Catalina Eddy

by Daniel Pyne

  “Oh.” Tina stood studying him, pale and pink and fetching, in the faint light—well, fetching for a Fed, Kirby thought.

  “Does Ms. Colter’s schoolgirl act give you a stiffy, baby?”

  He grimaced, “Don’t start.”

  “Because I can probably still squeeze into my Marymount pleated skirt if you want.” It was a good riff.

  “Stop.”

  “The nuns had tape measures. Two inches above the knee. So we’d roll them up at the waist after school and troll for college boys.” She skipped back and dropped heavily into his arms, cool and damp, shedding the comforter. “You’re going to sleep with her.” Tina kissed him sloppily, silky tongue and beer breath, trying too hard, but Kirby thought he understood.

  “I promise you I’m not.”

  “You will. It’s who you are. It’s how you say hello.”

  He knew she was right. “No.”

  “Your kryptonite.” He couldn’t argue with that, either. “And mine is you,” she added sadly, pushing away from him to get showered and go.

  3

  SAN DIEGO FEDERAL BUILDING, downtown, Sixth Street, seventh floor, a functional beige interrogation room with blank walls and plastic-clad metal table and chair where it was just Kirby and Stix Mahrez, suffering the winking red LED eyes of security cameras mounted high in opposite corners; video capture, for the permanent record. Mahrez’s mustard-colored jailhouse jumpsuit was short at the wrists and ankles; Kirby wore chinos, no tie, sport coat draped over the back of his chair.

  “We found drugs in Saad’s locker. In your factory. Drugs that he says you gave him to sell.”

  Mahrez regarded Kirby with disappointment. “Are you that lazy? ‘He says’? Saad says? What’d you promise him? What’d you threaten him with? This is a guy who comes from a country where, if you get arrested, you can kiss your fingernails goodbye. He’s expecting the guy with the pliers any minute. Saying whatever you want to hear to delay the arrival of Dr. Pain.”

  “He gave a sworn statement,” Kirby said.

  “Of course he did.” And then, in a way that caused Kirby to pause: “I am innocent of these charges, you know it. You know it.”

  Innocent of these charges, Kirby thought cynically. Mahrez’s long list of alleged crimes engendered a presumption of guilt on these new ones, and, moving forward, who knows? Jury trials were always a crapshoot, and if Mahrez opted to let a judge decide his fate—a white, right-leaning, Orange County Reagan Republican federal bench lifer—there was a very good chance he’d get hard time quid pro quo for all the bad behavior he was assumed to have gotten away with. And even if he prevailed, an indictment would be a massive, and expensive, inconvenience.

  On one hand, Colter’s interest in the man was so inscrutable, so unknowable, that Kirby should have felt obligated to protect Stix from whatever mad hijinks were lurking in the partisan jet stream that swirled above their heads. But on the other, as much as he hated the blatant miscarriage of justice in which Kirby was now playing the lead, it served a crude purpose in his own concrete pursuit of the elusive domestic cocaine dealer he had been chasing for over a year.

  “Do you know Juan Blanco?” Kirby said, after a while.

  Again, Mahrez said nothing.

  “The wannabe narco-kingpin weasel from TJ. Shaved head and a diamond-crusted Rolex watch.”

  “Guadalajara Cartel?”

  “That’s right,” Kirby said.

  “Rafael Quintero’s cousin.”

  “They’re all cousins, aren’t they?”

  Mahrez shook his head. “No, they’re not.”

  “Well, twenty years ago Juan Blanco was a scrawny little sociopath selling stems and seeds to American college kids on Rosarito Beach,” Kirby said. “I thought you might have run across him.” Crickets from Mahrez. “Now? He’s a presidente municipal who runs the Tijuana branch of Félix Gallardo’s operation, buries young girls in the desert and claims to have half of the Baja California judiciary in his pocket. Or so I hear.”

  Mahrez said, “I don’t know Blanco.” He added, “But if I did, I would doubt the little shit is anything more than a straw-man fall-guy stooge for the Arellano-Félix boys, who actually run Tijuana for Gallardo.

  “And, oh—they’re calling themselves the Sinaloa Cartel now. You should update your files.”

  Kirby smiled and leaned across the table on his arms. Mahrez may be long out of that sea, he thought, but the surfer in him still knew where all the shallows were. “Well, stooge or no, Blanco’s made a big move into the local rock and weasel dust business, and if we could just locate the American on this side who’s making that happen, we can shut down the pipeline.”

  “Oh.” Mahrez made a mock-serious face. “And what? People on this side will stop using? Game over, rainbows and unicorns, we all live happily after?”

  Because it was (a) accurate and (b) only underlined the Sisyphean nature of his job, Kirby never liked the line of this reasoning. “Probably not,” he admitted. “But maybe we could get an indictment on Blanco, ask for extradition, flip him on Guzmán Loera—with the potential to even bring down Gallardo. You do what you can.”

  Mahrez considered it. “If it’s not Blanco who’s calling the shots?”

  Kirby frowned. “Who would it be?”

  “Don’t know. Just speculating.”

  “You don’t know.” Kirby remembered something dimly, rumors of a third, silent partner in Nick and Vic’s infamous controlled-substance import business, and wondered if Mahrez, out of practice, had just slipped.

  “And anyway, you’re not just a dreamer, you’re out of your mind.” Mahrez turned glib. “You can’t touch Gallardo. You can’t touch Guzmán Loera. You can’t even touch Blanco. Because they own the police down there. They own the politicians. All the way to Mexico City. You have no idea what you’re up against. Ten, twenty years from now? They’ll own Mexico itself. Unless Americans stop doing dope.”

  Kirby pressed on, stubborn. “If you know who that guy on this side is, or can give me any information that helps take us another step closer to discovering who he is, I can have you back home in half an hour, Stix.”

  “No shit.”

  “No shit.”

  Mahrez shook his head, said nothing.

  “Conversely,” Kirby continued, “you have two felony priors from back in the day, no doubt youthful indiscretions that would be easily overlooked except, my goodness, according to the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, this would be strike three and require you getting twenty to life, mandatory, if convicted, no early release.”

  It took a moment for Mahrez to process this. “Not in the federal system,” he countered, although he didn’t sound sure of it, adding, as if to show he wasn’t going to be bullied, “Besides, haven’t you heard about the startling disparity between sentences for white, nonviolent offenders and their African-American counterparts?”

  “No, but, see, I’d be happy to ship you over to the San Diego DA and let the state exercise those more restrictive sentencing guidelines.” Kirby was bluffing, but he was playing with house money; Mahrez had nothing to call with but his liberty.

  Mahrez fell quiet. Kirby had him on his heels.

  “I’m noting for the audio record that you do not have an attorney present.”

  “I waived the privilege, yeah. If that’s what you want me to say. For the record.”

  “And you understand that’s unusual.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It just is. Everybody loves to lawyer up.”

  A pensive moment passed, then another, then it was Mahrez leaning in, a different expression, open, solicitous. “Look. Counselor. I’m clean. You know that I am. There was another time, another life, and, okay, I get that you’d like to balance the scales of justice, from my alleged misbehavior, way back when. But that’s not how it works, is it? You do that,
and the whole house of cards, everything you stand for, nation of laws, comes crashing down. You can’t pick and choose, you can’t play God. And in this case, this bullshit thing with Saad . . .” He stopped himself. Kirby was again fascinated by the veil that, however briefly, had been pulled back. Revealing what?

  Mahrez restarted, “What I mean is, I understand that you think you’re helping me, but—and you really should have thought of this before you ever hauled me in here to offer some kind of half-assed deal for my cooperation in something you will never, ever succeed in accomplishing—you think you’re helping me, but as a consequence of those questionable decisions I may or may not have made when I was younger, there are individuals and organizations who would love to know I’m in detention, Mr. Kirby. Because if they have any cause to believe I may be cooperating with you—naming names, or like that—I am a dead man. Thanks for asking.”

  It was Kirby’s turn to take a moment to let this sink in. “What are you saying? You don’t trust your own lawyer not to rat you out to your old friends and enemies?”

  “Same difference, but . . .” Mahrez shrugged again, his wrists rattling the shackles. “Would you?”

  —

  SABRINA COLTER WAS SITTING still-life, all settled in, behind her vast, clean, Deco desk when Kirby came to report on his interview with Stix Mahrez.

  “He won’t cooperate.”

  Kirby did not fail to note the stark contrast between the new U.S. attorney’s previous night’s guileless schoolgirl act and her utter sangfroid now. Seeing how easily she shouldered the considerable mantle of Justice Department power was jarring. Her lipstick matched the stripes on the American flag in the corner behind her, and lent a disquieting, naughty undercurrent to their debriefing.

  “Won’t cooperate,” she said, as if struggling with a foreign language.

  “Yeah,” Kirby said, “and, oh, on a side note, he’s not the guy we fucking want.”

  “Language.”

  “What?”

  “Ephesians 4:29. Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.”

  Kirby stared at her.

  She smiled, little perfect teeth. “We have a witness who says he is. The man we want, I mean. So.”

  “He’s not who I want. And I don’t believe he can help me get there.”

  “I guess I wasn’t aware that we were here to serve your personal agenda.”

  “We have an Egyptian illegal,” Kirby said, trying not to show his impatience, “who thinks he’s back in Cairo, and that he’s got to parrot whatever we want to hear in order to prevent us from cutting out his kidney and then shipping him to some secret CIA prison to be tortured.”

  “Americans don’t do that.”

  “Try to convince him otherwise, though. Any half-baked defense attorney who graduated from even a second-tier law school will chew Saad up on the stand. And meanwhile, cocaine continues to flood across the border, because we’re wasting our time trying to bust an innocent man and flip him on a coke distributor he surely doesn’t know, he’s been out of the game so long.”

  “Who said anything about making him a drug informant?” Colter rose and walked around her desk and sat on the end of it, legs crossed, one shoe dangling on upturned toes. She felt for the tiny cross on the chain around her neck, affecting a Catholic schoolgirl vibe that made Kirby shift uneasily in his chair. He’d gone to Catholic school. With girls like this. It chafed him, still, and set his palms sweating.

  “The ultimate determinant,” the U.S. attorney said, reciting something she’d memorized, “in the struggle that’s now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, and the ideals to which we are dedicated.”

  She paused, as if expecting Kirby to identify the source of the quote. He couldn’t. “President Reagan,” she said.

  He tried not to look confused. “Okay.”

  “He said that to the British Parliament.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Her dark eyes bored into him. “Is this how you always dress for work?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “Casual,” she said. “Like, hmm, I don’t know. A community college writing instructor or something.”

  Kirby, growing more and more irritable, told her, yeah, this was how he dressed. “Okay, well, whatever, but,” he said, trying to get the conversation back on point, “even if our snitch is telling the truth, and survives some half-assed cross, the evidence against Mahrez is paper-thin, and he knows it. Sure, we can argue he’s tied to the drugs found at his board factory, but factually it was the Egyptian’s stash. An employer can’t be expected to absolutely control what employees keep in their private lockers, an employer isn’t legally liable for it, and I can’t make the charges stick unless you give me more time to build a real case, and either way—”

  Colter cut him off and said she’d be more persuaded if he were wearing something Italian. Silk. Silk suits this climate, didn’t he agree? Assessing him: “Dove gray, and a power tie would rock on you.”

  Kirby frowned. Is she serious? Or just nutty? Colter slipped off the desk and strolled around him like a dog show judge.

  “So . . . you’d suggest we just let Stix Mahrez go?” she asked with a theatrical incredulity. “And then what?”

  “And then . . . tap his phones,” Kirby told her. “And audit his books, and dog his friends and work the street. You know. Build a case. Do our job. If Big Stix is, by some bizarre synchronicity, dealing drugs from his surfboard outfit, he’ll slip. He’ll stumble. And we will nail him. And then you’ll have the leverage to get him to do whatever it is you need him to do.”

  Colter thought about it. “Nobody’s ‘got’ him for twenty years,” she said simply.

  “Because he quit the game,” Kirby said again. “But hey.”

  His opinion didn’t interest her. “You must have some nice suits.”

  Kirby told her he saved them for trial, then suggested she could just tell him what it was she wanted, instead of playing this game.

  “I want you wearing your nice suits all the time,” Colter replied. “New office policy.”

  Kirby grinned and nodded and struggled not to lose his shit. Words tangled just behind his tongue. Stalled out. “Can I let the guy go?” he mumbled.

  Colter, entertaining a smile, smoothed her dress and stretched her spine. “I think—well, why don’t I just talk to Mr. Mahrez myself?”

  —

  A LITTLE BOXY SURVEILLANCE CAMERA leered down at them.

  “You grew up with the mayor.”

  It was late and the Federal Building held the silence of its emptying, the hustle of the day’s business always seemed, to Kirby, to echo ghostly in the vacant hallways long after everyone was gone. Since Kirby’s last session with Mahrez, somebody had left an empty Coke can on the interview room table, and the ashtray was full. Colter sat across from Kirby, who was puzzled by the question and wondering what the hell the mayor had to do with anything. The suspect was unshackled, on his feet, in a far corner, restive, arms folded and leaning against the wall.

  “Poole?”

  “Yes.”

  “In Chula Vista. I did,” Mahrez agreed. “I grew up with the mayor, yes.”

  “And after?”

  A pause. “After what?”

  “After you grew up.”

  “We went different ways.”

  “You have some kind of falling-out?”

  “Look. Ask me questions you really want answered, or I’m going to stop cooperating. I’m tired.”

  “What was his relationship with your old partner?”

  “You’d have to ask Vic,
but he’s dead, so.”

  “You like Mayor Poole?”

  “I guess.”

  “Personally and politically.”

  “I don’t think much about politics.”

  “You backed his first run for City Council.”

  “Did I?”

  “In a major way.”

  “Are you asking, or telling me?” Then he shook his head. “Fifteen years ago. Why is that—”

  “Did he know it was drug money?”

  Mahrez smiled. “You might want to rephrase that.”

  Kirby tried to get things on track. “Ms. Colter, maybe we should stick to—”

  Colter talked over him. “Did he ever ask you to stop giving him campaign funds, once he realized you were, you know, dealing—or, sorry, had got this reputation for dealing—”

  “You understand that I’m not going to dignify that with an answer, ma’am?”

  “Fair enough.” She thought for a moment. “Still keep in touch?”

  There was a long silence. Kirby watched Mahrez walk from one facing wall to the other, making some kind of considered calculation before he said that he didn’t keep in touch, no. Colter waited. Mahrez measured his words. “We cross paths, sure. We see each other, you know, socially, certain public functions, here and there. Why?”

  Colter leaned on the table and folded her hands. “What if you called him up and said you wanted to talk to him?”

  “He’d be surprised.” Mahrez studied her. “And curious.”

  “What if I told you that we want you to go visit your friend, Mayor Poole, wearing a body wire? You won’t be snitching; we’ll give you a series of scripted questions, you can work them into your conversation in any manner you choose, and once you’ve done so, no matter what his answers are, I’ll put it in writing if you want and you can bring your lawyer or other representative to witness it—you do this and we’ll drop all charges relating to—”

  Kirby had to interrupt this, “Hold on a second—”

  “—the allegations of our informant that you employed him to peddle drugs.” The U.S. attorney’s dark eyes followed Mahrez intently as he turned his back to her and walked across the room to reacquaint himself with the corner.