Lady Justice and the Organ Traders

by Robert Thornhill

  The driver tooted and a big overhead door opened into an interior dock.

  One of the first things I noticed was a white line painted on the wall high above our heads with the inscription, ‘High water mark. Friday the 13th 1951’ referring to the great flood that had inundated the entire West Bottoms. The old building that had endured everything that man and Mother Nature had thrown its way was now the home of an international gang of organ bootleggers.

  “Not exactly the K.U. Med Center,” Kevin whispered as we climbed out of the SUV.

  We were led to a door and when we stepped inside I knew what Alice must have felt like when she went down the rabbit hole. Everything was bright, shiny and clean.

  The front part of the huge room was separated from what I assumed were the operating cubicles, by green curtains.

  A fortyish man was sitting in a line of chairs against one of the outer walls.

  Our driver took the bag containing the cash and motioned for us to take a seat.

  “Somebody will be with you shortly.”

  The guy in the chair looked completely frazzled.

  “Josh Summers,” he said, extending his hand.

  “I’m Walt Williams and this is Fred Fenton.”

  In the next fifteen minutes, Josh poured out the heart-wrenching details of what his family had endured.

  “We had absolutely no hope until we met Dr. Vargas. I was losing my wife and my kids were losing their mother and there wasn’t a darn thing we could do about it. Now, we have hope for the future. We’re broke, but at least we’ll all be together.”

  Up to that point, all that I had seen of the organ trade was the scorched body of Leroy Grubbs and the stolen body of Roscoe Hawkins. Josh’s story made me look at things in a different light.

  Josh looked at his watch. “Two and a half hours. I hope everything is going okay. She was so weak.”

  We heard the door open and saw our driver escorting a scruffy looking man into the room.

  “Must be your donor,” Josh said. “I got a glimpse of ours, but we weren’t allowed to meet.”

  As the man walked by, our eyes met and I saw his look of bewilderment turn to recognition and then to shock.

  “Hey!” he said, turning to the driver. “What’s a cop doing here? I thought you said no cops!”

  “Oh crap!” I muttered, recognizing Dexter, a drunk that Ox and I had rousted at least a dozen times.

  “A cop?” the driver said, pulling an automatic from under his jacket. “Which one?”

  Dexter pointed a shaky finger at me.

  “Roland!” the driver shouted. “Get in here!”

  An enormous man strode into the room.

  “What’s up?”

  “Looks like we’ve got a cop here. The donor recognized him. What should we do?”

  “Put all three of them in the back room,” Roland said. “When the Doc is out of surgery we’ll let him sort this out. I’ll call for some of the boys to come over just in case there’s trouble.”

  The driver ordered us on our feet and herded the three of us into a smaller room. On the far wall was another door that opened into a small room that had probably served as an office in earlier years.

  He shoved us inside and I heard the lock snap shut.

  Dexter was the first to speak. “Somebody owes me twenty grand!”

  “Sorry Dex,” I replied. “I’m afraid your kidney’s no longer for sale.”

  “Well, shit!” he moaned. “What am I supposed to do now? I’m locked up in here with a cop that will probably throw my ass in jail and outside that door is a goon that will probably be told to shut me up permanently.”

  “Quit whining, Dexter,” Kevin said. “Let’s figure out how to get out of here, then we’ll worry about your sorry ass.”

  We looked around the room. An old rotary dial phone sat on top of a rusty metal desk. I hadn’t seen one of those in years. An oscillating fan was resting in the corner. It had probably cooled some poor secretary in the days before air conditioning. The only other objects in the room were a pencil sharpener screwed to the wall and a stack of old newspapers.

  “We got this!” Kevin said. “Piece of cake.”

  “Got what?” Dexter wailed. “The only thing we’re gonna get is cement shoes and a trip to the Missouri River!”

  “Would you please shut up? Just do what I tell you and we’ll get out of here in one piece. Walt, do you have an ink pen?”

  I nodded.

  “Great! Hand it over.”

  He unscrewed the pen and removed the slender ink cartridge.

  “Now bring me one of those newspapers.”

  I noticed that I had picked up the sports page from 1967 and the Chiefs had finished the season with nine wins and five losses at the old Municipal Stadium.

  Kevin slid the newspaper under the door and started poking the ink cartridge in the key hole.

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  “I don’t suppose you noticed that the door was locked with a skeleton key?”

  I hadn’t.

  “There!” he said.

  I heard a ‘plunk’ as the key fell to the floor. Kevin carefully pulled the newspaper with the key on top, back into the room.

  Needless to say, I was impressed.

  “That’s our ticket out. Now we need some weapons.”

  He went to the rotary phone and started pulling the cord. He had about ten feet when it disappeared into the wall. He gave a jerk and the cord broke loose.

  Next he picked up the old fan. “Hope this still works,” he said looking for a wall socket.

  The fan groaned and slowly started to oscillate.

  “One more thing and we’re all set.”

  He went to the pencil sharpener and removed the outer casing.

  “Perfect! It’s full. Let’s go get those creeps!”

  Dexter was beside himself. “Are you kidding me? Those guys have guns and you’re going after them with an old fan and a pencil sharpener?”

  Kevin grabbed Dexter by the collar. “Listen to me, punk. If you want to get out of here alive, just do as I tell you. Your job is to scream at the top of your lungs. That should be right up your alley. Just scream that we’re beating the crap out of you. If you don’t cooperate, that’s just what’s going to happen. Got it?”

  Dexter nodded.

  “Let’s go, Walt,” he said, grabbing the phone cord with the phone still attached on one end. “When shithead here starts screaming, one of them will come running through that door. We’ll be on either side with the chord.”

  I followed him to the door to the outer room. Kevin gave the signal and Dexter started wailing.

  “Shut up in there!” the driver yelled.

  Dexter kept on screaming.

  “Damn it!” the driver muttered and I heard him coming to the door.

  As soon as he stepped into the room, Kevin hissed, “Now!”

  We pulled the cord tight, tangling the driver’s feet. He fell flat on his face. Kevin was on top of him immediately, whacked his head with the rotary phone and bound his hands behind his back.

  Kevin patted the driver’s body. “Damn! No gun. Time for plan B.”

  Fortunately, there was a wall plug beside the door. Kevin plugged in the fan and nodded to Dexter again.

  Dexter’s wails brought Roland to the door.

  As soon as he stepped into the room, I emptied the sawdust from the pencil sharpener into the whirling fan blades. The dirt and grit hit Roland squarely in the face. He screamed and stumbled blindly into the room desperately rubbing his eyes. One whack with the base of the fan and Roland was out like a light.

  I looked at my watch.

  “Twelve noon on the button. We should be having company soon.”

  A moment later, we heard shots outside the building. Apparently our task force had made contact with Roland’s reinforcements.

  The firefight only lasted a few minutes.

  We heard a ‘crash’ and Blackburn’s men came ch
arging in.

  Poor Josh Summers was cowering behind his chair.

  The commotion had brought Dr. Vargas and his surgical team from behind the green curtains.

  “This is the end of the line, Dr. Vargas,” Blackburn said. “Your transplanting days are over.”

  “What about my wife?” Josh said, charging from behind his chair. “Dr. Vargas, is she going to be all right?”

  Vargas turned to Blackburn. “Agent, I have a young woman with a family on my operating table. We ran into some complications and the surgery is taking longer than expected. We are at a critical point. If I’m not allowed to continue, she will die. She will never make it to the hospital.”

  Josh grabbed Blackburn’s arm. “Please! Please let him finish. I have two teenage boys waiting at home for their mother. Please don’t take her away from them.”

  I could see that Blackburn was wavering.

  “Look Agent,” Vargas said, “I know what you think of me, but I’m not a monster. Dozens of families are with loved ones today that would have perished without my help. What’s another half hour in the grand scheme of things? Let me finish my work and return this woman to her husband and children. Call an ambulance to come for her and her donor and by the time they get here I will be finished.”

  The room was silent, waiting for Blackburn’s response.

  “Go!” he finally said.

  An hour later, Beth Summers and her donor were on the way to the hospital, Dr. Vargas and his men were in cuffs on the way to jail and Blackburn’s men were clearing out the old Armour warehouse.

  As I headed home that evening, I found myself struggling with my feelings. The organ trader ring had been put out of business. Knowing what had happened with Leroy Grubbs and Roscoe Hawkins, I should have been deliriously happy, but I had also seen the other side of the coin.

  Beth Summers would be reunited with her family and hopefully lead a happy, healthy life because of that same ring. I even thought about Kevin. I wondered how many older people like him had been saved by Vargas because they had nowhere else to turn.

  To some, Vargas was the personification of evil. To others, he was a savior.

  For some, legalizing the sale and trade in organs is the answer to a major problem. To others, it is a mortal sin.

  “Why,” I thought, “can’t life just be black and white instead of so many shades of gray?”

  CHAPTER 13

  It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the bust in the West Bottoms.

  The police department and the FBI had not publicized the ongoing investigation into the organ trading ring fearing that the ring would be spooked, pull up stakes in Kansas City and move on to another big metropolitan area.

  Once it was discovered that organs had been bought and sold and bodies snatched in our fair city, a media feeding frenzy ensued.

  The Fibbies, as usual, preferred to remain tight-lipped regarding the details of the bust and only confirmed that it had indeed taken place.

  One enterprising reporter, Bob Woodall from the Star, the same guy that had found Roscoe Hawkins body at the homeless camp, was more persistent than the others and identified scruffy old Dexter as one of the participants in the raid. Seeing the opportunity to become a folk hero of sorts and most likely pocket a few bucks from Woodall, Dexter sang like a canary.

  He told the story of how he was lured into giving up a kidney for more money than he had ever seen in his life, to being locked up when he inadvertently identified an old cop that was part of the undercover sting. But the thing that got the reporter’s attention was his detailed account of Kevin’s MacGyver-like actions that had freed the three of them and taken out the thugs guarding the warehouse.

  Dexter realized his mistake when the reporter’s attention immediately shifted to Kevin.

  As the details of the story unfolded, it read like a script taken from an episode of the old MacGyver TV show.

  Since I was part of the whole thing, I was interviewed, but, as usual, I shied away from the limelight, preferring to remain as anonymous as possible.

  Kevin was another story altogether.

  I’m sure he figured that with his bum kidneys, his days were numbered, so he might as well take this opportunity to go out with a bang. With his engaging personality, his sense of humor and his colorful past, he quickly became a media darling. His face was on the front page of the Star and he was interviewed by every TV station in Kansas City.

  He relished every moment, but in the news business, fame is fleeting. After a few days, the bust in the West Bottoms was old news and the reporters had moved on to a juicy scandal in City Hall.

  The FBI faced another conundrum, what to do with Josh and Beth Summers. They had broken the law by purchasing a kidney.

  The problem became moot once Dr. Vargas’ files revealed that some very prominent and influential citizens with serious clout at City Hall had used the doctor’s services to save the life of a loved one. They certainly couldn’t prosecute Josh Summers and not go after those high on the social register with deep pockets.

  The names in those files made me think of my conversation with Pastor Bob. When faced with a moral dilemma such as this one, most of us would be willing to break the law when the lives of those we love are on the line.

  Once Kevin’s fifteen minutes of fame had passed, he had become a regular visitor at our apartment. The old, dog-eared photos from Maggie’s family albums recalled events they had shared in their childhood years. I enjoyed listening to them reminisce about those early years and found myself really liking the big, raw-boned guy that had mysteriously appeared at our door. The only downer was the realization that his days with us were numbered. He had started his treatments at the DaVita Dialysis Center on Hospital Hill, but we all knew that he was just buying time.

  We had just finished supper and were about to move to the living room when Kevin’s cell phone rang. Like many old folks, myself included, he switched to loudspeaker so he could hear more clearly.

  “Is this Kevin? Kevin McBride?”

  “It might be. Who is this?”

  “What? You don’t recognize your old buddy? It’s only been fifty years.”

  “Bugsy?”

  “In the flesh.”

  “How in the world did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t all that difficult. Your ugly mug has been all over the news.”

  “But I thought you were in witness protection.”

  “I was and so were you. I figured that if you felt comfortable enough to come out of the woodwork, then I could too. It’s been fifty years. Surely those goons have forgotten about us by now.”

  “I’m not sure that was a wise move for you. For me, it doesn’t really matter.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m dying. Kidney failure.”

  “Oh, geez, Kevin. Really? I saw all that stuff on TV, but I thought you were just doing an undercover thing. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Of course you didn’t. Whatever happens, it’s been worth it. I’ve reconnected with my little sister. Actually, I’m with her now.”

  “Maggie? That red-haired, freckle-faced kid that used to bug us all the time? I’d really love to see you both again. What are you doing for lunch tomorrow? My treat.”

  Kevin looked at Maggie who was shaking her head and mouthing, “Can’t. I have appointments all day.”

  “How about you, Walt? I’d love for you to meet Bugsy.”

  I wasn’t scheduled to work and I figured that if the guy was buying, what did I have to lose? Besides, who wouldn’t want to meet a guy with a moniker like Bugsy?

  I nodded.

  “Maggie has to work but Walt, my brother-in-law, is available. Can he come?”

  “The more the merrier. How about that diner over on Broadway? I think it’s called Mel’s or something like that.”

  I liked the guy already.

  “Great! See you at noon.”

  On the way to the diner, Kevin told me that Bugs
y’s real name was Salvatore Scarpelli, but no one ever called him that.

  When we were finally introduced, I understood why.

  Actually, he looked like a geriatric Pee Wee Herman except for the Clark Gable moustache on his upper lip. The combination of moustache and bulging eyes made me think of a rodent that I had caught in a trap whose head was smashed causing his eyes to protrude. I decided it wouldn’t make a good first impression if I called him ‘Mousey.’

  As usual, the food was great and I enjoyed listening to the two old friends reminisce.

  Bugsy must have apologized a half dozen times for dragging Kevin along that fateful day fifty years ago, but each time, Kevin brushed it aside saying that it was water under the bridge.

  Bugsy had been relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas by the U.S. Marshals and had been a car salesman at a Ford dealership. I tried to imagine myself buying a car from the guy but I just couldn’t picture it.

  “Say,” Kevin said, as we were polishing off the last crumbs from Mel’s cream pies, “Maggie had some old photo albums from when we were kids. She let me borrow them for a few days. I remember seeing some pictures of you with that slicked back pompadour of yours. You were the Brylcreem Kid. Do you have time to stop by my apartment to have a look?”

  “I’ve got nothing but time. Let’s go!”

  Bugsy followed us to Kevin’s three-story brownstone.

  We parked and climbed the three flights of stairs to his studio.

  Kevin slipped the key into the lock and was about to open the door when he looked down.

  He put his finger to his lips and pointed to a paper match stick on the floor. I recognized the old trick right away. Kevin had placed the match stick between the door and the jamb when he left that morning. Someone had been in his apartment.

  We were about to quietly back away when the door flew open and we were staring at the business end of a .45.

  On the other end of the gun was a goomba that could have come right out of a scene from The Godfather.