The Big Bitch

by John Patrick Lang

  Manners introduced himself and Mary asked for ID. He produced his badge and Mary asked for a driver’s license.

  “I’m a detective sergeant in the Berkeley PD,” protested Manners.

  “I don’t give a shit if you’re on the Supreme Court. Show me a driver’s license or I will bounce your ass out of here like it was a basketball,” insisted Mary.

  “Just show her your license, Manners,” ordered Hobbs.

  Reluctantly, he did.

  “Usual for you two?” She looked at me and Hobbs. We both nodded. “Just got a new brand of rye whisky in. Cheapest shit you can buy. Been saving it for you, Hobbs.”

  “You’re too kind, Mary,” he replied.

  “What kind of premium American whiskey do you have, Miss Mary?” inquired Grubb.

  “How’s Knob Creek? Or would you prefer Single Barrel Jack Daniels?”

  “Let’s start with the stuff from Tennessee. Yes, ma’am, that will do nicely. Double, straight, with branch water chaser, if you please,” said Grubb.

  “What do you want? Milk and cookies?” Mary asked Manners, who ordered a Coke.

  We sat in silence until the drinks arrived. When they did, Grubb said, “Miss Mary, it’s quite a place you all have here. And at the risk of embarrassing you, might I say that you’re maybe one, maybe two birthdays past your prime, but I’ll wager you were something special in your time, weren’t you?”

  “You are a horse thief, aren’t you?”

  “Horses, chickens, cars, hell, Miss Mary, one time or ’nother I probably stole just about everything. But as for you, you were a beauty queen, wasn’t you?”

  “I was runner-up to Miss Tulsa of 19— er, something or other.”

  “Don’t look like no runner-up to me.”

  “Hoss, you don’t know where I’m from. Where I come from, a poor white girl from the boondocks don’t end up as the prom queen.”

  “Darling, I’ve forgotten more than most folks will ever know about where you all come from.”

  “Mary, we have official police business we need to address, and then maybe you and Ol’ Grubb here can get a room. Okay?” said Hobbs.

  “Mind your goddamn manners, Mr. Used-To-Be,” said Mary as she walked away.

  “Time to cut the shit; time to answer questions,” began Hobbs. “Like what is a small time grifter doing in the middle of my major murder case? Like what are in those boxes you brought into Holiday’s office? But first question, Jefferson Davis Grubb, former Secretary of the Treasury of the New True Confederacy, what do you figure your life expectancy is if we put you in the system tonight?”

  Grubb stared at the ceiling. “If I pass enough cash around, get protective custody, and get real lucky, maybe four to five days.”

  “Then take the cornpone out of your mouth and answer my questions.”

  “I always say, ‘When all else fails, tell the truth.’ ”

  “I’m sure that telling the truth is something you haven’t had much practice at, but give it a shot. Give it a shot like your life depends on it,” Hobbs said in a cold tone.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Grubb took a long sip on his sour mash as Manners slurped on his Coke. I took a small pull on my Steinlager and Hobbs tossed down his double rye and lifted his Mason jar to order another. At the bar a regular named Scottie, an accountant who had recently served time in federal prison for tax evasion, was counseling another regular, Slim—an unemployed crane operator—on why he should file a long form and itemize his deductions. An old country song entitled “Pick Me Up On Your Way Down” played on the jukebox. Grubb cleared his throat.

  “We got to start with what I call ‘The Holiday Treatment.’ The whole thing that created all the shitstorm for Doc. Let me tell you how that worked—”

  “Jeff Davis,” I broke in, “jeopardy isn’t attached to any of the charges against me. The statute of limitations hasn’t run out yet.”

  “Who the fuck am I?” asked Hobbs. “The FBI? U.S. Attorney General? What do I care about bank fraud in some other jurisdiction?” He slammed his hand down so hard on the table that the drinks shook. “All I want is the cocksucker who killed Cortez!”

  “I’m sure you do, Hobbs,” I said, looking at Manners. Hobbs looked at me, and then nodded.

  “Manners, go out and have a smoke,” he ordered.

  “I don’t smoke, Captain,” responded Manners.

  Hobbs’ eyes narrowed as he leaned forward and said, “What the fuck is wrong with you, Manners?”

  Taking the point, Manner rose and went outside.

  “Get to it!” Hobbs ordered, first looking at Grubb and then at me.

  “First thing you need to understand is how the Holiday Treatment works,” said Grubb. “Now, of course, I ain’t saying Doc here was really doing this, but these are the charges brought against him, so we’re kinda talking hypothetically, but here it is: it’s about laundering money. To get set up with Doc, you had to have a million in hard cash to get the ball rolling and you could launder up to what? Twenty million?” Grubb looked at me.

  “You go over twenty mil, you bring some attention and heat you just don’t need,” I said.

  “Now Doc was a true equal-opportunity lender. His clientele included a big-time pot grower, an outlaw motorcycle gang, a major underground gun dealer, a man called Mr. Crystal because he ran about two dozen meth labs through the Northwest, some inventor of some kind of software he sold on line and made millions with, and a major San Fernando Valley pornographer. They all had the same problem: get the money in the bank. Clean. So you go see Doc and the first thing he does is get you in touch with people to set up an offshore corporation. You sent them to Caymans, and what, Belize?” He looked at me expectantly.

  “Eventually I sent them mostly to the Republic of Seychelles, an island off the east coast of Africa. There you could create a corporation in twenty-four hours. Very convenient.”

  Mary stopped over to check on us and took another order. “Today I Started Loving You Again” by Merle Haggard rang from the jukebox. A regular at the bar told a drunken African who had found his way into the saloon that soccer was “the most dumb-ass sport in the whole fucking world.” The African took a swing at the man who’d insulted soccer, missed and fell on his face. He looked up to find Mary standing over him with her sawed-off Louisville Slugger. “Straighten your ass up or go back to Africa. I don’t give a damn which,” she said, slapping the bat in the palm of her left hand. The African apologized and started crying.

  Grubb picked up the thread. “Now you got your corporation, which is some kinda investment or holding company,” he said. “So you’re set to start your estate plan, which is buying real estate. But you don’t buy it to flip it, your endgame is cash flow. Here, Doc can it explain it better that me.”

  I sipped from my Steinlager and said nothing.

  “Holiday!” shouted Hobbs.

  “Okay,” I said. “I was an executive vice president and oversaw all wholesale operations—loans that were brokered in. I could make exceptions on loans, although I didn’t really have to. I just needed them to fit the criteria and guidelines to be sold on the secondary market. With the large down payments these loans had and the people selected as borrowers, they were all what we called “A” paper. Borrower was solid with his credit and the appraisals were straight up; the only kink was the down payment. The broker had to source the down payment funds. So they come in a form of IRA, 401K, annuity. Since you controlled the corporation you just created, you controlled the date stamp. Your corp might be in business for two days but the annuity had been there for twenty years. Seasoned funds.

  “Once you do your first, the second becomes easier. We did it other ways. We had two lawyers who used their clients’ trust accounts to launder the funds to close the transactions. Now you had limits in the secondary market as to how many loans you could have. So you switch to another investor and do more. You keep buying up houses, duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes. Then, after you have the
mortgage six months or so, you start to make advance payments to the principal. I always made sure there was no prepayment penalty so you could prepay as much as you wanted. So you’re laundering cash two ways. In the front door and then in the back door. Now you’re protected even when the real estate market crashes and you lose fifty percent of your equity, because you don’t care about anything but rent value.

  “With all the foreclosures, rent values remain stable or go up a little.” I sipped my beer as Hobbs studied me. “You do it slowly. Two years for ten million, three years to launder fifteen million to twenty mil was my rule of thumb. But at the end of the day you have properties that are free and clear or close to it, and you have hundreds of thousands of rental income per annum. You get an accountant who knows his way around a schedule E—the tax form for real estate—and you make damn sure every dollar you collect is reported. You are home free. You clean money by taxing it. You are paying property taxes and income taxes. You pay on time. You pay your mortgage on time, and with every one out of eight mortgages in the country in default, no red flags come up on you. Because your loans are what we call ‘performing.’ Congratulations. You are a successful real estate investor. You hold a nice portfolio of good properties with remarkable positive cash flow. You are legitimate. A legitimate landlord. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the basics. After the first few deals, everything you do is legal. Like I say, you pay real estate taxes, income taxes, and you always pay your mortgage on time. In fact, you always pay it off early.”

  “You make it sound awfully goddamn simple,” said Hobbs. “But to make it work you need what? At least a crooked realtor and a crooked mortgage broker?”

  “What you need is a number of people to look the other way. I think the legal term is ‘willful blindness,’ ” said Grubb.

  “I think if the concept of ‘willful blindness’ didn’t exist, you two pricks would have invented it,” said Hobbs, shaking his head.

  Chapter Forty

  I stood up to stretch. Grubb went to the men’s room as Hobbs sipped his drink. Manners came back in to report to Hobbs that the parking lot next door was a farmers market of crack and heroin sales. Hobbs asked Manners if he wanted a “fucking transfer to narcotics, or do you want to go back outside and have a smoke?” Manners went back outside.

  “What’s Grubb to you? Besides business. A friend?” asked Hobbs.

  “Jeff Davis is what passes for a friend these days.”

  “Do you know what those lowlife Aryan Brotherhood boys, or as I call them, Aryan Barbarians, are going to do to him if he ends up incarcerated? After they take his balls off with a blowtorch?”

  Grubb came walking back to the booth.

  “You and I’ll finish this later,” said Hobbs.

  “So that’s how the Holiday Treatment works,” said Grubb, sitting down. “Now Doc and I glossed over a few details, and there are a few fine points, and you gotta be careful and slow, but you got the nuts and bolts of it.” He took another sip of his whiskey, then added, “Not to be telling stories out of school, but Doc here got sloppy. Doc was getting how much under the table from Day One?”

  “That’s not important,” I said.

  “I’ll decide what’s important,” demanded Hobbs.

  “Minimum fifty grand. Cash. To start,” I said.

  “So Doc starts living large. Gets him a custom Jaguar two seater with a ten-cylinder Cosgrove Grand Prix racing engine. Set him back, what … two hundred large?”

  “A little bit more, if it matters,” I said.

  “And soon Doc can’t get out of bed in the morning without snorting half an eight ball of cocaine. Then a little Russian potato juice to take the edge off. And pretty soon if you want to see Doc, you got to go searching the titty bars. Now his people at his bank have treated Doc like the Boy Wonder. His production has created bonuses they’ve never seen before. They let him do his thing until they see him start to dissolve. FBI starts nosing around, so being the fucking vultures that all banking execs are, what do they do?”

  The question hung in the air. I looked at Hobbs. “The president and the board of directors realize they have a huge liability with me and the loans,” I said. “They don’t know the whole story but they know enough. So the president steps up to CEO and I become president, just long enough so that culpability and all liabilities easily fall on me. Two weeks after making me president, the board of directors asks for my resignation, gives me a chickenshit severance package, and two weeks later a federal grand jury indicts me.”

  “Doc here had some high-price legal talent that proved the government couldn’t connect the dots on any of the charges,” Grubb added. “Doc might have gotten sloppy but he was always slick. He never introduced anyone directly to me or any other player in the game. An outlaw biker gang leader is the only principal who ever met Doc face to face. I was the broker, and Doc’s bank the wholesaler. In the business, the borrower never meets the wholesaler. Often doesn’t even know who he is until the deal is funded and closed. When his lawyer was done, so much evidence had been kicked out that there wasn’t enough to sustain one indictment. As you know, Doc walked, but he walked out of the game forever.”

  “Yeah, I became a pariah, but so what?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you so what,” answered Grubb. “This Jack Polozola comes to me, tells me he’s a friend of Doc Holiday’s, and implies that Doc sent him to me. That his client has eight million to invest. I can’t find Doc to verify this—he’s either laying low or in rehab—but the guy seems just like the other dozen or two people that have found their way to me from Doc. And after a deal or two I realize that what is going on is the Holiday Treatment.

  “Had Doc set this all up before he left the game? Had he really left the game? I had to assume that Doc was out of it. So who was running the show?”

  “Who if not Holiday?” asked Hobbs. “Polozola?”

  “Whoever it was wasn’t standing behind the door when the Good Lord was passing out the brains,” Grubb said. “As for Polozola, there’s a tree stump in Idaho with a higher IQ.” Grubb looked at me. “You find him yet?”

  “Yes, I found him,” I answered.

  “Yeah,” said Hobbs, “we found him, and as soon as the Oakland PD authorizes a séance we will be questioning him.”

  “Séance? Handsome Jack is dead?” asked a surprised Grubb.

  “Yeah,” said Hobbs. “And the two slugs in his left temple pretty much rule out natural causes. He’s not going to be much help to us here, so I’m relying on you to tell me what the scam was. What’s in the boxes? Why did you bring them to Holiday? Polozola’s death is linked to Cortez. Tell me how. Now!”

  “Cap’n, I don’t have the whole load of hay, but I’ll give you every bale I got.”

  Hobbs was losing patience, even for him. “For the last time, Grubb, take the fucking cornpone out of your mouth. Don’t talk to me like I’m one of your marks.”

  Grubb leaned forward with his palms outstretched and shrugged. “Fair enough,” he said. “Doc comes to me. Haven’t seen or heard from him for what? I guess three years. Wants to look at some closed files. Real serious about it. Until that very day I had thought that the initial contact was Doc. While I knew he wasn’t orchestrating the deals, it was still the Holiday Treatment—but then I find out he doesn’t know Jack Polozola from Adam. The same Jack who just a week before had come to me to say that he had to get a whole lot of gone between him and Portland town. Didn’t say why. Now we been making some long dollars for some time, but Jack, without a word of explanation, just says he’s got to go. He’s in the wind. So after I have lunch with Doc, I go back to my office and dip my bill in a little 114.3 proof Kentucky Straight Whiskey. Try to put it all together, but all I can figure is that someone has sent up a scam with a failsafe. The failsafe is that if it all goes to hell, the patsies are Doc and me. Now the U.S. Attorney General would like to take another bite out of Doc’s ass; and as for me, hell, you’ve seen my jacket. With my record
it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. I decide that whatever the fuck is going on, I don’t need to be a part of it.” He sipped from his drink for a beat. “But assuming this failsafe was set up, what makes Jack run? I can’t figure it out, but then think, well, maybe Doc can. I decide it’s definitely time to pull up stakes. Doc had asked for the files so I bring ’em to him.”

  “The hard copies?” I asked.

  “Yeah, the hard copies, and there are no paper copies. But we keep all files for three years on CD discs. Now last time I was inside I rehabilitated myself by learning a little computer science, and before I left Portland I ran down all the discs on all the Dr. Smith deals and washed them in battery acid before I deposited them in a dumpster outside of a Wal-Mart in Medford. The only copies are in Doc’s office.”

  “So,” Hobbs said, “whatever is in the boxes, whatever crimes, fraud, money laundering, et cetera, the only physical evidence is with Doc?” asked Hobbs.

  “Yeah.”

  Hobbs was silent for a long beat and then rose and walked to the swinging front door of the bar, where he yelled for Manners. Manners returned and Hobbs ordered him to watch the prisoner, Grubb, as he motioned for me to follow.

  As Hobbs and I took a spot in front of the saloon, a staggering street person came by, panhandling. Hobbs flashed his badge and the man tried to take it. Hobbs grabbed the panhandler by his shirt, spun him around, and bounced the man off the wall. “You want to go to jail or get the fuck out of here?” inquired Hobbs. The man hopped away, favoring his left leg and cursing some woman named Violet.

  “Grubb,” said Hobbs. “Once again, you know his chances we take him in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Grubb can walk, but it’s up to you. The deal is: you tell me everything about the case you are working on, everything about your client, everything you know about the Smith and Lichtman murders, and everything on this Muriel bitch. You review all the files Grubb left you and at ten a.m. tomorrow we meet and you debrief me on all the content.”