The China Connection

My new Lieutenant Morales mystery/thriller will be published shortly. Keep an eye on this blog for details.

Nomination for A RESERVATION FOR MURDER

It is still not to late to nominate my new Lieutenant Morales mystery, A RESERVATION FOR MURDER, for consideration for acceptance in the Kindle Scout program. Just go to the following url,
https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/1PNVTB6SR97MO.
Thanks so much.

New Lieutenant Morales Mystery: A Reservation for Murder

I know that quite a few people have been waiting for the next Lieutenant Morales mystery following Dead in the Water.  Well, here is the first chapter of A Reservation for Murder:

 A Reservation for Murder

                                       A Lieutenant Morales Mystery

                      “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

                                                Sun-Tzu, Chinese general and military strategist, (400 BC)

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

                                                Hotel California

                                                Eagles

                                                           

                                                            THE DIARY

 I killed two people today. Helluva way to start the New Year.

 The man got what he had coming. But I do feel bad about the woman; I actually liked her, but I had no choice. Under the circumstances, I could not leave any witnesses. As they say in the military, sometimes there is collateral damage. Put another way:  shit happens. May she rest in peace.

             I probably shouldn’t be writing any of this down now or ever.  Someday, it will probably come back to haunt me.  But, you know what? Right now, I just don’t care. Since I can’t tell anyone about what happened, unless I write it down and see the words in black and white describing what happened, it does not seem real. 

It all began about two weeks before Thanksgiving. I was sitting in my office about 5:30 in the early evening when my cell phone rang.  Because I was getting ready to leave the office, at first I wasn’t going to answer the phone.   I just wanted to go home and have a nice dinner with my wife and kids.  It was a Tuesday and so we were having meat loaf.  We always had meatloaf on Tuesdays.   But, because the phone continued to ring, something in the back of my brain said that this call might be important.  And so, against my better judgment, I answered phone.     

            You wouldn’t think it was possible, but my whole world was changed forever as a result of that stupid phone call.  As, I think back on it now, answering that call was probably the biggest mistake of my life. We all probably would have been better off. And two people would still be alive. But thoughts like that are useless now.  The deed is done.

            A soon as I picked up the phone that early evening, the caller began, without any preliminaries, "Your wife is having an affair."

"Who in the hell is this? “ I screamed into the phone. “What are you saying? You’re crazy.”

 The voice on the other end did not answer my questions but instead more forcefully than before repeated the phrase. "Your wife is having an affair. “

Before I could say anything more, the caller hung up the phone. I frantically tried to check out the name and number of the caller on my cell phone but everything was blocked. I even called Verizon but they said they couldn’t help me either. Something about the phone being an untraceable throwaway, like the kind that the drug dealers use to communicate with their clients.

At first, I refused to believe some anonymous bastard who calls at the end of the day and makes such an absurd accusation. I guess it’s a little like when patients are told that they have terminal cancer and only a few months to live. They say that their first reaction is almost always the same: disbelief, “It can’t happen to me.”

 My wife having an affair, no, that's just not possible. The caller must be mistaken.  The caller must have dialed the wrong number. Those were my initial reactions.

 We had been married almost 15 years. Yeah, our marriage wasn’t exactly perfect. Like most guys I had fooled around a little bit.  You know how it is.  Guys will be guys.  But my wife, no, I was sure, no way.

But you know how it can be sometimes?   Some things can just gnaw at you. Well, that call was one of those things.  I just could not get it out of my head.  It was there when I woke up in the morning and when I went to bed at night.  In between, throughout the day, it seemed like that call was just about all I thought about.

A few days after receiving the call, I began watching my wife closely at home. All of a sudden, just [1] about everything she did seemed to me to be suspicious.  If she went to the grocery store at night, I sometimes followed her.  I particularly noticed that she started getting these phone calls in the evening, sometimes even after ten o’clock. She never received those kind of calls before. When I asked her about them, she simply said she was working on a special Christmas gift for me.  She said that she had to make some sort of special arrangements for the gift through the seller on EBay.   She claimed that the guy who was selling the gift could only talk to her at night. It sounded fairly plausible at the time and anyway, I really wanted to believe her.  She was just thinking of me, that’s all.  What a relief.

  But the thought of what that anonymous caller had said would not leave me. A week or so later, I decided that I had to confront her with what that caller had said to me. I was burning up inside and I had to know for sure.  Was that anonymous caller right?

So, after dinner one evening and after the kids had gone downstairs to play in our new rec room, I took her into the den and closed the door. I said to her as casually as I could, “You won’t believe this, babe, but I got this call a couple of weeks ago.  Some guy called and said you were having an affair.”

There was absolutely no change in her expression as she responded as calmly as I had been, maybe even more so, “You have got to be kidding, honey.  How could you possibly believe some jerk who calls you up and makes a crazy claim like that?  You know I only love you.” She grabbed me around the waist, hugged me and kissed me hard.

That night we made love for the first time in what seemed like months. Things were good again, just like that.

She sounded so convincing in her denials that I just had to believe her. I even felt sort of foolish that I had doubted her and accepted at face value what some anonymous caller lied to me about my wife.  Who do I believe?  This stranger or my lovely wife?  The choice was easy at the time. That nasty caller was just trying to stir me up so I would do something crazy. But the caller was wrong and when I found out who it was……well, that would have been a very different story.

But then it all came crashing down on Christmas day. Of all days on the calendar, it had to be Christmas!  My favorite holiday of all.  I happened to get up early that Christmas morning, even before the kids. When it comes to Christmas, I have to admit, I’m like a little kid myself. I can’t wait to get started. Even though it was still early and dark outside, I went downstairs as soon as I woke up to see what gifts were there.  My wife was still sleeping.

I first turned on the Christmas tree lights.  The tree was all sparkly with the white lights and silver ornaments we had hung the day before. I was in the best mood.

Then I began sifting through the presents my wife had piled high under the tree, looking for that special gift she had promised me. I found a large box wrapped in gold foil with a green Christmas tag and picture of Santa taped to the top of the box.  “This is it,” I thought.  But then I looked at the tag a little closer.  The tag was addressed to “MS". Who the hell was MS? The tag also read, “With all my love forever.” What kind of crap is that? She had never written or said anything like that to me--- ever.  Instantly, I realized she had mistakenly put a gift for her lover under our tree. That was it.  I was sure now that she was having affair. The caller was right after all.  The only question is with whom? Who could this bastard MS be?

When my wife came downstairs a few minutes later, she must have realized her mistake because she grabbed the gift from under the tree and ran upstairs with it where she apparently hid it because I never saw it again. I don’t think she had any idea that I had already seen it.  I made a quick decision not to say a word to her at the time about the gift. After all, it was Christmas and the kids were now up and opening presents. Why create a fuss now? Now that I knew it was true, it could wait until after the holidays.  And my actions then would speak louder than anything I could possibly say now or ever. Much louder.

“MS," who in the hell could that be?  I pondered that all day that Christmas day, ignoring my kids as they played with their new toys. The next day, back at work, as I was sitting at my desk, I realized that there was really only one man it could be. One man with those initials who was such an asshole that he would even dare to fool around with my wife. Once I knew who it was, I had figure out how to make him pay.

I t was a couple of days later that I finally caught up with him.  When I confronted him, of course, he denied it. He swore up and down that whoever told me that he was having an affair with my wife was lying.   But I didn't believe him for a moment.  His reputation had preceded him. When I pulled out my gun, he could see I was serious and he started begging for his life, like some sniveling little kid. I couldn’t stand it anymore. Unfortunately, it was just then that the woman appeared in the room.  She must have heard him begging me for his life and came to the room to see what was going on.

Then it all happened.

I shot them both. Blood splattered everywhere in the room. Both of them fell to the ground moaning, but I could see the looks of disbelief on both of their faces before they fell.  I had to finish them off with a second bullet. It was the humane thing to do.

 After I removed the bodies from the room and stashed them in the trunk of my car, it took me almost three hours and four bottles of Clorox to clean up the bloody mess. I was pretty certain I got it all.

I know one thing: No one will ever suspect me. Never, not me. Not in a million years. HAHA, Hell, they won’t even find the bodies.  They are long gone. I made sure of that. They will just be two missing persons. 

 And even if they do suspect me, what in the world are they going to do about it? Nothing!

I remember reading once something that Shakespeare wrote in one of his plays, “Murder will out.”  But all I have to say to that is, “Not this time, Will.  No way.  Not this time.”

---

 [1]

New Book: A Reservation for Murder

     A Reservation for Murder

                                   A Lieutenant Morales Mystery

                      “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

                                                Sun-Tzu, Chinese general and military strategist, (400 BC)

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

                                                Hotel California

                                                Eagles

Chapter 1

Nothing much ever happens on Pine Island. So it was all the more surprising when a man who was fishing from the Matlacha drawbridge saw a body floating in the water in Pine Island Sound just a few feet away from the bridge. It was even more surprising when that body turned out to belong to Mike Sullivan.

The body of Mike Sullivan was the first body discovered in Pine Island Sound that January. But it was not the last.

Mike Sullivan was anything but an ordinary kind of guy. He was a part- time fisherman and a full-time jerk.  Although he had been on the island only a few months, he had managed to alienate half the island. Night after night, as he sat drinking Coors Light after Coors Light at the bar of the Sunset Bar and Grill, he boasted about his many conquests to his few friends and anyone else who would listen.  He claimed that there wasn’t a woman on the island that he couldn’t bed if he really wanted to.  And with his wavy dark hair and brooding brown eyes, many a woman on the island had already fallen to his charms.

Recently, Sullivan seemed to have come into some money, no one knew for sure from where or how much. But he was clearly spending it freely.  He had bought himself a brand new, candy apple red, Ford F-150 pickup truck with a trailer hitch. The trailer hitch was for a new 32 foot fishing boat which he now kept moored near the Bonita Lodge.  A couple of people from the island had been surprised to see him in downtown Fort Myers on several occasions recently wearing a blue pin-striped  suit and fancy black loafers, rather than the scruffy jeans and rubber waders he usually wore. That new suit would come in handy now that he was dead and the undertaker laid him out for his funeral, The island’s undertaker, Jeffrey Bonnett, always prided himself on how well the deceased looked in his funeral parlor after he had worked on them. “Hell,”  Bonnett often bragged, “some of these poor bastards look better dead than they ever did when they were alive.”

 He was particularly proud of the work he did on Sullivan. “He looks like a movie star.” he said,  “A goddam movie star.”

When word got around the island that Sullivan had been found dead in the waters of Pine Island Sound, there were not a few men on the island who were relieved. And quite a number of women who were moved to tears.

Dead in the Water hits the Amazon Best Seller Lists!

Mystery Financial

As of today, my book, Dead in the Water is ranked No. 5 in the Mystery/Suspense/Thriller/Financial category for Kindle books.  Please see the above link. Many thanks to all of you who have purchased the book.  I would be extremely grateful if you would please write a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Reviews are the independent writer's best friend.  Thanks to all.

Free book: Dead in the Water

My mystery thriller, Dead in the Water, will be free on Amazon for the next three days. If you decide to download the book, I would be extremely grateful if you would please write a review.http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Water-Lieutenant-Morales-Mystery-ebook/dp/B00U35Z7CS/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1434756382&sr=8-5
I am sure you will enjoy the many twists and turns that you will find in my book. It is the perfect beach book.

Goodreads Giveaway Ends Today

Today is the last day to enter to win a free copy of my mystery thriller, Dead in the Water, on Goodreads. Only 5 copies are available.

Free New Mystery/Thriller Excerpt: "Dead in the Water"

In my most recent post of December 20, 2014, I wrote about my soon-to-be published mystery/thriller, "Dead in the Water." Dead in the Water is about the disappearance of a new bride on her honeymoon while on a cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico. Who was responsible for her disappearance?  Was it her new husband or her boss, a wealthy automobile dealer? And what roles do the Chinese government and a prominent Miami attorney have to play in her disappearance? Lieutenant Mario Morales, the head of security aboard the ship, investigates and discovers that her disappearance is not exactly what it seems.  You will be as surprised as he was when you learn the shocking truth about her disappearance..

While the novel is still being finalized for publication, I thought that I would share with you an excerpt from the book.  I hope you will enjoy reading it.

                                                        DEAD IN THE WATER

“Lieutenant Morales, Lieutenant Morales, please wake up, sir. Hurry. We need your help right away. Lieutenant Morales, please sir".

I rolled over in bed and pulled the alarm clock closer to my face so that I could read it better.  The clock's dial glowed 5:00 in a sickening green color. Was that a.m. or p.m.?  I really had no idea. It seemed like I had a hard time remembering things lately. In fact, I wasn’t even too sure how I had ended up back in my own cabin.  Or at least I thought it was my own cabin.

“Lieutenant Morales, please answer me if you are in there.  We need your help right away.  We think there may have been a murder on board the ship.” The voice sounded to me like a roar, even through the thick cabin door.

After a few seconds, I got my bearings and was finally able to recognize the voice as belonging to one of the new security guards I had recently hired to replace two guards who had been fired for drug smuggling shortly before I was hired as head of security on board the Mardi Gras.

 “Roman, Roman, something or other,” I mumbled as I rolled over onto my back, as I finally remembered the name of the man whose voice I heard outside my stateroom door. “What the hell does he want at this time of the morning,” I wondered. “Goddamn him, just when I was starting to fall asleep after being awake all night.”

The pounding on my door continued but all I wanted was to be left alone.  I had a throbbing, migraine headache, and I felt like I might throw up.  I did recall that the Captain’s welcoming party the night before had gone on for a lot longer than usual and I had drunk way too much tequila. I did not particularly like tequila, but there was a certain young woman at the party, who I was drinking with and she loved tequila. Lots of it.  I could barely keep up with her as we downed tequila sunrises together at dinner and later at the bar in the ship’s lounge. Truth be told, I hadn’t had a drink in over a year since I left LA. Little wonder I felt so lousy now.

“What was her name? I’m not sure that she even told me.”  I thought that she was Asian----Chinese, or Vietnamese or maybe, Korean, but I wasn’t even sure about that.  But I was certain that she was quite beautiful. She wore her long black hair down to her waist and her eyelashes seemed almost as long. She had on a black, silk, split leg dress that was slit to her hip and showed off her surprisingly long brown legs. I thought she looked incredibly sexy. “I must look her up this morning.”

“Get me some coffee. Black, no sugar,” I yelled as I started to climb out of the narrow single bed. “I’ll be right out.” I climbed slowly out of bed and stood up and immediately I realized that the ship was not moving. Usually, when the ship is moving, I feel a little unsteady when I first get out of bed or stand up from a chair. When I was being interviewed for the job as head of security aboard the Mardi Gras, I had told the interviewer that I had lived my whole life in California and had never been on a ship before. He assured me, “Don’t worry; you’ll get your sea legs in no time.” He was wrong. It had been six months and I still seemed to feel woozy half the time.

Once out of bed, I walked over to the far side of the cabin and looked out the small porthole. The ship was enveloped in a thick, black fog. I couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky began, it was so thick. We must be stopped in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.  I hoped it was only the fog and not some mechanical problem that had caused the ship to be dead in the water.

There had been a rash of mechanical problems recently on all of the Mariner cruise ships. A few months before I came on board, there had been a suspicious fire in the engine room of the Mardi Gras, which had required the evacuation of the ship. Passengers aboard all four of the Mariner ships also had gotten violently ill from the norovirus. The cruise line’s public relations department had issued press releases claiming that all of these intestinal problems were caused by the passengers themselves. But, because of these problems, the cruise line had become fodder for the late night, television talk show hosts almost every night. Bookings were definitely down as a result and Mariner had recently filed for bankruptcy.

I had been chief of security on the Mardi Gras for almost six months. I had found life aboard the Mardi Gras to be quite pleasant.  Since I had come on board, I and my deputy, and our crew of eight security guards had investigated several robberies and assaults on board the ship. Most of these were of a petty nature.  I made sure that security aboard the ship was quite tight because it is well known that some passengers on cruise ships are affluent and travel with a considerable amount of cash and jewelry. For that reason, a variety of petty criminals and a few well-trained thieves stalk the cruise ships to prey on those passengers. But murder? I quickly dismissed the thought that there had been a murder on board my ship. Not that I wasn’t familiar with murder.  I had seen plenty of murders while working homicide out of the Ramparts Division west of downtown Los Angeles, where there were frequent homicides in that most-densely populated part of the city.

But, undoubtedly, I said to myself, this supposed murder on board the ship, will turn out to be nothing but a false alarm. It was early March and there were hundreds of college kids aboard the ship for spring break, many of whom got quite drunk on the mai tais and other drinks that freely flowed aboard the ship. I thought that this “murder” may just be one of those college pranks that those kids loved to play on the crew just for the hell of it.

 I convinced myself that Roman had failed to examine all of the facts. The facts do not lie, I said to myself. For me, Roman was just a little too excitable and I may have to reconsider his hiring, Little did I know how wrong I would turn out to be.

“I hear you, you idiot. I hear you. Now just keep quiet.  You’ll wake up the whole damn ship.”  The last thing that I wanted to happen was to have Roman create a panic among the passengers on the ship with these cries of “murder.”  Some of the passengers who were awake were probably already wondering why the ship was stopped in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Now, if they heard about a murder on the ship---well, who knows what might happen.

         Every week, the Mardi Gras sailed between Miami and Cozumel, Mexico, with a short day stop in Key West, Florida. The four and five day cruises ran between early January and early May. At one time, the Mardi Gras had been a state of the art cruise ship, but now it had seen better days. Several times during the last year or so, it had stopped dead in the water due to mechanical problems.

The Mardi Gras generally had almost 2000 passengers on board as well as a crew of at least 1000. The logistics of providing food for those 3000 people were astounding. The logistics of interviewing those same 3000 people about a potential murder or disappearance were even more frightening to me.

Yet each of those 3000 people was a potential witness who might add something to the puzzle if indeed there was a murder. On the other hand, we were still a day’s sail away from Miami.  The last thing we needed was to stir up mass hysteria among the passengers and crew if they thought a murderer was loose among them.

 “I’ll be right out, goddamn it. And quiet down, for God’s sake,” I yelled through the door.

 The last thing I did after getting dressed and before leaving my cabin was to put on my St. Michael medal which I wore on a silver chain around my neck.  I never went anywhere without it. St. Michael was the patron saint of police officers and I believed he had saved my life more than once. I had been an altar boy when I was a kid and even thought about becoming a priest.  My mother would have loved it if I had been ordained a priest, but I knew that I was not cut out for the religious life. But I still believed and tried to get to Mass as often as I could. When I was still on the LAPD, some of the other cops would call me “St. Mario” because I went to Mass so often. I sort of liked the nickname.

“So, where is this so-called murder?,” I said as I stepped out of my stateroom into the narrow hall.  I was surprised to see not only Roman, but also Sergeant Virginia Boudreaux, my deputy and, most surprisingly, Captain Antonio Vivaldi, the captain of the Mardi Gras.  The Captain was wearing his immaculate dress white uniform, which always looked as though it had just come back from the dry cleaners. I had been told that some crew members sometimes joked about Vivaldi because his name was the same as the famed Italian composer and they had heard the Captain playing Vivaldi’s music in his cabin long into the night. I myself preferred Herbie Hancock’s jazz albums.

“This must be serious to get you out of bed this early, Tony” I joked to the Captain. But Vivaldi did not laugh and said nothing in response.

“Lieutenant, I think you should take this matter seriously,” said Sergeant Boudreaux. “We believe a woman may have been murdered on her honeymoon.”

“So, you believe a woman has been murdered,” I said. “And on her honeymoon, no less. Well, tell me, where is the body?”

“Well, sir, there is no body,” piped up Roman.

“No body, but a murder has been committed.  Very interesting.   This is an impossibility. Why are you wasting my time? Are you sure this is not just one of those spring break pranks?”  I was still irritated at being awakened so early in the morning and I was almost ready to turn back and return to my cabin to sleep off this powerful hangover that was gripping me.

“It is very complex” said Captain Vivaldi.

 “Murder is always complex, Tony. But you must have a body.” I continued, “And who is this woman who has been murdered.”

Captain Vivaldi again responded, “Her name is Linda Weigand. She is on the cruise ship with her new husband, Robert. It was her husband who called to report that she was missing and that he suspected she may have been murdered.”      

 Suddenly, this disappearance took on a totally new flavor. Maybe this was something more than just a sophomoric, fraternity brothers’ prank.

 

New Mystery/Thriller Novel

If you are a fan of the late great mystery writer, P.D. James, or the late French mystery writer. Georges Simenon or even, John Grisham, have I got a treat for you. My mystery/ thriller, "Dead in the Water," is in pre-production right now. The lead investigator, Lieutenant Morales,  is sort of a combination of James' Adam Dalgliesh and Simenon's Inspector Maigret, with a twist of Lieutenant Columbo thrown in for good measure. Partly set on a cruise ship in the Caribbean and in Miami, including Little Havana, the plot also features a trial attorney with some unusual clients.

As "Dead in the Water" comes closer to publication, I will include an excerpt in this blog. So, keep your eyes on this blog in the next few weeks. I know you will enjoy the book when it becomes available on Amazon and Kindle and in your favorite bookstore.

P.S. An excerpt is now available on this blog.

Dead in the Water

It has been a while since I published a new post.  Part of the reason for the gap is due to the fact that I have been working on my new mystery novel,  Dead in the Water. It is the first in a series of novels featuring Lieutenant Mario Morales, a retired LAPD homicide detective who is now the head of security aboard a Caribbean cruise ship. Lieutenant Morales is sort of an Hispanic version of Columbo. If you enjoyed watching Lieutenant Columbo  at work solving crimes in his own inimitable way, you will love Lieutenant Morales in this exciting new book, Dead in the Water.

I will keep you posted when it is available, so please check back here every once in a while. And let me know if you would like a copy once it is published.

By the way, if you are already a Columbo fan or would like to become one, the entire collection of Columbo DVDs is available on Amazon at the following link. I recently bought the set for my wife and myself and it is extraordinary to see Peter Falk in his most famous role.