The Reformed bn-4

by Tod Goldberg

  “And where is Junior?” I said.

  “He was released last year,” he said.

  “Blood in, blood out,” I said. “So I take it he’s looking for yours now?”

  “More a pound of flesh,” Eduardo said. “He wants in on this business, says because of our oath to each other, every dime that passes through Honrado, half is his. And he wants to run Latin Emperor business through here, launder their money through my organization. And he wants payback. I think that is the largest issue. He did twenty-five years.”

  “How’d he get out?” Sam asked.

  “Overcrowding,” Eduardo said. He gave a shrug. “Good behavior. Paid off the right people. These things happen. He may have been the kingpin all these years, but I suspect even he saw after a while that the path to getting out of prison was paved with nonviolence.”

  “So, call the cops,” I said. “That’s an easy extortion case.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I got pulled over two weeks ago right here on the corner. I thought maybe I’d run through the stop sign. Instead, the officer came to my window and handed me that envelope. Didn’t say a word. Just dropped it on my lap. Three days ago, there’s a knock on my door, at my home, and it’s another officer. He tells me he was just in the area and wanted to make sure I was still alive. That’s all he says.”

  “You recognize this cop?” Sam asked.

  “No, I’d never seen him.”

  “Thing is,” Sam said, “anyone can get a cop uniform, and anyone with a little time and money can get a cop car. So you don’t know if you’re dealing with real police.”

  Eduardo squirmed in his seat. He was being eaten up by this, but there was something more. We just hadn’t gotten to it yet. “You see, that’s true. But the fact is, we’ve… they’ve… had police on the payroll for thirty years.”

  “You telling me the Latin Emperors employ crooked cops?” Sam said.

  “Mr. Axe, please, tell me you are aware that the Miami PD has a rich history of being on the take. Since the days of Al Capone.”

  “Okay,” I said, “so the Emperors have bad cops on their books. Fine. Why not call your friend the mayor?”

  Eduardo did that squirming thing again. I was beginning to know his tells-he might be a pious man, but he was also a nervous man. “Junior called the other day. Understand, I have not spoken to this man in almost twenty years. He said to me that he was happy to see that I was prospering and that I was doing good things in the community, and that I’d helped Emperors that had been released from prison get jobs,” Eduardo said. “And then he told me that if I didn’t do as he asked, he’d go public with what he knows about our past, about where the bodies are buried-literally, where the bodies are buried.”

  “I thought you didn’t kill anyone. I thought you never got arrested for violent crimes,” I said.

  “How do you get arrested for a crime no one knows was committed?” Eduardo said. “These men, they weren’t missed by anyone. These are criminals, Michael, that maybe rolled down to Miami after getting out of prison, or they’re people who never had families, or people whose families never expected to hear from them again. These were not good people. But the fact is, I did not kill them. I did not order their deaths.”

  “How can that be if you ran the gang?” Sam said.

  “Division of labor,” Eduardo said, “and plausible deniability, I suppose. In terms you can both understand, Junior ran the defense and the judicial, and I was in charge of the economy and outreach. Those were our skill sets.”

  “Obviously,” I said.

  “And if I am arrested again,” Eduardo says, “I’m in prison for life. And that would be a short life. I would be dead within an hour, I assure you. Even though I am innocent, it wouldn’t matter. I’m confident my involvement at all would constitute a conspiracy charge, and I am confident that the judicial system would happily use me as a public relations target. All of this, all of what you see here, would be gone. This is all because of me, Michael, because of my desire to atone and my desire to help these kids so that they don’t necessarily make the mistakes I made. And here, my past can ruin it. I did my time. I admit my mistakes. I admit my crimes. I will not let all of the good I am doing fall to waste. And that-that, Mr. Westen-is why I cannot call the mayor or the president or anyone. You are my only hope.”

  The room fell silent. I frankly didn’t know what I was going to do to help Eduardo, but I had the sense that he was right-no one else could help him, and without help, all that he’d done would crumble.

  Plus, I liked being called his only hope. I felt a little like Obi-Wan Kenobi.

  “Okay,” I said. “I need time to think about this.”

  “And I can pay you whatever you require,” he said.

  “Well,” Sam said, “there are going to be some expenses…”

  I put a hand up to stop Sam, which is a bit like hoping a feather could stop a freight train, but luckily it was still pretty early in the day for Sam, and he didn’t quite have his normal midafternoon head of steam yet. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I need the karma. And so does Sam.”

  “One question,” Eduardo said. “Are you actually a spy?”

  “I am,” I said. “Or I was. You and me, we’ve both been excommunicated from our organizations. You by choice, me by someone working behind me, trying to discredit the good I did, so I understand uniquely the situation you’re in.”

  “How did you go from here to there?” Eduardo said. “And why are you back?”

  “I could ask you the same question,” I said. “We all make choices, Eduardo. I made the right ones. You made the wrong ones. And yet here we both are.”

  “A strange fact of life,” he said.

  I couldn’t imagine a stranger one. “When are you supposed to have an answer for Junior?” I said.

  “Two days,” he said.

  “You have a way of contacting him?”

  “One of his soldiers is to come by tomorrow to confirm.”

  “No phone number?”

  “No, no,” Eduardo said. “I have no idea where he’s even living. My people on the streets say he is not in the old neighborhoods.”

  “All right. When his guy comes, you tell him you want a face-to-face meeting here. When is this place the busiest?”

  “All day,” Eduardo said. “We have a shift that starts at seven, another at four, though we feed the workers at three thirty for the night shift.”

  “Tell him to be here at three thirty, then,” I said. “Let him see the full workforce.”

  “What will we be telling him?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I have a few ideas.”

  Sam and I wound through the shaded lawn of Honrado Industries as we walked back to the car. There were flags in places where the new buildings were planned and signs, propped up with artist renderings of what the buildings would look like. The weird thing was that just across the street from this small bit of paradise-paradise built on the religious reformation of a gangster and put in peril by his past-was the real world: a teenage girl pushing a baby stroller, a homeless man asleep in an apartment complex carport, a stray dog nosing around for scraps.

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” Sam said. “Why come back here? If you’re Father Eduardo, I mean. Why not just move to Idaho and start all over? He had to expect that he’d run into these kinds of problems eventually.”

  “Home is home,” I said. “And besides, he’s paying penance.”

  “I dunno, Mikey,” Sam said. “I don’t see myself running over to Fallujah when I retire just to pay penance. I could live my whole life without seeing the Republican Guard again and I’d be perfectly fine. Know what I mean?”

  “You can’t discount ego, either,” I said. “Eduardo wouldn’t be lunching with the mayor if he lived in Boise. He might be doing it all for the good, but there’s still a little bit of the showboat gangster I remember in him.”

  “You gotta have that to make it in the God ga
me,” Sam said. “Look at Tammy Faye Baker. She wasn’t exactly reserved and refined.”

  He was right. He usually is. “Listen,” I said, “I want you to find out what you can on Junior Gonzalez. I need to know just what kind of guy we’re up against.”

  “If he’s got cops,” Sam said, “I’m a little limited on my sources. People tend to talk when they think something of interest is happening, and you never know who knows who in law enforcement.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find someone who can help,” I said.

  “I can go back to my guy in Corrections, but he’ll only know so much. I’ve got a buddy who did some time at the same prison while Junior was there,” Sam said. “That might be a place to start. And I’m pretty sure he’s no friend of the local law. He runs a pretty lucrative post-lockup business these days, is my understanding. You know how Father Eduardo gets kids back on the road to good? My buddy, he paves the road with the papers they might one day need if they ever want to work a real job.”

  “What was your friend in for?” I asked, which is probably the wrong question to ask anyone when they say they have a friend who’s done time.

  “Oh, you know, fraud, some passport business, minor nonviolent acts meant to increase his personal wealth. That sort of thing. Good guy. You’d love him. I’ll call him and see if we can meet up for drinks. He’s the kind of guy who likes a little lubrication.”

  “I know the type,” I said.

  “Ah, Mikey, you only know the half. My guy? He still makes pruno at home. You’d love it. Puts a little spice in there that’ll make you jump out of your socks. Of course, if he makes it wrong, it can also kill you. So it adds a bit of thrill to the evening.”

  “That’s great,” I said.

  When we reached my Charger, there was a young man of about twenty walking slow circles around it. He had on the same polo shirt as the rest of the kids working at the facility. “This yours?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Nineteen seventy-three?” he asked.

  “Nineteen seventy-four,” I said.

  “Original interior?”

  “It’s had a few accidents,” I said, though I opted not to tell him the number of times I’d fixed bullet holes in the leather… or the scrubbing that goes into getting scorch marks out… or, well, the periodic exercise involved with removing blood. “But yes, the original interior.”

  “The body looks good. You should lower it,” he said.

  “Not my style,” I said.

  The kid considered this. “Then at least you should buff out the bullet marks on the passenger’s side.”

  “I’m going to get on that,” I said.

  “You pull it to the auto shop around back. I’ll do it free of charge. Good practice, homes. Know what I’m saying?”

  Unfortunately, I did.

  I looked at Sam. “You got twenty minutes?” I said.

  4

  Dealing with a source or a confidential informant is always a dicey proposition, but Sam Axe had made it into a kind of performance art. The way he figured it, people wanted to tell you their deepest and darkest secrets, because what fun is it knowing something salacious if you can’t revel in the knowledge with a friend? And maybe over a couple of beers? And maybe, in some cases, earn some cash for what you know?

  The issues were always the same with people in the know, however: The more you used them for important information, the more power they began to accrue, and thus the more demands they’d start to make for the privilege of giving you what you needed. So Sam tried not to use the same sources more than one or two times. And at all times, Sam tried to keep his sources feeling like what they were sharing was an act of friendship. What better way to show that you like someone than to give up information on a third party? It was a lesson the FBI would have been smart to pick up on-back when they had Sam informing on Michael’s whereabouts, it was never even posed as an issue of friendship. It was always under a veil of threats: Do this or lose your retirement package, lose your health benefits, get audited for the rest of your life.

  So when Sam called K-Dog Dorsey to see if he might want to meet up for drinks, he didn’t bother to let him know that he intended to pump him for information. The last thing any ex-con wants is to be questioned. The best way to get information out of someone like K-Dog is to perform a subtle form of conversational manipulation that involves, well, making him talk about things that would make him sound like a tough guy.

  Problem was, Sam had to drink K-Dog’s pruno in the process of this conversation, which meant there was a high likelihood he’d forget salient details in the process. So he did what any good operative would do: He wired himself. He also took a cab to K-Dog’s, since there was an even higher likelihood he’d be far past the legal limit to drive just by breathing the air in K-Dog’s house. He was pretty sure K-Dog brewed his concoction in a more sterile environment than the prison toilet he learned his trade with, but, nevertheless, Sam also brought some antibiotics to the party, too.

  Of all his preparations, the antibiotics seemed like the smartest move to Sam after only a few minutes in K-Dog’s home. It was the sheer amount of animal hair in the place that got Sam spooked. It floated in the air. It was stuck to the walls. It covered the sofa Sam sat on. How could a person live with that much dog hair? At some point, wouldn’t it get into the food supply? Sam didn’t like to cast aspersions on how other people lived, but in this case he felt like maybe K-Dog needed an intervention from someone who really cared about him. Unfortunately, Sam didn’t really care about him that deeply, so he was in something of a pickle.

  K-Dog walked into the living room, holding a pitcher of pruno in one hand and two glasses in the other. At least all three of those things looked clean, though all would need proper inspection. “Now it’s a party,” K-Dog said. “Like old times. K-Dog and the Axe, right?”

  “Sure thing,” Sam said. It was true they’d had some old times, but it wasn’t like they were best friends. In fact, they’d met under rather odd circumstances. K-Dog (whose real name was Kevin, but no one bothered to call him that, especially since he wore a gold chain with a dog bone around his neck and had a tattoo of a bulldog on both of his arms and the words “Dog Pound” etched across his chest) had run a nice fake-passport business back in the late eighties and early nineties, before he was pinched post-9/11. Sam had met a nice girl in Cuba on a mission and couldn’t get anyone in the government to listen to him about what an important, uh, asset she’d be, and so he had to turn to K-Dog to try to get a decent batch of papers for her. It cost him a bit of dough, but it was worth it… or, well, it would have been worth it if the girl ever even bothered to give him a call once she got stateside, but Sam didn’t dwell on that. You win some, you lose some, and sometimes you end up buying a fake passport for someone.

  Over the years, though, they’d formed a nice friendship based on mutual respect and the fact that they both had things on the other person that could be used against the other. Sam even tried to help after he got picked up after 9/11, but K-Dog understood that old alliances didn’t mean much in the scope of world calamity. So he did his time. And now here they were again… drinking prison wine.

  K-Dog filled Sam’s glass and then the two toasted, as if they were drinking some nice scotch. Sam took a sip of his pruno, swallowed, and then felt a burning sensation akin to drinking electricity. He had to try to keep his balance, even though he was sitting down.

  “Good?” K-Dog asked.

  “The best,” Sam said.

  “Added a little something new this time,” K-Dog said.

  “Battery acid?”

  K-Dog slapped Sam’s leg. “I ain’t in prison, Axe Man. I put in a couple habanero chili peppers.”

  “A couple?”

  “I wanted it to have that same bite I remembered from the joint. You can’t get that usually unless you add something like engine coolant or acid. Thought the habaneros would do the trick.”

  That explained the thic
k brow of sweat that had already formed on Sam’s neck. But it also proved the best opening Sam could think of to get the information he needed out of K-Dog.

  “Who taught you how to make this?” Sam knew the answer to this already, since it was the first thing he’d asked him after their last evening on the pruno train, but Sam knew it would lead to where he wanted to go.

  “Originally? My man Ernesto. We bunked for six months before he caught a shank. Poor guy. He’s pissing out of a tube now.”

  “Who cut him?” Sam liked saying things like “Who cut him?” It reminded him of being a kid and watching prison movies, which is probably why prisoners talked like that, too. Everything anyone knew anymore was learned on television. Sam took another sip of the pruno. It went down smoother this time, possibly because he no longer had feeling in his extremities.

  “Mexican Mafia guy,” K-Dog said. He took another drink, too, but made a face. “You think this needs more ethanol?”

  “No,” Sam said. “They have some beef? I mean, wasn’t Ernesto in his fifties?” Oh, crap, Sam thought, he hadn’t told me that again. Fortunately, K-Dog seemed to have been tasting his work all day long and didn’t seem to notice Sam’s fumble.

  “Well, Ernesto, he was Latin Emperor from back in the day, and the Mexican Mafia was trying to make a move into Coleman back then, and for some reason they thought Ernesto was a shot caller. Man, he was just an old-ass man already. Read books most of the time. Didn’t even lift anymore. He thought it was foolishness and got stuck regardless. Sam, my man, don’t do time.”

  “I’m not planning on it,” Sam said.

  “Who plans on it?”

  K-Dog actually had a misty look in his eyes. Man, pruno could make anyone feel sentimental. Sam picked up his glass and toasted K-Dog, let him know he felt his pain.

  “You gotta be tough,” Sam said.

  “True,” K-Dog said, his composure back where it should be.

  “Who was the toughest Latin Emperor?”

  K-Dog scratched his chin and really gave it some thought. “Well,” he said, “I think you start with a guy like Junior Gonzalez and work your way down. You know of him?”