Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

  By stopping at three, Nammar was forcing Jim to split his cross-examination across two days. The jury would hear two hours at the end of the day. Then they’d go home and forget it, and Jim would spend the night wondering whether he needed to hit those points again or call it a loss and move on. I had a solution for that problem.

  “Nammar paid a visit last night,” I said. “Agent White tagged along. They stayed with DeCanza three and a half hours, coaching him. Threatening him. I’ve got audio and video—”

  “I can’t have that. I don’t want it. Delete it.”

  “Okay.”

  “But tell me all about it, by all means.”

  “DeCanza’s going to bury Lorca.”

  “Who’s Lorca?” Jim asked. “I don’t know anyone named Lorca.”

  “If you say so.”

  There was no point arguing with him. Jim had picked this abandoned office because it wasn’t wired and the feds didn’t know about it. But there were lines he wouldn’t cross. His client had a story, and Jim’s job was to sell it. Anywhere and everywhere.

  “Tell me about DeCanza,” he said.

  “He was high up. Second in command, basically. Lorca—your guy—wasn’t just a voice on the phone, or a rumor. He was a face in the room. They worked side by side. So he knows everything. Which you already knew.”

  I walked Jim through the main points. DeCanza had started the way they all had. A mule, moving packages north across the border. After three trips without getting busted, they trusted him to carry cash. But he was a reader, and a thinker. When the DEA starting using listening stations and ground-penetrating radar to find the border tunnels, DeCanza hired men out of Baja boatyards and set up shop in the desert. Their first submarine was forty-six feet long and sank in the Sea of Cortez. Their second was ninety feet long and made three trips before its crew scuttled it in view of a Coast Guard cutter. But by then, DeCanza and Lorca had suborned so many customs agents, they didn’t need submarines. They could load their products onto commercial airliners and fly them straight into New York. They had replaced cash with cryptocurrency, which could be moved invisibly.

  If he’d been in an American corporation instead of an international cartel, DeCanza would have an impressive title. Chief Financial Officer, Vice President of Operations—something like that. But the cartel didn’t bother with formal titles. Except the one he had now, a title no one wanted: rat.

  Without DeCanza, the government’s case was entirely circumstantial. It could all be explained away. Jim’s client was a San Francisco businessman. The name Lorca wasn’t written on his California driver’s license. It wasn’t written anywhere. Which meant that if DeCanza vanished, so did the government’s shot at a conviction. People who rubbed Lorca the wrong way had a history of disappearing. This summer, I had been playing a dangerous game. I’d tracked down a turncoat rat and put eyes and ears in his room. If Lorca had known about the Westchester, the prosecution would be short a star witness. I wasn’t looking to become an accessory to murder. So to protect myself, and Jim, I’d only told him what he could afford to know.

  “It’s a nice roadmap,” Jim said. “But you’re not lifting my spirits. What do you really have?”

  I’d gotten it a week ago. I’d held it back, but I’d always meant to tell him at the right time.

  “You wouldn’t have wanted it too soon,” I told him. “So I kept it, and saved you an ethical dilemma.”

  “I can sort those out on my own.”

  “Not your call when I’m involved,” I said. “Which means before I give this to you, you’ve got to agree on how you’ll use it.”

  “Agree how?”

  “Either you put it in today’s cross, or you forget I told you. If it’s not today, it never gets used. Use it right now—no warning, no heads-up to your client—and it’ll give you a shot. If he doesn’t know until the government hears it, there won’t be any more blood on your hands tomorrow than there is right now.”

  “Deal.”

  Of course Jim would agree, even if he didn’t know what I was talking about. He needed what I had. And he probably understood that I was offering leverage. He didn’t need to be a genius to guess the form it took. There was one currency that traded above all others on the leverage market. Innocent lives. Women were gold, and children were diamonds.

  “They’ve got DeCanza living like a prisoner,” I said. “He’s their witness, but that doesn’t mean they like him.”

  “Nothing new there.”

  “He hasn’t seen the sky since mid-May. He’s in a Tenderloin shithole. Calling it a safe house is a stretch. They bring him his meals twice a day. They check on him every two hours, plus he’s wearing a GPS tracker on his ankle. But they’ll take it off when he comes to court today—and if you ask, he’ll deny it existed. They’ll give him immunity, but it’s contingent on a conviction. Which means they really have him by the balls—if he testifies the way they want, but your guy walks, there’s no deal.”

  Jim was tapping two fingers on the banged-up desktop.

  “I can get into that,” he said. “Even if he denies it, claims they’re putting him up at the Holiday Inn, it’ll chip away at his credibility. But you’ve got more.”

  Of course I had more. I’d be embarrassed to send Jim my invoices if I couldn’t give him more than that.

  “He’s been begging for a phone,” I said. “For a month, every day, he asks for one.”

  “What’s he want it for?”

  “He won’t tell them. But he told me, because he talks to himself,” I said. “He wants to talk to his wife.”

  “She’s supposed to be dead.”

  I made Jim wait a bit. I blew on my coffee and sipped it. I checked my phone.

  “You’re talking about the thing in Mexico City,” I said. “The apartment house that blew up.”

  “Two snitches saw her on the balcony.”

  “She was on the seventh floor, and they were a couple blocks away. Did you hear about a DNA test?”

  Jim stared at me, processing that.

  “Does Nammar know?” he finally asked.

  “Not a clue.”

  His fingers stopped tapping.

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I gave DeCanza what he wanted,” I said. “I gave him a phone.”

  It had been a relatively straightforward operation. Easy, and yet the dirtiest thing I’d ever done.

  DeCanza had regular visits from half a dozen FBI agents and three assistant United States attorneys, including Nammar. He’d asked each of his visitors for a phone, and had always been rebuffed. But if one of them broke rank and gave him a phone in secret, there were enough people in and out the door for anonymity and deniability. So I waited until he’d walked down the hall for the toilet, and then I went downstairs, picked his lock with a bump key and a screwdriver, and left a cell phone on his bed.

  Back upstairs, I took off my latex gloves and watched from the camera hidden in DeCanza’s ceiling. His quarters were as tiny as mine; when he returned from the toilet, it took him all of three seconds to notice the phone. He looked around the room and went to the window. He stood perfectly still for a full minute, his head down. Then he put the phone under his mattress.

  Three days later, he still hadn’t used it. So I waited until he went for his shower, and I bumped his lock again and left him a fifth of whiskey. Back upstairs, in crisp black-and-white, I watched him find the bottle and inspect the seal. He didn’t flush it or hide it, or pace the room in consternation. He cracked it open, took a single sniff, and then started drinking.

  Two hours later, he lifted the mattress and pulled out the phone. I watched him turn it in his hands. I watched him switch it on. He stared at it for a long time. And then, from memory, he dialed a number.

  Of course it was a trap.

  The phone was one half of a pair I’d bought in Chinatown. Over drinks at a booth in the San Lung Lounge, I’d paid a freelance hacker to sync them. He was finished with the job bef
ore he was finished with his Mai Tai. I handed him an envelope of twenty-dollar bills, and that was it.

  So when DeCanza dialed his wife, I watched and listened in real time.

  He should have known better. No long-term survivor of the Witness Protection Program would ever lay hands on a smartphone. He wasn’t cut out for this. I was just saving him time and protracted misery.

  “I ran the number and did some digging,” I told Jim. “He called a landline outside of Eagle Pass, Texas. A five-thousand-acre ranch, deeded to a Cayman Islands partnership. The partners are all foreign LLCs with stupid names and mail drop agents—you can guess who really owns them. The title is free and clear, so it was a cash sale. Five years ago, when DeCanza was riding high.”

  I slid a copy of the title report across the desk.

  “And the woman who picked up the phone?” Jim asked.

  “Maria Lucinda DeCanza,” I said. “She’s living there with their nineteen-month-old son.”

  “He’s alive too?”

  “I could hear him in the background.”

  Jim Gardner stared at the title report. He picked it up and paged through it, and then he put it in his briefcase. He wasn’t a good man, or he wouldn’t have been doing what he was doing. And I must not have been an angel either, or I wouldn’t have trusted him to do the right thing with the information I’d just given him.

  “Come by if you want to watch the cross,” Jim said.

  He took his briefcase and left the derelict shop. Five minutes later, I followed him out.

  I went back to the Westchester. My work there was done, and if things blew up in the cross-examination that afternoon, Nammar and the FBI might start wondering who had been watching DeCanza, and how. So I wanted to empty out my room. Pull all the surveillance equipment, wipe the surfaces clean of prints, and leave the place looking the way it ought to—empty liquor bottles, crushed beer cans, and takeout wrappers piled like a snowdrift in the corners and under the bed. I had a backpack full of garbage, ready to go.

  I passed the Refugio on my way. I counted ten black-and-white squad cars, two unmarked Fords that were surely detectives from homicide detail, and an idling ambulance. A van from the medical examiner’s office was pulling away from the curb. The suicide blonde was bagged and tagged, but the Wraith was still on the sidewalk. Someone had put traffic cones around it, and stretched yellow police tape from cone to cone. I raised my camera and watched through the lens, shutter clicking. A man pushed through the Refugio’s front door. Slim build, dark hair, and a suit that was shiny with wear. A homicide inspector. He pushed through the knot of officers, and then he was looking at me. I lowered the camera and kept walking.

  4

  At ten in the morning, I went home for the first time in five weeks. I walked from the Tenderloin to Union Square, trading flophouses and liquor stores for luxury goods and wine bars, and then I followed Grant Avenue into Chinatown. Home was a one-bedroom walk-up on the third floor above a seafood restaurant. I turned off the alarm with the fob on my keychain and went inside. Even this home—my new beginning—was tainted with the past. It was all part of a continuum. There were no clean lines and no clear demarcations.

  Six years ago, when my marriage exploded, I’d been thrown clear, carrying nothing but my clothes, three broken fingers, and a letter from the California Bar Association confirming my disbarment. It could have been a lot worse. I’d walked up to an associate justice of the California Supreme Court and knocked out most of his teeth. As I was sitting in the back of a police cruiser an hour afterward, jail time and significant restitution seemed inevitable. But both Juliette’s father and her future husband found it expedient to keep me quiet. So instead of doing time and going bankrupt, I actually made money. Fifty grand per tooth. The same day the divorce judge posted her decree on the court’s electronic docket, I got a cashier’s check drawn from my former father-in-law’s account. Juliette’s childhood chauffer delivered it to me in the lobby of the Oakland Marriott and stood there stiff and humorless as I used his back to sign the receipt. Maybe it wasn’t clear to anyone standing in the Marriott, but the residents at the Westchester Hotel would have recognized that check for what it was. Hush money.

  It had been an easy bargain to strike. Juliette’s new husband needed to keep credibility with California’s voters; to that end, his ex-wife probably got even more than I did. And as for me, I’d rather have had the money than the right to talk about Juliette. I didn’t even want to think about her. The cash helped. I started with a two-month haze of bar tabs in La Paz, Mexico. I remember lying on my back and watching the shadows cast by a wooden fan on my room’s ceiling. I drank mezcal until I couldn’t feel anything, until, finally, I felt just fine. I sobered up at a motel in the desert, and headed north again.

  There was plenty of money left. I didn’t have a job, so I couldn’t get a mortgage, but nobody could stop me from buying a place outright, in cash. I had five windows looking down on Grant. My view was partially blocked by the neon sign that announced the South Seas Golden King Seafood Restaurant. It blinked all night, its tubing gold and red.

  南

  海

  金

  王

  海鮮餐廳

  I could hear those characters buzzing in my dreams. When I closed my eyes anywhere but home, the silence would startle me awake again.

  There was nothing else to do, so I ran a bath. I had to let five weeks of rusty water clear through the pipes before I could put the rubber stopper in the tub. The fridge was empty except for condiments and a single bottle of Tsingtao. I opened that, and settled into the tub. In the Westchester, I’d never admitted to myself that I was scared. But now, at home, I allowed that much. I’d broken the law before, usually for Jim Gardner. But I’d never wandered so far off the reservation. I’d never done anything to cross the FBI or a federal prosecutor, and I’d never tricked a government witness into betraying his wife’s hiding place. I could have kept that last bit to myself, to protect a woman whose only mistake, as far as I knew, was marrying the wrong man. That would have been the right thing to do, and Jim would have paid my invoices when they came due. But I’d told him. I hadn’t even debated with myself about whether I ought to.

  It hadn’t occurred to me until just then that a person could be honest and immoral at the same time. Now I wasn’t so sure those attributes were mutually exclusive. And it wasn’t at all clear to me anymore which way the scale would swing if I put my character onto the balance.

  When the water got cold, I toweled off, turned on the lights, and shaved at the sink. I looked like myself again, but I felt the same way I had when I’d woken up that morning as I set out for my last pre-dawn walk from the Westchester. That got me thinking about the suicide blonde, the rainwater pooling in her eyes, beading her hair.

  She came and went from my mind until quarter after three, when I watched Jim Gardner start his cross. Then I had more immediate concerns, problems of my own making.

  I had gotten there too early.

  Courtroom Five, on the seventeenth floor of the Phillip Burton Building, was silent as I stepped into it. I was expecting a packed seating area, and I wasn’t disappointed. The trial was a headliner. The bodies were piled almost as high as the money, and the only politicians not pointing fingers were mysteriously out of town. I recognized a reporter from KTVU, and the crime beat writer from the Chronicle. Mixed into the crowd were the usual courthouse regulars. Law students, retirees with nothing better to do. Underemployed attorneys hoping for a scrap. There were also six men sitting side by side in the front row, behind Nammar’s table. I couldn’t see their faces, but I’d been looking at the backs of their heads all spring. They were DeCanza’s FBI minders.

  One of them, Agent White, turned around. I hadn’t made any sound coming in, but he must have felt the draft. His eyes met mine and locked there. Behind him, on the other side of the rail, Nammar was standing at the lectern between the two tables. DeCanza was on the witness stand to the jud
ge’s right. Jim was sitting to his client’s left, resting his chin on his hand.

  “And the man you knew as Lorca, the one we’ve been talking about all day—is he here in the courtroom?” Nammar asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you point him out to the jury, please?”

  Agent White finally turned back around. He wouldn’t want to miss this part. They’d been coaching their witness all spring for this moment.

  “Right there,” DeCanza pointed. “In the black suit. That’s Lorca.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Absolutely. I saw him every day for fifteen years. He was at my wedding. I was right there with him when his kid died.”

  “Is it easy for you, pointing him out?”

  “You mean, do I like it?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “It makes me feel like a rat.”

  “Are you scared of him?”

  I expected Jim to object, but he didn’t even look up.

  “He’s not a nice man, if that’s what you mean. You cross him and he doesn’t take it well.”

  “So you’re being brave, to sit up there and talk.”

  “Or maybe I just want to die. I know what he does.”

  “To guys like you who tell the truth?”

  “Guys like me. Yeah.”

  Nammar had been facing the jury as he asked his questions, but now he turned to the judge.

  “Nothing further, Your Honor,” he said. “I pass the witness.”

  Judge Linda Kim turned to Jim and looked across the top of her black-rimmed glasses at him.

  “Counselor?”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” he said.

  He rose and clasped his hands behind his back, straightening his arms to stretch his shoulders. Everything with Jim was a signal to the jury. I could guess what this was supposed to convey: he’d been bored, sitting there for five hours, listening to DeCanza tell lies. Lies that would be as easy to swat down as slow-moving flies. He wasn’t concerned about a thing, except that this might delay his dinner.