The Attorney

by Steve Martini

When I get to the office, the lights are on, the receptionist is there, but Harry is not. He is baby-sitting, out in Del Mar, seeing if perhaps Jonah will tell him something he has not told me. I still haven’t gotten straight answers from him as to where he was last night. We talked until nearly five in the morning at his house. He says he was depressed, angry, so that when he left Susan’s office after the failed attempt to go after Suade for contempt, he drove aimlessly for hours until he found himself on the beach sitting in the sand, where the cops picked him up. He doesn’t recall meeting anyone, talking to anybody. It is a story that is likely to light a fire of enthusiasm under the cops.

  When I get to my desk, messages are stacked neatly near the phone. I paw through them. One catches my eye. Joaquin Murphy wants to see me for lunch. I look at the time. He called a little after nine. I dial his number, I am assuming on the boat.

  It rings several times, and I’m about to hang up when he finally answers. “Hello.”

  “Murphy. This is Paul Madriani.”

  “You got my message,” he says.

  “Do you have some information?”

  “Better than that. My source wants a meeting.”

  Twenty minutes later, Murphy picks me up at the curb out front near the entrance to the Brigantine. It is just before eleven, and I am operating on adrenaline, fighting off sleep deprivation.

  I get in, and he looks at me from the driver’s side. He is hunched over the wheel, wearing a Hawaiian shirt with printed flowers the size of basketballs, and Bermuda shorts.

  “You look wiped,” he says.

  “Where’s the luau?” I ask.

  “It’s a business meeting. I thought I’d go conservative.”

  “Just so long as we don’t end up pig in the pit,” I tell him.

  He drives, north on Orange through downtown Coronado.

  “I take it you had a busy night?” he says.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I saw the news on TV about Suade.” He checks me for effect. “They’re calling it a drive-by. Must be a new gang. Tell me,” he says, “what kind of graffiti do angry white husbands use?” He’s smiling.

  “Not exactly a drive-by. That is, if the cops are guessing right. More of a sit-in.”

  He looks at me as if he’s not sure what I’m talking about.

  “They think she was sitting in the perp’s car when she got it.”

  “Ah. Is your client in any difficulty?”

  “Depends who you want to believe. Him or me. The cops have the carpet of his car under a microscope as we speak.”

  “Optimistic sort, is he?”

  “Sees a doughnut where the hole is,” I tell him.

  “You do have a few things going for you.”

  “Name one?”

  “A hundred enemies who wanted to kill the woman,” he says.

  “I’ll give you that.”

  “And right now I’ll bet you’re trying to identify them all.”

  “Something like that.”

  The newspapers and local media are speculating that the police have a lead, a possible suspect in Suade’s murder. So far, Jonah’s name has not surfaced.

  “I figured you might be getting busy,” says Murphy, “so I thought I should get this information to you sooner rather than later. My source thought a face-to-face meeting would be best. Outside your office.”

  “What does he have?”

  “He’ll have to tell you that himself. But I do have some stuff on your gal. Jessica. Mostly background,” he says. “She had a dozen misdemeanor convictions before they sent her to Corona. Mostly small stuff. Petty theft.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “She tried her hand at a little forgery, but the checks were small. Has a list of real colorful friends as well. Their latest kick was household burglaries and washing checks. That was before the drug charge sent her away.”

  “What about her friends? Any names?” So far Harry has not been able to come up with much.

  “One in particular keeps cropping up,” says Murphy. “Jason Crow.”

  I’ve heard the name, but I can’t place it.

  “He worked at the airport,” says Murph. “A baggage handler.”

  “Ah. I remember.” The guy Harry told me about.

  “Word is he and Jessica lived together for a while. He’s also reputed to have been her local pharmacist. Pills, pot, coke—you name it, Crow could get it. He put her in touch with people higher up on the chemical food chain.”

  “Is that how she got nailed on the drug thing?”

  “Probably. The man you’re going to talk to may have more on that.”

  “Tell me about him. Why all the secrecy?”

  “The nature of his job,” says Murphy. “He and his partner cross over into Mexico like birds in migration, only more frequently. I’m led to believe he works for the government—undercover.”

  “Ours or theirs?”

  “Ours. I think.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “It’s what you call a high-risk occupation. He’s not gonna tell you his name, or what agency.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  Murphy shakes his head.

  “Then how do you know you can trust his information?”

  “Because he’s given me stuff in the past, and it’s always proved out. If I had to guess, I’d say he works for DEA. I’ve seen him with another man driving a large car with Mexican plates. Automatic weapons in the trunk,” he says.

  “Maybe they hunt.”

  “Heckler & Koch MP-5s, fully silenced?” He looks at me as if this is supposed to mean something.

  “If you saw the assault on the Branch Davidians, you saw the FBI packing these. It’d cost you a couple of grand for one in mint condition. One silenced on full automatic could cost you five-to-fifteen at Terminal Island. I went with them once, down to Mexico. These guys were able to cruise back and forth through customs with a wink and a nod.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To a restaurant,” he says.

  “Why is it I feel like a character in The Godfather?” I ask him.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “There’re no pistols in the toilet.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about.”

  He laughs. “Anyway. Back to your friend Jessica,” he says. “She and this guy, Crow, worked a scam together for a short time, out of the airport. He checked bags and gleaned information on addresses from the luggage tags. Then she and a few friends would stake out the houses, see if anybody was home. Newspapers in the driveway, mail being picked up by neighbors—if a place looked empty, they’d hit it. Clean it out. It’s how he went down, Crow. Nosy neighbor called the cops.

  “What’s interesting about this is the cops found evidence implicating Jessica when they arrested her. Property in possession tying her to Crow and the burglaries. But the authorities didn’t press it.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t big enough.”

  “Three hundred grand in stolen property?”

  I whistle long and low through my two front teeth.

  “Why would they let it go?”

  “You might want to ask the man when you see him,” he says.

  Seaport Village is Disneyland on the water, without the rides. A lot of shops. People milling in and out, licking ice-cream cones and periodically looking for a bench on which to rest their weary feet along the meandering boardwalk that fronts the bay.

  Today it is not very crowded. A few tourists shopping in the traps for something to take home.

  We climb a flight of stairs to a landing that spans the walkway below and makes like a bridge over two small shops. We arrive at the entrance to a restaurant. It’s closed.

  “You
’re sure he said to meet him here?”

  Murphy doesn’t answer, but taps on the door with a set of keys. A couple of seconds later, a man wearing a dark sport coat, pleated slacks that hang on him like an oversized flag, and a dark turtleneck sweater opens up.

  “How ya doin’, my friend?” He’s talking to Murphy. “Come on in.” The man must be about six-nine, not just tall, but big. His clothes come from Omar the tentmaker. He’s wearing a pair of dark glasses that cover half of his face, wraparounds like the windshield on a sixties Cadillac. On his left wrist is a gold watch, a Rolex the size of the mirror on the Hubble telescope. He shakes Murphy’s hand, then looks at me.

  “Ha ya doin’?”

  I get the quick treatment, the kind that tells me I’m being studied from behind all that glass. What hair he has left is dark brown and slicked back, forming a ponytail at the rear of his head.

  “Bob’s waitin’ for ya out on the deck.” He nods toward Murphy, who leads the way.

  I can feel the bigger man’s hot breath on the back of my neck as we walk through the empty restaurant and out onto the deck that overlooks the water. When I get there, I see his partner. He is almost as big, leaning against the railing, smiling in our direction.

  “Hey, Murph. Been a long time. How’s business?”

  The entire time he’s talking to Murphy, he is looking at me.

  “It’s good,” says Murphy.

  “This must be your man.”

  The guy leaning against the railing is the size of your average mountain. Shoulders and hindquarters like a sumo wrestler, with dark glasses just slightly smaller than his companion’s. He has curly blond hair, receding at the sides like a glacial retreat, and forearms like Popeye, well tanned.

  “Bob. This is Paul,” says Murph.

  My hand goes out and gets lost in his grip—evoking memories of holding my father’s hand when I was six.

  “Paul . . .?” He leans toward me, his voice on an audible quest for my last name. “Paul what?” he says.

  “My friends just call me Paul, Bob.” I smile and lift my dark glasses out of the breast pocket of my coat, then slip them on. We stand on the deck looking like the Blues Brothers.

  Bob has a face like the lunar surface, pockmarked with craters you could get lost in.

  “Have a seat,” he says.

  Murphy has kept the faith. Apparently he hasn’t told them my last name or the reason I am asking questions about Jessica Hale.

  We pull up chairs and sit around a table that looks as if it hasn’t been wiped down since Christmas. Bob looks at his elbows after resting them on the glass surface.

  “I think this is what the EPA calls particulate matter,” he says. He laughs it off and wipes the back of each arm with the opposite hand.

  “Gonna have to get after the tax boys,” he says. “You’d think they’d take better care of their property. You met Jack?” says Bob.

  “We’ve met,” I tell him.

  “IRS shut this place down a few months ago,” he tells me. “Nonpayment. We got a few places like this around town. We don’t like to get rid of ’em too quickly. They come in handy—for gatherings like this,” he says.

  “Where we gonna get lunch?” says Murphy.

  “We thought you were bringing it.” Bob laughs big and broad. He doesn’t have the look of a man who’s missed many meals.

  “I can have Jack there beat around behind the bar and see if he can find a bottle. On second thought. Don’t bother. This shouldn’t take that long. Maybe Paul here will spring for lunch down the way after we’re finished.” He looks at me as if I’m going to open my wallet and give him a peek at my credit card.

  “I understand you’re looking for Jessica Hale,” he says. “Can I ask why?” Right to the point. No beating around.

  “You can ask,” I tell him.

  Our eyes lock behind dark glasses.

  “I thought we would be exchanging information,” he says.

  “You first.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Why the federal government turned her loose on major drug charges.”

  “Why do you think?” he says.

  “Because you wanted something from her in return.”

  He makes the fingers of his right hand like a gun and lets his thumb drop like a hammer.

  “What was it the government wanted?”

  “That’s two questions,” he says.

  “Yes, but you never answered the first one.”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Now you answer a question with a question. Fine. I’m assuming that if the woman was on drugs at one time, she may have slid off the wagon, if she was ever on it. Old habits, old friends, whoever supplied her might know where she is. You might know who that is. That might provide a lead.”

  “It won’t.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because we’re lookin’ for her, too. She owes us some information. Part of a deal that she didn’t deliver on. We’ve checked her old haunts. She hasn’t been to any of ’em. We know. We’ve squeezed the people who are there. If they’d seen her, they woulda told us.”

  “Why do you want her?” I ask.

  “Have you ever heard of a man named Esteban Ontaveroz?”

  “No.”

  “Also known as El Chico, Jefe, Enfermo de Amor. The last one means love stick.”

  “Man don’t suffer from low self-esteem,” says Jack.

  “He’s believed to have been involved in the killing of eighteen people in a little town north of Ensenada about a year ago. You may have read about it. They shot kids, women. One of ’em was pregnant. Took ’em out on a patio and laid ’em facedown, then did ’em with machine guns, execution style.”

  Bob picks up an envelope from the chair next to him and pulls out a picture, four-by-six glossy, and lays it on the table in front of me. It shows a tall, swarthy man, hollow cheeks, talking to another guy across the top of a car. The other man’s back is to the camera, but the ponytail and the size of the body, shoulders like a bull, bear a striking resemblance to his partner, the one he calls Jack. The picture possesses the grainy character of having been taken from some distance, magnified and cropped.

  I look, shrug my shoulders. Shake my head. “Never seen him.”

  “Deals drugs. Supplier up out of Chiapas. A businessman. You might call him a transporter.”

  “No, he’d probably call him a client,” says Jack.

  “Be nice.” Bob looks up at his partner, then back to me.

  “Mexicans tell us that Ontaveroz has a fleet of planes to make FedEx jealous. And a motto.”

  “And it ain’t ‘Fly the fuckin’ friendly skies,’” says Jack.

  “Plata o plomo,” says Bob. He looks at me to see if I get it. “No?”

  I shake my head.

  “Silver or lead. Bribes or bullets. You either take his money or you better have your funeral plan prepaid. He used to work the middle between suppliers farther south, Guatemala, Colombia, Costa Rica, but he’s been coming north lately, spending more time, expanding into the States. He has connections with the Tijuana Cartel.

  They control half the U.S.-Mexican border. Juarez Cartel has the other half. They say they’re ten times more powerful than the American Mafia at its height. They spend more money on bribes each year than the Mexican government spends on law enforcement.”

  “About twice as much,” says Jack.

  The way he says it makes it sound as though he’s tasted their money, a thought I keep to myself with this bull standing behind my chair.

  “We’ve had him, this Ontaveroz, under surveillance, on and off, for better than five years,” says Bob. “One of our major breaks was Jessica Hale. She and Ontaveroz lived together
for more than a year. She spent some time down in Mexico with him, living the high life, Acapulco, Cancun, Cosamel. She did provide some transportation. Moving product from Mexico across the border.”

  “But we think that was incidental to their relationship,” says Jack.

  “Sounds like you were in the bedroom taking pictures,” I tell him.

  “We got solid information. You want pictures, we can get ’em,” says Jack.

  “I’ll bet you can.”

  “Jessica knew intimate details about his operation,” says Bob. “The one source who could connect Ontaveroz with some major deals.”

  “She also knows where some bodies are buried,” says Jack. “And I’m not speaking metaphorically. She has enough to put him away for a long time, maybe life over there.” He’s talking about Mexico. “On this side, a couple of states I can think of would like to inject him with something besides his own product. That’s what she had to offer.”

  “You say she didn’t deliver?”

  “Not to match the proffer she gave to get the deal,” says Bob. “She fed us some information, testified in a few cases—trickle here, trickle there, allowed us to nail some small fry. We took a couple of Ontaveroz’s buyers down, crippled his organization for a short time. But the big enchilada slipped off the platter when she disappeared.”

  “In view of the people who cut the deal,” says Jack, “the lawyers at Justice, Jessica didn’t fulfill her obligations. They’d like her back. Now tell us,” he says, “what’s your interest?”

  “I’m not particularly interested in Jessica, only as a means to an end. It’s her little girl I want. She’s eight years old. Legal custody reposes in the grandparents.”

  “And you work for them?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “Tell me, are you a lawyer? An investigator?”

  “I’ll tell you after you tell me who you work for.”

  He just smiles, trying to read my eyes through polarized glass.

  “Her parents, Jessica’s, do they know anything? About her friends? Her dealings? Where she might be?”

  “If they knew anything, I wouldn’t be talking to you.”

  “They knew about Zolanda Suade,” he says.

  I look at Murphy. A man with this many connections has to feed them something to keep the channels open. But he puts his hands up in protest.