10 Tahoe Trap Page 10

  To my knowledge, no one has gotten hurt from this. Of course, I still don’t know what’s going on, so I could be wrong. I have to assume that it involves some kind of financial graft. But since this all began, I’ve had lots of conversations with my clients, and not one has mentioned anything that would hint at any kind of problem.

  However, as the money involved has escalated, I’m becoming increasingly worried. This anonymous man has paid me over $16,000 since spring. And he’s starting to change. He’ll say certain things that don’t seem especially bad initially. But later, they start to bug me. He uses a condescending attitude. Like instead of saying, “If you want, you could do this for me,” he’ll say, “You’ll want to do this for me, won’t you?” And he does it in a controlling voice that has a bit of a threat in it. It’s kind of a creepy change, like in a movie the way the psycho starts out seeming nice but then gets more and more crazy as he takes over the victim’s life.

  It’s because of this that I decided to write this down. Please don’t think I’m paranoid. I’m just very cautious. My life hasn’t been trouble-free, so I’ve learned to be a little afraid.

  Recently, John Mitchell has said some unusual things that I’m trying to figure out. But I’ve just noticed the time. I have to go. So I’ll hide this note, and tell Paco where it is. Then, when I get more time, I’ll finish what I have to say.

  Putting this in print sounds like I’m sort of overboard with worry. But if anything happens to me and Paco contacts you, I guess that will prove that I wasn’t too paranoid!

  If you do ever end up getting this note, then I apologize for the hassle for you. I will be putting you in a situation where you don’t get to decide beforehand if you want to be involved. Although I suppose you can just ignore all this. Either way, I’m hoping the check will be sufficient for the time being.

  Cassie

  I put her check in my wallet and folded her letter.

  While Cassie had suspected that things might get worse, nothing she had written would logically lead to something like murder. There was no direct threat. No disagreement. No calamity that she was being blamed for. Just an unusual situation that made her uneasy. Uneasy could be a warning signal. But uneasy didn’t usually mean murder.

  I walked over to the Jeep where Paco was still sitting. He turned to look at me through the open window.

  “If Cassie wanted to hide something the way you hid your money, can you think of where she would put it?”

  He shook his head.

  “Would she pick a hiding place inside? Or outside?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I’m going to do a quick search. Can you wait another ten minutes? Not go anywhere and stay with Spot?”

  Paco nodded.

  “Keep your eye on the drive. If you see the landlord coming, honk.”

  Another nod.

  I left Spot outside with Paco, then walked back inside and went into Cassie’s bedroom. It was neat, the bed made, clothes put away. On a bookshelf were a couple of dozen tattered paperback books. I leaned in to look. A dictionary, a thesaurus, a farmer’s desk reference, a bunch of books on gardening and farming, an anthology of Greek tragedies, and some classic novels like To Kill A Mockingbird and The Grapes Of Wrath.

  There was an old green, dented file cabinet. In the back of the top drawer was a hardbound book. I flipped through it. It listed customer names and addresses and had columns of numbers that showed Cassie’s sales and delivery dates and the dates that she’d been paid. Each payment showed the check number or the Paypal invoice number. The sales journal was neat and thorough and indicated that she was an organized businesswoman. I set it aside.

  I opened a few drawers, looked in the closet, went through a little writing desk that stood under the room’s only window.

  I found nothing revealing. Just the items that I imagine are common to most homes occupied by women and young boys. The only unusual items on the writing desk were catalogs for organic farmers.

  Paco had said that Cassie didn’t trust banks. I wondered if that was literally true. She had to have a bank account to deposit checks and get Paypal deposits.

  But she didn’t have to put all of her money in it. If she didn’t really trust banks, she might have a good amount of cash hidden somewhere.

  I made a quick search of the rest of the house. There were no bank statements or cash in any obvious place.

  Unlike when people put a door key under the front mat, when people choose a hiding place for something very valuable, they avoid the usual places. Paco’s money roll already demonstrated creativity. It didn’t mean that I couldn’t find another stash of money if I spent enough time at it. But a really good indoor hiding spot can take days to find. An outdoor hiding spot can be impossible to find. If I knew for certain that Cassie had squirreled away cash, I might put in the effort. But it wouldn’t be long before the men who wanted Paco would show up at the house. I couldn’t afford to take days.

  I picked up Cassie’s sales journal, went back outside, and looked around the house.

  Out the back windows I had seen tarps wrapped over geometric shapes.

  “What’s under the tarps?” I asked Paco.

  “Our stuff for the farmers market. Tables. And bins. Trays we put the fruit in. Cassie says we need a garage, but that would cost too much. But now we don’t use that stuff. We just use baskets for our deliveries.”

  “How does that work, those deliveries? Do you just take the customers a full basket each time?”

  “Yeah. Cassie arranges the fruit to look good. Then we take back the empty basket from the last delivery. And they’re clients.”

  “What?”

  “You called them customers. Cassie calls them clients.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Will you show me the hothouse?” I said.

  He nodded, got out of the Jeep, and walked around the back of the house. Spot came running.

  The hothouse looked flimsy enough that a serious storm might blow it away. But the plastic sheeting was lightweight. If the wind got strong enough, it would probably just rip off the plastic and leave the wood framework undamaged.

  At one end of the structure was a large propane tank. Near the tank was a door made of one-by-twos. It too was covered in plastic. Paco opened the door, and he and Spot and I went in.

  In the corner near the door was a hot-air furnace. Duct work stretched from the furnace down one side of the hothouse. The hothouse was arranged with raised-bed containers in long rows separated by narrow aisles. The beds held thick, lush tomato plants that were held up by wire racks. The plants were nearly six feet high, and they were heavy with tomatoes that were turning from green toward red.

  Under the plants I could see thin, black, plastic irrigation tubing that arced from plant to plant. Just above the plants were rows of grow lights.

  Paco pointed down toward a wall of plastic sheeting that divided the hothouse across the middle. There was another door in the plastic wall.

  “That other end of the hothouse are all the Cassie’s Vipers. Spot shouldn’t go in there ’cause he might sniff them. We shouldn’t touch them. You have to be careful.”

  “Got it,” I said. “We stay in this side with the tomatoes. Looks like you’ve got several different kinds.”

  Paco nodded. He walked down one of the aisles, pointing. “These are Sungold. Over there are Better Boys and Early Girls. And at the end,” he pointed, “are Cassie’s Amazements. She says our future is going to be mostly Amazements.”

  “Why does she say your future is in that hybrid?”

  “’Cause they don’t need to be gas ripened,” Paco said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Store bought tomatoes are picked green and ripened with gas. Real tomatoes are picked ripe. If you put real tomatoes in a truck, the ones on the bottom squish down to sauce.”

  “But Cassie’s Amazements are different,” I said, getting a sense of where Paco was going.

  Paco nodded.
“They can be picked green and tough.”

  “So they don’t make tomato sauce in the trucks.”

  “Yeah. But they don’t need gas to ripen. They ripen pretty good by themselves.”

  “Almost as good as vine ripened?” I said.

  “Close,” he said.

  “Seems like a tomato like that would be in demand by the companies that ship tomatoes by truck.”

  “Yeah. A guy talked to Cassie about it.”

  “What guy?”

  “A guy from a company,” Paco said. “He keeps coming and trying to get her to sign a paper. He drives a red Audi quattro.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He wants to sell Cassie’s Amazements.”

  “Does he just want to sell them, or does he want the rights to her creation?”

  “I don’t know. The rights, I think,” Paco said.

  “This guy say his name or company?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “He say anything else you can remember?”

  “No.”

  I looked around at the hothouse. “You can grow all of these so late in the season?” I asked.

  “We harvest until Thanksgiving. After that it’s too cold and too dark.”

  “Even though you’ve got the furnace and the grow lights.”

  Paco nodded. He walked over to a shelf on which sat an old computer. He wiggled the mouse, and the old screen gradually came to life, making little static clicks. Paco clicked on an icon, and up came the National Weather Service website. Paco typed in his zip code and brought up the forecast. He hit print and took the sheet of paper as it came out of an old printer.

  Paco looked at it for a bit, then carried it over to an electrical box on the wall. The box was up high, and Paco had to step up on a stool to reach it. He unlatched the cover door and swung it open.

  Inside the box was a thin, red, metal wheel. On its outer rim were two little knurled knobs around the perimeter of the wheel. I watched as Paco consulted the paper with the forecast and then unscrewed one of the knobs to loosen it. He slid the knob a tiny bit, then tightened it. He looked again at the forecast, then moved the other knob.

  “What’s that do?” I asked.

  “Changes the times the grow lights go on and off.”

  “Why do you change it?”

  “’Cause the fruit needs more light when it’s cloudy,” he said. “We use the lights less on sunny days to save money on electricity.”

  “Sophisticated,” I said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Refined,” I said. “Advanced.”

  He shook his head. “Cassie says it’s stupid. She says she’s going to get a professional system like the drip irrigation. It will be automatic.”

  “Based on her secret formulas, huh?” I said.

  He nodded. “But it’s expensive. She needs more money, first.”

  “How do you control the irrigation?” I asked.

  Paco pointed to another box, this one modern and made of plastic. He pulled on the catch, and the lid snapped open. Inside was a digital readout and a keypad below it.

  Paco shut the box, then walked down one of the aisles, squeezing a few of the reddest tomatoes.

  “These will be ready to pick in two days,” he said.

  I didn’t respond. I had no idea where Paco would be in a couple of days. If Cassie didn’t miraculously reappear unharmed, the tomatoes would probably go to waste.

  FIFTEEN

  We got back in the Jeep.

  “Sorry about that little disagreement with the landlord,” I said.

  “We are quick to flare up, we races of men on the earth,” Paco said.

  “What is that?” I asked, shocked at such words from Paco.

  “Something Cassie always says.”

  “When did she say it?”

  “When, like, people get mad at each other.”

  “Do you know where she heard it?”

  Paco shook his head. “She gets books from the library. Maybe she read it in a book.”

  We drove to McDonald’s. Paco got two cheeseburgers along with his large fries and Coke and chocolate shake. We sat at one of the outdoor tables, under the hot midday sun of a Central Valley November, one of the amazing things about California weather.

  “When you were in the house,” I said, “the landlord got bit by a bunch of little ants. Have you seen that before?”

  Paco nodded as he chewed, his mouth as full as a mouth can get. If he stuffed in any more food, his cheeks would rip.

  Eventually, he swallowed and said, “Fire ants. They don’t bite, they sting.”

  “I thought fire ants were just in Central America or something,” I said. “You have them in the Central Valley? Are they all over?”

  “I don’t think so. All I know is we have them.” He stuffed fries into his mouth.

  “Awful lot of them in the driveway,” I said. “They were driving the landlord crazy.”

  “That’s nothing. There’s a real big nest at the corner behind the hothouse. Cassie says if you tripped and fell on it, you could die from the stings.”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  Paco kept eating like a starving prisoner let out to visit an all-you-can-eat buffet.

  “Principal Sagan said you are smart,” I said. “She said you’ll be reading in no time.”

  Paco’s mouth was stuffed full, chewing. He said nothing.

  “You said that you didn’t know computers, but you used that one in the hothouse,” I said.

  Paco drank Coke, then sucked on the straw in his shake.

  “She doesn’t like me,” he said.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “’Cause I hurt her friend’s kid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her friend is Mrs. Burns. Bobby Burns is a bully. He called me a wetback and jumped on me from behind. I fell down. But I turned and he hit first.”

  “How bad did he get hurt?”

  “His head hit the ground, and his ear got split. It made a lot of blood. He started screaming about how I’d attacked him.”

  “But you didn’t? He came after you first?” Paco had already stated that, but I wanted to press the point.

  “He jumped me.”

  “Did Bobby Burns end up okay?” I asked.

  “He had to go to the clinic to have stitches. But it all healed. Now you can’t even see where his ear split.”

  “Did you get in trouble for this so-called attack on Bobby Burns?”

  “Yeah. I had to go to the cop station.”

  “Why did that happen?”

  “The teacher looked in my pack and found my harvesting knife, and she called the cops.”

  “What do you use the knife for?”

  “For cutting the stems on tomatoes and peppers. Cassie got it for me.”

  “Why did you keep it in your pack?”

  “I keep all my harvest tools in my pack with my school stuff.”

  “What are your other tools?”

  I could see Paco visualizing as he spoke. “My work gloves and my garden belt with my trowel, my knife, my snips, my wire roll, my wire cutter, and my pliers.”

  “Why do you bring this pack to school? Is it the only pack you have?”

  “Yeah. I keep my tools with me because sometimes when I come home, Cassie is on the phone, and she doesn’t like me to come in and make noise. She says I have to be quiet when she’s calling a client. So I go straight to the hothouse to do my chores.”

  “Why not just leave your pack in the hothouse?”

  “I used to. But it got stolen. Cassie said I lost a hundred dollars worth of tools and two hundred dollars worth of time ’cause we had to drive to two different farm stores to get new tools.”

  “So you bring your pack to school.”

  “It keeps my stuff safe,” Paco said.

  “Where’s the pack now?”

  “In the van.”

  “What happened at the cops?”

>   “They fingerprinted me and took my picture and locked me in a cell. Cassie had to come and let me out.”

  “Did they charge you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did they accuse you of a crime?”

  “They said I brought weapons to school. I had to go to court. I wanted to tell about how Bobby jumped me. But the judge said I couldn’t tell about that. He told me that if I ever brought weapons to school again, I would be taken out of school and sent to a place.” Paco stopped, looked up, frowned. “I can’t remember what he called it. Cassie said it was a boy’s prison. She said that after the boy’s prison, I would be sent to Mexico.”

  Paco drank the last of his shake. “Then Cassie had to go to court,” he added.

  “Why?”

  “She said she got suited.”

  “You mean, sued?”

  “I guess.”

  “Was it Bobby’s parents who sued Cassie?”

  Paco nodded. “They said I caused pain and suffering, and Cassie had to pay them a lot of money.”

  “Didn’t her insurance cover it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I drank my coffee. The lawsuit must have been the big expense that Cassie referred to in her note.

  “Is Bobby Burns okay, now?” I asked.

  Paco nodded as he stuffed more fries into his mouth. “He hasn’t jumped me again.”

  “Do you like school at all?” I asked. “Is there anything about it that’s fun?”

  He chewed the last of his fries, and swallowed.

  “Going to school is like putting on gray clothes,” he said. “There’s nothing exciting about it.”

  After lunch, we were walking out of the restaurant toward the Jeep when Paco spoke.

  “Will you buy me something?”

  “Depends on what it is,” I said.

  Paco glanced up toward the sun, his eyes squinting. “My sunglasses are in the van.”

  “You want new sunglasses,” I said.

  He nodded.

  There was a gas station and food mart next door. It had two rotating racks of sunglasses, one by the magazine rack, and one behind the counter, safe from the customers. Even from a distance I could tell that they were the expensive ones.

  Paco tried on every pair in the first rack, then looked at the rack behind the counter. The clerk said he could come under the flip gate and look.