen Harry, don’t worry, all’s well, see you in a few weeks, call you in a few days, pet the poodle for me, I love you.”

  “Love you, Luce. Bye.”

  “Bye Harry
.” She hung up, took a deep breath, and headed over to the money-changers. She got a hundred dollars worth of colones, stashed the rest of her personal bucks in her daypack, got a good grip on her suitcase, and headed out into the fray.

  She was greeted by balmy tropic air overlaid with the stench of diesel fumes, and the not-so-balmy din of unmuffled trucks and buses and cacophonous horn honks from the nearby highway. Half a dozen limo and cab drivers got in her face. No big deal for a New York girl. Expertly not seeing that which she did not wish to see, she elbowed her way through the crowd and hailed a taxi for the rush hour ride into San Jose, her small fortune tucked into her suitcase.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CITY BY DAY, CITY BY NIGHT

  Though it shared a slightly dingy, gone-to-seed quality with the hotel’s guestrooms, lobby, restaurants, and casino, due to its location at the confluence of the city’s central plazas the verandah at the Grand Hotel still reigned as the nerve center of San Jose’s tourist scene. Nearly everybody who passed through Costa Rica at the very least had a cup of coffee or a beer here. This much Lucy determined soon after checking in. Naturally, rather than take a nap as planned, in her wired, over-excited state she did a hotel speed drill. She unpacked and changed her clothes, discovering a dead roach in the dresser. She washed her face after waiting five minutes for the hot water to reach her fifth floor room. Inspecting herself in a murky old rust-spotted mirror, she dabbed on lipstick and ran a brush through her hair. She paused, took a deep breath, and sighed, thinking of Harry, wishing she knew how she really felt about him. Then she grabbed her day-pack and headed out. Bounding down four flights of stairs rather than waiting for the wheezy old elevator, she hit the ground floor and strolled to the front desk to book a safety deposit box. She stuck her valuables in the box—including one hundred thousand dollars in twenty dollar bills neatly packed into a heavy duty manila envelope marked with the word “manuscript”—and then watched the desk man lock it into a wall of boxes in a locked room behind the front desk.

  That done, she pocketed the two keys required to get at the money, picked up a copy of the local English language weekly, the Tico Times, in the sundries shop, and found a table on the verandah with a panoramic view of the plaza. After ordering coffee and toast, she put on her sunglasses, opened the paper, and settled in for her first reconnaissance of Costa Rica.

  Spilling out onto the plaza from beneath a canopy that ran the length of the building façade, the verandah’s dozen or so umbrella-shaded tables were occupied by a diverse lot—local businessmen, old gringos with young Tica babes, beefy American tourist families, and motley crews from the vagabond posse, twentysomethings in post-punk hip clothes.

  The scene was far from exotic, to Lucy’s practiced eye. Many a time she’d seen a far stranger cast of characters in Tompkins Square. No, her first take was that San Jose offered the ambience of a slightly downscale middling American city, enhanced with pretty surroundings, great weather and foreign language. On the edge of the verandah a trio of Peruvian Indian guys played Andean music—Lucy had heard those breathy mountain tunes first in the subway station under Times Square—on pan pipes and a pair of guitars. Other indigenous-looking types sold beads, ceramic flutes, feathered tchochkes, and miscellaneous exotica to those who didn’t live within driving distance of a World Mart back home. Across the plaza, the imposing, neo-Baroque façade of the Teatro Nacional loomed, its gilded highlights glowing in the tropical sun. Lines of tourists and locals waited at a row of pay phones by a fountain in the plaza. She decoded the language buzz, picking out Spanish, German, and French along with something Slavic—Russian? Ukrainian?—and an assortment of English accents ranging from uppercrust Brit—that pale, khaki-draped sixtyish couple murmuring over a stack of birding books three tables down—to South Bronx. It was a predictable polyphony for a spot like this, where San Jose’s shifting crew of international roadsters congregated daily to ogle one another.

  Lucy got a refill and then settled into a skim of the Tico Times. The paper’s substantial page count gave credence to what she’d heard and read in the more informative guidebooks and on the net: thousands of gringos had holed up in Costa Rica in the past couple of decades, scoring their cheap real estate in the hills and on the beaches, bedding and wedding hungry young women, investing in hotels, restaurants, tour companies, teak farms, and other tax shelters. As for The Money: the real estate market offered some possibilities—there were a few hotels for sale, along with land, lots, houses in the suburbs, and the like—but nothing jumped out at her on the first go-round. Tour companies advertised whitewater rafting, surfing safaris, jungle canopy rides, volcano climbs and birding expeditions. Several housing developers ran full page color ads enticing investors with offers of pre-build prices on villas or condominiums in gated golf course communities on or near the beach in Guanacaste.

  When she finished with the adverts and turned to editorial, the first story she focused on quickly got her attention. The article consisted of an exchange of insults and accusations between a U.S. tourist and the local owner of a small hotel near the beach town of Samara, on the Nicoya Peninsula. The tourist claimed that he had locked $15,000 in a safety deposit box in the hotel, and that when he went to retrieve it, he found only $8,000. He argued that he was told when he stashed his money that he would have the only key—but he was certain someone who worked for the hotel had another, and had taken his money. The hotel owner responded with outrage, claiming the man was trying to blackmail him and to ruin the reputation of his hotel, that no one else had access to this box, and what was he doing with all that cash anyway? Lucy briefly wondered where she ought to have put the money. Then she changed the subject by flipping to the next page, only to find another hair-raising tale describing the death of several North Americans in the crash of a small plane on the side of the Arenal Volcano the previous week. One of them had been carrying eleven thousand dollars in cash when the plane went down, and someone among the crew of “rescuers” who’d climbed the mountain at great personal risk to try and save lives—these “heroes” had been the subjects of fawning stories in both Spanish and English language papers the day after the crash—had stolen this money off the corpse.

  This nightmarish tale came from the young man’s father, who lived near Arenal in the town of Fortuna de San Carlos. He said his son, en route from San Jose to Fortuna, was delivering the money to help pay the cost of constructing a couple of new guestrooms for the small hotel the two of them owned and operated in Fortuna. Nobody knew exactly how or why the plane had crashed. The volcano had been particularly active of late. People surmised the pilot swooped in to give his passengers a good look at the lava flow, probably got whacked by a blast of hot gas belching out of the crater, lost control and went down. Regardless of that the money had disappeared along with another passenger’s three cameras and a diamond ring reportedly ripped off a dead woman’s finger. There were no survivors among the six on board. Lucy pictured scavengers working over broken bodies, and then pictured her one hundred large in the safety deposit box in the hotel. Jesus! She paged on, only to read yet another tragic tale, about a tourist who drowned on a whitewater run when he fell out of the boat on the Rio Toro, again near Fortuna. The boat’s captain, an American of East Indian extraction from Marina Del Rey, California, who also owned the tour company that ran the boats, said he’d taken this guy on the same river three times before, had never lost a passenger, and could not explain how it had happened.

  Lucy finished her second cup of coffee, shook off all the dire news, and checked the time. She had scheduled a noon meeting with Manny Sky, the American ex-pat owner of Costa Rican Journeys, the country’s single largest tour operator. He’d been in Costa Rica since the Viet Nam War era, a thirty-five year vet who’d arrived, Lucy suspected, on the run from the draft. The offices occupied both floors of a landmarked 19th-century colonial building a few blocks away.

  After two hours of dutifully eyeballing San Jose’s cultural offerings, Lucy arri
ved at the green and cream colonial-style home of Costa Rican Journeys promptly at noon. An elegant young woman welcomed Lucy into the foyer, where she perched in an oversized white wicker chair, waiting for Mr. Sky to descend the rather grand staircase from his upstairs aerie.

  Descend he did, a few moments later, Mr. Manny Sky. Of medium height, somewhat stout, with a fringe of graying long hair around a balding pate, Sky pushed sixty; with his thick spectacles he looked like a Jewish intellectual from New York City, say, Allen Ginsberg without the beard, sporting tropical garb: sandals, khaki shorts, and a flowery short-sleeved shirt. “Hello, Miss Ripken,” he boomed, seizing both her hands as he reached the bottom of the stairs and she rose to meet him.

  Lucy extracted her hands from his hairy paws. “Hi, Mr. Sky. Call me Lucy.” She hoped her low-pitched voice might mellow him down.

  “OK, Lucy.” It worked. “And please, everyone calls me Manny. Let’s go upstairs and chat. Sorry to keep you waiting but I was on a call with a travel agent in Philadelphia who’s thinking about sending a planeload of seniors down here and I had to convince her that it was safe and sane.” She followed him up the marble stairs.

  “Well, considering what’s happened in the last week are you comfortable doing so? I mean, I’m no wimp but if I was in the US and saw the papers I’d be a bit worried.”

  “What, the volcano? That pilot was a fool to go so close to the crater.”

  “A grisly story nevertheless. Those guys picking over the corpses—who knows if they were even all dead.”