We had arrived at the airport at six-forty-five in the morning and we’d just had time to make it to the hotel, shower, change and get down to Wall Street by nine. I looked at my watch. It was ten o’clock. A couple of hours’ sleep wouldn’t hurt before lunch.
I lowered the window that separated us from the driver. “Back to the hotel, please.”
The answer was typically New York. “We’re on the way,” he said. “I figured that’s where you were going.”
***
It seemed as if I had just closed my eyes when the telephone began banging in my ear. I reached over and picked it up. “Yes?”
“Gareth?”
“Yes.”
“Martin Courtland here.” His voice crackled with tension. “Have you been watching the twelve o’clock news?”
“I’ve been asleep,” I said.
“There’s a news teletype in the lobby,” he said. “Take a look at it and call me back.”
He clicked off abruptly. I put down the receiver. Eileen hadn’t moved. Silently I got out of bed, dressed and went downstairs. I got out of the elevator and walked to the teletype near the Park Avenue entrance.
The machine chattered away, largely ignored by the people who hurried back and forth, apparently more interested in their own world than the one outside. The machine was pouring out figures on the Federal Reserve Bank. I picked up the long sheet hanging over the back and read it. The story hit me between the eyes.
FROM UPI * NEW YORK 12 NOON
TREASURY DEPARTMENT OFFICIALS ANNOUNCED AT NOON TODAY SEIZURE OF WHAT MAY TURN OUT TO BE THE BIGGEST HAUL OF ILLEGAL NARCOTICS IN THE HISTORY OF THE DEPARTMENT. IN A MASSIVE OPERATION REMINISCENT OF MILITARY OPERATIONS DURING WORLD WAR TWO, RAIDS WERE CONDUCTED IN THREE MAJOR CITIES IN THE UNITED STATES AND TWO FOREIGN COUNTRIES. THE FBI AND THE NARCOTICS DIVISION OF THE TREASURY DEPARTMENT IN COOPERATION WITH SCOTLAND YARD AND THE NEWLY FORMED OPERATION CONDOR GROUP OF THE MEXICAN NATIONAL POLICE TIMED THE RAIDS FOR EXACTLY ELEVEN A.M. E.S.T. PREMISES RAIDED WERE THE LIFESTYLE CLUBS IN NEW YORK, CHICAGO, LOS ANGELES AND LONDON, THE LIFESTYLE HOTEL IN MAZATLAN, MEXICO, THE RETREAT, A RELIGIOUS MISSION IN MAZATLAN, AND THE PRIVATE ESTATE OF SENOR ESTEBAN CARILLO, A FIRST COUSIN OF THE GOVERNOR OF MAZATLAN. THE LIFESTYLE CLUBS AND HOTEL ARE OWNED BY GARETH BRENDAN PUBLICATIONS, PUBLISHERS OF MACHO MAGAZINE AND OTHERS. NUMEROUS ARRESTS WERE MADE AND MORE ARE EXPECTED MOMENTARILY. DRUGS SEIZED WERE LARGE AMOUNTS OF HEROIN, COCAINE, MARIJUANA, AMPHETAMINES AND QUAALUDES WITH A STREET VALUE ESTIMATED AT BETWEEN TWO AND THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. POLICE IN EACH OF THE MAJOR CITIES ORDERED THE PREMISES OF THE LIFESTYLE CLUBS CLOSED PENDING FURTHER INVESTIGATION.
FOLLOW-UP *** MEXICO CITY
MEXICAN POLICE REPORT THREE DEAD AND TWO WOUNDED IN GUN BATTLE AT SCENE OF DRUG RAID. A HEATED GUN BATTLE IN WHICH MORE THAN TWO HUNDRED ROUNDS WERE EXCHANGED RESULTED IN THE DEATH OF TWO PRIVATE GUARDS IN THE EMPLOY OF SENOR CARILLO AND BROTHER JONATHAN, A MISSIONARY AT THE RETREAT. TWO MEXICAN POLICEMEN WERE WOUNDED. BROTHER JONATHAN WAS IDENTIFIED AS JOHN SINGER, A FORMER SERGEANT OF THE LOS ANGELES POLICE FORCE WHO RETIRED WHILE UNDER INVESTIGATION BY THE LAPD ON CHARGES OF SHAKEDOWN OF DRUG PUSHERS. THE CHARGES WERE LATER DROPPED.
FOLLOW-UP *** NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT OFFICIALS PROMISE SPEEDY ARRAIGNMENT OF MANAGERS OF LIFESTYLE CLUBS AND OTHERS ARRESTED IN THIS MORNING’S DRUG RAID WHICH RESULTED IN THE CONFISCATION OF THREE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS OF NARCOTICS. A HIGH DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL CLAIMS THAT THE BACK OF THE SO-CALLED MEXICAN CONNECTION MAY BE PERMANENTLY BROKEN. THE MEXICAN CONNECTION REPLACED THE FRENCH CONNECTION BROKEN MORE THAN THREE YEARS AGO IN A CRACKDOWN IN FRANCE AS THE PRINCIPAL SOURCE AND SUPPLY OF DRUGS IN THE UNITED STATES.
FOLLOW-UP *** NEW YORK
GARETH BRENDAN PUBLICATIONS LTD., OWNERS OF THE LIFESTYLE CLUBS AND HOTEL CLOSED TODAY AFTER MASSIVE DRUG RAID, IN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL STOCK OFFERINGS IN RECENT HISTORY HAS SOLD TWO MILLION SHARES TO THE PUBLIC FOR ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. MR. BRENDAN, WITH THREE MILLION SHARES OF THE COMPANY STILL IN HIS PERSONAL POSSESSION, IS PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE COMPANY. THE STOCK WILL BE POSTED ON THE BIG BOARD FOR THE FIRST TIME NEXT MONDAY.
I tore the sheets from the teletype and went back upstairs. Eileen was awake when I came into the suite. “What’s happening?” she asked. “The telephones have gone crazy. It seems like everybody in the world is trying to reach you.”
I handed her the teletypes. “Read that.”
“Verita wants you to call her right back,” she said. “It’s urgent.”
I nodded, went to the phone and punched out Verita’s direct line. “Gareth,” I said.
“You know what happen?” It was the first time in a long while I’d heard her lapse into an accent.
“Yes. I just found out.”
“You better come back real quick. All hell is breaking loose.”
“I’ll be there on the next plane.” I thought for a moment. Her fiancé had been one of the hottest criminal attorneys in California before he was elected to the bench. “Your friend the judge. Do you think he can arrange to meet me at the airport when I come in?”
“I theenk so.”
“Good. I’ll let you know what flight as soon as I make the reservations.” I couldn’t keep the bitterness from my voice. “Julio fucked us.”
“You haven’t heard the news?” Surprise was in her voice.
I was up to my ass in news. “What news?”
“Julio was machine-gunned to death when he came out of his garage less than an hour ago by two men in a car. The police were on their way to arrest him and they say he was killed to keep him from talking.”
“Oh, shit.” That had to mean that Julio wasn’t the loner he led the Chicanos to believe. There must have been some ties to the mustaches. This was a gangland-style killing. “Okay. I’ll call you back in a few minutes as soon as I have flight confirmation.”
I put down the telephone. It began to ring the moment the receiver touched the cradle. I picked it up and put it down, disconnecting the call without answering it. Then I dialed the hotel operator. “Hold all calls on twenty-one, -two and -three until further notice. I don’t want to talk to anyone.”
As soon as she hung up, I dialed Courtland. While waiting for him to get on the phone, I told Eileen to book us on the next flight to LA and to let Verita know.
“How can a thing like this happen?” Courtland asked.
“I don’t know. But I’m on my way back to the Coast to find out.”
“If this isn’t cleared up to everyone’s satisfaction by the time the stock is posted on the board, the board of governors will have no alternative but to suspend the stock from trading.”
“Does that mean we have to give the money back?” I asked.
He sounded horrified. “We don’t do things like that on the Street. We honor our commitments.”
Like their seventeen million dollars’ worth of commissions, I was thinking but didn’t say anything.
“But it is very embarrassing,” he added.
“I’ll keep you posted,” I said and hung up.
Eileen came back into the room. “There’s a three o’clock and a five o’clock. But we’ll never make the three o’clock. We have to pack.”
“Fuck packing,” I said. “We’ll make the three o’clock.”
***
ETA Los Angeles was 5:52 P.M. Not 5:50, not 5:55. Airlines had their own ways of calculating time. They always took off on the five-minute unit, but they always landed on the five-minute unit plus two. I guess they had their reasons, but on this flight it didn’t matter. We ran into heavy headwinds and pulled up to the gate at 6:41. I looked at my watch and wondered what that did to their computers.
I was met at the gate by a crowd of newspaper, radio and TV reporters and two process servers. One was a subpoena to appear before the federal grand jury in Los Angeles, the other to appear before the congressional committee on organized crime in Washington. Both were on the same day and almost at the s
ame time.
Judge Alfonso Moreno was just behind the process servers. Verita’s fiancé was a tall, lean Mexican with a lantern jaw and sandy brown hair. Actually, he looked like a Texas cowboy, which was, in fact, what he was. He’d been born in El Paso and played football for Texas State.
He didn’t waste time. “My advice is to answer every question with a ‘no comment’ until we have had time to talk.”
I met his eyes. “I would like to make a short statement which I wrote on the plane if you agree.”
“Let me see it.” He took the note from my hand, studied it, then gave it back to me. “Okay,” he said. “But not one word more.”
“Thank you.”
“Give me the subpoenas,” he said.
I gave them to him. He stuck them in an inside jacket pocket, turned to the reporters and held up his hands. They fell into momentary silence. “Mr. Brendan has a statement that he would like to make.”
I read from the note. “I have returned to Los Angeles to aid and assist the authorities in their investigation of this affair. It is my firm belief that when the investigation is completed, they will find that no officer of the company or the company itself has been involved in the matter.”
There was a babble of shouted questions from the crowd. I heard one reporter’s voice above the others. “Are you aware that the Nevada Gaming Commission withdrew the gambling license for your proposed hotel and casino pending further investigation?”
I answered without even glancing at the judge. “No comment.”
Another reporter. “Is it true that you spent several days at the Mazatlán Lifestyle Hotel in the company of Julio Valdez, who was shot to death this morning?”
“No comment.”
The judge took me by the arm. I held on to Eileen and we began to push our way through the crush of reporters. To each of their shouted questions, I gave the same answer: “No comment.”
We finally reached the limo at the curb outside the terminal. Tony took off as soon as the door had closed. “Where to, boss?” he asked as we moved into the airport traffic.
“Verita said that we should come to her apartment. It would be quieter there and we would be able to talk,” the judge said.
“Okay.” I gave Tony the address and turned back to the judge. “Is that statement about the Nevada Gaming Commission true?”
“Verita told me that she received the telegram from them at three thirty this afternoon.”
I shook my head. It wasn’t getting any better. “Verita was anxious for me to get back here in a hurry. Did she have anything special to tell me?”
“She didn’t confide in me. She said she wanted to talk to you first.”
But that never happened. Because when we pulled up to the new high-rise apartment on Wilshire Boulevard where Verita had moved in order to be near the office, the ambulance and four police cars were already there. A body, covered with a blanket, lay half on and half off the curb.
The judge and I were out of the car almost before it stopped. We pushed through the small crowd toward the police. A boy with a little dog in his arms was talking to a policeman, who was taking notes.
“I was just taking Schnapsi for her evening walk when I heard this scream and I looked up and saw this woman come flying over the railing up there on the fifteenth floor falling down on me.”
“Did you see anybody else up there?” the policeman asked.
“Hell, no,” the boy said. “I was too busy getting out of the way.”
“My God!” The judge’s voice was a strangled sob in his throat. I followed his gaze to a small hand that was not covered by the blanket. A diamond twinkled on the ring finger. “I just gave that to her last week!”
Then his face turned a peculiar green and he lurched toward the curb. I grabbed him by the shoulders to keep him from falling and held him while he cried and vomited his guts into the street.
CHAPTER 50
The next day was another slice of hell. The LA Times ran a screaming banner across the top of the front page. WOMAN VP BRENDAN PUBLICATIONS SUICIDE, POLICE SAY.
The subhead wasn’t much better. “Verita Velasquez, first cousin to Mexican Crime King, who was shot to death yesterday.” The story itself was a masterful construction of facts that added up to a totally false impression and left the reader thinking that Verita was Ms. Inside while Julio was Mr. Outside.
It took us two hours to clear the reception area of reporters and work out a system that would keep them out. We did it by closing off all but two of the six elevators and screening all visitors in the downstairs lobby.
Finally, the office was quiet, although it was more like a mausoleum than a place of business with everyone walking around on tiptoe and speaking in hushed whispers.
Even Shana and Dana were subdued. They weren’t playing their usual game. Today I seemed to get their names right every time. “Mr. Saunders of circulation on the line.”
“Thank you, Shana,” I said picking up the phone. “Yes, Charlie.”
“We have some real problems, Mr. Brendan,” he said in an upset tone.
I didn’t need him to tell me. I kept my voice calm. “Yes?”
“Many wholesalers and distributors are refusing to accept our shipments of the new issue of Macho and others are returning them in unopened bundles.”
This was a real problem. These were the people who got our magazines on the stands and racks where they could be bought by the public. “How many did we print?”
“Four million five hundred thousand.”
“How many do you think will stick?”
“According to our computer, between five and seven hundred thousand.”
There went two million dollars in real money and didn’t take into account possible profits. It didn’t take long for the story to dig in and hurt. I took a deep breath. There was nothing that could be done about it, at least for the moment. There was an old saying that a lie could travel halfway around the world while the truth was putting on its boots to go after it. Maybe if I were in their place, I would feel the same way. I wouldn’t want to be doing business with what looked like the biggest drug pusher in the world.
“Sit tight, Charlie,” I said. “Things will get back to normal once we get this business straightened out.”
I put down the telephone. The intercom buzzed again. “Bobby is here to see you.”
“Send him in.”
Bobby came in with his eyes red from weeping. “Oh, Gareth!” he cried. “I can’t believe she’s dead.”
I got out of my chair and put my arms around him. He leaned his face against my chest, sobbing like a child. Gently I stroked his head. “Easy,” I said.
“Why did she kill herself? I’ll never understand it. She was going to get married next month.”
“She didn’t kill herself.”
He stepped back. “But the police said that she did. They said there was no sign that anyone had been in the apartment with her.”
“I don’t give a damn what they said.” I went back to my chair.
“If she didn’t kill herself, then who killed her?”
“I think it was the same people who killed Julio. I have a feeling that they thought that she and Julio were closer than they really were.”
His eyes were wide. “The Mafia?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m damn well going to try to find out.” I took a cigarette from the box on the desk and lit it. “Is your father in town?”
“He’s at home.”
I pressed down the intercom. “Get Reverend Sam for me. He’s at home.” I released the switch. “I thought he got rid of Brother Jonathan two years ago.”
“You know Father. He sees only the good in people. Brother Jonathan managed to convince him that Denise was a doper and that he tried to get her straight but couldn’t.”
The intercom buzzed. “Reverend Sam on the line.”
Reverend Sam’s voice was genuinely sympathetic. “A terrible business, Gareth, a terri
ble business. She was a lovely girl.”
“Yes, Reverend Sam. But I’m calling about Brother Jonathan.”
“Shocking. I couldn’t believe that the man was capable of such duplicity.”
“How long did you know him?”
There was a moment’s pause. “Let me see… seven, maybe eight years…. He joined the mission right after he left the police force.”
“How did you happen to meet him?”
“Your Uncle John sent him to me. There had been some threats against my life at that time and he came to work for me as a bodyguard. But then God shone His light on him and he began to devote himself to the mission. By the time we decided that the threats were no longer a problem he had already reached the second level.”
“I see. Thank you, Reverend Sam.”
“You’re quite welcome, Gareth. If there is anything I can do to ease your burden, don’t hesitate to come to me.”
“Thank you again. Goodbye, Reverend Sam.”
“Goodbye, Gareth.”
“You’re right about your father, Bobby. He sees only the good in everyone.”
He managed a smile. “The last of the innocents.”
“Not the last,” I said. “The first.”
After he had gone, I sat alone for a while, just thinking. Brother Jonathan still bothered me. On an impulse I sent for Denise.
She, too, had been weeping. “Poor Verita. I really loved her. Her aura was so pure.”
“She was a good lady,” I said. “Look, I need help. If what I ask you hurts too much, just tell me. I don’t want to disturb you.”
“I love you, Gareth. I’ll do anything I can to help you.”
“When Brother Jonathan had you in transit at the Retreat, was it really me that he was exorcising from your mind?”
“It seemed like that.” She hesitated. “We always started the transit that way. The first thing he told me was that I had to get you out of my mind and my body.”
“Did he ever talk about anything else?”
“I think so. But I don’t remember too well. After the question about you, everything always seemed to go fuzzy.”
“That’s because he gave you a shot of Pentothal,” I said. “There were still traces of it in your blood when I brought you to the hospital. And it was from one of those injections with an unsterilized needle that you got hepatitis.”
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