Needles

by William Deverell

  “Oh, fuck off!” They both laughed, and Flaherty counted out $10,500 and passed it to the connection, who, still chuckling, handed over a package wrapped in brown paper. Flaherty opened it, smelled it, tasted it, snorted a little just to make sure, then pulled out a gun and arrested the man.

  An hour later, back in the offices of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Agent Flaherty — an undercover specialist — was on the telephone with Superintendent Charrington, internal security, Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Charrington was a crooked cop hunter, and he wanted someone with special ability for a delicate task.

  “See you in Vancouver, love,” said Flaherty, grinning.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Charrington said. Audacious, he thought. But after all, the agent was American.

  Monday, the Twenty-third Day of January,

  at Ten O’Clock in the Morning

  Corporal Everit Cudlipp, reeking and hung over, his pounding head held together by a set of headphones, shifted uncomfortably in his chair, doing battle in a losing cause against flatulence. His growing paunch had been nurtured by a daily quota of beer, and there were sounds hissing and popping within it. No one heard these noises, for all Cudlipp’s neighbors also had their ears enclosed in headphones. They were members of Special I, the bugging squad. The only sounds in the wiretap-monitoring room were the whirring noises of reel-to-reel recorders.

  The annual winter roundup of West Coast heroin traffickers was underway, and Cudlipp’s job was to listen for leads to dealers still at large. The two men talking on the tapped phone were rambling on about friends caught in the scoop — or rodeo, in the argot of the trade — but soon went on to other things.

  “Danny got scooped. Buncha other guys I don’t know. Danny got popped in the rodeo last year, too, so he won’t get his bail.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “And I think we’ve had a little steam up this way, just hanging around, you know, so watch it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Danny got loose, I tell ya. I seen him. He was fuckin’ lunch bucket on Friday down at the Homer booze can. Heat comes in there. I seen a coupla big gazoonies, looked like they had a piece of something under their jackets, just sittin’ around, yackin’ with him. He’s giving this rap about the good shit he’s got, and he’s wired, dozin’ off. Two days later he gets made. I don’t know, man.”

  “Heard there’s lots of ladies down there.”

  “The new booze can? My man, it’s like a sugar daddy’s trip in a penthouse. Picked up a sweet little chick up from L.A., up here to check out the scene, and she was hangin’ around lookin’ for action, you know? So we went flyin’ out of here in my new wagon — seen my new El Do-ra-do? — for a little tour around the park with her. Man, she did not take in the scenery, unless you count the old bazooka, which is now so red and sore I can’t tell ya . . .”

  Cudlipp gritted his teeth in resentment. He would have loved to have been driving a new El Dorado around the park, some sweet little chick from L.A. giving him head. Still . . . there was Alice, his steak house waitress. Insatiable Alice Carson, who urged and goaded him in bed, and often marked his back with her fingernails.

  But surely he deserved a handsome chariot as well, a sleek Cadillac with Alice Carson clinging hungrily to him as he swooped down the freeway. It would come. Alice would be his permanent old lady. A ranch house in Adelaide. The means for wealth and a fresh beginning were at hand, and the hand that held them out was the hand of Dr. Au P’ang Wei.

  Somehow, in the middle of this cruel and dreary winter of his thirty-sixth year, Corporal Everit Cudlipp had got caught up in a hopeless tangle of love, avarice, and double-dealing. He wanted out. But he also wanted Alice Carson. He could not have Alice Carson unless he had money. He could not have money unless he travelled down the trail with Dr. Au. Cudlipp was on it, stepping carefully and watching his back.

  He was doing a lot of drinking along the way, and it showed. His nose was blotchy and his body puffed and slack. His finest feature, a resolute chin, was slowly retreating behind the cover of jowls. Slouched now in his chair, he halfheartedly gave ear to the voice on the dealer’s phone:

  “. . . It dazzles me. If you can take the hassles, Billy, if you can take the fuck-ups, the bums, you can wear diamonds. . . .”

  Everit Cudlipp had joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police when he was nineteen. The pattern of his sixteen years on the force was out of the archetypal mold for a career officer: a short period of training when he actually learned how to ride a horse, endless series of two-year shifts in dreary towns in the Prairies and Northern Canada, highway patrols, radar traps, Christmas roadblock. Calls to break up brawls in beer parlors. Lectures to teenagers about beer. Visits to lonely women peeped by toms. Cudlipp mastered the technique of two-fingered typing, then endured the policeman’s purgatory — endless hours of composing reports without number. He learned well the mechanics of the courtroom, and he served in barren little Legion Hall courthouses as clerk, as prosecutor, as friend and adviser to the local lay magistrate, and occasionally as informal counsel to the smiling, obsequious town drunk. Later he undertook courses in Ottawa and Regina on refined aspects of criminal investigation. Ten years ago he finally graduated from his uniform into plain clothes and graduated from the country into the city. He became a narc.

  For six months, he was a hippie. He worked undercover for the soft-drug detail, and was to be seen frequenting dope smokers’ haunts of Vancouver’s Fourth Avenue, wearing a dirty Mexican serape from which exuded the rich stink of shared mattresses in the co-op houses where he crashed. He smoked pot and collected names. He cultivated his garden of potheads, buying from everyone who had a spare lid to sell, spreading his largesse broadly and evenly, buying dime bags, nickel bags, even only a joint or two if a friendly freak could be persuaded to part with a little of his own supply.

  Cudlipp had not enjoyed that time. He had felt easier with the straight criminals, the muggers and smugglers and embezzlers, the young toughs with big mouths who learned their lessons in back alleys or up against the hood of a police car. Cudlipp believed the hippies represented a greater danger to his preferred way of life than did the bandits and bunco artists who shared society’s concern with material values. So it was with pleasure that Everit Cudlipp, brandishing his lists of traffickers, came in from the cold of the counter-culture and triumphantly led a police sweep — a hippie rodeo — through the rows of seedy co-op houses near Fourth Avenue.

  He was famous for a few days. Newspapers and radio talkers heralded the bravery of a dedicated cop who had survived for six months behind enemy lines. He received a written tribute from the commissioner’s office in Ottawa, thanking him on behalf of his country for his bravery in the trenches of the drug culture. He made corporal.

  Everit Cudlipp had peaked then, at the age of twenty-five. Somehow, his star stopped rising. He was moved to heroin control. The addicts were easy targets, although sometimes a little jumpy. But the jumpiness made for more excitement. A careful cop could enjoy a little workout occasionally, especially if it became necessary to prevent the suspect from swallowing the evidence.

  Now he spent his days in the anesthetizing routine of electronic listening devices, whose demands dulled body, mind, and soul. Cudlipp had been at it today for two hours, and he was dying. His mouth was parched, his system was dehydrated, his head throbbed, and his stomach heaved.

  Cudlipp’s wiretap target, a middleman, a bundler who ran his own back end, had his own complaints.

  “He wants us to cuff him two whole fuckin’ bundles,” the middleman’s partner said.

  “No way,” the middleman replied. “He don’t get cuffed until he pays for the last one. I ain’t gettin’ behind no more on this sucker. Tell him we want the cake on the line.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We ain’t gettin’ ripped, right?”

  “Yeah.”

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nbsp; “Uh . . . the new came in last night.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, well, we were up all night with the mixer. Then we did a tester out to Gabe. He said the blast is okay, but it don’t hold so good when you level off. You couldn’t nod on it or nothin’, so we’re gonna have to beef it up a bit. Last time you guys cut it with a buff that was too heavy, like snow, and Gabe got off too heavy on the tester. Came onto him so strong he got into the hots, and he sweat so bad he took his shirt off. He said —”

  “Yeah, well, we found —”

  “He said it was procaine, you know, for buffing coke.”

  “Yeah, we figured that out. But it was dynamo White Lady. It’ll sell like ice cream in August. It means champagne, Billy, two-hunnerd-dollar hookers every night.”

  Everit Cudlipp had been head of a Special I unit for a year now, manning the taps, listening blearily each day, listening to the dealers, listening to their ladies, listening to their voracious gossip, hearing about the good times. Cudlipp’s long hours of panning for gold sometimes paid off with a few nuggets of information, but his guts wrenched with envy at the knowledge that for some, crime was paying well. He heard tales of money (“beans,” “cake”) passing hands in amounts so large that he began quietly to curse a world where honest men like Everit Cudlipp were forced to accept gifts.

  Cudlipp’s relationship with Dr. Au went back to 1969, when the Surgeon had begun to emerge as a leading importer of number four white heroin from Burma via Bangkok and Hong Kong. The relationship was strictly official: a cop trying to make a crook. Cudlipp watched Au for a few years and finally put together a reasonable case of conspiracy to traffic, charging Au, his mixer, and three of his middlemen. Later Cudlipp sullenly agreed to a deal proposed by the federal prosecutor, following discussions with defence counsel: the middlemen would plead guilty to trafficking, and charges would be dropped against Au and his back end (the mixer, the man who cuts the dope eight to one with manitol and fills the gelatin capsules). Cudlipp was certain that palms had been well buttered and that Au had supplied the butter, but he did not resent Au for that. It was business.

  Cudlipp abhorred some criminal types: child molesters, pimps, political weirdos. But as athletes respect the skills and abilities of high-scoring players on opposing teams, Cudlipp respected the skill and ability of Dr. Au P’ang Wei. After the conspiracy charge was dropped, Cudlipp began to visit Au regularly, and although the visits were official business, Cudlipp enjoyed them. Au always expressed interest in the health, happiness, and financial well-being of his visitor.

  “Drug Enforcement in the States claims you’ve been meeting with some of the Chicago people,” Cudlipp said on one occasion.

  “Corporal Cudlipp,” Au replied, “one who acts upon rumors is, in our words, chasing the wind and catching the shadow.”

  “They say the meet was in Vancouver, at the airport Hyatt. A mafioso captain and a couple of strong-arms, Dr. Au. They were being followed.”

  “No doubt I was mistaken for another, my friend. I have heard that we all look alike to Westerners. At any rate, the agents of the DEA cannot find a door in an empty room. I am relieved to know that in this country the police, so well represented by yourself, have a reputation for being more efficient, and for being fair as well. In the United States of America, by comparison, one may not adjust his hat under an apple tree or tie his shoelaces in a melon patch without suspicion attaching to him. Please sit awhile. You are on duty; therefore, I shall offer you only coffee. You must bring me up to date upon the atrocious demands being made upon you by your wife. Perhaps I can sweeten the coffee. There is an excellent brandy . . .”

  The friendship grew. So did Cudlipp’s bank overdraft. He was up to his armpits in debt from misadventures with penny stocks and owed fat sums to his ex-wife. Ultimately he decided that his current financial needs might be met through the discreet sale of valuable information to Au, and he knew he possessed in Jim Fat the vehicle to perform the task.

  More than a year earlier, Jimmy Wai Fat Leung had been unlucky. Armed with information from a disgruntled customer of Jim Fat, Cudlipp was waiting near a railway-station locker when the little dealer came by to secrete a pound of uncut heroin. Cudlipp cheerfully took him in tow and in a discussion over coffee told his suspect that for such amounts the practice of the judges was to send Orientals away for life. Jim Fat, a family man, agreed to exchange information for clemency. The two men began to meet regularly.

  For several months Cudlipp so damaged Au’s business that the street price of heroin was driven up by ten dollars a capsule. The result was a junkie panic, a fifty-per-cent increase in house break-ins, and the death of three shopkeepers who unwisely ignored the danger of guns held in shaky hands.

  Cudlipp basked in a brief resurgence of former glory, but his bank manager was unimpressed. So he called again upon the services of Jimmy Fat. The offer was this: if Jim Fat would take a small package and place it under the driver’s seat of Au’s Continental, he would be released forever from the threat of prosecution for his pound of heroin.

  That was insufficient inducement. Jim Fat feared the Surgeon’s knife. But Cudlipp’s ace was this: Jim Fat’s parents had recently arrived from Hong Kong as immigrants — after he had made suit to the immigration department, guaranteeing they would not be a burden on the state — and Cudlipp made Jimmy Fat know that if he did not help, not only would he go to jail for life, but his mother and father would return to the colony in disgrace, and the wan face of Jimmy Wai Fat Leung behind the screen of a visiting room would be their memory of their favorite son and provider.

  So Jim Fat took the deal.

  Without giving away too much information, Cudlipp assured junior narcotics officers on his team that he had been tipped that Dr. Au, upon entering his car, would be found in possession of heroin, enough to end his career. The heroin had in fact come from exhibit locker 3-C, maintained by the Southeast Asia heroin section, RCMP.

  There was little likelihood of Cudlipp’s transgression being bared. Exhibits went missing all the time, for one reason or another. But it was wise to be careful, because the brass were currently trying to keep the force’s collective nose clean while royal commissions inquired into police practices. However, no one was going to miss four ounces from a two-pound bag. Once weighed, amounts were never questioned.

  The deed done, Cudlipp called Au, and they agreed to meet at his office.

  “There is a sadness about you,” Au said. “Does your personal situation continue uncomfortable?”

  Cudlipp told him his wife had won a court order for arrears of maintenance. That had come on top of some losses in private speculations. He also said an investigation was under way which would almost certainly result in Au’s arrest, but exposure to risk might be avoided. Au inquired as to the extent of Cudlipp’s obligations to others. The policeman would be able to make ends meet with twenty-five thousand dollars.

  The safe was opened. Bills were counted out. Cudlipp gave information. The young policemen working under him were likely, he said, to withdraw surveillance from the automobile after two or three days.

  That automobile, said Au, was always kept locked, and only a selected few had access. Would the officer care to speculate as to how entry into it had been made?

  Cudlipp regretted that such matters involved confidential police information. Au went back to his safe.

  The twenty-five thousand dollars in hand would pay Cudlipp’s current debts. Forty thousand more, given to his wife as a lump sum to satisfy all future claims, would free him forever from her mercenary grip.

  Au paid ten thousand dollars down. They talked.

  A few days after Jim Fat’s death, an envelope containing the further thirty thousand arrived at Corporal Cudlipp’s door.

  “. . . With all these suckers getting scooped, there’s gonna be a panic around here with the whole town’s veins poppin’ out.�
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  “Well, can we get something out on the street by tomorrow?”

  “There’s the pound those jokers delivered, but they tried to whiz me.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “It’s a choked pound.”

  “You sure?”

  “My calculators don’t corrupt, man. They took the hog. There’s a unit short. They came by in their old beat-up frapped car and just threw it at me.”

  “Well, Jesus, a guy best make what best ventures.”

  “Yeah, we’ll get the pound up fast, cut it all down by tomorrow. . . .”

  Cudlipp made notes while his stomach rumbled. Tonight he would lie in the arms of his sweet waitress, who would have cold beer waiting for him in the fridge. She would talk with him about going farther down the road with Dr. Au. About how far they would go. And what price they would ask.

  Friday, the Seventeenth Day of February,

  at Eleven O’Clock in the Morning

  The secretary heard gasping, the noise of turbulent wrenching of the throat, muted behind the closed door, and she felt her own throat muscles constrict in sympathy. It sounded like the dry retching of a man whose guts had been emptied of all loose matter. Each day it got worse; each morning at nine when the boss arrived at the office, his face was more ashen, his lips more the color and consistency of chalk, his eyes more red and damp. Two weeks ago, when she had first started to work for him, he had looked well enough — at least he did not throw up — but in the last few days he had gagged and retched for two or three hours at a time. And yet by noon he would emerge from his office in good condition, talking to her in that clipped, cool way of his: casual, relaxed, confident.

  She had known alcoholics before, but none as strange as Mr. Cobb.

  She had little to do and was bored. Cobb was a trial lawyer with an empty waiting room. She knew he had been a prosecutor for twelve years, and she recalled seeing his name in newspaper accounts of murder trials. Before he went on the bottle, he had been a courtroom lawyer of high reputation. On his own now, without clients, was he on a downhill run? Was it a mistake to have answered his advertisement? Damn it, he had seemed so capable and self-assured at the interview.