10 Tahoe Trap (13 page)

I’m an organic gardener specializing in tomatoes and peppers that I used to sell at farmers’ markets.

A year ago, one of my clients asked if I would deliver produce to his house in Tahoe. He is very focused on having a healthy diet full of fresh produce, but he didn’t have time anymore to go to the farmers’ market. He said he also travels constantly for business, and that when he comes home late after a hard trip, there’s nothing better than a glass of wine and a stir fry dinner of fresh-picked produce. He said that he had tried sending his housekeeper to the farmers’ market, but that she didn’t have a good eye for produce. So he wondered if I could save my best produce and also buy the best from the vendors who sell other kinds of produce. He wanted me to deliver it to his house. He would pay top dollar for the privilege of having the freshest produce.

It worked out very well. Soon, I started getting calls from his Tahoe friends. They, too, wanted my delivery service. And the word kept spreading. I ended up quitting the farmers’ markets, and instead I just focus on getting the best produce there is and delivering it to my clients up at the lake.

I called this new business Field To Fridge: Fresh Organic Produce, Hand-Picked and Hand-Delivered. It has gone very well.

Last winter, a time when I have no produce of my own, I started buying from distributors who fly in produce from countries like Chile to sell to restaurants. Because my customers are willing to pay extra, I pay the distributors a premium. As a result, they give me first pick of each day’s air shipments.

My Field To Fridge business now runs year ’round, and I’m at a point where I can’t take any more business unless I decide to hire an employee. (Of course, I have Paco’s help, and he is a lifesaver.)

One day last spring, I got a call from a man who said his name was John Mitchell and he wanted to make me an offer. He said he would like to call me once a week. He said he knew a man who was one of my clients. If I could tell him when and where this customer traveled, he’d mail me two hundred dollars in cash.

I hung up on him because it just sounded wrong. I couldn’t technically say what was wrong with it, but that’s how I felt.

John Mitchell called each of the next three weeks and asked if I’d reconsidered his offer. I hung up on him each time.

The next week when I delivered to my client, the one that John Mitchell had asked about, the housekeeper told me that my client had left for San Diego the day before.

That evening, I got another phone call from John Mitchell. That time I didn’t hang up. I thought, if the housekeeper is willing to tell me – a delivery woman – where my customer went, what would be so wrong with me telling the man on the phone?

So I did. It still felt wrong, but that’s how I rationalized it.

(To be truthful, I was also influenced by some things that happened recently with Paco that cost a great deal of money. I’m not what you’d call well-capitalized. I’m just a hard-working woman. I used to clean hotel rooms and houses. Then I made the transition to organic farming. I’ve always put everything I made back into the business. But after Paco, let’s just say that my back-up kitty was used up. I needed money pretty bad.)

The man asked for my mailing address, and two days later I got two one hundred dollar bills in the mail. The envelope was postmarked in Sacramento. No return address.

He’s called each week since. Sometimes I have no information, other times I do.

I know you’re thinking that I’m a bad person for doing this, and you’re right. But the money from John Mitchell has really helped me.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. The man knows how to set the hook. After I’d received several payments from him, he asked me if I’d like to make many times more money. I asked how. He said that he would pay for the same travel information for some of my other clients as well. All I had to do was go through my client list and consider which ones I had enough contact with to learn about their travel plans. So I did. The next time he called I read him a list of client names. He said yes or no to each name. He ended up choosing nine names.

From that point on, when he called each week, I’d give him travel information on three or four clients. Two different weeks I had info on seven clients. One week, eight of the nine clients on the list were traveling, and I knew where they were all going. Now here’s where it really gets dicey. The man raised what he pays me from two hundred to three hundred dollars per client per week. The week when I told him where eight different people were traveling, he mailed me $2400.

This money has changed my life, Mr. McKenna. I’ve been able to buy Paco anything he needs. I’ve been saving for a house.

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?”