Curtis felt his blood rush when Mendes looked up at him: big lost eyes, beaten down with fear, and begging for a friend.
He had him.
“What kind of options are you speaking of?” asked Eduardo politely and in a voice that sounded fractured.
“That depends,” said Curtis. “That depends on how much you would like to stay out of prison.”
Prison, he had said. Not jail. Prison was a much more frightening word than jail.
Eduardo Mendes licked his lips, which suddenly looked very dry.
“I would like that very much,” he said softly.
“I am an accountant by trade, Eduardo,” Curtis began. He made a point of using his first name. “I don’t always see people. I see numbers. I see accounts. I see how those things are linked to one another. I want you to think about who you are linked to, and what you can tell us about those people.”
“Which people did you have in mind?” Eduardo answered immediately. His voice was awfully calm.
Once again, Curtis wished he could consult Jordan.
“I’m talking about people in the drug business.”
“In this country, or another country?”
“In any country.”
The handcuff rattled. Eduardo readjusted himself in his seat. He pulled the chair in closer to the table.
“Specifically, what would you like to know?”
I want to know everything, Curtis thought. And you are going to tell me.
“I would like to talk about what you have been bringing into the country, how you are getting it here, who you are getting it from, and who you are selling it to. We can start with any of those topics.”
“And if I do have a conversation like this, what will you do for me?”
“That depends on your level of cooperation, Eduardo. If you are willing to share a little information, then we may be talking about a reduction in sentence and some asset forfeiture. On the other hand…”
He looked back to Jordan, who was stoically not moving. He sat there with his arms crossed and his back to the wall.
“You understand that I’m not promising you anything, but…” he paused for dramatic effect. “If you give us something big, you could be looking at a walk.”
The handcuff rattled again. He was thinking about it. Mendes’ eyes disappeared from view. His hair was matted with sweat. His shoulders weakened and sagged. Curtis could hear a shoe tapping nervously. He was mostly sure it wasn’t his own.
There was a long moment where no one spoke. Curtis adjusted his chair as nonchalantly as he could. Over his shoulder, he could see a glimpse of an unmoving Bobby Jordan, a man who had never been nervous a day in his life. He was as patient as a mountain. Curtis felt like it was Christmas morning and he wasn’t allowed to get out of bed.
Curtis wondered what the right move was. He had all day and all night and even tomorrow. Eduardo Mendes did not.
Nasty little thoughts had time to sneak into his mind. He had spent years on this, and it all came down to this interview. There were only a few eyes in the room, but many more would be watching. They would be waiting for results. His entire career rested on this case.
“Eduardo,” he said.
There was no response.
“Eduardo.” When he still didn’t move, Curtis spoke anyway. “You could be a very valuable asset to us. Or you could be a solid prize in your own right. You’re not stupid. You know we searched your home. We searched your business. We have all your computers. We have your car. We have your phone. We even have your girlfriend’s phone. We have your accountant. We’re going to get you one way or another. This is your chance to help yourself.”
Nothing. He should be in tears right now.
“Think about yourself and your relationship with people. Are the people who work for you loyal to a fault? Are they blindly loyal? Would they be willing to go to prison for Eduardo Mendes?”
Curtis wondered if he had gone too far. He decided he hadn’t gone far enough.
“Do you think Strasberg is willing to die in prison for you?”
Eduardo Mendes popped up. That got his attention fast.
“We arrested your accountant Strasberg at his office right after we arrested you. We have all of his computers and all of his books. You’re both good to go for money laundering. His signature is on everything. When we walk down the hall and talk to him, he’s going to take the deal and give you up. Then where will you be?”
“Strasberg?” Eduardo asked in a whisper.
“Yes, Strasberg,” said Curtis. He knew he shouldn’t have said it. Something was wrong.
“Strasberg,” said Mendes, and when he did, there was a tiny flicker of life in his tone.
Eduardo Mendes suddenly had a spaced-out wistful look to him. He sat back in his seat and ran a hand through his long hair. A smile began to dance at the corners of his mouth.
Curtis came back at him with his tax documents, spreading them out across the table where Eduardo couldn’t avoid them.
“Arlo Strasberg. Right here. And here. And here,” he said, pointing out the man’s signature on the same page as Eduardo’s. “All of your money was laundered right through him. He has as much to lose as you do.”
Eduardo stretched, as much as he could stretch with one arm chained to the desk, but he stretched, and his joints cracked loudly. Then he smiled broadly, glanced casually at Jordan, looked Curtis in the eye, and very confidently said, “I think I would like to speak to my attorney.”
Curtis felt like it was Christmas morning, only to find that all his presents had been burned in a fire. His Christmas was a charred disaster.
Curtis pointed to a page on the table. “Look at this,” he said to Mendes.
“Agent Curtis,” Bobby Jordan said, cutting him off. “I’m afraid this man said the magic words.”
With that, Jordan stood up, crossed the room, and turned the heavy metal handle of the door. It clicked loudly. Curtis began to quietly gather his things, as Jordan now held the door open for him.
“Agent Curtis?” Eduardo called as they tried to leave. He stopped.
“Was this your first time?”
Curtis stared back at him.
“How do you feel it went?” Eduardo asked.
Curtis dropped some papers from the stack. He’d packed it poorly and in a hurry and while he was distracted, but now he looked as ridiculous as he felt.
“Let me tell you something maybe no one’s ever told you before,” said Curtis. “We don’t play fair. When the feds go through your books, they always find something to hang you for. You or your girlfriend or your friends. One way or another, you always lose.”
Eduardo Mendes smiled. The son of a bitch smiled.
***
Montrose was on them as soon as they hit the hallway with even more bad news. He had a way of subtly abusing pronouns so that the successes were “ours” and the problems were “yours.”
“You,” said Special Agent in Charge Montrose, “have a problem in Interview Two.”
A thin old man sat in the chair. His eyes were red from crying. He didn’t look healthy. His skin was slightly jaundiced and hung loosely from his neck. He was unshaven and had been so for a week or more, from the looks of him.
“Good afternoon, Mister Strasberg,” said Curtis as he sat down opposite the old man. He wasn’t that old, thought Curtis. Not this old. He nodded, however weakly.
“Sir, my name is Special Agent Walter Curtis. I’m with the Drug Enforcement Administration task force. I understand that you are an accountant.” He was speaking too fast. He knew it, but couldn’t stop it.
“Yes,” said Strasberg.
Curtis turned to Montrose, who was looking over his shoulder now. “He’s been mirandized?” Montrose nodded.
“Mister Strasberg, do you have a client by the name of Eduardo Mendes?”
“I don’t know,” said the old man.
His hands were shaking. He was terrified.
Curtis went into th
e files once more and produced one of the documents he had shown Mendes.
“Mister Strasberg, is this your signature?”
“I don’t know,” said the old man.
“Mister Strasberg, I need you to listen to me very carefully. I am an accountant with the DEA task force. We have seized all of your business records. We have records of cash transactions and wire transfers, administered by you, with your signature, again and again and again. Now, you can tell us “I don’t know,” but eventually, you are going to have to answer to this in front of a jury. “I don’t know” isn’t going to be good enough.”
A tear slid down the old man’s face. It slowed Curtis. His heart beat so hard that he was sure his shirt must be shaking.
“Arlo, you’re not the person we’re after, and I think you know that. If you are willing to help us, we can help you.”
Curtis noticed then that Strasberg was chained to the desk, just as Mendes had been, except that his hands were clasped together, fingers interlocked, as if praying.
“Arlo, who is the man you work for?”
“I just want to go home,” said Strasberg haltingly.
“The sooner you help us, the sooner you can,” Curtis said, but the thought raced through the edges of his mind that what he had said might not be true. “Who is the man you work for?” he asked again.
“My father,” said Strasberg.
Curtis turned in his chair to look at Montrose. The boss made a gesture with his hand that said, “This is what we’ve been dealing with while you were gone.” Curtis looked to Bobby Jordan, who gave him nothing.
“Your father?”
“My father is coming to get me.”
Curtis looked at Arlo Strasberg. Curtis had done a background workup on him as well in the course of his due diligence. It was not nearly as extensive as the one on Eduardo Mendes, and it couldn’t hold a candle to the treatise had written on Aureliano Colon. Arlo Strasberg was seventy years old and looked older.
“Your father is coming here?” Curtis asked him.
“Yes. I want to go home now.”
“Mister Strasberg, you can’t go home now. We have you committing tax fraud and multiple counts of money laundering. You’re in a great deal of trouble. You’re going to jail.”
The old man began to cry in earnest now. There was an air of discomfort in the room now. Curtis was completely bewildered.
“Arlo,” Curtis said, trying to get his attention. “How old is your father?”
“I don’t know,” said Strasberg. “Will he find out about this?”
Curtis pushed back from the desk. The door was eight feet away. He wanted to go through it. He wanted to walk out of that door, down the stairs, into the street, and never come back into this place. He wanted to run. He was chained to this case. He was chained to it irrevocably.
“Mister Strasberg,” he heard Bobby Jordan say. “Could I ask you a question?”
Bobby Jordan had come to his rescue. Bobby Jordan had opposed this investigation from the start. Bobby Jordan had told him that Eduardo Mendes was not a drug dealer, was not a big fish, and was not the fast track to success. Bobby Jordan who had wanted nothing to do with any of this spoke up to save him, his voice calm and cool and unflappable as always.
“Mister Strasberg, could you tell me what year it is?”
***
Later, as Curtis sat in the conference room with Montrose and the rest of the team, surrounded by his research and spreadsheets and the montage of Colon’s murder still taped to the far wall in glorious black and white, a memory he tried to forget came uninvited to the front of his mind. He thought of that day on the lake years ago, his family on vacation in New Hampshire, when his father decided that nine years old was far too old to be afraid of the water. Curtis saw what was coming and begged his father not to do it, growing louder and more panicked as his fear became a reality. As he was hoisted into the air, he opened his mouth to scream. Water rushed in before he could make another sound.
“Obviously,” Montrose continued, “today was a significant disappointment.”
Montrose wanted the money. He wanted a cash seizure. He hadn’t been in Texas three years and had no roots here. It was no secret where his sights were set, and he had hoped to put an eight figure seizure on his resume.
“We still have a case against our target, and we will put resources into its continuation as necessary,” he said. Curtis knew he didn’t mean it. There was only one person in this room who would ever touch this case again, and every man in this room knew who that was.
“In the meantime, we are actively seeking new targets. Thanks for all your hard work today.”
Curtis sat still in his chair as they began to file out, and he heard Montrose ask Bobby for a word in private. He was alone and surrounded by years of fruitless effort.
The old man thought it was 1952. They hadn’t even bothered to process him. They called an ambulance and shipped him off for evaluation while one of the Austin cops was instructed to find a relative or, as Bill Montrose had put it, a caretaker.
There was a grainy photo of Colon, just to the top left of the one with his head taken off. He didn’t sneer. There was no intensity about him. He looked benign. He looked like a well-heeled Mexican on vacation, not a drug lord.
Bobby Jordan came back into the room and stood in front of Curtis. “I suppose we ought to talk,” he said.
I am being scolded, thought Curtis.
“I had an aunt,” he began. “I loved her very much. When I was a kid, we realized that after dessert, if we cleaned up any trace evidence, we could ask for dessert all over again and she would happily serve it to us. She couldn’t remember that we’d already had it.
“When she got worse, she would talk about herself as if she were seven years old. Same as Arlo Strasberg there. We found out years later that she had Alzheimer’s and I don’t need to be a doctor to know that Arlo Strasberg has it too.”
He had his hat on his head. It was that same big cowboy hat he always wore, though it always looked crisp and clean.
“You never did any surveillance on Strasberg, did you?” Jordan asked.
“I was all over his books and monitoring his transactions.“
“But you never did any surveillance. You watched his numbers go from this account to that account, but you never watched the man. That’s the difference, you know. The difference between being a cop and being an accountant. I think we learned that today, didn’t we?”
Curtis didn’t know if Jordan expected him to answer.
“Why didn’t you think of it?” Curtis asked.
Bobby Jordan shrugged.
“Maybe I did.”
“You thought of it and never said anything to me?”
Bobby shrugged.
“Did you want me to fail?” Curtis asked.
“Maybe I just wanted you to learn a little bit of a lesson.”
“What lesson is that?”
“That you may be the best accountant in the federal government, and an incredible researcher. But you’re not cut out for the rest of it.”
“What rest of it is that?”
“I think you know what I’m talking about.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
“I’m talking about street work. Hell, Curtis, you’re always talking about your buddy Virgil back in Boston and what a great cop he is. That’s his specialty. And the accounting thing is yours. I think once you recognize that, you’ll find the success you want.”
“What if it’s not the success I want?”
“Then it’s the success you’ll have to settle for.”
Curtis didn’t speak for a while. He avoided eye contact with Bobby.
“You set me up to lose.”
“You set yourself up, kid.” He added the slightest intensity to it. “You over reached.”
“A little guidance,” Curtis said, and as he said it, he knew how defeated he sounded. He still couldn’t stop himself. “A little goddamn guidance
. Was that too much to ask?”
“Maybe it was.”
When Curtis didn’t answer, and it was clear that he had won this argument once and for all and forever, finally, Bobby Jordan walked out and left Curtis alone.
***
Curtis told the Austin cops that he would walk Mendes down to the deputies. They tried to tell him that they had it, but he sullenly replied that it was his mess and he would clean it up himself.
Mendes smiled when he entered.
“Is my attorney here yet?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“Please let me know as soon as he arrives.”
“I will. You won’t be here though.”
A dent appeared in that arrogant smile. Curtis was too tired, too spent, and too distracted to notice.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re still under arrest. You’re on the way to jail.”
“I am going to the police station until my bail is paid. I spoke with my attorney.”
“Your attorney was misinformed. You’re going to prison. Your bail is nine hundred thousand dollars.”
Eduardo Mendes tried to comprehend that number. Curtis didn’t have to look it up or make a phone call. He had arranged it weeks earlier. The bail would be more cash than Eduardo Mendes had on hand, and the prison he was going to had a fearsome reputation. Curtis’ plan had been to steamroll Mendes. He wasn’t tough and he wasn’t street savvy. He was exactly the type of person who would be terrified of one night in prison. When Curtis placed the handcuffs on him, he could feel Mendes shaking.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “I would like to talk.”
“Your lawyer already called us and demanded that we stop speaking with you. ”
Curtis could see him racking his brain for any possible way out of this situation. Curtis had imagined their interview, and in his mind, it had gone differently. It ended with Mendes cooperating. It ended with seized assets, intelligence, and confessions. It ended with Curtis as the star.
“What if I know about a murder?” Mendes said as they entered the elevator.
“I’m sure you do,” Curtis said. Just a few hours past and he would have killed to hear those words.
South of Evil Page 4