by Matthew Iden
I put a smile on my face and went outside with the beer.
Chapter Fifteen
It seemed like a good time to get a hold of Bob Caldwell, the DEA agent who had collaborated with Danny Garcia in the past. The number Bloch had given me rang fifteen unanswered times. I hung up and thought about it. I could try calling later or I could get my ass in gear and actually chase down a lead. So I got in the car, pointed it towards 7th street, and in fifteen minutes I was cruising DC’s somewhat underwhelming waterfront—about a block wide and ten blocks long—looking for a parking space. I squeezed my car next to a parking meter by the Harbor Patrol building, then headed up the boardwalk that fronted the marina.
Bloch had told me “the waterfront” and not much else, so I had to settle for walking up to folks who seemed like they might own a boat and asking if they knew a Bob Caldwell. I got a lot of blank stares until I remembered the name of the boat—The Loophole—and then I had his slip number in a matter of seconds. Trust people in DC to not know a person, but instantly recognize the name of a dog, house, or boat.
I took my time walking down the cement slab boardwalk, admiring what I saw, from dart-shaped pleasure craft to worn-out houseboats. Bumpers and lines squeaked and creaked with the Potomac’s gentle tide and the smells of the crab shacks and fish stalls on Water Street a few blocks away set my stomach rumbling in a good way. If I closed my eyes and ignored the joggers, security helicopters, and the jets taking off from National airport, I could be in a small fishing village on the Chesapeake.
The person who’d recognized Caldwell’s boat told me he was moored at the Gangplank marina, about a third of the way down the waterfront. The pier was fenced off with a security gate, but someone had propped open the chain-link door with a cooler to make it easier to bring stuff down from their car. A static security camera was trained on the entrance. I pulled out my cell phone and tried Caldwell’s number again. Ten, eleven, twelve more rings and no answer.
No sense wasting the trip. I clomped down the ramp and through the gate, trying to look like I belonged. There were scads of boats, though, and I wasn’t sure how to find Caldwell’s. To keep up the illusion for anyone watching, I didn’t want to stoop and stare at the slip numbers. Then I remembered Bloch has said The Loophole was a sailboat. Most of the craft in the slips were pleasure craft or barges, so I headed for the only group of masts I could see.
The first four or five weren’t what I was looking for, though I did appreciate the names: Sea Pub, Roman Holiday, Play Date. The Loophole was the last one I checked, a long, slim sailing yacht, maybe thirty-five or forty feet long. A little ragged around the edges, but at least it appeared used, unlike some of the yachts that still had their white winter shrink-wrap clinging to their hulls like bandages.
There was no one on deck, so I shouted Bob Caldwell’s name at the boat a few times. When there wasn’t any answer, I walked down the graying wooden pier and leaned across the short stretch of water so I could put my hands on the side of the boat. I hunched a bit and peeked inside a porthole, but between the glare on the glass and the fact that the window was tinted, I didn’t see a damn thing.
When I straightened up, there was plenty to see, since there was a gun in my face.
Holding it was a plump white guy with graying hair who had damn near magically appeared on deck. He was in a kneeling position, leaning over so he could cover me. A neat, salt-and-pepper beard ran along the edge of his jaw, or where his jaw would be if he’d been thinner. The perfect line of the beard and his clean-shaven cheeks emphasized the chipmunk-roundness of his face. He wore a Hawaiian shirt with a pineapple and orange-slice pattern on it, khaki shorts, and deck shoes. He could’ve been an insurance salesman on his day off. But I paid less attention to what he looked like and more to the chunky black handgun pointed at my face. The analytical, professional side of my brain tried to ID it—maybe a .45 ACP or an old Browning Hi-Power. It didn’t really matter. The more emotional side of my brain recognized that, at this range, a cap gun could take my head off.
“Who the hell are you?” the guy asked. His voice was hoarse, all gravel and sand, like he’d spent his life as a rock-n-roll roadie instead of a DEA agent.
Keeping very still, with my hands held against the gunwale of the boat, I said, “Marty Singer. I guess Sam Bloch didn’t tell you I might drop by?”
“Who the fuck is Sam Bloch?”
I said, slowly, pacing my words, “MPDC lieutenant with HIDTA. One of the cops on his team, Danny Garcia, was killed a few months ago. He asked me to look into it and said a guy named Bob Caldwell knew Danny from working with him back in the day. He thought Caldwell might be able to give me a handle on what Garcia was looking into before he was taken out.”
The guy seemed to think it over, or that’s what I’m assuming he was doing, since he didn’t blink or even look away for what seemed like a whole minute. My arms started to cramp from holding my weight against the boat. It was like holding halfway through a push-up. I needed to stand or let myself slide into the water between the pier and the hull.
“Is that good enough or do you need something else?” I asked. “A note from my teacher, maybe?”
“You with MPDC?”
“Was.”
“Department?”
“Homicide. Retired.”
“Got any ID?”
I shrugged, no mean feat in my position. “I do, but it won’t mean anything to you. I’m not official anymore. No badge.”
He seemed to think that over with the same fish-eye stare as before.
“Can I at least stand up?” I asked. “My arms are about to fall off.”
“Let’s see that ID,” he said. “Right hand only, slow.”
I reached back, pulled my wallet out, and opened it so he could see my Virginia driver’s license through the little plastic window. I squeezed the wallet, hoping the whole thing didn’t drop into the Potomac with a slip of the fingers. He glanced at it, nodded with a quick jab of his head, then he stood and the gun disappeared under the Hawaiian shirt, though not before his eyes did a quick scan of the dock. All while keeping me in line-of-sight.
“You are Bob Caldwell, right?” I asked, straightening up.
“That’s me,” he said. He stooped to retrieve an aluminum cane that I hadn’t seen while I was busy looking at his gun. He took three gimpy steps towards me, then leaned over and gave me a hand up to the deck. A blurry blue tattoo decorated the inside of his forearm. “Sorry for the rough welcome.”
I heaved myself onboard. His grip was meaty and surprisingly strong. “Do you really not know who Sam Bloch is?”
“I know who he is. I wanted to see if you did.”
“Jesus,” I said. “I’m glad I stuck with MPDC if this is how paranoid life in the DEA is.”
“Hold on a sec,” he said, then limped over to the stairs below-decks. A second later he came back carrying two lawn chairs. He handed one to me, then unfolded and sat in the other with a groan. He’d oriented his chair so he could keep an eye on the docks. His gun had to be digging into his gut, but if he was feeling any pain, he didn’t show it.
“What’s the limp from?” I asked.
He took a second to fish out a pack of cigarettes, tapped the pack until one fell out, lit it. It was a clove and a puff of its sweet, acrid smoke wafted towards me. “Accident. Working on this damn boat. The jib got wrapped around the mast, so I thought I’d scramble up there like a goddamn monkey and fix it.”
“Less like a monkey and more like a gorilla?”
“Shit, more like a hippo. Fell off and landed kidney-first on a cleat. Real smart. Some nerve damage. Don’t know if it’s permanent yet. But I walk with a cane now.”
“Where’s the paranoia from?”
“Twenty years in the DEA,” he said, taking a drag. “Live and learn. Don’t and die. So now I don’t climb masts and I point my pea-shooter at people who try to look in my windows.”
“I called,” I said. “Twice.”
&nbs
p; He shrugged, unapologetic. “Caller ID. Didn’t know your number.”
A small crowd of people walked by on the boardwalk, chatting and laughing, probably late lunchers trying to get crab cakes before the fish markets closed. They were thirty yards away, but Caldwell’s eyes followed them until they were almost out of sight.
“You’re on disability?” I asked.
“For now. The pay is good and the workload is great. But I’m really just killing time until retirement. The day that happens, I’ll throw off the lines, put Jimmy Buffet on shuffle, and sail The Loophole down to St. Thomas. It’s going to take two months and I’m going to love every fucking clichéd minute of it.”
“When’s the happy day?”
“Soon. Second week of July. I’ll finish up disability, take a week’s vacation, then walk in with my papers.” He finished the cigarette in record time, then flicked the butt into the water. Smoke from his last drag wreathed his beard and curled around his head. “You’re retired. What the hell are you still doing around here? Got kids, family? It can’t be the PI work.”
I shook my head. “I’m not a PI. This is a favor.”
“You must owe somebody big,” he said. He folded his hands over his belly, which swelled underneath the Hawaiian shirt. “Anyway, you wanted to ask me something. About Danny.”
“Bloch said you might’ve done some work with him, maybe some liaising between DEA and HIDTA.”
Caldwell’s face flickered, like a light had passed over it. “Fucking Danny. Getting killed.”
“You knew him pretty well?”
He shrugged. “I worked with him on a few cases, though not as many as you might think. It’s all drugs, but our circles didn’t really cross much, you know? He was an intense little dude. Could work a street. I mean work it. He could be a buyer or a junkie or anything in between, just perfect. Me,” he gestured towards his body, “I’m a fat white guy. Maybe I could bankroll a deal or act like a retired hippie who needed to score some weed, but that’s about it. No way I could keep up with him on the street.”
“What did you end up doing, then?”
“Surveillance, trained other guys at HIDTA, helped with some busts when I could squeeze into a vest. Smoothed things over when things got chippy between the DEA and the other agencies or departments.”
“You know what Garcia was working on when he got killed?”
“Bloch doesn’t know?”
I shook my head. “He said Garcia was on a long chain, barely kept him up to speed.”
Caldwell laughed, shook his head. “Big surprise. I haven’t worked with HIDTA in a while, but Bloch is a by-the-book kind of guy. Garcia was the exact opposite. Creative, an artist. Improvised all the time. Street-smart, talked a mile a minute. He probably had no time for Bloch. Fact, I’d be shocked if they touched base more than once or twice a month.”
“Did he ever tell you about the cases he was on?”
Caldwell pushed himself out of his chair and limped over to a cooler, holding on to a bulkhead for support. He pulled out a can of Miller Lite, held it up for me. When I shook my head, he closed the cooler and limped back over to the chair where he fell into it so hard I thought the whole thing was going to snap in half, but by some miracle the nylon and aluminum held. He cracked open the beer and slugged back a third of it.
He shook his head. “Like I told you, I haven’t worked with HIDTA for a while. And, while I got along with Garcia better than Bloch probably did, it’s not like he told me his innermost thoughts.”
“Why would Bloch tell me to talk to you, then?”
“Well, I worked with him more than anyone else at the DEA. Maybe he thought I’d have some insight,” he said. He lifted the can, hesitated, then put it back down. “You know, not sure it’s worth mentioning, but I do know he hated the Latino gangs that had made inroads around here in the last few years. Took it personally, I think.”
“You collaborate with him on that?”
He made a face, jerked a thumb towards his chest. “Forget something? Gringo gordo, remember? We teamed up on the black gangs, crack dealers, the white kids running meth labs out in the boonies. I only know about the Hispanic thing because he talked about it all the time.”
“He hate anyone in particular?”
“Salvadorans. The ones moving into all the Latino neighborhoods, taking over, you know? Those guys don’t just deal drugs and make money, they want to rule the place, own every part of it.”
“You think he might’ve been looking into one of them?”
Caldwell held his hand up. “No idea. I just know he felt that special something for them.”
I nodded, thinking it over. A boat passed by, ignoring the No Wake rule, and the waves it kicked up rocked The Loophole gently from side to side. “You know a guy named Terrence Witherspoon?”
He stared at me, which I realized now was his way of thinking hard about something. Then he closed his eyes and put his head back. His lips moved silently. He opened his eyes and shook his head. “Witherspoon’s common enough, but I don’t know the name, sorry. Should I?”
“Not really,” I said. “It was a long shot.”
“You gotta cover all the bases,” he said.
“True,” I said, then gestured at his arm. “So, how long were you on the force?”
His hand, which he’d raised to take another swig from his beer, froze in mid-air. “What?”
“Your tattoo,” I said. “It’s the old MPDC logo. I’m going to guess you didn’t get that when you went into the DEA.”
He looked down at the inside of his forearm like the tattoo had suddenly blossomed under his skin. “Yeah, it’s been a while. I was a beat cop for three years before I chucked it all to go down to Quantico and try out for the Feds. I thought it would be more exciting than scratching my ass in a cruiser. Big fun.”
“Was it?”
He snorted. “About as much as falling off my mast twenty feet up.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” I said.
Chapter Sixteen
A week after talking to Danny Garcia’s widow, I was back out in Chantilly to talk to his son. Ten minutes into the drive, I found myself whistling “Chantilly Lace” and I realized I’d whistled it the first time out, too. It’s an easy song to hate and impossible to get out of your mind once it’s sunk its claws there.
I managed to clear my head by reviewing the case out loud, sometimes shouting the questions I wanted answers to anytime I had the urge to purse my lips. Why was I driving out here again, exactly? What did I think Paul Garcia would be able to tell me about his father that I hadn’t already learned? Danny had taken obvious pains to shield his family from his work. No, shield wasn’t a strong enough word. Danny had lived a double life. The chances that his son knew something about what he did in the force hovered somewhere between zero and none.
Maybe.
And that maybe was why I was taking the time to drive out to Chantilly. An intense, dedicated family man might feel the need to protect a wife or young children from the brutal realities of being an undercover cop. But what if his son had become a man, served in Iraq, seen calamities and horrors on par with the ones his father had seen? Maybe Danny, accustomed to adopting an entirely new persona at home for years, had decided to open up and share a little of his undercover life with a son who shared similar, if not exact, experiences.
Maybe.
I parked in exactly the same spot I had the previous week and looked the house over. This time, the Bronco was in the driveway behind the Corolla, gleaming in the sun. It had been washed and the asphalt of the drive was stained a dark black where water had sluiced off to the curb. A garden hose was coiled on the grass. It could’ve been a scene of summertime bliss—but the shades were drawn and the home radiated stillness.
I went up to the door and knocked. I heard some bumping around inside. The curtain might’ve been drawn back from one of the windows. I resisted the urge to slide my hand down to my gun where it rested in its holster�
��the instinct and training built up from so many years of knocking on doors where the reply could be automatic gunfire. But I relaxed. I’d been here once already. This wasn’t a shootout in a crack house. I was here to talk.
The door opened. Standing in the doorway, based on the picture I’d seen last time, was Paul Garcia, Danny’s son. He was about five-nine and broad across the shoulders. He seemed chubby, but it was what guys call “hard fat.” To call him clean-shaven was an understatement. He had pale skin that was so devoid of facial hair that it almost glowed, and a Marine-issue haircut that showed scalp. Brown, almost black, eyes stared back at me. He had on a camo t-shirt, Umbro shorts, and flip-flops.
I introduced myself and explained why I was knocking on his door. “You’re Paul Garcia?”
“Yes, sir. My mother said you’d been here before.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m looking into several cases for a friend, murder cases, including your father’s. I wonder if you have a minute to talk?”
He didn’t reply, but stepped back and motioned me into the house, then gestured to the same spot I’d sat in when I’d talked to his mother. Paul sat on the couch across from me. The flip-flops and casual wear seemed out of place when compared to how carefully put-together his mother had been.
He cracked his knuckles, then rested his hands on his knees. “How can I help you, sir?”
“You were in Iraq, is that right?”
“Yes, sir. And Afghanistan. The 24th MEU.”
“MEU?”
“Marine Expeditionary Force, sir,” he said. He almost saluted.
“Your mother said you mustered out recently?”
“Last year, sir.”
“That long? You still seem to be very, ah, Marine-like, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“I applied to the police academy right after I shipped back, sir. It’s a lot like the Corps.”
“Only softer?”
A trace of a smile. “It’s not Camp Lejeune, sir.”