The Nominee

by Alan P Woodruff

  From the way Brochette spoke when describing the plan, White knew Brochette hadn’t told him everything.

  Brochette lowered his head, avoiding White’s probing look, and stared at his desk. After a minute of silence, he continued. “About the time we were putting our plan together, David got busted for possession of marijuana when he was in the Keys. The State’s Attorney was looking for someone the help him gather information on people who were dealing drugs down there. He convinced the judge to give David a choice. Go undercover or go to jail. David agreed to go undercover.”

  “How did you find out about it?”

  “David called his mother, and she called me. I called the state’s attorney down in Marathon and found out the rest.”

  “What happened then?”

  “After the state’s attorney told me about the deal the judge had given David, I called him a few names I now regret. When I finally calmed down, I decided he’d probably done David a favor. We agreed that he would keep me informed.”

  “And?”

  “A couple of weeks later, he called to let me know what was going on. He told me David had connected with Jackson.”

  “Because the Sheriff had picked up David and thrown him into the same cell as Jackson for a weekend.”

  “Yeah.”

  White took a deep breath and did everything he could to control his rage. “Damn it, Graham!”

  “I know. I should have told you, but there was too much at stake.”

  “What could be more important than keeping your son out of jail.”

  “Lucius, you have to understand. I’m part of a multi-jurisdictional task force on drugs. The U.S. Attorneys for all the districts in Florida and some representatives of law enforcement are trying to come up with a solution to a problem that we’re all facing.”

  “And what’s that, other than the drug epidemic.”

  “The information we got that started our investigation turned out to be accurate, or close to accurate. Anyone the drug bosses are afraid will turn state’s evidence were being bailed out, and the crime families take care of their problems.”

  “As in permanently.”

  “Right.”

  “Is that all there is to it.”

  “We can’t prove it yet, but we think some of the state’s attorneys are directly involved in on the arrangement. We’ve identified at least five state’s attorneys who don’t seem to have made very convincing arguments at bail hearings for over a dozen dealers who have made bail and ended up dead.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I’m afraid not. We also think that at least one attorney is involved.”

  “In what way?”

  “This attorney arranges the bail bonds for whoever the drug bosses want released.”

  “The attorney you’re interested in wouldn’t happen to be Richard Barlow, Tom Jackson’s step-father?”

  “How the hell did you know that?”

  “You’re not the only one who knows how to conduct an investigation!”

  “I don’t suppose I have any right to ask, but please keep this to yourself. A lot of people would be in danger it what we’ve discovered became known by any of the drug bosses.”

  “Then I suggest that you start being straight with me.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Starting with how many people know that David was undercover?”

  Brochette ignored the statement and said, “I’m sorry Lucius. My hands were tied.”

  White controlled the urge to say what he was thinking. “I don’t give a damn about that. But I want to know who else knows about David.”

  “Only the U.S. attorneys for the three districts in Florida and our contact at the Department of Justice.”

  “Damn it! Do you mean that Wilson knows David is undercover?”

  “No. Wilson is an assistant U.S. attorney. Only his boss knows about David.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I can only be sure that he wouldn’t have been told. I know his boss well, and I know he wouldn’t say anything to anyone… especially now that he knows David is my son.”

  White waited until Brochette’s breathing slowed. “What else haven’t you told me?”

  Brochette took a final deep breath before continuing. “About a month after David and Jackson got together, we discovered that Jackson was actually involved in cocaine trafficking. We knew we were getting into something more serious than we originally expected. After the arrests in Matlacha we knew David was in over his head. He wasn’t safe in jail, and there’s no way I could have gotten him released without revealing our relationship.”

  “You could’ve told Paul what was going on.”

  “It was too big a risk. We didn’t know who might be involved, and we couldn’t risk anyone finding out that there was an official investigation going on.”

  “And that’s when you came to me.”

  “We could have continued the original investigation,” Brochette said. “But once my relationship to David became known, David was useless as an undercover snitch. We knew we’d never be able to get anyone else to pursue the drug angle on the inside. Then the Attorney General decided we could play it out as a murder investigation. You could stick your nose into anything, and no one would think it was anything more than a routine defense investigation.”

  “I’m beginning to understand why you waited five days before coming to me.”

  “It’s the bureaucracy,” Brochette agreed. “Decisions like that don’t get made overnight.”

  “And you didn’t know anything about Jackson’s father?”

  “I’ve told you, Jackson was our only interest.”

  “And you don’t know about any connection between his father and Congressman St. James?”

  “Other than knowing his name, I didn’t know a thing about St. James.”

  “Well, he certainly seems to know about you, and he’s ready to do anything to block your nomination.”

  “How would knowing about my relationship with David help St. James?”

  “Maybe he expected you to take a leave of absence to defend David. That would have forced you to withdraw your nomination.”

  Brochette exhaled and nodded.

  “When you hired me, instead of trying to defend David yourself, he had to change his plans. He tried to use David’s arrest to embarrass you into withdrawing from consideration. I think that was the problem Congressman Tierney was telling you about.”

  “It’s possible,” Brochette agreed.

  “It’s also possible he dug into your financial disclosures and found out that you hadn’t disclosed the fact that you were supporting a child.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Jack Lancaster said the rumors had something to do with your personal life, and your financial disclosures. At first, I didn’t make the connection because we didn’t know where the problem was coming from. Even though you disclosed your relationship to David at his bail hearing, there was no reason for that fact to go anywhere else. It wasn’t until we came across a connection between you and Congressman St. James that I put it together.”

  “And when it became obvious that those parts of his plan weren’t going to work, he decided to tie me into the murder investigation.”

  “I don’t have anything connecting the Congressman to the murder investigation.”

  “Then who?”

  “I’m still working on that,” White said. “Jackson knew something. I don’t know what it might have been. What I do know is that when he started talking about a deal with Paul Parker, he became a liability. He had to be eliminated, regardless of anything else.”

  “But why frame David?”

  “If Jackson was going to make a deal, and name David as a conspirator, David would have had a motive to get rid of Jackson. If they could pin the murder on David, no one would look any further.”

  “And using my gun created a direct link to David.”

  “Something like that,”
White said. “And while we’re on the subject, how did you discover your gun was missing?”

  “That’s simple enough. I kept the gun in my car, but I knew there would be times that David would be driving the car. If he was stopped for anything, and the gun was found, his bail would be revoked. When we got home from the bail hearing, I went out to the car to get the gun. That’s when I discovered that it was missing.”

  “Before that, when was the last time you saw the gun in your car?”

  Brochette rubbed his chin. “A couple of weeks, maybe a month before. I usually go to the range for some practice at least once a month.”

  “Do you keep your car locked?”

  “At home I do. I don’t generally lock it at the office.”

  “Why not?”

  “We have restricted underground parking in the federal building. I park in a portion of the garage that’s only accessible to the U.S. Marshals, the attorneys from my office and the office of the federal public defender.”

  “What about your staff and the court staff?”

  “They park in a different part of the garage. Their pass cards don’t give them access to our part of the garage, and a guard keeps anyone from just walking in.”

  Leslie interrupted from across the conference table. “As interesting as it is to watch you two play “what-if” games, we still have to decide what to do about Lyle Wilson’s plea offer.”

  “We can’t take it,” White said firmly.

  Brochette looked from Leslie to White. “Why not? With the murder charge out of the way, we can reveal that David was undercover. He won’t face any charges on the drug bust.”

  “Except that dropping the charges is contingent on David telling Wilson what he wants to hear. David doesn’t know anything to give Wilson, so there’s no assurance that Wilson will drop the murder charges.”

  “But if Wilson knows David is innocent, he won’t indict him. Like you said, if he indicts David, he’s giving any other suspect a ‘reasonable doubt’ defense.”

  “Which is why Wilson will wait. He has a rope around David’s neck, and he can pull any time. But he won’t do anything until he has to. That buys us time to figure out what’s going on.”

  For a minute, no one said anything.

  Finally, Leslie broke the silence. “Then I guess it’s time I had a chat with Mr. Wilson.”

  #

  “Wilson was less than thrilled by the news,” Leslie said when she rejoined White, Horse and Brochette in the War Room.

  “He’ll survive,” White said. “But he’s going to be under a lot of pressure. We better come up with something soon.”

  “If it helps,” Horse began. “I’m beginning to think Manny may be right about the source of the cocaine.”

  White looked at Horse and waited. Horse thumbed the eraser on his pencil as he considered what to say. “First of all, we’ve never been able to explain why two kilos were found. We know a drug dealer wouldn’t waste that much on a set-up.”

  “That’s yesterday’s news. Where are you going with this?”

  “Stay with me for a minute,” Horse said. “We also know that only law enforcement agencies would have that much cocaine that could be used in a set-up.”

  White waved his fingers in a “get-on-with-it” motion.

  “I’ve checked with my sources in all the jurisdictions in South Florida. I can’t find any record of that much seized cocaine being used in a sting.”

  “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t.”

  “No,” Horse agreed. “But it does reduce the possibilities. Think about this. If you were running an authorized sting, there’d be a record of your use of seized drugs… but there aren’t any such records.

  “On the other hand, if you were running an unauthorized sting, a lot of people would have to be involved to hide your use of two kilos of blow. You’d be taking a big chance, and whoever is behind this is too smart for that. The fact that there’s no record of seized drugs being used in any sting tells me that the drugs didn’t come from seized evidence.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “There’s one more clue we haven’t been focusing on.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The cocaine they seized was pure, uncut.”

  White was suddenly interested. “Which means it was seized before it got into the hands of any dealer.”

  “More than that,” Horse continued. “I think it was seized right off the boat.”

  White knew Horse wasn’t just guessing.

  “’Bout a month ago, Ah read about a murder in Marathon. Some old guy wandered into a bar during the hurricane. No one paid any attention to him until the next day. That’s when they discovered that he was dead from a knife in the chest. He didn’t have any identification, but a waitress said he tried to say something to her in Spanish. The next day they found the wreckage of a deep-sea fishing boat. The old man’s fingerprints were all over the cabin.”

  “This boat, could it have been a cocaine delivery boat?”

  “It has the range to have come from the coast of a cocaine country. But big-time dealers usually use freighters and drop their goods for fast boats to pick up. The pick-up boats can outrun the Coast Guard, but the fishing boat couldn’t.”

  “And the Coast Guard probably wouldn’t have even suspected it of transporting cocaine. That might have been the idea.”

  Horse did not immediately respond, but his expression suggested that he was thinking about White’s proposition. “Or…,” Horse paused again as if trying the focus his words. “What if a new operation was trying to get started in the trade. Someone who couldn’t afford to use freighters and didn’t have a network to use shore-based pick-up boats.”

  Leslie scowled. “But David Shepard said that he and Tom Jackson used a fast boat to pick up packages that were dropped at sea. That doesn’t sound like an operation that would be smuggling in a fishing boat.”

  “Unless….” White started before pausing and clicking his pen open and closed while thinking. “What if someone in the organization is branching out on their own?”

  “We don’t have any evidence of that.”

  “No, but it’s a possibility we should keep in mind.” White made a note on his legal pad and continued. “What else do you have?”

  “Ah made some calls, and it turns out that authorities had a tip about a cocaine delivery being made in Marathon about the same time as the murder. The official story is that nothing came of it, or the hurricane changed everyone’s plans.”

  “And you think someone intercepted the delivery and kept it?”

  “Not just someone. The DEA and the FBI were responsible. But their activities were being coordinated by Lyle Wilson.”

  White stopped his idle doodling and came to attention.

  “I thought you’d find that interesting.”

  “Frightening might be a better choice of words,” White said.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Everything you’ve said is consistent with something David said about a cocaine pick-up in Vaca Key. He even knew about the old man being stabbed by the Cambodian.”

  Leslie’s face was quickly developing a confused expression. She was beginning to realize how much more complex White’s criminal investigations were than the legal issues she was accustomed to dealing with. But she was determined to show White that she could be an asset. “Are you suggesting that the Cambodian is in bed with Wilson?”

  “Ah think it’s a possibility.”

  “But how. Is the Cambodian feeding information to Wilson, or is it the other way around?”

  “She asks a good question, Lucius,” Horse said.

  White could see where the conversation was leading and didn’t want to deal with it.

  “You were going to look into Tom Jackson’s father….”

  “Richard Barlow.”

  “Yeah. Have you found anything useful?”

  “Ah don’t know how useful it is, but Ah’ve come up
with some things that I think are interesting. Ah’ve done some more digging into Congressman St. James. Who do you suppose the Congressman’s biggest financial backer is?”

  White rocked backward and shook his head as if denying the possibility of a fact would make it go away. “I don’t think I’m going to like this.”

  “Probably not. It’s Richard Barlow.”

  “Damn!”

  “Barlow established a political action committee. He’s chairman of the PAC, and he contributes big money every year.”

  “It’s interesting,” White said. “But a PAC can’t directly support a specific candidate. PACs are limited to promoting issues.”

  “Barlow’s staying within the law, but just barely. The issues his PAC supports are almost word-for-word the issues the Congressman campaigns on.”

  “Is Barlow giving money directly to the Congressman’s campaign.”

  “He’s the Congressman’s biggest individual contributor.”

  “St. James doesn’t represent Barlow’s district, does he?” Leslie asked.

  “No, he doesn’t. In fact, the issues that St. James has campaigned on aren’t even the same issues that seem to be important in the district where Barlow lives.”

  “I don’t get it. Barlow doesn’t live in the district St. James represents. And Barlow doesn’t seem to have any connection to St. James’s former employer where St. James could help him? Why is he such a big campaign supporter of St. James?”

  “That,” White said, “is one of the things we have to find out.

  27.

  “I’m in the kitchen,” White called as he heard the elevator door open. The sounds of a John Coltrane recording wafted through the apartment accompanied by the sound of a knife striking the rock maple of the cutting board on the pedestal island in the middle of the kitchen.

  “Ah. Onions,” Leslie murmured.

  “If you knew as much about food as you know about sex, you’d know that these are shallots, not onions,” White said. “Onions go on hamburgers, or on bagels with cream cheese, lox, and capers. They don’t go into my famous chicken excelsior.”

  Leslie made no secret of the fact that she was domestically impaired. She justified her lack of skills in the kitchen with the simple observation that “I have talents appropriate to many rooms. The kitchen just isn’t one of them.” White conceded both points.