The Sinister Pig jlajc-16

by Tony Hillerman

  Even the schedule for today was already offbeat. On his notepad he listed an agenda of problems to be dealt with:

  1. War on Drugs. Haret?

  2. Chrissy. Budge.

  3. Reassure Bank, call V.P. for M.C.

  4. Four Corners. Mex lawyer.

  Come to think of it, the e-mail concerned all the same problem. Everything but Chrissy. And now Chrissy had been handled properly and neatly, with no residual loose ends left to complicate matters. He drew a line through “Chrissy. Budge.” and renumbered items 3 and 4, making them 2 and 3. He could draw a line through chrissy because in that one he had kept control himself. He had assigned it to a man who was solidly, and stolidly, under control. A valuable keeper, Budge. But the other three problems had all grown out of assigning jobs to people he had no handle on.

  He had assigned a really important project to people he was never sure he could trust—either for honesty or competence—because he didn’t have a hammer held over their heads. As a result 3,644 pounds 11 ounces of his cocaine, neatly packaged in one-liter Baggies, had been loaded on a rusty trawler at Puerto Cortez in Belize, and the trawler had blown its old diesel engine. He had the trawler towed into a wharf at Vera Cruz, sent one of his A.G.H. Industries lawyers flying down there to arrange a secure way to get the coke into the A.G.H. warehouse outside Mexico City. All that represented more than $400,000 in needless costs, and at least a hundred hours of his own time. The cost of developing a secure way to get that coke out of Mexico, where it was worth maybe $5,000 a liter, into the U.S. market, where it was selling for $28,000 a liter as of yesterday in Washington, was even more expensive. That ran into the millions, and it wasn’t over yet.

  Winsor made a deprecatory clicking sound. The retail price in the District of Columbia had dropped $2,000 a liter in just two months, the slide starting as soon as that move to legalize medical marijuana began looking serious. If the bill passed, the fear of genuine federal control of all narcotics would spread, sending the wholesaler’s price to the bottom. There was too much big money against it to keep even that mild little marijuana bill from passing now, he was pretty sure of that, but even the fear of it was already costing him. He did the math in his head: 3,644 pounds, at 2.206 pounds per kilo, made 1,656 kilograms. The $20,000 per kilo he could now count on in bulk price to wholesalers would bring in $33 million if the value held. He had less than $9 million invested so far. Even if he wrote off the trawler as a total loss—which it probably would be—the deal would be a big winner. And most of the remaining expenses were in a capital property, repeatedly useful if he stayed in the importing business. If he didn’t, he could rent it to other importers.

  He leaned back, away from that, and thought about Budge. It was unfortunate he hadn’t known him well enough when this all started to understand what a good hand he was. He’d taken him in partly because he could fly the company plane as well as drive, and mostly because he had a handle on the man, and Budge knew it. Budge could have taken the company’s yacht down to Belize, loaded the coke onto it, and sailed right up the Florida coast to the A.G.H. dock south of Jacksonville.

  A thoughtful man, Budge. Perfectly efficient. No residual messiness left behind to nag you. Clean cut. Done with. Just as the Chrissy problem was done. Thinking of that cheered him up.

  Budge had rolled Winsor’s limo into the driveway of the town house this morning exactly on schedule, and stood there, holding the door open and smiling so calmly Winsor had wondered for a moment if he’d actually done the job.

  Physically, Budge was the sort of man Winsor had dreamed in his boyhood he could become: six foot plus, quick, graceful, agile, with a handsome, tan, intelligent face.

  Winsor had said: “Well? How about Chrissy? Did it go well?”

  Budge had laughed and said: “Boss, I’m hurt that you even asked me such a question. Chrissy bothers you no more.”

  Problem solved.

  The War on Drugs problem wasn’t so easy. It had to be won over and over again as long as he stayed in the importing business. The sensitive subcommittee session dealing with that war was opening just about now. Haret should be there representing Winsor’s interests. Winsor’s interest was in keeping the War on Drugs alive, well funded, and managed with the same bungling incompetence that had filled the prison system with bottom-level dealers and users, and left the big operators untroubled and the price of cocaine and heroin profitably high. Not much in pot. Nickels and dimes. But it was on the list of “controlled substances” and had to be protected.

  His grandfather had fattened the family fortune handling whiskey shipments during prohibition. Repeal destroyed that industry, put booze in licensed liquor stores, taxed it to death, and took out the profit. If the country actually “controlled” pot, the next step would be to actually control cocaine and heroin where the money was. That would happen some day. Winsor had decided that once he got this shipment safely into the country he’d consider dropping out of the trade.

  Haret understood all that. But would Haret be working at the committee meeting? Would he be alert? Winsor had seen Haret at the French Embassy party last night heavily into the champagne. Worse he’d seen Haret on the moonlit balcony outside the ballroom passing a snort of cocaine to the pretty little senatorial assistant he had brought with him. Poor place for that. Poor judgment. Winsor had known Haret since their days at Harvard Law, but he’d have to find another lobbyist. Too bad Haret wasn’t another Budge.

  Winsor sighed. Back to problem 4, now numbered 3. He reread the printout. “Your ‘cause for alarm’ is now dealt with.” Only that. Winsor remembered the argument and his anger at the obtuseness of his man in Juarez.

  “I don’t want to hear any more ‘maybe this’ and ‘maybe it’s only,’ ” Winsor had told the Mexican. “Having someone snooping around makes me uneasy. It is cause for alarm. Deal with it.” The Mexican’s answer had been a moment of telephone silence, then a chuckle, and his man had said: “This nosey fellow is causing you alarm? OK. Shame on him. We will deal with it. Mark him off.”

  Winsor hadn’t liked the sound of that nor the sarcasm. He liked this terse e-mail note even less. He thought about responding with an e-mail question. Perhaps “How?” or “Explain.” But the Mexican might be stupid enough to be overly precise and he didn’t want that “how,” if it was what he suspected, to be in print anywhere.

  Then he thought again of the erasure of his Chrissy problem. That restored some of his good spirits.

  In the limo, he had slid the panel open and asked Budge for the details. Budge had chuckled.

  “Boss, are you getting careless? I’m always speech less in this car.” With that he handed a folded sheet of paper back over his shoulder through the panel.

  Budge’s attitude about not talking business in the limo was an argument Budge had won.

  It had gone like this:

  Winsor: “Why not. You keep it locked and garaged. Nobody could get to it to get a tap into it.”

  Budge, smiling at him: “Except you, Boss.”

  Winsor, frowning: “What the hell you mean by that?”

  Budge, still smiling: “Think of me at a grand jury. I’m under oath. I am facing a possible perjury indictment. The prosecutor asks me—”

  Winsor: “OK, I see what you mean.”

  Now Winsor opened the folded note.

  Arrived at 9 a.m. Subject was ready with small suitcase and purse, smiling, giggling. Insisted on chattering.

  At airport, put subject in back of plane. Used chloroform while buckling subject in. Went on autopilot off coast at 8 thousand. Used a bit more chloro. Removed subject’s duds. Added that to the stuff in her suitcase. Put in two lead ingots. One ingot in purse. Flew deep water. Ejected suitcase and purse. Flew to ten miles, assured no air or watercraft in sight. Ejected subject. Windexed all points in aircraft possibly touched. Landed. Went home.

  Ejected subject.

  Winsor flinched at that. Glanced up at the back of Budge’s head. Had the man looked bac
k to see Chrissy’s body falling? In his own imagination Winsor saw it tumbling toward the water, saw the splash. He shook his head, erasing the image. This wasn’t like him, this sudden sentiment. But Chrissy had been with him more than a year. They’d had great times together at his place in Florida while his wife was doing her annual London-Paris-Milan fashion-shopping binge. But Budge had known her only from the times he’d been sent to pick her up or drive her home. No reason for sentiment. Quite different situation for Budge.

  Winsor had moved across the seat to a position from which he could see Budge’s face in the mirror. His expression was relaxed, unreadable.

  Winsor leaned to the intercom. “Did you look back? Watch her fall?”

  “What?” Budge sounded surprised. “Why? Something falls out of an airplane, there’s no place to go but down.” Then Budge shook his head. He had been smiling.

  Winsor considered that.

  Winsor compared it with his own reaction. Well, he hadn’t had the sort of experience Budge would have gone through flying for the Guatemala military, or whoever he was flying for, in that endless war against that country’s crop of rural rebels. Budge had never talked about that—at least not to him—but it must have been pretty heavy stuff to get him a place on the Human Rights investigators’ list of government war criminals. Unless the CIA arranged that when they needed to get rid of him. Something to keep their handle on him. No doubt lots of indiscriminate killings went on in those rainy mountains. Anyway, it had all worked out well for him. The CIA had gotten Budge out of Guatemala, into Washington, and onto the payroll of one of a war hawk congressman’s committees as a temporary. And Winsor had made a powerful friend by hiring him as a favor to the congressman.

  It had proved to be a favor to himself. A man he could count on to get a job done right. And a man who could be trusted, too—as far as Winsor could trust anyone. And Winsor could trust Budge because he came with a gun at his head and Winsor’s finger on the trigger. All Winsor had to do to draw the line through Budge, just as he had drawn it through Chrissy, was call a certain man in the Secretary of State’s office, who’d call the Guatemalan Embassy, and Budge would be flying south in handcuffs to a Guatemala jail. Of course Budge knew this. Thus Budge was trustworthy.

  Budge, smiling still, was tearing the note in fragments, which he put into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Endlessly careful, Winsor thought. Burly as Budge was, even with Chrissy being a little thing, she might have been hard to handle in the close quarters of his Falcon 10. Bringing along the chloroform to put her to sleep was smart. Why take risks in a little plane. A dependable workman, Budge. Then he had another thought and spoke into the intercom.

  “You told me you had five of those lead weights. You mentioned three.”

  He heard Budge sigh. Then he stuck up his hand, snapped his fingers, said: “Gimme some paper.”

  Winsor clipped the notebook page to the clasp on his fountain pen, handed it back through the window. Budge scribbled and handed it over his shoulder.

  The scrawl read: “Wired to cuffs on wrists.”

  Winsor relaxed into the comfort of the limo seat. Pretty girl, Chrissy. Fun. Had she really gotten pregnant? Maybe. Anyway she was strongly into marrying him. Determined. Making lightly veiled threats. He had imagined her running, tears falling, to tell his wife. Not that Margo would have given a damn. But it would have given her a huge advantage if she wanted to divorce him. And Margo represented old money, and big money, and good connections. Even better than his own.

  He’d miss Chrissy. But Vassar, and Bennington, and Smith, and Holyoke, and the rest of them turned a new crop out every spring. Smart, stylish, good families—everything. But he’d wait a bit before he’d adopt another one. That problem was solved. He’d concentrate on solving the others before hunting himself another congressional intern.

  5

  Captain Largo’s instructions on the subject of cooperation with the FBI were clear and emphatic. “When you have to work with a Fed, use his car, not ours.”

  That explained why Sergeant Jim Chee was sitting in the passenger side of a dark blue Ford sedan, with Special Agent Oz Osborne of the Federal Bureau of Investigation behind the wheel. The automobile, a type favored by the Bureau since as far back as memory went, had been parked all morning amid an infinity of sage brush on the slope above the Huerfano Trading Post. It was a pleasant location with a fine view of the business establishment below, of traffic speeding along New Mexico Highway 44, of Chaco Mesa far to the west, and the sacred Turquoise Mountain rising against the sky beyond that. North. Visible through the side window were the towering walls of Huerfano Mesa.

  The view was why they were there, with the focus being on the trading post and the highway. Their orders were more detailed than Largo’s had been.

  If an old pale blue Volkswagen camper van showed up below them—either emerging from Navajo Route 7500, which wandered through the Bisti Oil Field, or on U.S. 44, they would drive down to the highway, stop the van, and check the credit cards of everyone in it. If anyone had Visa card number 0087-4412-8703, made out to Carl Mankin, this person would be held. Osborne’s superior in Gallup would be immediately notified. The van occupants would be taken to Farmington and held for questioning. If no one had this credit card, all would be taken into the Huerfano Trading Post, and the employees there would be asked if any of them resembled the fellow who had stopped at the post in the blue van on two recent occasions buying gasoline with the Mankin card in the “pay at pump” computer, which didn’t ask for card-owner signatures.

  If store employees didn’t identify anyone, Osborne would inform his boss, hold everyone, and await further instructions. Chee didn’t like that. In fact, there was a lot of this duty he didn’t like. For example, Agent Osborne’s tight-lipped attitude about it. Well, he’d try again.

  “If you were a gambling man, Oz, about what would be the odds this guy shows up in his Volks?” Chee asked. “Or has that credit card, if he does show up?”

  Osborne was listening to some sort of music on his tape player headset. He reduced the volume, shrugged, said: “Very slim. Highly unlikely.”

  “Exactly,” Chee said. “So having us out here waiting for this bird with damn little chance of seeing him is another of those things that tells me this Carl Mankin was either very important himself, or had done something very important.”

  Chee paused, glanced at Osborne. Osborne was listening, but pretending not to.

  “I didn’t see that name on your most-wanted list.”

  Osborne shrugged.

  “If somebody stole my Discover Card, and I reported it missing—or if I disappeared myself, hiding out, and was using it here and there—would the federal government drop everything and start this dragnet? I doubt it.”

  Osborne chuckled. “You think one of your girlfriends would miss you?” he said. “How about that pretty Officer Bernie Manuelito you’re always talking about. Would she come back to look for you?”

  Which caused Chee to change the subject of his thoughts. He resumed his fruitless speculation about Bernie, about the real reasons she’d quit the Navajo Tribal Police to become a Border Patrol Officer, and about the letter from her in his jacket pocket, what it had said about the dangerous-sounding work she was doing, and, worse, its absolute lack of any hint of missing him. But Chee didn’t want to talk to Osborne about Bernie. He let the remark pass and went back to the question of Mankin.

  “Or perhaps Mankin was in the act of doing something very important for some very big bureaucrat,” Chee said. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t think,” Osborne said. “Remember? You told me federal employees aren’t allowed to do that.”

  “Come on, Osborne,” Chee said. “Someone big in federal affairs believes this is important or we wouldn’t even know about the credit card. The purchases were recent. Somebody big had to call Mr. Visa himself and get a drop-everything computer check made on that Mankin number. Right?”

  “They don�
��t tell me things like that.”

  “And they still haven’t told you whether they’ve identified our well-dressed homicide victim? Right?”

  Osborne nodded.

  “Let me speculate then. Let’s say the officially unidentified body and the Visa card both belong to Carl Mankin. And Mankin was either a much-trusted and highly ranked agent of something like the National Security Agency, or the Central Intelligence Agency, Drug Enforcement, or our new Homeland Security Agency, or any of the other ten or twelve federal intelligence bureaucracies busy competing with one another, and now his bosses have missed him. And they want to know who killed him? Or, more important, why?”

  Osborne looked at Chee, yawned, and resumed staring out the window.

  “So we’re out here on the off chance that we will catch whoever got off with Mankin’s credit card, and he will tell us something useful.” Chee said. “Is that it?”

  “I wonder who started that notion that Navajos were silent, taciturn people,” Osborne said. “My theory is the killer is the lead scout for a flying saucer invasion and he had to shoot Mankin because Mankin had uncovered their conspiracy to take over our planet? Or how about Carl Mankin is a favorite nephew of the president’s best friend? That sound all right?” He turned off his tape player, fished another tape out of the glove box, and looked at it. “How about James Taylor in Concert? He’s good.”

  “Whatever,” Chee said. “You’re the one who listens to it. And you know what I’m going to do tomorrow, if we’re not still out here waiting for Volks? I’m going to a man I know who accepts Visa cards from his customers, give him this Mankin number, and get him to call Visa for a background check. Then I’ll tell you, and you can pass it along to the top brass in the Bureau.”