High Crimes

by William Deverell

  In the bathroom, Peddigrew turned the faucet on, a precaution against listening devices. He knew it was silly, but one never knew. He closed the door behind Kerrivan. “I am pissed right off,” he said.

  “Well, I thought you’d be up, because you told me you were taking an early boat back.”

  “Never mind. Forget it. And how are you going to go back down? You’re broke; you have no boat.”

  “There is a negative cash flow situation, as they say.”

  Peddigrew looked at him, as if measuring him. “I may have some ideas.” He pulled a small bindle packet of coke from his shaving kit. “Like a toot?”

  Kerrivan closed the toilet seat and slumped onto it. “My sinuses get stuffed. Maybe a little. A pick-me-up.”

  “This is like silk. I don’t have to chop it.” He dipped the point of a nail file into the packet and took a hit up his nostril, then passed it to Kerrivan.

  “It adds a bright edge to a dreary day,” Peddigrew said. “I’m almost out. I’m getting another half-ounce flown in.”

  Hip Toronto lawyer syndrome, thought Kerrivan. “Altogether very too, too much,” he mumbled.

  “Ninety-seven percent pure.”

  Bullshit, Kerrivan thought to himself. It might register about forty percent. But he didn’t want to destroy his lawyer’s illusions. “You said you had some ideas.”

  Peddigrew started to search his face in the mirror for blemishes, drawing the skin taut by stretching it between two fingers. Kerrivan assumed it was a morning ritual.

  “There is a company in Halifax,” Peddigrew said. “A marine wrecker’s. I happen to know the principals. I have an ex-client in Colombia, in Barranquilla, who has a marine works. Every once in a while he comes upon an old coastal freighter that might have one more long trip left in her.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s got one now.”

  “And the Halifax company will buy it for scrap,” Kerrivan said. “Hey, that’s a pretty good scam. Who’s the Halifax company? You?”

  Peddigrew looked at him with an expression of shock that Kerrivan guessed was feigned. He remembered it from the courtroom. “I am a signing officer, of course,” Peddigrew said. “A paper director. That’s common in the law business.”

  “How big is it? How many tons will she carry?”

  “I’m going to have breakfast, then catch my ferry, Peter. Why don’t you visit me in Toronto?”

  “Toronto? I can’t afford to get my shoes shined.”

  “Look, we have an order from the judge releasing to me in trust all the equipment that was on your trawler: the navigational devices, which are worth something, the radios, radar, scuba gear, life vests, the camping stuff, the dinghies even. You’ll get three, four thousand dollars on a quick sale.”

  “That won’t get me into a poker game.”

  “It will get you to Toronto.”

  “And then what?”

  “I’m going to give you a chance to help earn your fee,” said Peddigrew. “It’s going to be high.”

  ***

  The final leg of the Eastern Provincial Airways flight had been cancelled at midnight because of an obdurate fog at St. John’s airport, so Superintendent Milton Edwards had had to lay over in Halifax. Even now, at seven a.m., thick fingers of mist ribbed the landing field, and Edwards stiffened in his seat until the 737 grunted onto the runway, bounced, then settled.

  The Kerrivan debacle, Edwards feared, would further damage the image of his beloved police force, already beset by a circling wolf pack: journalists, politicians, and civil rights activists making forays from ivory towers. They made an unholy and unsavory combination. But as superintendent in charge of external relationships for the RCMP — image polisher and flak catcher — Edwards had learned to become patient and thick of skin.

  Defusing the bomb the judge had tried to drop on Mitchell was going to require all of Edwards’s skills.

  As the taxi he’d taken from the airport slowed to a stop in front of the RCMP building, Edwards saw that the lights were already on in Mitchell’s offices. Give him credit, Edwards thought. He gets up early.

  But the Mitchell that Edwards observed, sitting behind his desk making notes from a tall pile of file folders, was a Mitchell who seemed not to have gone to bed at all. Edwards had opened the door without knocking and was watching the inspector’s deep concentration. The man’s clothing was rumpled, there was a stubble of beard over his rough, meaty face, and a shine of perspiration on his head.

  “It’s seven-thirty,” Edwards said. “Did you get any sleep at all?”

  Mitchell’s eyes did not seem to focus on him. They looked diseased, raw.

  “I should have guessed you’d be the first they’d send to jump on my ass,” Mitchell said.

  Edwards suddenly felt all of Mitchell’s pain. “The nature of the business,” he said, “is that sometimes they don’t convict.” He went to the coffee machine and poured a fresh cup for Mitchell, one for himself.

  “You can stuff the soft soap,” Mitchell said.

  “You’re on the front pages.”

  “Yeah? Did I make ‘The National,’ too? ‘Good evening, here is the CBC news. RCMP Inspector Harold Mitchell today was accused of enforcing the law. Parliament has ordered a royal commission.’ God.” He paused. Then he brought his fist down hard on the table. “Why the Christ didn’t I get any support on this case?”

  “What do you mean?” Edwards asked.

  “Just for example, that jerk they sent to identify Kerrivan’s voice on the tapes. He’s supposed to be an expert at identifying voices from the wiretap. After we bust Kerrivan, this guy talks to him in an interview room for half an hour. About fishing and the weather and God knows what. And he still can’t identify Captain Jackpot’s voice when the wiretap is played in court. “I couldn’t swear to it, Your Honor,’ he says. Right in front of the jury. God spare me. Everyone else knew who it was.”

  Edwards sipped his coffee, waiting for Mitchell to let go, to blow out the steam.

  “I don’t mind the shit in my face so much,” Mitchell said. “It’s Kerrivan laughing — that’s what I can’t stand.”

  Mitchell gave a long, wheezing sigh, and pulled one of the files from the pile.

  “This was him in 1973. Jamaica.” The photograph showed Kerrivan walking down a dock with a black man. “He was doing ganga then, kind of small time, while he was working on his master’s ticket.”

  Another file. “We almost had him in 1975. This is Kerrivan and Kelly on the ketch they rented.” The picture showed the two men in yachting whites, looking like wealthy kids on a summer holiday. “The Puffin II, they called it. Cute, hey? Sixteen hundred pounds of Colombian gold down below.” Mitchell shuffled through other files. “He got bigger and bigger. Three tons, five, eight. How does he finance it? Who’s his bankroller? The guy wastes every dime he makes on blackjack and women.”

  “Why don’t you take a week or two, Harold? Get a little sun.”

  “Uh-uh. How’d you like to help me prepare a budget, Milt?” It sounded like an order, and Edwards felt irritation.

  “A budget? I should be working on your obituary.”

  “Milt, you’ve got to get me into the minister’s office. I’ve got to get a budget approved. I’m talking about a couple of million dollars.”

  “Come on, Harold, you can’t get that kind of money for pot.”

  “You can sell it for me, Milt. You got the grease with the minister.”

  “They’re cutting back. It’s a year of fiscal restraint.”

  Mitchell exploded. “Restraint? Restraint? Kerrivan and his snot of a lawyer have made the whole fucking force look like clowns with putty noses. Restraint — bullshit! We went penny-wise and pound-foolish this time. The guy in charge of Project Seawall — me — is looking like Inspector Clouseau walking backwards into a swimmin
g pool.”

  “They’ll think you wasted your money on this last one.”

  “Well, I’ve got some news for you. Kerrivan has already started to get the next one together. If we’re going to do this right, we start yesterday. I’m putting some eyes on Kerrivan and his buddies right now. And ears. Our lawyers better get me a judge who’ll give me a decent wiretap. I’m going to cover this town with wire. Every place Kerrivan has stayed over the last five years. Friends. Relatives. Old girlfriends. There are about two hundred of them. Every pay phone these guys use. I want a blanket authorization. I don’t want to have to keep coming back kissing ass for extensions.”

  “They use a guy named Judge King out here.”

  “Let’s get him. God, I wish I’d had him in court yesterday. And I’ve got to have someone who can identify their goddamn voices on tape. It’s got to be somebody we trust. Half the dumb Newfs here think Kerrivan stands on the right hand of God.” Mitchell was drumming his fingers on the table. “Look, Milt, when you’re working on the budget, remember we may have to pay out some money to people here and there.”

  “Yes.” Edwards, somehow, had now clearly been assigned the budget job.

  “One other little tiny detail,” Mitchell said. “I want an undercover operation. It’s got to be someone with Caribbean connections.”

  “We can borrow someone from Washington.”

  “No goddamn way! This is my show.” A short, strained smile. “Okay, our show. I want someone we control, not the Yanks.”

  “Harold, we do happen to work with the Americans on these things.”

  “Piss on them. If we use a DEA agent, the DEA will grab all the credit.”

  “Suit yourself. We don’t have anyone in Colombia.”

  “The Americans have a list of private entrepreneurs. Maybe we can find someone who could cut a few corners.”

  Edwards didn’t say anything.

  “Do you want to know how we’re going to sell this to Ottawa?” Mitchell asked.

  “Tell me.”

  “Come with me.” Mitchell took Edwards into the phone room. No one else was on duty, but some machines were recording. Mitchell pressed reverse on a Uher reel-to-reel and waited until the tape had rewound, then pushed the play button.

  There was a sound like quiet breathing, possibly a snore. Mitchell moved the tape ahead a few feet.

  “This morning, about an hour ago,” he said.

  There was a sound of knocking. Mitchell turned up the volume. The knocking became heavy, incessant. A groan. A voice. “All right, all right.”

  The sound of feet shuffling, a door being opened. A voice distant but loud enough to make out: “I thought I’d return your car, James, boy. Sorry about the left door —”

  Mitchell pressed fast forward. “Let me just spin this ahead. The scene is Peddigrew’s hotel room, by the way.”

  “You’re going back down?”

  “Why, sure, and I’m going to put together the biggest damn smuggle of the century. I’m aiming to pick myself up twenty tons of Colombian gold.”

  Mitchell pushed the stop button. “There’s some other chit-chat. Kerrivan had a dame with him, so there’s half an hour of fucking. If that turns you on.”

  Edwards wasn’t saying anything.

  “Well?” said Mitchell. “Twenty tons of dope. Do you know what that’s worth on the street? Figure it out. Colombian gold goes for a hundred and twenty an ounce and up.”

  Edwards snorted. “You know he’s bullshitting.”

  “Sure, but the minister isn’t going to know that.” He was smiling. “This tape buys me a lot of electronic hardware, some high-class undercover, and maybe a witness or two.”

  “Tell me, Harold, how long have you had a bug in the lawyer’s room?”

  Mitchell looked past him, his expression benign. “Oh, a few weeks.”

  “You know you don’t have a court order to intercept from a lawyer’s room.”

  “Aw, come on, Milt, don’t play the pansy with me. This isn’t public. It’s not for court.”

  “You can’t replay it for the minister.”

  Mitchell had the look of a truant schoolboy. “We can tell him we have information. We wouldn’t be lying.” He doodled on a pad for a few seconds, then looked up squarely into Edwards’s eyes. “You know what, Milt? I was too honest in that court. I didn’t have to say I promised Kelly immunity. I didn’t have to say I promised him a damn thing. There was nothing in writing. I got nailed because I was too honest in there. I come out smelling like shit pie and Kerrivan and his merry men are out all night having a howl, busting up a bar with a bunch of bikers. Jesus, Milt, come on.”

  Mitchell slowly sank back into a chair. His face seemed to collapse, lines radiating inward. “He’s got to make just one more run.” He was breathing slowly, trying to beat back the tiredness. “If I can get the hardware . . . if I can get top-quality undercover — and I mean the cream, Milt, the best there is, I don’t care what it costs — I’m going to sting Kerrivan. I’m going to pull off the biggest goddamn operation since the Normandy invasion.”

  “You’re going to?”

  “We’re going to, Milt. You and me and the RCMP. With a little help from our friends.”

  Chapter Five

  Jessica Flaherty wiggled an index finger into her loose pack of menthols, fishing out one of the last two cigarettes. She stroked a wooden match up the zipper of her jeans and it seemed to burn like a flare in the late-night gloom of the Miami waterfront park. She snapped a quick mental picture of her new informant, Alfredo J., a man who wished to meet only in darkness. He had said no to the DEA house.

  His manner was professional, although he seemed overdressed for the role of unobtrusive spy: a loose tunic, belted at the waist, a scarlet feather in his hatband. He spoke clear English.

  “As you come to know me and trust me, we will work close together,” he said.

  Having a good glimpse of him, Flaherty decided she wouldn’t mind that. She just hoped he wasn’t gay.

  “It is even more important that I learn to trust you,” he went on. “Are you interested in politics?”

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe we will discuss politics some day. Paez’s people seek, I believe, to avoid the Florida coastline, where there are too many patrol boats. I have seen them studying maps — New England, the Maine coast, where there are quiet bays. Ultimately, the cargo will go to New York City. There is a large Colombian community there, and Senator Paez has cousins in the borough of Queens.”

  “How will they move it?”

  “They do not tell me everything, because I am too new to them. Obviously they are looking for experts, experienced contrabandistas. Gringos. They believe gringos are more efficient, smarter, braver.” He sounded sorrowful. “There is a lack of pride among certain Latin people. They want a ship that cannot be connected to them.”

  “What do you want out of this?”

  “Perhaps, some day, a favor. One day we will talk politics.”

  ***

  “I’ll be your only friend in there,” Edwards had told Mitchell.

  “In there” meant in the office of Jean-Louis Lessard, Her Majesty’s minister in charge of the Department of the Solicitor General, the man at whose desk the RCMP buck stopped.

  On that desk now sat Mitchell’s two-million-dollar budget.

  But the minister was ignoring it. Instead, he was pounding a stubby forefinger at the front page of the Toronto Globe and Mail.

  “Quote,” he said. “‘Shove Law, Shove Judges, Says RCMP Inspector.’ Unquote.” His eyes peered up at Mitchell, who was sitting on a leather-covered chair, trying to strike a relaxed pose.

  “That’s the headline,” Lessard said. “Unfortunately, they didn’t bury your earthy prose behind the classifieds.”

  “I’ve read it, sir,” Mitchell sai
d. He looked out of the corner of his eye at Edwards, who was standing near the desk, sipping coffee, looking out the window. Edwards had told Mitchell to keep his mouth shut, to let him do the talking. Otherwise, he had said, Mitchell would have no friends in there.

  Lessard seemed to relish reading the article aloud. “‘St. John’s, Newfoundland. By The Canadian Press. A senior officer of the RCMP told a reporter Thursday he could shove the Canadian system of justice up his A-dash-dash. The comment was made after a judge ordered two men acquitted of marijuana-importing charges. “If this is justice, you can shove it,” Inspector H.E. Mitchell said after the verdict. “You can shove the lawyers, the law, and the judges up your red, rosy A-dash-dash H-dash-dash-dash.”

  Lessard raised his hands in a gesture of Gallic supplication. “The article tells us how this particular judge shoved the law up yours, Inspector. ‘The honesty of a high officer of the RCMP is in doubt.’ That’s the judge talking. ‘His conduct should be the subject of close scrutiny by the minister to whom he is responsible.’ C’est moi, Inspector.”

  Lessard turned to the deputy minister, who was seated in a far corner of the room. “Who is this judge?” he yelled. “Where in God’s name do we get these jerks?” He didn’t wait for an answer, turning back to Mitchell.

  “So you’re the hotshot narcotics man the commissioner has been bragging about. Well, I want to tell you something, hotshot: Who’s going to clean it up? You’re not going to clean it up. I’m going to clean it up. I’m the guy who has to stand in front of the TV cameras explaining how RCMP inspectors are only human beings.”

  Mitchell hoped someone else would say something. But the others, Edwards, the deputy minister, the department counsel, were arranged in a circle like spectators at a cock fight.

  Lessard picked up the budget proposal. “It’s an expensive cleaning bill. Two million bucks? You’re serious?”

  “That’s not far above average for a big narcotics operation, Mister Minister,” the deputy said.

  “A couple of dumb Newfoundland pot pushers?” Lessard said. “It can’t be worth it. And if it’s the price of revenge, Inspector, I can’t afford it.”