by Jeff Siebold
“He was for a while,” said Zeke. “Then he started lying.”
Zeke and Kimmy were heading back to Ardmore, crossing the Schuylkill River. They were driving Zeke’s rental car, heading toward a meeting with Oscar.
“When did you notice that he was starting to lie?” asked Kimmy.
“Well, I noticed it when I asked him to step me through his day. The telling became simpler, and he didn’t use any exclusive words.”
“Exclusive words?” asked Kimmy.
“Words that indicate that there are details that need to be considered but are then excluded. Like ‘except’ or ‘but’ or ‘without,’” said Zeke. “A lie typically has simple content and is presented as complex, while the truth usually has complex content but is often presented simply.”
“Huh. And you listen for that sort of thing, that change in his speaking pattern?”
“I do,” said Zeke. “It’s sort of second nature.”
“I don’t want to be in a relationship with you. You know too much.”
“I know. It’s scary, right?” said Zeke.
Kimmy thought for a while. “So you’re saying that he left things out when he described his day?”
“Yes, most likely he did more than he told us, probably some things after he dropped his daughter off that he doesn’t want to share with us,” said Zeke.
“Right. So it could be something significant, or just something he doesn’t want to talk about,” said Kimmy. “He could be embarrassed, I guess.”
“More likely he’s hiding something,” said Zeke.
* * *
“We’ve got to stop for gas, Carrie,” said Seth. “Just up ahead. We’re almost to California. Needles.”
“Finally!” Carrie whined. “I’m so tired of sitting in this car!”
“Yeah, me, too,” said Seth. “I saw a sign for pizza up ahead.”
“I’m hungry,” said Carrie. “I want a burger and fries.”
Her foul disposition created tension in the Saab. It seemed to Seth that she was arguing about almost everything. And she hadn’t wanted sex since their stop at the Best Western in St. Louis.
“Cool,” he said. “I think there’s a Jack in the Box up here, too.”
“What? A what in the box?” she asked.
“I think it’s like a Burger King,” said Seth. “That’s what the sign looked like.”
“OK,” she said, grudgingly.
“These mountains are pretty impressive,” said Seth, changing the subject. “Sort of rust colored, not like anything you’d see back home.”
She ignored the comment. “So we’re almost to Los Angeles?” she asked.
“Well, no, we’re almost to California,” he said. “We have another four hours to go to get to L.A.”
She made an exasperated sound and rolled her eyes, and looked out the passenger side window, pointedly avoiding Seth’s gaze.
“You’re kidding, right?” she said, finally.
“No, really, four hours depending on L.A. traffic. Maybe a little more.”
“And we’ll be at the beach?” she asked.
“That’s the plan,” said Seth.
“It’s not like the Jersey Shore, right?” she asked. “It didn’t look like it on TV.”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Seth. “It’s California, so it’s more built up. And richer.”
“Where are we staying?”
“I’ve got enough money for us to stay in a hotel by the beach until we find a place to settle,” he said. “I took it from my dad’s cash stash.”
“OK,” said Carrie and exhaled loudly.
Seth had expected the trip to be more of an escape from authority, a shedding of the problems his divorcing parents had created for him, followed by a new start in a new place. But it seemed there was nothing he could do to satisfy his girlfriend. Right now, he thought to himself, I feel like I’ve brought a whole bunch of new problems with me.
Carrie said with some disdain, “Give me a cigarette.”
He passed her the pack and the lighter, and she lit one and took a long drag. Then she looked at him for a moment, reached over and held the cigarette to his lips, as sort of a peace offering. He took it, and she went to work, lighting another.
* * *
He should be about done with the distribution, the killer thought. A cell phone was sitting on the table and the killer willed it to ring. It didn’t.
I can’t let him mess this up. I’ve got to fix the problem and keep things moving, the drugs and all.
The phone rang, loudly. It was a chirping ringtone, attached to the businessman’s number.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” said the businessman. “It’s done. Went smoothly, just like you said.”
“It should have. You shipped it all?”
“We did. A couple of our buyers had to double up, but they’re good with it,” said the businessman.
“I’ll tell our friend to watch for the money and grab it when it shows up, as usual,” he continued.
As soon as the drugs arrived via UPS, the distributors wired the money to a prearranged PayPal account. The money was taken out of the account as soon as it was available.
“And nothing local, right?”
“Right, just the Philly guys,” he acknowledged.
“Good, we’ll do it again next week.”
“Works for me,” he said.
Chapter 31
“I need you both to level with me,” said Zeke. He was standing in the Lopper’s living room, talking with Oscar and George again.
“Whaddaya mean?” George said weakly, coughing.
“Things aren’t usually what they seem,” said Zeke. “And in this case, there’s a lot that I don’t know.”
“Yeah?” said Oscar. “How does that help solve Susie’s killing?”
“I’m not sure yet,” said Zeke. “But from my work with Military Intelligence, MIC, I learned that the information I get is always skewed, tainted and filtered by the omissions and exceptions of the person giving the information. Sometimes it’s innocent, like they think, ‘That won’t help him.’ Sometimes it’s intentional. Sometimes there’s a bigger secret that is being protected.”
“Yeah?” said George. He sounded weary.
“And in this case, it seems like a lot of the important information is historical, and you haven’t given me anything to work with.”
“You mean like context and background?” said Oscar.
George coughed weakly again. He was in his dining room, lying on the hospital bed, resting.
“Also emphasis and omission,” said Zeke. “So we need to go over all this again.”
“OK, tell us what you want to know,” said Oscar.
Kimmy had agreed to wait at the hotel, to give the men a level of deniability when they spoke with Zeke. And she and Zeke had decided, given the personalities, there would be a higher level of trust if Zeke talked with them alone.
“There are a couple areas I want to investigate,” said Zeke, “areas that may not seem to be connected with the murders but may actually have influenced the events.”
“OK,” said Oscar. “But some of this has to stay between us. You can’t repeat it.”
“Hey, Oscar, just let me tell it,” said George. “I’m not gonna be here for long anyway. It’s not like they can prosecute me or anything. Not enough time.”
Zeke sat in a nearby chair. “What does the doctor say?” he asked, looking at George.
“They don’t know, but they say they’re watching for my organs to start shutting down. Its a matter of weeks, is what they said. Maybe less.”
“I’m sorry,” said Zeke.
“Not your doing,” said George, and he flipped his hand, dismissing the apology. “Let me tell the story, and when I’m done, you can ask your questions.”
* * *
“One day, you guys are gonna run all this,” said Gino Larosa. “Youse gotta work it from the ground up, so you know everywhere they can beat you. You ne
ed that experience, if I’m gonna let you run this thing of ours.”
Oscar Larosa and George Lopper had been best friends since they attended elementary school near the Italian Market off South Ninth Street in downtown Philadelphia. Now, fifteen years later, the boys had gone to work for Oscar’s father, helping with deliveries. Mostly, the deliveries consisted of protection money from local Italian shopkeepers and money from their neighbors for numbers or betting. George and Oscar had grown up around it, and it was pretty much accepted as a way of life in Little Italy.
“We got it, Pop,” said Oscar. “We’re good.”
Each day, the boys would make their rounds, stopping by the shops and restaurants, chatting with the proprietors and picking up or dropping off the requisite packages. Most of the establishments were owned by immigrant families, and usually the entire family worked together to make the business profitable. Philadelphia was a tough, merciless city, and the Italian immigrants there were glad for Gino Larosa’s support. He was one of their own.
George and Oscar made their rounds, walking the streets of the Little Italy neighborhood, typically in the afternoon after the lunch rush. They laughed and joked with the shop owners, and made their pickups and deliveries. Once in a while a shop owner would tell them about a particular problem and they would relay that information to Gino.
“Hey, Dad, Tony Delfontine says that the Micks came by and they want him to do business with them,” said Oscar. “You know, buy his food and supplies from them.” Delfontine’s was a popular Italian restaurant off Ninth Street that the Larosa family frequented.
“Suddenly, the damn Irish think they own this town. OK, so we’ll take care of it,” Gino had said. “We gotta take care of our own.” And that was the last Oscar had heard about it.
One day Gino told Oscar, “Hey, we’re moving away.” Oscar, who lived at home in his family’s small house in Philadelphia, was surprised. George had his own apartment near the Italian market. He rented half of a duplex from his Aunt Rosa. She lived in the other half.
“Where are we moving?” Oscar asked.
“Your mother wants to get outta the old neighborhood. She wants a house up near Bryn Mawr,” he said. “She thinks it’s safer.”
“We’re OK here,” said Oscar.
“Yeah, she’s thinking about your sister, too.”
“Carol?” asked Oscar. “Carol’s alright here.”
“Mom wants to move.”
“That’s an expensive area,” Oscar said. “Can we afford that?”
“Yeah,” said Gino, “we can. I’ve been putting some money aside for a while.”
“So we’re gonna keep the business going but move away?” asked Oscar.
“Yeah, we’re moving to the suburbs.”
* * *
“The people there were different,” said George. “We were third generation American-Italian and had been in Philly since the late 1800s, but out in the suburbs, those folks had been there since that William Penn guy was the governor.”
“They’ve been around here for over 300 years,” said Zeke, affirming.
“In one form or another,” said George. “So they’re pretty entrenched, you know?”
Zeke nodded.
“And they’re protective of their families,” said George.
“Yeah, I get that,” said Zeke.
“So they had a couple hundred years on us to get their people in position and to secure their systems.”
“Systems?” asked Zeke.
“Yeah, you know, distribution systems, manufacturing systems, financial systems, political systems, like that,” said George.
“You’re saying that their crime was already organized when you got there?” Zeke smiled to himself.
“Tight as a barrel,” said George. He coughed twice, then took a sip of water.
“That included the drug business, I suppose,” said Zeke.
“It did,” said George.
“So we stayed with what we had, downtown, amongst the Italian families. We had a good thing. Really didn’t have much rough stuff. No drugs. People were respectful, and when outsiders came around, well, we helped them out of the neighborhood. It was good.”
Oscar nodded but didn’t say anything.
“So what happened at that time was 9/11,” said George. “It changed everything. Oscar told you what happened then, right? We enlisted in the Army and I got married to his sister before we left.”
He asked it as if it were a question.
Zeke nodded.
“For us, that was a big deal. We were both moved to action.” He said this with a distant look in his eyes. “World Trade was only two hours from here. And the Pentagon bombing was only 140 miles in the other direction. We took it pretty personally.”
“I get that,” said Zeke. “I did, too.”
Chapter 32
“Oscar’s dad, Gino, he never went for the drugs or the prostitution, you know?” asked George. The question was rhetorical.
Zeke nodded.
“So neither did I, when we first took over the business.”
“When was that?” asked Zeke.
“When I got back from the Army,” said George. “Around the end of 2005. Gino was getting older and he wanted to retire, at least from the day-to-day stuff.”
“And so you and Oscar were the next in line.”
“Sure, Oscar was his son, and I’d married his daughter, so it was natural. We knew the business pretty well, even with a few years away in the service,” said George, with a wheeze in his voice. “The plan was for me to keep it going until Oscar could muster out in 2007. Then we’d be partners.”
“I had a commit to six years to get into Delta Force,” said Oscar.
“So, like I said, no drugs or prostitution in Gino’s organization. He was a family man.”
“Is he still alive?” asked Zeke.
“No, he passed nine years ago,” said Oscar. “He didn’t do too well with retirement.”
“I’m sorry,” said Zeke.
“So anyway,” George said, “we knew there were people selling drugs, and we knew there was prostitution going on. We also knew who was involved, but it was sort of happening around us. Gino didn’t deal in that.”
“Did that change?”
“Well, yeah,” George said. “I decided to get into some of that after Gino died.”
“How’d that work out?” asked Zeke.
“Doesn’t matter,” said George. “The point is I looked into it. There were some other people, Welshmen, who seemed to have the heroin, pot and meth all tied up. We were never really excited about the meth. Or the prostitution, either.”
Oscar nodded quietly.
“But then we decided to take over distribution of prescription drugs,” said George.
“In Philly?” asked Zeke.
“Some, but we found out that there’s plenty of demand for it out here in the suburbs, too,” said George. “It’s what we called a ‘white collar drug,’ oxycodone and hydrocodone and Ecstasy, all those. Very profitable, too.”
“Do you think getting into the drug trade had something to do with the killings?” asked Zeke, jumping ahead.
“Don’t know,” said George in a muffled voice as if he were having trouble breathing. “But like you said, you might need the whole picture to be able to solve this.”
“OK,” said Zeke.
“So we set up a distribution channel. Ha, I sound like an MBA now. A ‘distribution channel.’”
Oscar smiled to himself.
“Course we needed some muscle,” George continued. “We moved a couple of our guys around, low level guys who were involved in the numbers and collections end of it. For marketing we used our existing customer base to put the word out that we had the pills, and it didn’t take long for the demand to catch up with us.”
“Competition?” asked Zeke.
“Yeah, but mostly outta Philly. We mostly stayed in the suburbs, areas around here, and we did OK,” said George.
<
br /> “Has something happened recently?” asked Zeke.
“Well, yeah. After I got sick, I kind of lost my focus on it. I couldn’t do the day-to-day anymore. Over the past few years, someone’s been moving in on us, taking over our business...you know, supplying our customers and stuff.”
“Who?” asked Zeke.
“We don’t know for sure,” said George. “We don’t know who’s at the top of the organization. We’ve just seen low-level dealers popping up in our territory and selling to our customers. A lotta times at a discount.”
“When you challenged them, what happened?” said Zeke.
“Yeah, of course we did. Let’s just say that it looks like there are a lot of layers in the organization. We can’t seem to figure out exactly who’s behind it. We get to the next level up, sometimes a couple levels up, then it stops. It’s like no one knows who’s running it. There’s a guy, a name, but we don’t think it’s him. He don’t have the juice.”
“There’s got to be a source for the pills,” said Zeke. “Have you identified that yet?”
“Donno,” said George. “We think they’re shipping them in from somewhere else, maybe a lab. But they’re very careful and the operation seems to be distributed, like there’s not one leader. Lotsa guys getting pills and selling them.”
“But the money has to go back to the leadership, doesn’t it?” said Zeke.
“Right,” said George.
Oscar nodded, but didn’t say anything.
“From what we can tell, from what we’ve heard from the guys on the street, they’re using PayPal like a dead drop.”
“How do they maintain control if no one knows who they are?” asked Zeke.
“We think they’re using a cut-out, a straw man, someone they say is at the top who really isn’t,” said George. The room was silent for a minute, except for George’s wheezing breath.
“So, who’s the guy, the straw man?” asked Zeke.
“He’s related to that girl who disappeared, Carrie McCarthy. They say the one at the top, who really isn’t, is her dad, Kevin McCarthy,” said George.