Fields of Wrath (Luis Chavez Book 1)

by Mark Wheaton

  Luis winced at the lie but said nothing.

  “The county assessor assured me the files would be ready to be picked up when I got here from the city. Father Chavez was able to get time away from the parish to help carry them.”

  The receptionist waited for Maria to continue. When she realized it was her turn to speak, she nodded. “I don’t think Janette’s left for lunch yet. She’ll know what to do.”

  “She’ll know where they are?” Maria insisted.

  “She’ll know where they are,” the receptionist confirmed.

  “Great!” Maria enthused. “We’ll wait here.”

  The receptionist rose, seemed to wonder for an instant how it was she came to be hypnotized into this task, then headed back into the office.

  Luis eyed Maria with bemusement.

  “What?” she asked. “They don’t teach you that in the seminary?”

  Twenty minutes later the receptionist returned. She was trailed by a second woman, as well as two young men pushing handcarts laden with banker’s boxes.

  “We’re pretty sure this is all of it,” chimed the receptionist, triumph in her voice.

  “How sure?” Maria snapped back.

  The receptionist was cowed. The second woman, Janette, stepped forward.

  “It’s everything that was back there,” she said. “We would’ve liked to make copies, but as you seem to need them now . . .”

  Maria ignored the tone and nodded to the young men.

  “If you can help us get these to the car, we’ll bother you no more.”

  As Luis watched Janette consider this, even he was impressed with how well Maria had pulled this off.

  Ten minutes later they rolled into a supermarket parking lot a few blocks up from the accounting firm. The pair immediately dove into the boxes. Unlike the ones at the county assessor’s office, these files were in disarray.

  “I can’t find anything in here,” Maria said. “It’s like they just dumped everything in boxes to get rid of us.”

  “That’s exactly what they did,” Luis replied, setting one box aside for another. “Doesn’t matter. If it’s all here, we’ll sort it out.”

  It started small. Luis found a stack of white employee tax forms buried under a stack of returns. They were all marked as having come from the year before. He counted them as he went.

  “How many workers did you say were accounted for last year?”

  “Seventy-one,” Maria remembered. “Why?”

  “I’m up to ninety-one.”

  Maria gasped. Luis realized the thin chance that her brother might not have been involved in some kind of illicit activity had just evaporated.

  “What does it mean?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Luis admitted. “I think we have to keep going. We have to know the whole story.”

  When they finished going through all the boxes, separating the different forms, they’d counted over seven hundred workers white-sheeted through Santiago’s farm that year, over eight hundred the year before, six hundred the year before that, and another seven hundred before that.

  What was worse was they all had foreign passport numbers or civil IDs. They’d all signed in their own handwriting. They’d all filled out the requisite biographical information. To dummy up this many fake people would be near-impossible. But if all these people really were somewhere working the fields of the Santa Ynez Valley, where were they?

  When Luis finally came across one with Odilia’s name, he blanched.

  “Here it is.”

  “I don’t get it,” Maria said. “What’s the scheme here? Why would you fake papers? If you’re using illegal workers, why would you then register them with the state as employees? It doesn’t make sense. How could my brother have died to keep this a secret?”

  Luis thought he finally knew the answer.

  “It’s laundering. But instead of money, they’re laundering people,” he said, paging through a few more of the forms. “If on paper they’re paying all this money out through Santiago’s farm, then they must have been using him as some kind of front. The government thinks all these people are working there, but they’re really somewhere else, likely doing the same job but off the books.”

  “I don’t understand. Why do this?”

  “You hear stories like this all the time. Recruiters trawl through Mexico and South America promising jobs up north,” Luis explained. “‘Don’t be like those pendejos who hop the border only to spend their lives dodging INS,’ they say. ‘We’ll make it legal by putting you right into a job when you land. You just owe us a small fee. And if you don’t have the money now, well, you can work it off when you get there.’”

  “That was Santiago,” Maria said slowly. “He was so excited. He’d been guaranteed a job. But when he called for me, he didn’t want me following in his footsteps. He said, ‘I know people now. You don’t have to go through what I did.’”

  “He already had his own land?” Luis asked.

  “Yeah. I was surprised, but this was my big brother. In my eyes there was nothing he couldn’t do. How did he get it?”

  “That’s the rest of the scam,” Luis surmised. “He probably worked his ass off for them to pay off the debt. But rather than release him, they proposed a trade. He gets land of his own, but he has to work as a front company for them. But that’s the insidious part of the scheme.”

  He held up all the forms with Santiago’s signature on them.

  “Whoever’s behind it gets all the illegal labor they want,” Luis continued. “But if INS or somebody shows up saying this is a big scam, who gets busted? The grower using these hundreds of workers? Or the guy whose name is on all the documents?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Maria exclaimed. “He was being set up.”

  “Probably without even knowing it,” Luis guessed. “Until Annie Whittaker came along and filled him in. That’s when he agreed to expose the whole thing to the district attorney.”

  “And that’s when they killed him.”

  The pair fell silent for a long moment. But then Luis remembered something Maria had said earlier.

  “The buyer for the farm. The one that showed up on your doorstep offering to pay too much. Did they have a name?”

  “The Marshaks. Probably the biggest farming concern up there. Why?”

  Luis didn’t respond, but a theory began percolating in his head.

  PART IV

  XIX

  Jason had been in no mood for a party. His lawyers had called with the bad word from Crown Foods’ legal team. It would be another week before a revised offer was ready. Though they’d insisted it was all clerical, experience told Jason this wasn’t good. Only days before, the same opposing lawyers had made promises about pulling all-nighters and working the weekend.

  One of the Marshak lawyers, a middle-aged man named Burt, was the bearer of all this bad news. “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s something new. They finished their final round of due diligence last month. We duly resolved the issues that came up. They weren’t holding anything back for contingency’s sake.”

  “But right now?” Jason asked. “If it’s from an outside source, they must know we’re down to the wire. Somebody’s trying to sabotage the deal.”

  The sigh on the other end of the line seemed to confirm this.

  “It’s a possibility,” Burt said. “But that it came up immediately after you rejected their original offer suggests inside knowledge. If you’d signed in the room, this would all be moot. Who really benefits by sitting on the information until it’s almost worthless?”

  Jason wanted to present at least a few theories of what the “new information” could be before calling Glenn. He thought about it for half an hour or so, trying to come up with a few ideas, but none surfaced. He needn’t have bothered.

  “I know all about it,” G
lenn said, cutting him off. “Donald Roenningke just gave me everything they have.”

  “What is it?”

  “That’s asking the wrong question,” Glenn snarled. “What’s more important is to find out who gave it to them.”

  “If I could take a look, maybe I could—”

  “I want to send it to my lawyers first,” Glenn countered. “I’ll let you know what they find out.”

  My lawyers, not our lawyers, Jason thought, knowing Glenn meant his personal team.

  “We’ll talk at the house later,” Glenn said.

  “At the house?” Jason asked.

  “Constance’s party?”

  Before Jason could reply, Glenn hung up.

  While he loved his cousin and her children, a party to celebrate the oldest’s graduation from preschool seemed ridiculous. This was on top of an actual graduation ceremony that morning at the preschool.

  He had tried to come up with an excuse, but Glenn’s word was final. Which was how Jason found himself two blocks from his uncle’s multiacre estate, dreading the typhoon of children he’d soon be enduring in the old man’s terrace and gardens. He looked forward to approaching it with a stiff drink in his hand, then remembered how many professional contacts and colleagues had been invited. If Glenn caught him with a drink in his hand, he’d get another lecture.

  A wonderful, calming idea popped in his head like a gift from God. It was accompanied by a pleasant rush of endorphins, and he began to relax. He plucked his cell phone from his pocket and dialed.

  “Hey, where are you right now?”

  A few hundred yards away, Glenn paced through his study, chewing a piece of nicotine gum. He hadn’t smoked in decades but kept the gum around for the cravings. He’d found this box in a desk drawer, and though it had expired over three years earlier, he’d popped two pieces into his mouth and followed them up with a glass of scotch.

  “Are you all right, Daddy?”

  Elizabeth lit into the room in a floral-print dress. Though now in her early forties, to Glenn she didn’t look a day older than the incoming college freshman he’d dropped at Boston College two decades earlier. For someone who lived the mostly charmed life of a billionairess, she was by all accounts a good person. The biggest surprise was her success with men, her husband Phillip proving to be a far more solid citizen than Glenn had given him credit for early on.

  At times he wondered if his son-in-law would’ve been a better protégé than Jason. But he was determined the name on the building remain Marshak.

  “Daddy?” Elizabeth repeated.

  “Fine,” Glenn said. “How’s the party? Are Constance and her friends having a good time?”

  Elizabeth, oblivious to what lay in the two padded envelopes on Glenn’s desk, smiled and took her father’s hand.

  “They’re loving it. Everyone’s in the garden. Come down.”

  “Of course,” Glenn said, giving his daughter a peck on the cheek. “Five minutes.”

  Elizabeth smiled again and left. Glenn poured himself another drink.

  When he came down half an hour later, he took the outside stairs off the study’s balcony, hoping his daughter wouldn’t notice how long he’d stayed in after her exit. As he descended, he lurched forward and had to grab the rails to prevent himself from tumbling onto the concrete below. A waiter sprang to his aid, grabbed his arm, and helped him the rest of the way down.

  “New shoes,” Glenn said by way of explanation.

  The house’s grounds were arranged so that there was an impressive approach in both the front and back. The house was set back from the street a good thirty yards, cars arriving at a rotunda, where they were met with the home’s majestic Mediterranean facade, Spanish-tiled roof, and enough windows to indicate bedrooms in the double digits. But it was on the back patio that jaws really dropped.

  The rear of the house emptied out onto a wide veranda that overlooked a series of tiered gardens that stretched out over eight acres. In it were samples of every kind of plant in the Marshak empire: lemon trees, beds of wild strawberries, and rows and rows of grapevines. Beyond several fountains and hidden within an orange grove was an Olympic-sized pool ringed with cabanas. It was the pièce de résistance of the tour, and Glenn delighted in his visitors’ awe, even though he hadn’t been in the pool for years.

  From the rear terrace he couldn’t see Constance or her friends. They’d probably tired of the activities closer to the house and ended up by the pool. This was fine by him. Fewer would notice if he slipped away.

  The anonymous allegations were distracting him, though not as greatly as a niggling impulse to call Henry. Glenn knew if he got Henry to call up Donald Roenningke, this whole thing would be over. Henry’s word was unimpeachable. If he said there was nothing to the charges, Donald would take it to heart. Signature pages for the Crown Foods contract would be on Glenn’s desk by the next day.

  But this would require Glenn to admit to his brother that he needed him to sort out a crucial matter for the company that he couldn’t do himself.

  And Henry would love that. He scowled.

  There had to be another way. Something he hadn’t thought of yet.

  “Glenn?”

  Someone was trying to flag him down from the side of the house. He considered ignoring them, but the second time they called his name he recognized the voice.

  “Glenn,” said Jason, jogging over. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  Jason stopped short, looking his uncle up and down, and extended a steadying arm.

  “Why don’t you come inside?” Jason asked, lowering his voice.

  “Fuck off,” Glenn growled.

  When last they’d spoken, his nephew had been frantic over the Crown Foods setback. Now he was upbeat, as if nothing had happened.

  “What’re you so happy about anyway?” Glenn slurred, aggravated.

  He looked past Jason and spotted a young woman in an ill-fitting dress. She hadn’t moved from where Jason had left her at the corner of the house.

  “What the fuck?” Glenn bellowed. “What the holy fuck?”

  Glenn lumbered toward her. He didn’t know her name, but he didn’t have to. He’d had more than his share of field girls to know what she was. But bringing her to a party? This was going too far.

  “Jason,” Glenn said, sobering. “What do you think you’re doing bringing that . . . person here?”

  Jason ran to her side, trying to take control of the situation.

  “This is Odilia. She’s a friend. A very special one.”

  Glenn spat in Jason’s face with such violence that Odilia flinched. Jason staggered backwards.

  “Glenn?”

  “Get her out of here!” Glenn seethed, gripping Jason’s arm so hard his knuckles whitened.

  “But Glenn—”

  Glenn twisted his fingers in Jason’s flesh.

  “If you don’t have the mental faculties to understand why bringing her here is a bad idea, take my word for it. Get her out of here right now. And you get out, too.”

  Jason looked ready to protest when Elizabeth appeared on the veranda. Only then did Glenn notice the other guests and hired help had discreetly moved away.

  “Hi, how are you?” Elizabeth said to Odilia.

  Odilia smiled back, but Jason already had her by the elbow.

  “Let’s go.”

  Jason yanked Odilia toward the house. Elizabeth turned to her father angrily.

  “Why did you have to do that?” she asked.

  “Are you crazy?” he shot back. “This family has enough free spirits. If Jason doesn’t start acting more like the next CEO and less like his father, I just might have to go outside the company to find our next chief executive.”

  With that, Glenn headed back into the house, wishing for the umpteenth time in his life that Elizabeth had s
hown any interest at all in the company business.

  XX

  Bullet holes? A sniper’s nest? Laundering illegal workers? Slavery? Crooked cops?

  Michael’s head hadn’t stopped spinning since he’d entered the little café across from the courthouse and Luis started talking.

  “Wait, you said you spent the night in Annie’s guest room closet?” he asked, trying to slow it down a little.

  “I didn’t have much of a choice.”

  “This was in the downstairs bedroom?” Michael prodded.

  “Upstairs. The one farthest from the stairs on the left.”

  Michael nodded. It was a small test but a test nevertheless.

  “And the records? You have them?”

  “My son printed out the bank error,” Maria said, speaking for the first time. “The other records are in my car, both the ones for the people that actually worked at my brother’s farm, but also the hundreds of fake ones that were at the accounting firm across town. That’s why we’re here. We can give them all to you and your team. You can use this, right?”

  Michael hadn’t expected any of this. He’d initially hoped the priest might come back with something, but he’d mostly forgotten about him after hearing nothing for a week. Then came the e-mail threat with the photos of him and Annie. Any thoughts he’d had of resurrecting the case himself were duly vanquished. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

  But this was even bigger than Annie had hinted. It wasn’t just a big case, it was the career maker he’d been looking for. It was clear the targets in the case already had his scent, so he had to keep his distance. Strike only when the opportunity presented itself. Anything else would be career suicide.

  And maybe he could just get to the blackmailer before the blackmailer got him . . .

  “What about the Marshaks?” he asked. “That’s the last piece of the puzzle.”

  “That’s where it gets thin,” Luis said, turning to Maria.

  “Santiago worked in the Marshak fields before getting his own land, land he bought from the Marshaks,” Maria explained. “We located four other small farms in Ventura County with the same pattern of ownership. Marshak field hands worked for the Marshaks for several years, then got farms of their own, though it would have seemed out of reach economically.”