Chasing Clay (The DeWitt Agency Files Book 3)

by Lance Charnes

  I finally say, “How long do we wait for this guy?”

  “He’s usually late. Not this late, but late.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Almost five years.” His voice is like the air leaked out of him.

  Around the time when the super-heroin problem flared up. “You sold Nam Ton before that, though.”

  “Yes, in small numbers.”

  I glance his way. Bandineau’s dressed for work—a white suit shirt, russet tie, tan sweater vest, coffee-heather sportcoat. There was no handshake, and he hasn’t looked at me since he got in the car. I up my estimate to mostly scared and pissed. “How’d you find him?”

  “He found me. He said someone had given him my name as a dealer in Nam Ton. He said his company had taken over the supply line and there’d be more regular product for me. I didn’t ask how all this happened or why.” He finally looks me in the eye, then deflates a bit more. “I hope you appreciate he didn’t want this meeting. I had to be very forceful with him.”

  “I do appreciate it, Jim. I think ultimately you will, too.”

  He turns to look out his window. There’s nothing but empty, cracked asphalt between us and the next car fifty yards away. The streetlights look lonely.

  The past three days have given me nonstop heartburn. Nothing more from Bandineau on the meeting, nothing from Allyson. The only new thing I actually finished was translating the document pouch from the crate in Bandineau’s storage cube. Actually, another associate did, giving me an address in Thailand and one in Oakland. I’ll send that in with my report from this meeting.

  The days ticked down one by one. Yesterday was hard: it was Day 30 of the project, and I had to let it crawl by without accomplishing anything. Then Bandineau called first thing with the time for tonight’s meeting. I guess he figured I could just hop in Hoskins’ jet. If only. Because it’s so late, I’m stuck here overnight.

  “How’d you get involved with Nam Ton?”

  He doesn’t answer for a while. Then he chuckles. “She didn’t tell you?”

  “She who?”

  “Savannah.” He glances at me, maybe to check my reaction, then back to the parking lot. “She brought it to me. She gave me a printout of the journal article and asked me what I thought.”

  Not exactly what she’d told me. Although when I think back, she said I know he read the journal article, which isn’t lying. Why not just tell me she’d given it to him? Unless she didn’t, and Bandineau’s throwing shade.

  When he doesn’t continue, I say, “What did you think?”

  “Well, of course, it’s special when someone discovers a new culture. The photos were… extraordinary. I told her I thought it was very interesting and asked her to bring me any other information she came by.”

  “How come you hadn’t seen it already?”

  “She brought me a peer-review copy. It hadn’t been published yet.”

  “That’s not strange?”

  He shakes his head. “I assume she still has connections at Columbia. I’m familiar with one of her old professors—his work, at least, I’ve never met him. Anyway, a few months later she returned from a trip to Thailand and brought me a lovely Nam Ton ewer. She said she’d bought it at a market. It was the first Nam Ton piece in our collection.”

  Savannah: I think someone gave him his first piece. A fudge, or the truth? I’ll have to sort it out later.

  “You mean, even though you knew it was exported in violation of Thai cultural heritage laws and the UNESCO treaty.”

  Bandineau throws up his hands. “If she’d bought it at a market, the damage was already done. It was already out of its context and for sale. At least if the Norris has it, it won’t disappear into some collector’s basement.” He shrugs. “Sometimes we have to make these judgment calls. It’s not black-and-white.”

  I wonder if ICE will see it that way.

  A black Camaro swings into a space three over from ours on my side. There’s one guy in it, but I can’t see much of him. He turns on a phone—the inside of his car lights up—then holds it to his ear.

  Bandineau’s phone starts buzzing. “Yes?” He leans forward to look past me. “I see you… all right.” He hangs up. “That’s him. He wants to meet outside, between the cars.”

  “Let’s get to it, then.”

  There’s a sharp wind off the bay that rattles trash across the lot and ruffles the channel. I’m dressed like Carson out for a skulk: black jeans, black turtleneck, black windbreaker, black leather gloves. I figured Bandineau’s source will take me more seriously if I look like one of him.

  The guy who meets us is a shade shorter than me, blocky, square-faced. He’s draped in a dark squall jacket (the lights screw with colors out here), dark Dockers, and what look like khaki lace-up boots. His hands are in his jacket pockets; I hope there’s not a gun in there, too.

  Bandineau says, “Thank you for coming. Rick, this is—”

  The man says, “Dan.”

  I say, “Rick.” So much for the formal introductions.

  Dan jerks his head toward Bandineau and demands, “What are you to him?”

  “Let’s say that I’m a customer who’s taken a close interest in Jim’s success… and security.”

  Dan nods slowly. “He told me about that. Thought I had a tail on my way here—that’s why I’m late.” He has a normal-good voice: baritone, no accent, no Goodfellas tics.

  Whoever followed him probably wasn’t the DEA or ICE; as far as I know, they don’t know about him, though they will after I file my report. I edge my back toward the bay. It gets the wind out of my face and out of my phone’s microphone, which has been recording since Bandineau got in my car.

  Still, I need to act pissed. “Christ. Did you bring them here? Are they out there?”

  “No, no. I lost ‘em before the tunnel. We’re good.”

  “You better hope so. They know. They know about the heroin, they know about the pots. Tell me how that happened.”

  He waves his left hand. Is there a gun in his right? “I got nothing to do with drugs. I’m a legit importer. I—”

  “A legit importer who handles trafficked antiquities. What else do you leave off—”

  “Look. I don’t know from trafficked.” He’s starting to sound irritated. I hope it’ll make him talkative rather than homicidal. “I specialize. Toys, trinkets, souvenirs, folk art, handicrafts. These guys offered me a deal. Folk art, straight from—”

  “Asian guys?”

  There’s just enough light on his face to let me see his eyes narrow. “Who told you that?”

  “Seriously? This shit’s coming from Thailand. Who else’s gonna handle it? Are these the guys with the heroin?”

  “How would I know?” Dan’s voice gets louder. He steps toward me. “How do you know all this? How do we know you’re not DEA?”

  Suddenly, there’s a gun in my face.

  Bandineau finally wakes up. “Dan! No! Put that away, we don’t need—”

  Dan snaps, “How do you know he’s not a narc? You bring him here, he says all this shit…”

  I don’t move. I can’t; I’m paralyzed. Sweat runs down my flanks. I try to stay focused on Dan’s eyes so I don’t focus on the gun barrel about an inch from my forehead. I hope he reads this as stone-cold attitude rather than sheer terror.

  “…Did they get to you? Is that why we’re meeting? Jim, I—”

  “I’ve been to his house.” Bandineau sounds almost as panicked as I feel. “I’ve seen his collection, his cars. His housekeeper. He knows the mayor of Los Angeles. For God’s sake, put the gun down!”

  Dan swivels his eyes to me. “Is that true? You know the mayor of L.A.?”

  I hope the turtleneck hides the big gulp I need to get my voice going. “I gave Eric a bunch of money for his campaigns. We talk.” I stick my hands in my windbreaker’s pockets so he can’t see them shake.

  “I saw him.” Bandineau’s alm
ost pleading. “He came to the house.”

  “Look, asshole.” That must be Hoskins—or maybe Carson—talking, because I can’t think of a thing to say. “They arrested me. Probably because they know about you. They got talkative. I pulled a lot out of the questions they asked.”

  Dan stares at me for way too long. I try to stare back. The gun’s muzzle moves in a tiny circle, like it can’t decide which part of my brain to remove. Bandineau keeps pleading over and over with Dan to put the gun away, to the point where I want to tell him to shut up.

  Finally, the gun disappears as quickly as it appeared.

  My knees want to turn into Silly Putty, but I convince them to hold off. Breathing’s another story, though. After a while, that restarts and I can talk again. “Can we get back to business now?”

  Dan growls, “What do you want?”

  “Your buddies on the other end of this have caused me a huge problem. They may cause a bigger problem for Jim. We need to know all you know about them so we can protect ourselves. You better start thinking about that too. Got that?” Dan nods once. He doesn’t look happy, not that I especially care. “Okay. These Thai guys—are they the ones bringing the pots into the country, or are they just a cutout for whoever’s the real importer?”

  “Far as I know, they’re the guys. But I was gonna tell you before, they’re not Thai.”

  “They’re not? The pots are coming from Thailand.”

  Dan sighs and shakes his head. “They ship from Bangkok, but they’re not Thai. They’re from Myanmar.”

  Holy. Shit.

  No wonder I couldn’t find Nam Ton in Thailand: it’s not there.

  No wonder the Thais aren’t cooperating with the DEA: it’s not their party.

  Nobody says anything. I break the pregnant pause. “Jim, you got something to say?”

  “I… I had no idea. I saw the Thai shipping documents and just assumed… Why didn’t you mention this before?”

  Dan says, “You never asked. I never got that you wanted to know much about where they came from.”

  Time to get back on track. “Okay, whatever. What ties you to these guys? Do you talk to them on the phone? Email? When you meet, is it always in the same place? Is it the same guys all—”

  “Wait, wait.” Dan holds up his hands. “Jesus, you ask a lot of questions. What’s it to you?”

  “We went over this right up front. Jim and I have a DEA problem.” I bite off each sentence to make a show of being impatient. “We probably caught it from you. What we need to know is, are you protecting yourself? If you’re not, I’m gonna assume your car is bugged or has a tracker and we’re both out of here and you never hear from either of us again.” I ignore the choking sound that comes from Jim’s direction. “So answer the fucking questions or you get to look for another buyer.”

  I suppose I should be more careful talking to a guy who was holding a gun to my head a few minutes ago. I tell myself that if he wanted to shoot me, he’d have done it by now. It doesn’t help.

  Dan mutters something I don’t try to decipher. “Jim, are you onboard with this? We had a deal.”

  Bandineau doesn’t answer. I hope it doesn’t mean he’s rethinking our arrangement. I realize how close to the water we are, and how easy it would be for a body to go into it.

  “Yes.” Bandineau’s voice cracks. “Yes, I am. Rick apparently knows how to do this better than I do. He’s asking for both of us.”

  “Whatever.” Dan shakes his head. “Different phone number every time. Same meeting place. One guy’s there a lot, but he’s always got someone different with him. Plain-wrap white panel trucks. Good enough for you?”

  “You got a burner?”

  “Of course I got a fucking burner. I’ve been doing this for years. Never had a cop problem ‘til now.”

  “You’ve hooked up with heroin traffickers before?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  We may be done here. I know better than to try for names or places; he’d know those make no difference to Hoskins. I’ve already found out more than I expected. I hold out my hand. “Give me your card.”

  Dan laughs. “So you can give it to the cops?”

  “Get real. If I was a cop or worked for them, they’d already have about a thousand pictures of you and your car and have this whole thing on tape. They don’t need your damn card to find you. This is so I can contact you without having Jim in the middle of it. Unless you want us as a package deal?”

  He hurls a sharp look Bandineau’s way, then hauls out his wallet and slaps a card on my palm. “If you never call, I won’t be disappointed. Jim, watch your ass.” He stalks away without another word.

  Bandineau and I stand in the wind for a good minute after the Camaro growls off into the night. I hold the card to face the nearest light. Manresa Imports, Daniel Coulson, President, a West Oakland address. If the feds didn’t know about him already, they will now.

  Bandineau asks, “Should I be worried?”

  “You should’ve been worried a long time ago.”

  Chapter 36

  As soon as I get back to my motel room—I’m in the Holiday Inn Express just outside Oakland Airport, and no, I don’t feel any smarter for it—I bring up Dr. Udomprecha’s map on my laptop. The chunk of Myanmar in the box is what Savannah called “Shan State.” Told me to forget about it. “The Bamar didn’t have the skills back then to make anything like the Nam Ton wares,” she said. I believed her.

  It was too specific a diversion to be a mistake. She lied to me.

  I wake up my laptop, go to English Google, and type “‘Nam Ton’ + ‘Shan State’.” Two hundred fourteen hits.

  That sounds promising. The top two go to a site called travelingluck.com, and they look the same. I click on the first one. Once I scroll past the time zone and sunrise/sunset times, I get a slice of Google Maps with a green pin in the middle of a green patch of landscape. I zoom out until I can see borders. The green pin is north of Mandalay, in the northern part of Myanmar. Way outside the box on the paper’s map.

  I close that tab and go back to the search. I’m about to blow off the second link until I notice that the URL is slightly different from the first one. Oh, what the hell. I click.

  What… the… hell…

  The green pin’s next to the yellow line of a road, apparently Highway 45. When I switch to satellite view, I see there’s a river there. Promising, but of course, it’s not labeled. I zoom out until I find the Thai border, then look in the box on the report’s map for a border that matches. It’s a hump that wraps around Doi Pha Hom Pok National Park in Thailand. Then I follow Highway 45 north until I find a town: Mongton.

  I know I have a digitized map that covers this area. Finding it is another thing.

  Where I end up is with a very busy topographic map drawn by the U.S. Army Mapping Service in 1960. Of course, the Thai border doesn’t show up, but I can tell it should be beyond the east edge and that the area I’m looking for should be in the lower right-hand corner. The town names are in small black type set against dense brown elevation contours, so it takes a lot of squinting and panning to make them all out.

  I find Mongton. I slide south along the black squiggle of a road.

  “Ohhhh, there you are, you little bastard.”

  Tiny blue letters on top of a brown contour line, next to a thin blue line: “Nam Ton.”

  Chapter 37

  28 DAYS LEFT

  Back in L.A. and unpacked early Friday morning, I set up my laptop and hunt the two companies I know are tangled up in smuggling Nam Ton: Manresa Imports and WCZ Trading Ltd., the originator on the shipping document pouch from Bandineau’s storage cube.

  “Manresa” gives me 16,900,000 hits. Among other things, it’s a town in Spain, a beach and surf break near Watsonville in northern California, and a three-Michelin-star restaurant with a fire problem in Los Gatos in the Bay Area. “Manresa Imports” gives me a couple hundred hits, nearly all from dire
ctory sites that list the same address and phone number on Coulson’s card. The company has no website or social media presence. For $122 of the client’s money, I get a Dun & Bradstreet report that says Manresa Imports LLC is a branch of Manresa Investments. It has several lines of credit it doesn’t use very often, judging from how spotty its credit history is. Lots of cash transactions? That would make sense given who it does business with. “Manresa Investments” turns up a history so sparse, it can only be a shell company. “Manresa Thailand” and “Manresa Myanmar” both come up empty.

  That data aggregator I use gets another $49 from the client to give me a report on Daniel R. Coulson, who lives in a P.O. box at the Fruitvale post office in southern Oakland. He has a decent credit rating, the usual credit cards with moderate balances, and no mortgage or car loan—which means he rents his crib and owns the car, has the loans under Manresa or another company, or pays cash for a lot of things. Manresa isn’t listed under his assets. That last bit’s interesting, but not immediately useful.

  WCZ Trading doesn’t exist.

  Its address exists—a shitty corrugated-iron warehouse on Ninth Street in West Oakland with a panoramic view of the Nimitz Freeway—but a search for the company name gives me no valid hits. D&B’s never heard of them. Staying on the down-low is one thing, but this is nuts.

  Then I wonder: what would happen if I searched for the company name in Thai or Burmese? Not that I know how to do that. I know someone who probably does, though.

  Olivia says, “You brought me a puzzle. How sweet of you.”

  “Anything for you.”

  “I’ll have a go at it straight away. Unsolved puzzles are the work of the devil, you know. I’ll let you know what I find about your mystery company. While I have you… is there a reason I need to pay hire for a dog? Did you need a dog for your cover?”

  “The contractor’s billing you?”

  “Yes. Are you aware of it?”