Valley of Bones jp-2

by Michael Gruber

  Thirteen

  Paz got his shield back a week after the shooting, not a record for a shooting panel, but still pretty fast. Paz detected the hand of Major Oliphant in this and wondered whether he finally had a rabbi in the department, also whether he liked this or not. Lieutenant Posada, from whom he collected his shield and his service weapon that morning, was his usual morose self. He slid the items across his desk with the elan of a convenience-store clerk delivering a package of chewing gum, together with the information that the major wants to see you. Paz had never done a bad deed to Posada and didn’t know why the head of the assault and homicide unit disliked him. It could have been mere race prejudice, or the natural enmity of some dull people for some smart ones, or something more political. It did not keep Paz up nights. Tito Morales was standing in the squad bay when Paz left Posada’s office, and he got a thumbs-up and a grin from his partner, but not from any of the other detectives.

  Oliphant poured him a ritual cup of coffee and sat him in a comfortable side chair. Paz noted that his cup was marked with the seal of the FBI Academy at Quantico; perhaps meaningful, perhaps not.

  After the shortest possible interval of pleasantries, Oliphant said, “So, does it connect up?”

  Paz was pleased with the shorthand. His old partner used to do that too, jump over the details and express the thought that two equally smart cops ought to have been thinking at a particular juncture. Cletis would say stuff like “Where was the key?” and Paz would almost always know what key and where the key should have been, even though no one had mentioned a key before. He said, “It has to, sir. Dodo Cortez got no business burglarizing a South Miami home with a gun in his pants. He was a shooter, basically, and more than that, he worked for Ignacio Hoffmann, who also employed our suspect’s current employer, Jack Wilson.”

  “Hoffmann?”

  Paz recalled that Oliphant was still with the Bureau when Ignacio had his non-day in court, so he explained who Ignacio Hoffmann was, the dope running, the bail jumping.

  “Interesting,” said Oliphant, “but of course I wasn’t thinking of that aspect.”

  “No, it’s an extra. The real connection is between our original killing and someone burglarizing the home of Emmylou Dideroff’s psychologist. So I’m thinking, what’s the prize? Why kill a guy, why burglarize a shrink? The answer has to be information. Someone wants to know something they think our suspect knows and they’re willing to use violence to get it.”

  “You’re saying they pressured the victim to tell something, it went too far and they killed him?”

  “Maybe, but I have a feeling al-Muwalid was a rival for the same information. I’ve gone over my notes and talked to my partner and I think we had him wrong. He was hiring muscle around town and we assumed that he wanted to protect himself. What if he was hiring them to look for Emmylou? The oil guy he met, Zubrom, actually told us he was looking for someone, and I ignored it because I was only thinking about dangerto Muwalid, not that he might be a danger to someone else. I mean,he was the one who got whacked. So the odds are that whoever killed Muwalid sent Dodo Cortez to find whatever it was Emmylou might have told her therapist.”

  “I thought this Dideroff woman killed Muwalid.”

  “That’s the official position.”

  “But you no longer believe it.”

  “I’m not sure what I believe, Major. It all depends on who Emmylou D. really is. People think she knows something, but does she know she knows it? Is she a player playing cagey? Or is she a victim?”

  “What does she say in that confession she’s writing?”

  “Not much. A lot of childhood memories and religion. We’re awaiting the later installments.”

  Oliphant swiveled for a moment and sipped thoughtfully from his own FBI mug. “It doesn’t work.”

  “I know,” Paz admitted. “The hole in it is that if they thought Emmylou knew something, why didn’t they just snatch her up and put the irons to her? Why all this rigmarole with framing her for Muwalid and going after the confession? Well, one possibility is she doesn’t know what she knows. She’s already been tortured once. Maybe that was their first shot at trying to get it.”

  “Tortured?”

  “Yeah, the docs say she’s got recent dislocations in both shoulders and whipping scars on her back and soles of her feet. Burns too. So maybe they think that in a situation she feels is safe, with a therapist who’s got no interest in any secrets, she’ll let something slip.”

  “It’s plausible,” said Oliphant. “Barely. So…next move?”

  Paz had prepared for this question, of course, and he answered fluently, although with more confidence than he actually felt. Since the early passages of this affair he had caught glimpses of a brewing chaos, weirdness, conspiracy in high places, international crap, the stench of Africa again. It was important to have a tale to cling to, as children do, and now he spun it out.

  “Basic fact: Emmylou Dideroff, if she acted at all didn’t act alone…”

  “Because of the missing cell phone.”

  “Right. There’s no cell phone. Next fact: my partner talked to the late Dodo’s associates. About a week before the murder Dodo got a phone call that excited him. Apparently Dodo has not had an organizational home since the Hoffmann gang went down, but now he’s talking about steady work. He was seen a couple of times by two different people getting into and out of a silver Lexus with a big Anglo guy at the wheel, always at night. According to the regulars at the lounge he hung out in, Dodo’s talking big, he’s got more money to spend.”

  “You’re starting to like him for the hit on the Arab.”

  “And Jack Wilson, who drives a silver Lexus. Look, Wilson knew that Emmylou was in the vicinity of a particular machine shop at a particular time, because he sent her there. There’s a phone booth across the street from this machine shop. We know that Muwalid got a cell phone call in Zubrom’s office and he took off like a bullet after it. Maybe the call said something like we have your information, go to such and such phone booth and wait. That second call both shows him to Emmylou and sets up a meet in his hotel room. He goes there, followed by Emmylou. Emmylou parks the car and begins her search for Muwalid’s room. But Cortez already knows the room. He picks up the connecting rod from Emmylou’s truck, goes to Muwalid’s room, kills him, dumps him over, and leaves. Emmylou arrives and is waiting like a patsy when we walk in.”

  “Or Emmylou and Wilson are in it together. Maybe she fingered Muwalid for Dodo.”

  “Then why wouldn’t she take off?” Paz asked. “Why was she waiting there praying, or whatever?”

  “A deeper game? She wanted to be locked up in a nuthouse for some reason?”

  “That’s pretty deep. Although, given that it’s Emmylou, we can’t rule it out.”

  “Get more facts,” said Oliphant.

  “Fine. The main fact I need is, do you know anything about the guy who owns her houseboat, David Packer, the man of mystery?”

  “Why would you think that?” A little glaring here, which Paz ignored.

  “Because you were with the feds and the feds are involved in this in some way, unless you think it’s a coincidence that the guy who rented Emmylou her domicile has got the State Department covering up for him when a cop calls for information. I got the sense that there are calls whizzing back and forth between that phone there on your desk and Washington, D.C., and there’s a bunch of you watching me to see what I’ll turn up, like a bunch of kids watching an ant on a sidewalk, maybe poke it with a stick once in a while. Because if that’s the case then, with all due respect, sir, fuck it.”

  They played eye games then for what seemed like a long while to Paz. He had been thinking about this aspect of the case, the week off duty had given him plenty of time to think, and about what Oliphant had said the last time they’d discussed it, and how unsatisfactory it had been even then. He had called David Packer a dozen times during that week and got his answering machine and left a message, but had not been cal
led back. No big deal, it was not a crime to leave town, but still….

  “Not whizzing,” said Oliphant, “I wouldn’t say whizzing. But I’ve gotten some calls. And made a few. And the fact is that you’re going to have to let me be the judge of what I can and can’t tell you, and the reason for that is that people I respect are feeding me information that they’ve got no legal right to release to me, they’re putting their jobs and pensions on the line.”

  Oliphant leaned back in his chair, lacing his hands across his midsection, which to Paz looked about as soft as a steel-belted radial. “Let’s talk a little more about the intersection between national security and the work of the FBI. We’re interested in bad guys in that area just like we are in O.C., mail fraud, computer crime, and so on, and obviously the best way to penetrate the bad guys is to turn a bad guy. That’s how we got the Klan and the mob. Not so easy with terrorists, because the kind of terrorists we’re mainly interested in nowadays are pretty impenetrable by your average FBI-type person. So we look on the periphery. Terror cells need services like any other organized body. They need false IDs, they need money moved, they need transport and weapons and ammo. And there are, naturally, all-American scumbags who will supply this stuff for a price.”

  “So you penetrate the scumbags.”

  “We do. But you can see the problem. In order for your penetratee to work effectively, he has to continue with his scumbaggery, for which he now has effective immunity, because he’s been doubled. He keeps selling, let’s say, fake IDs, and even though he lets us know what he’s doing, we are still not going to pick up all the evildoers he’s selling to, because these guys are not dumb, they can figure out that if everybody who bought bad paper from old Charlie got busted, there must be something funny going on with old Charlie. And there you have the great conundrum: you’re licensing guys to commit criminal acts, in the hope that you can prevent even greater criminal acts. It’s inherently corrupting. Inherently.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “Well, it depends on whether you believe in our system,” said Oliphant. “If you believe that justice under law is essentially weak, then you’ll bend the law until it breaks. You’ll have killers and rapists and every kind of human garbage on the payroll of the United States. And you’ll stop some terror and some will take place anyway. If you believe that justice under law is inherently strong, then you won’t license criminals. You might use them or squeeze them but you won’t fucking protect their criminal acts. And the result of this is that you’ll stop some terror and some will take place anyway. Will you have more victims? Unclear. I tend to doubt it. You can stop ninety-nine percent of terror attempts just by taking your thumb out of your ass, like we could’ve stopped nine-eleven if we hadn’t been having turf wars and snoozing in our deck chairs. The rest of it is like lightning strikes or traffic fatalities, it’s part of life in any open society, get used to it, not that the attorney general is ever going to get up on the TV and say that. But if you play it straight, at least you won’t have blowback, you won’t have impunity, you won’t have the corruption of law enforcement.”

  “This is why you left the Bureau,” said Paz; a statement, not a question.

  Oliphant shot a hard look over, but Paz met it, and after a bit the man nodded. They were in a new country now. “A guy in New Jersey snuffed a teenager he was fucking and we gave him a pass because he was buying air tickets for some al-Qaeda types. Maybe coulda-been al-Qaeda types, I mean they didn’t even fucking know! This was a high-level decision, by the way.” He pointed to the ceiling. “Very high. I thought of blowing the whistle, but I decided that at the end of the day…at the end of the day I’m not a whistle-blower, not that I couldn’t respect someone who was, but it wasn’t me. So I handed in my papers instead. My sad story, now you know, and if I hear it from anyone else, I’ll make sure you spend the rest of your career guarding the concession stand at the Orange Bowl.”

  A long uncomfortable silence followed this remark. “And yes, I am a fucking fanatic on this issue. And why?” Here he pointed to his face. “This. People like you and me, the law is all we got going for us. Corrupt as it is, unjust as it is, without the law we’d both still be chopping cotton.”

  “Chopping sugarcane in my case,” said Paz.

  “Chopping whatever, but not in a suit and tie in a nice office, with authority over white folks. No fucking way.”

  “That was very inspiring, boss.”

  “Fuck you, Paz,” said Oliphant without ill-humor. “I wasn’t trying to inspire you, I was trying to illustrate why I’ve been getting phone calls from pissed-off guys.”

  Paz didn’t budge. “So who in the federal government is hiring bad actors? No, let me guess. David Packer?”

  “The name came up. He was in Sudan, I hear. He was employed by SRPU. And now he’s here. And you are not to fuck with him.”

  “Why not?”

  Oliphant’s face took on a harder expression. “Two reasons. One is that I just told you not to and I’m the fucking commander of this organization. The other is if Packer yells to the people he reports to, all kinds of shit is going to hit the fan, and the helpful calls from Washington will dry up, and a big chunk of federal law enforcement will stop hunting bad guys and start looking for who leaked it. So follow up on Wilson, follow up on Cortez and your suspect. Find out who killed Muwalid and why. That’s your job. Go do it.”

  It was a dismissal. Paz got up and left and flagged Morales from his desk in the squad bay. Out in the parking lot, Morales asked, “What did the major have to say?”

  “He said you’re looking sharper since you got some decent suits. He likes the Fendi.”

  “Really.”

  Paz told him really. Morales said, “Holy shit.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” said Paz, getting into an unmarked Chevrolet. “Let’s go see what Jack Wilson has to say for himself.”

  But when they arrived at Wilson Brothers Marine they found not Jack but a smaller, stouter version, who greeted them at the door to the shop with an air of relief.

  “That was fast,” he said. “I just called it in a couple of hours ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Paz. “You’re…?”

  “Frank Wilson. You’re here about the missing persons report, right?”

  “Who’s missing?”

  “Jack, my brother. You’re not from missing persons?”

  “No, homicide,” said Paz.

  “Oh my God!” said Wilson and paled beneath his tan.

  It took them a few minutes in the little office to straighten it out. Jack Wilson had not been seen for nearly a week. His car was gone, he did not answer repeated pages or cell phone calls, he hadn’t deposited a couple of large checks made in payment for work. Frank, it turned out, was the technical guy, Jack took care of the business end, although he knew his way around a marine diesel. Frank seemed anxious to talk and they let him. He assumed the cops knew that Jack had worked on Cigarette boat engines for some shady characters and made no attempt to hide this, but he assured them that all that was in the past. No, there had been no large withdrawals of money from the company account. No, he hadn’t heard of anyone named Cortez nor did he recognize the photo they showed him. They left after half an hour of similarly fruitless questioning.

  “That was a waste,” said Morales when they were back in the car.

  “No it wasn’t,” said Paz. He got on the radio and made Jack Wilson a wanted man, giving the specifics on his vehicle. Then he said to Morales, “Jack Wilson took off right after Dodo Cortez showed up dead on the evening news. Probably not a coincidence. Assume he was running Dodo. A well-known hit man tries to steal a piece of evidence connected with our suspect, and that leads to the thought that maybe the suspect’s been framed, that the well-known hit man did it. He knew we’d ask around and pick up on the connection between him and Cortez. He tried to keep it dark but he didn’t bother to get an old beater for his meetings with Cortez, and a new silver Lexus is going to catch t
he eye in that neighborhood. Speaking of which, let’s take a look at Mrs. Dodo. You know the address, right?”

  “Yeah, Second and Fifteenth. I told you I already talked to her. She’s uncooperative.”

  “I’ll use charm,” said Paz. “Go.”

  It was the kind of Miami neighborhood where the front lawns are used to park cars, meaning that the small houses are occupied by large numbers of recent immigrants, not necessarily in the same family. The small concrete-block-stucco house formerly occupied by Dodo Cortez had a patchy lawn with no cars, indicating a slight elevation in social status. Paz told Morales to wait at the front door while he looked in the windows to check out the grieving widow. From the side of the house he was able to see through partly open blinds into the living room, where a woman lay stretched out on a Bahama couch. She was dressed in a sleeveless orange blouse, a pair of black panties and one shoe, which hung like an ornament off her toes. The television was on, a Spanish soap it sounded like, but the woman was not watching it. Among the clutter on the nearby coffee table he saw a burning candle, several glassine bags, a bent spoon, and a hypodermic needle, all of which explained the woman’s stunned lassitude.

  Paz went back to the street. He told Morales, “Give me two minutes and then pound on the door and yell ‘Police, open up!’ ” He then went around to the back of the house. It took very little time to wiggle a glass jalousie pane out of the rear door and pop the lock, and by the time Morales made his demonstration, he was moving through the kitchen and was in plenty of time to keep the woman from flushing her heroin down the toilet.

  After a lot of noise and some weeping, the two cops had the woman settled down and handcuffed on the couch. She said her name was Rita and she didn’t know nothing, and hadn’t done nothing and they planted that dope and she wanted her lawyer. She looked about nineteen.

  “I told you,” said Morales.

  Paz smiled and spoke to the girl in Spanish, sitting down next to her on the couch, as if they were about to go on a date, the usual cop endearments, he wanted to help her out, he’d be happy to go away and leave her with her dope, provided she gave a little, helped them out, they were murder cops, not narcs, they could care less about her habit. And then he sketched out what would happen to her if not, the heroin looked like felony weight; maybe they could fatten up the bag, if not; the state’s attorney really wanted to clear this murder that her boyfriend had pulled off, and so did they, and so they would put herunder the jailhouse on the dope charges, if not. And it wasn’t like she was ratting Dodo, Dodo was dead on a tray in the county morgue and he didn’t give a shit, and so on in a calm voice in soft Spanish, like he was talking her into bed.