Five Quickies For Roger And Suzanne (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 7) Read online

  FIVE QUICKIES FOR ROGER AND SUZANNNE

  By Jerold Last

  All Rights Reserved

  The Empanada Affair, Copyright 2011, 2013 © Jerold Last

  Someone Did It to the Butler, Copyright 2012 © Jerold Last

  The Body in the Parking Structure, Copyright 2012 © Jerold Last

  The Dog With No Name, Copyright 2012 © Jerold Last

  The Haunted Gymnasium, Copyright 2012 © Jerold Last

  Cover design, copyright 2013 © Jerold Last

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Story1.The Empanada Affair

  Story2.Someone Did It to the Butler

  Story3.The Body in the Parking Structure

  Story4.The Dog With No Name

  Story5.The Haunted Gymnasium

  Note From The Author

  Introduction----Five Quickies for Roger and Suzanne

  This anthology contains five different stories of various lengths, shorter than full-length books (hence the title), featuring the characters from my South American mystery series of novels. Collectively, the five stories together are as long as a traditional novel, more than 60,000 words. Each story was written under different circumstances, which I’ll share. Two of these stories take place in South America, one in Argentina, the other in Brazil. Three take place in Los Angeles, Roger and Suzanne’s hometown. One of the stories is also available from Amazon as a stand-alone novelette for $0.99, so getting it along with three additional stories and a long novella in this collection is a real bargain.

  Short stories (the “Quickies” of the anthology’s title) are often classified based upon their length. In one common scheme, the “true” short story is less than 7,500 words long. The next step up is the novelette, between 7,500 and 17,500 words. Between 17,500 and 40,000 words we have the novella, and books longer than 40,000 words are novels. These exact lengths vary with the definition’s source; I used Wikipedia. The five “quickies” in this anthology include one short story, three novelettes, and a novella. The novella is a completely revised and rewritten version of my first novel, The Empanada Affair. A lot of extraneous material has been removed to focus on the mystery/suspense story and the exotic locale, Salta, Argentina. Each story has a new introduction to tell you, the reader, a bit about where the story came from, or something interesting about the location of the action.

  Story1.THE EMPANADA AFFAIR

  At almost 33,000 words, our first story, “The Empanada Affair” is a novella. I had originally envisioned it as a full-length novel and, in fact, it was my first published book as a novel of more than 60,000 words. When I look at it two years and six books later, it reads in retrospect a lot like a first novel. Too much for my current taste, at least, that’s my reaction when I re-read it now. I was learning how to write as I wrote it, and it shows. It tries to combine several genres---mystery/suspense, action/adventure, travel, food, wine, and sexual situations/erotic romance. At the time it was originally written a few years ago, the fantasy was about selling a lot of books to five separate markets that way. I dreamed of having a lot more commercial success than if the only interested would-be readers had to come from a single genre. Clearly, I had a lot to learn about book marketing, and still do!

  Since then I’ve written four more novels, and experimented with short stories and novellas. I went back to “The Empanada Affair” and started cutting and pasting, as well as rewriting the remaining sections to bridge the resultant gaps. The last third of the original book, which took place in Los Angeles, came out almost in its entirety. The graphic sex scenes, and all the references to them that I could find, were removed. I kept the meals that were culturally relevant to the northwest region of South America that Roger and Suzanne visited. Then I discarded the rest of the “foodie” scenes, which were originally included to give my characters a place to sit down and discuss the case and to attract hungry gourmet readers to the novel. Unless the locale specifically included key scenes that significantly advanced the plot, out went a good deal of the tourist travel through the Andes Mountains of Northern Argentina and downtown Los Angeles.

  The biggest remaining problem was pulling what was left of the story together so it would read as a coherent whole. You, dear readers, will have to decide how well I succeeded in accomplishing this task. The result is a novella about half the length of the original book that I think reads much better, and a whole lot faster, than the previous 63,025-word novel of the same name.

  After revision to the new novella format, “The Empanada Affair” features all of the signature elements of the subsequent novels in the series: Roger and Suzanne in the lead roles as investigators of a murder, a local police person as a collaborator, a corpse appearing early in the book, a chance for Roger and/or Suzanne to demonstrate their martial arts skills in a fight, a South American location with description of the local sights to see, and a chance to taste the local foods and wines. The story has its roots in several actual things seen and learned on my first visit to Salta in 1999. The local geography around the central plaza is very familiar, because it’s a block or two away from the apartment Elaine and I rented while we lived there in 1999. A lot of change in Salta has occurred since then, but most of it is around the edges, while the historic downtown has been maintained. Even more change has occurred in Cafayate, as many of the major wineries from Mendoza have expanded into this new terroir, and a substantial amount of corporate money has been invested in modernization of the older wineries.

  Welcome to Salta, Argentina, and to the new, improved, “Empanada Affair.”

  The Empanada Affair

  Elaine and Jerold Last

  Copyright © 2011 by Elaine and Jerold Last

  All Rights Reserved

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This story is dedicated to our good friends in Salta and Cafayate, to the Malbec wines from the region, to the parillas we had too many of when we lived in Salta, and to the ubiquitous empanadas that inspired this book. The characters are fictional, but all of the places and foods are real.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter1.The Client

  Chapter2.The Flight to BA

  Chapter3.BA the City

  Chapter4.The Flight to Salta and Getting Settled There

  Chapter5.Arrival day in Salta, we find a hotel and dinner

  Chapter6.Salta, Day 1

  Chapter7.Back to the police station

  Chapter8.Humahuaca and Purmamarca

  Chapter9.The Road to Cafayate

  Chapter10.Cafayate

  Chapter11.Santa Rosa de Tastil

  Chapter12.Back in Los Angeles

  Chapter1.The Client

  It was a sunny day in November, one of those days the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce tries to convince tourists is typical of our weather all year round. I was sitting at my desk waiting for a client to walk in and hire me. Sitting at the same desk for a couple of days, I was getting bored with nothing much to do. It had been a good year for me and I’d been working hard until the end of last week. That meant I was sitting on a nice bank balance and could afford to be without a client or a job for a while longer. On the other hand, I don’t particularly enjoy doing nothing. That made me think about taking the rest of the afternoon off and making a quick trip over to Hollywood to work out at the new Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gym I’d seen written up in the local news section of the L.A. Times. A moment later the decision was taken out of my hands.

  There was an assertive rap on the door, and she wal
ked in. About 5’8”, on the good side of 30 years old, lean athletic body, Scandanavian looking face, long blond hair, and an aura of success and good breeding. Wearing $300 jeans and Bruno Magli heels, her look was casual but at the same time Los Angeles sophisticated. An I.D.-type security key card from UCLA hung on a thin strap around her neck. Maybe it was pheromones, maybe it was just how beautiful she was, but somewhere deep in my mind a little voice was shouting, “Wow, this could be the one for you!”

  I introduced myself and made a gesture; she sat on the client chair facing my desk, crossed her long legs, and leaned forward. There was a pause while she decided what to say. I could read the letters on my door backwards; they still said “Roger Bowman Investigations”. Glancing around the office, I saw once again the desk with a computer monitor on top, the computer tower and a laser printer under the desk, the client chair in front, and a couple of file cabinets against the wall. The opposite wall featured a large window with a great view of the smog hiding the Tehachapi Mountains to the north, and a sprinkling of my various martial arts competition trophies on shelves on the walls, an overall image far less elegant than my potential new client.

  The voice was as attractive as she was. “Hello. I assume you’re Roger Bowman,” she said.

  “Yes, I am,” seemed to be the right answer.

  She looked straight at me. No fear, mild concern. “My name is Suzanne Foster.”

  “What can I do to help you, Ms. Foster?”

  “I’m being followed,” she told me calmly, “And there seem to be at least two people taking turns doing the following. This has gone on for more than a week that I’m aware of, and I don’t know for how long before that until I realized I was seeing the same two men behind me over and over.”

  I thought about her answer for a few seconds. It’s never a bad idea to appear thoughtful at this stage of an interview with a potential new client. “Do you have any idea why someone would want to have you followed?”

  She answered readily and without hesitation. “There’s no reason on Earth why anybody would be following me because of something I did or didn’t do. It seems more likely that it must be related to my father’s murder last month. I can’t think of any reason somebody would want to kill my father, but someone did. The police are assuming that it was a random killing---a robbery that went bad---and not looking very hard for who did it any more. I want to hire you to find out who did it and why, and to bring his killer to justice. And to find out who’s following me, and why, and do something to make it stop.”

  She sat back in the client’s chair and waited for me to answer.

  I thought a bit before continuing. “The Los Angeles police department certainly has more manpower and resources to solve a murder than a one-man detective agency like mine. What makes you think I could succeed when they can’t?” I asked reasonably.

  “The killing didn’t happen in Los Angeles,” she replied.

  I picked up a pen and prepared a pad of legal-sized paper. “Maybe you need to start at the beginning and tell me your story.”

  She moved forward in the chair and started to explain. I listened carefully without interrupting, and took notes as she spoke.

  “My father was Robert Foster, an amateur winemaker and a wealthy retired businessman who made a ton of money importing hand-made crafts and furniture from all over the world, especially South America, and selling it to buyers from stores who dealt with the public. He dreamed about buying some land of his own and having his own vineyards and winery. About a month ago he went to Argentina to buy some property and start his new career growing grapes and making wines. I heard from him shortly after he arrived, just to let me know he had gotten there, then nothing until the U.S. counsel in Argentina called three weeks ago to let me know his body had been found laying on a street in Salta, beaten to death.

  “Apparently the police in Salta didn’t do much of anything to investigate after the body was found and identified. They function on a cash economy down there, with minimal use of credit cards, so the assumption is that he was carrying a lot of money that was missing when they found him. His killers left his passport and his wallet with no cash in it on the body, which was why identification of his body was so easy. The police are convinced that it was a random robbery, and they have no clues as to who did it.”

  “Why do you think this has anything to do with your being followed?” I asked.

  She continued speaking calmly and concisely. She’d obviously thought a great deal about this, and had a very analytical mind. “I think his killing had its roots here in Los Angeles and that the killer or killers followed him to Argentina and murdered him for reasons other than stealing a few thousand pesos he was carrying in his wallet. I want to hire you to go to Argentina with me, help me to find out as much as we can about what happened, and try to identify who killed him and why.”

  “You may be asking for the impossible,” I replied. “You’re asking me to solve a murder over a month after the killing, in a foreign country where I have no contacts and no connections to the local police, no status as a private detective, no clues, and nowhere to begin. This will be very expensive and maybe a total waste of our time, Miss Foster.”

  For the first time since she began her story, she showed signs of stress. She reached up to touch the edge of the UCLA key card hanging on her neck and twisted the card. “I know all that. But I can’t just leave things as they are. I need to know who did this and why. Money is not an object, and I think that if someone who has an open mind and only this one case to concentrate on looks into it with fresh eyes, there could be some answers. And I’d be there with you, so as far as your standing with the police in Argentina is concerned, I think my status as next of kin will extend to you and we’ll get their cooperation.”

  “Let me ask you a few more questions before I say yes or no. First and most important, what did you mean when you said that you thought his killing had its roots here in Los Angeles and that the killer came from here?”

  The key card was turned over and over as she fidgeted with it. This part of her narrative was much more difficult for her. “Dad was far too wealthy to have made his money as an honest import agent. I think he was mixed up in something illegal over the last 10-20 years that helped him get rich. I don’t know what---drugs, smuggling, something bad---but I do know that he did a lot of traveling abroad for his work, especially to Argentina. This trip to buy land for a winery could have been a combination of business with pleasure for him, and I think we need to find out what the business part was all about. If we knew that, we might find links to Los Angeles. I think that’s where the answers will finally end up being found. And my being followed for the last week or two makes me even more convinced that there’s a strong connection between something criminal in Los Angeles and my father’s murder in Argentina.”

  It was time for me to ask her the difficult question. “My next question may be a little harder for you. The answers you’re looking for may be ugly and reflect badly on your father. Are you prepared for that?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few weeks and I’d rather know the truth than spend the rest of my life wondering whether Dad was an innocent victim or one of the bad guys.”

  I thought about what she’d told me and that I could guess for a minute or so. There were several pro arguments for my getting involved. I had nothing better to do right now, at least professionally, and was being offered the equivalent of a very well paid vacation to an interesting and somewhat exotic part of the world where I’d likely never go on my own. The case was a real challenge and I like challenges. My Spanish skills consisted of whatever was left over from four years of study in high school, but was serviceable enough to handle chasing missing kids and wives in Tijuana.

  My companion would be a beautiful woman who I was already fantasizing about falling in love with, and who I was certain would be an interesting and intelligent travel companion. My current social and sex
ual life was nonexistent, and something was going on that suggested there were possibilities here with Suzanne, whose pheromones were calling out to my libido. Strangely enough, that little voice deep in my mind was telling me that it thought that my pheromones were having a similar effect on her libido. It seemed to be worth a week or two of my currently idle time to find out if we really were connecting.

  To be perfectly honest, from a professional point of view my conscience was telling me that if the client had been a 73-year old man I would have found a dozen reasons to say no to this case. But the client was a beautiful woman, not an old man, and the trip would be a most welcome change in my routine. There weren’t any con arguments against accepting Suzanne as a client, except the chances of success were slim to none.

  I made up my mind. “OK, I’ll do it, but with a few conditions. You’ll pay me double my usual fee for as long as I’m working on this case, plus all of my expenses here and in Argentina. We’ll set a time limit of no more than two weeks for how long we can stay in Argentina. This is a one-man agency and I can’t afford to be away from my potential clients longer than that. And I’ll need a retainer of $2,500 today. A check will be fine.”