The Wabash Factor

by Howard Fast

  Pulling it out of my memory, “Alfred Gomez Porfetto. Has a wife with a silly name.”

  “Birdie May. Not a silly woman, no indeed.”

  “Who the hell is he, this Porfetto?”

  “A most unusual man, does good works everywhere, friend of widows, orphans, and various organizations for cancer research and such. He has even set up a Porfetto foundation which seeks out worthy young folks who need college support. Horse breeder, sportsman. This, Harry, is extracurricular, not a part of my Wabash investigation except where it links up. I’ve heard a good deal about Alfred through the years. He’s primarily a West Coast figure, very low profile. Avoids publicity when he can. We came across him years ago when we participated in a stock offering of a company that grew fruit, oranges, avocados, and peaches. Southern California. There was no substance, and the stockholders who had put up four million dollars found themselves with peeled fruit, so to speak. It wouldn’t happen today, but at that time every Jack and Joseph was going public. We don’t like to be involved in such things and we rooted around and discovered that Porfetto had sold the land to the fruit company for two million and that he picked up another million out of the stock deal. As I said, he’s practically unknown here, but he has enormous land holdings in California. Sunland City with it’s thirty thousand population is his. He owns the land, the stores, shopping centers, hotels, even the fire company. Only a drop in the bucket. He claims to have been born here in America. He owns one of the largest steel companies in Brazil. His English is faultless, but people who know Spanish told me he is not a Brazilian, not by any means, and that his Portuguese leaves a lot to be desired.”

  “Where do these friends of yours think he comes from?”

  “Santa Marina.”

  “Bingo. We’re well past the hour you offered me, Harvey.”

  “The hell with that. This is the first exciting thing that’s happened to me in years.”

  I nodded and said, “All right, let’s scratch away at it. Myself, I’m just a city cop, but my wife spends a good bit of her life denouncing injustice, and she even feels that the women of today can prevent the world from going down the sewer. One of the things that really sets her going is our intervention in Santa Marina, which she claims is ruled by as vicious a set of killers as ever existed. The word around, she tells me, is that the cocaine and banana business in Santa Marina is controlled by a single family, the same family that operates the death squads, and that a very important branch of that family operates here in the United States, very quietly, very effectively.”

  “We’ve talked about that at our research meetings. Porfetto’s wealth runs into billions, and by the way, it’s a common name in many places down there. But there’s no way to track wealth today. You have numbered accounts in Switzerland, substitutes, washing machines, and of course a whole web of masked foreign interests. We heard that Porfetto sold eight hundred thousand acres of mahogany stand in Brazil. I can’t imagine what the price was—bought by the government with money lent by New York banks—nor have I any notion of where the money went. Why did he want his own boat manufacturer? Obvious enough—if indeed he’s connected with the drug trade.”

  “Why would he be? He has more money than God.”

  “That’s true,” Harvey agreed. “But the dozen or so families who own Santa Marina and run the death squads there base themselves on cocaine. Family loyalty is strong down there. We pour millions into Santa Marina and we’ve been pouring millions into the place, all based on the threat of a communist takeover. Well, part of it is tanks and guns, but untold millions have been poured into the place for food and medicine. Ask anyone who’s been there whether they’ve ever seen a food or medical program backed by us.”

  “What are you telling me, Harvey? That this money has gone to Porfetto?”

  “And the others. Where do you think his capital came from?”

  “That could be, I suppose. Tell me, Harvey, you’re a conservative, a Republican—right?” He nodded. “And you voted for Reagan?” He nodded again. “And you talk about our policies in Santa Marina exactly the way my wife does.”

  “Harry,” he said slowly, “we’re in the money business, and in the money business, you have to be purer than Caesar’s wife. Every day, we buy and sell in the millions, not for ourselves but for others. A customer telephones and tells us to sell ten million dollars of whatnots at a dollar each. Then we owe him ten million dollars. No paper, no written order, not even the whatnots—nothing on either end but trust. We’re not good guys, we’re not bad guys, we’re not for or against justice. We’re in the business of making money, pure and simple. You can do it two ways—with integrity or as a bandit. We don’t like the bandits. Porfetto took us, and we don’t like that. And when you say that he’s running a Santa Marina death squad in the United States—”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “It’s there, Harry. You’ve been pulling teeth for it these past two hours.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no. For the moment, between ourselves. Yes?”

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  Chapter 11

  I USED THE TELEPHONE at the Harvard Club. Public telephones can be a damn nuisance. They’re usually broken or occupied and they mostly share a lack of privacy. The telephones at the Harvard Club were both comfortable and private, and when Harvey had steered me to them, and had shaken my hand and pledged himself to ride by my side, if the need arose, I called Finelli and reminded him about the big cocaine bust.

  “Don’t remind me, Harry. I got medals up my ass. Would you believe it, not even a commendation?”

  “Why?”

  “Because Hallihan, that asshole captain of mine, said that I had broken the proper pattern of procedure. You ever hear of anything like that? He was stuffing his mouth in Foo Ling, that Chinese restaurant over on Broadway, and he claims I should have called him. How the hell did I know where he was, but he was burned up because the media didn’t give him the play.”

  “Joe,” I said, “is this wire naked or do you have extensions on it?”

  “One line. Pure.”

  “Got a few minutes?”

  “All you want,” Finelli said. “Nothing but hookers and transvestites. All of a sudden, we got transvestites, and this big six-foot boy tries to run and he breaks his ankle on the high heels. It’s no lead-pipe cinch, walking around in a skirt and bra.”

  “Hallihan—is he there?”

  “In his office, out of earshot.”

  “Now about that cocaine—”

  “Harry, what in hell’s your interest in the coke? That was two years ago.”

  “It’s come out of the grave, believe me, Joe—”

  “Hold on!” Finelli snapped. “You calling from the station house?”

  “No. Outside.”

  “Your apartment?”

  “No. Outside and as clean as the driven snow.” Now it was my turn to ask what he was driving at.

  “They put a tap on your phone—at the station house.”

  “Come on, Joe, that’s crazy. Why in hell would they tap my desk at the house?”

  “Damned if I know. But I saw Kenelly at a bar last night, and when I asked him what was new over there, he told me that this was going around. Who knows? Why?”

  “The hell with that. Just go along with me and maybe we got a little personal noise to make. Now where’d you take that coke when you removed it from the boat?”

  “Harry, I been through that a hundred times. You saw how it was packed—pound bags, plastic, fifty pounds in a wooden box. We made a checklist in triplicate right there on the boat and then we put it into our own panel truck. You saw it, I saw it, five other guys saw it and swore to it.”

  “Yeah. I left you there and went across town. You took the coke to the station house, right?”

  “Right. I wanted to drive the stuff right down to the property clerk’s room at Police Plaza, but the others said no, don’t do it because Hallihan is such an asshole about procedure; he’ll kick
ass because we didn’t check every bag at the station house and then call downtown and see if our cops wanted custody or whether the feds should have it. So we took it to our house and we stored it in the property room until the narcs could test it. They ran their tests, and by the time it was finished and we called downtown, the guys at Police Plaza said that it was late and the driver of the property truck had gone home and it wouldn’t make any difference if we shipped the stuff down there tomorrow, but actually what they wanted was time to call the media and see themselves on TV. So we left the stuff overnight in our property room.”

  “Where is your property room? Downstairs behind the desk?”

  “No, we ain’t got your class. We use a big old closet that opens off the captain’s office.”

  “And what happened next day, when the truck came from downtown?”

  “The media came with them,” Finelli said. “These days, everyone is in competition for the media. So we gave them the coke and they took it downtown.”

  “How? I mean what happened when you knew they were there for the coke?”

  “Nothing. Hallihan opened one box, handed me a bag, and said try it. He said he wanted to know that none of those clowns downstairs had been tampering. I ain’t got no equipment, I tell him, but he says take a little and that I’m no stranger to coke. It was coke. No doubt about that. So we tied up the bag, put it back, nailed down the box, and I yelled downstairs for the guys from downtown to come and pick them up. Now what the hell are you making of this, Harry?”

  “I’ll tell you, Joe. Put a few guys out in the neighborhood, very quiet, good guys you can trust, and see whether they can find a big buy on powdered sugar two years ago. It always comes in small boxes, so someone might just remember a real big buy.”

  “You got to be kidding.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Jesus God, do you know what you’re putting to me?”

  “You’re an old, hard-nosed cop,” I told Finelli. “If it’s bullshit, put it in the bullshit basket and forget about it.”

  “What in hell’s going on? They tap your phone, they try to kill you on the highway—what in hell is going on, Harry, and how does it connect up with the coke?”

  “I don’t know—yet.”

  “It’s two years.”

  “So it’s cold and you forget about it. It’s just a thought.”

  I put down the telephone and left the Harvard Club. Nice lunch, I said to myself. It would be nice to be able to drop into a place like this every time the mood took you. It would be even nicer to come out of there and not have to say to yourself that maybe it’s the last time. I walked uptown. I mentioned before that a police lieutenant doesn’t walk. He rides; wherever he’s going, he has to get there quickly. I’d walked more these few days than in three months past. At 59th Street, I swung west, and at Central Park West and 72nd Street, I went into the old Dakota and rang the bell at Dr. Jacob Miller’s apartment.

  Dr. Jake, as my kids called him, had lived in the Dakota forever or anyway before all the movies were made about the apartment house and before the apartments cost a million dollars each. We found him when Fran became pregnant with Gavin, and he has been the family doctor ever since. He is the only physician left in the city of New York who still makes house calls and who doesn’t take Wednesday off to play golf. There were only two patients in his waiting room, and when the nurse told him I was there, he managed to see me only thirty minutes later.

  Jake was a small man, very small, white-haired and equipped with the last pair of rimless spectacles extant. He studied me carefully, motioned to a chair, and said, “Nu, Herschel, how is the crime business?”

  “To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, God must love criminals, he made so many of them.”

  “Possibly. All our notions of God are open to revision, like everything else. What hurts?”

  “Nothing, thank God. This is no time for me to be sick. I come to you for enlightenment. Can you give me ten minutes?”

  “Sarah, Gavin, and your wonderful redheaded wife?”

  “All good. Fine. I don’t want to waste your time, Jake.” And then, I went on to tell him, as concisely as I could, the circumstances of the deaths of Stanley Curtis and Asher Alan.

  When I finished, he said, “So what are you asking me, Herschel?”

  “I think they were murdered.”

  “Oh?”

  “Could it be?”

  “Herschel,” he said gently, the only one aside from my mother who called me Herschel, “sure it could be. We live in a time of great killing. Perhaps it has always been that way, but communications were not very good. We only knew what happened close to us. Ah, enough of my drugstore philosophy. Instead we’ll go to the drugstore and talk about pargyline. Pargyline—” He spread his hands. “Why pargyline? There are a dozen prescription drugs where a double or triple dosage taken for a week will kill. I don’t think it was anything they ate in the restaurant. Maybe just salt, and that was the straw that did it. Restaurants load their food with salt. Maybe a double dose of pargyline. But there are so many miraculous, important prescription drugs that given a double dose can cause stroke. Nobody questions the doctor. Thank God most doctors are decent people. Could you ever convict a doctor who said it was a mistake?”

  “But both in restaurants?”

  “A coincidence. You know, a lot of people die in restaurants, too much rich food, too much salt, too much drinking—and then all of a sudden, a heart attack. Once I went on a cruise with Elsie. We were going to have a quiet beautiful vacation. Never again. Every other night, after a huge dinner, at eleven o’clock, they served a buffet, corn beef, ham, smoked salmon, caviar, smoked turkey, pilaf, herring, all these delicious salty things. Every night the passengers stuffed themselves and washed it down with beer or wine, and every other night or so, I was awakened at least once to help the young ship’s doctor with one or two heart attacks. So you see, guns like that nasty one in your belt are not the only lethal things.”

  Nevertheless, guns are lethal. I was on foot and alone and untracked in the belly of a great city, and I felt good because there was no way they could know where Fran was or where I was. I was so relaxed that my brain stopped working and it never occurred to me that they knew sooner or later I’d come back to the station house, and that if they put a few men on the cross streets and on the avenues leading there, they’d have me. Also, for the first time, I began to realize that I was not the kingpin of what was going on, but had simply stepped into the middle of work in progress. As far as they were concerned, Fran and I were simply nuisances that had to be eliminated. But that idea was only beginning to dawn on me. What happened three blocks from the precinct house was the first edge of the dawning.

  It was not the kind of hit-and-run that the mob engages in; it was paced, cool and deliberate. I was walking east, three blocks from the station house, when at the other end of the street a man stepped out of the doorway of a fairly posh apartment house, spun toward me and raised what looked like a very heavy automatic, a Mauser or some such gun. I didn’t have time to observe the gun. A number of things were happening simultaneously, and as they say, I went with the action. When the man appeared, the first moment of his appearance, something triggered my warning system. He was a good shot, an incredible shot, and in spite of the fact that I leapt aside, that first shot took a tiny bit of skin from my earlobe. I was down on my knees as he got off his second shot, and it went over my head. At the same moment, a private school, located on my side of the street and between the shooter and myself, erupted, pouring nine and ten-year-old boys and girls into the street, who saw the man with the gun and who began to scream. The last thing in the world that I desired at that moment was to pull out my own gun and shoot back. On target, I’m the best shot at the precinct, but still I might hit one of the kids. A long shot, and kids running every way. It was just no good. I crouched and ran for the corner. No more shots. I swung around the corner, pulled up against the avenue side of the corner building, d
rew my gun and gripped it with both hands. I was about four feet from the corner of the building. He would come on this side or across the street: either way, I’d have no more than a fraction of a second lead before he saw me, either my first shot or his.

  The next hundred seconds or so were interesting, but I would not want to live through them again. He didn’t come. Instead, after two minutes or so, I heard the sound of our patrol cars. It was an absolutely beautiful response. We can do it when we have to.

  Toomey got out the first-aid box and patched up my earlobe. “It’s bleeding, but it’s just a nick. You don’t want to go to the hospital, do you?”

  “Good God, no.”

  “Well, it ruined your jacket, Lieutenant. Scars of the wars, but what makes me feel good is the fact that the bad guy missed you. Who was trying to ice you?”

  I shook my head hopelessly.

  “He’s going to ask you,” nodding at the captain’s office, and at that moment Courtny opened his door and yelled, “Golding, get your ass in here!”

  “Sweets for the sweet,” Toomey muttered.

  I marched into Courtny’s office. He didn’t ask me to sit down. Instead, with a note of utter disgust, he said, “What happened to your ear?”

  “A guy with one of those big old automatic pistols, the kind that can stop a tank, took two shots at me. One nipped my ear.”

  “I know that much. What am I, a spectator here? God damn it, Golding, it’s time you learned that I run this place.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “Now what the hell does that mean?”

  “A stupid remark. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. If I am talking strange, it’s because for the past week people have been trying to kill me.”

  “What was this creep who took a shot at you? A mugger, a mob guy, or what?”

  “A hired pro. Maybe Percy Lax.”

  “Come on, how do you know that?”

  “Because I been in this business seventeen years. Who else carries cannons? And I hear Lax is our local tourist.”