They ran, mouths agape, back into the mountain cove of number-three fairway, where at last Nelson’s man showed some fatigue. He leaped into a pearl-gray Rolls-Royce golf cart belonging to a pair of amateurs who were looking for an OB ball on the hillside. Next thing the amateurs knew, their golf cart was plunging down the fairway away from the green!
One of those seigneurs of Corporate America ran after it for thirty yards, when all the veal chops, pasta and bread sticks caught up with him. Then he stood holding his chest and screamed, “That’s a genuine crocodile golf bag I won at the Bing Crosby clambake, you thieving fuckhead!”
But he was shocked into silence when a second golf cart, belonging to his playing partners, got stolen by a second thief, who went flying after the first! The second thief was a little redhead with a demented expression, who yelled at everyone in his path: “Playing through! Playing through!”
The cart chase was on! Nelson’s guy went screaming across the wash by number eight and across the fairway, almost getting smacked by a whistling wood shot hit by a CEO from New York who made five million a year in bonuses that gave him only moderate pleasure, but was in heaven because he’d just hit a 250-yard drive, thereby justifying the ten grand all this had cost him.
But as the CEO drove his cart toward that thing of beauty, a golf cart buzzed across the fairway, mashing his all-world tee shot into the ground! And causing him to cry in horror: “Official! Get me a ruling, goddamnit! Official!”
The chase ended on number nine where a foursome was on the fairway playing in. Nelson’s man appeared to be banking on a disappearance among the masses around the clubhouse. He scattered the mud hens in the lake as he sped by, but he didn’t scatter the intrepid gallery. He couldn’t straighten out at the last minute, and drove the cart into the same lake that had punished a duck-hook three minutes earlier. His was the second car in the lake, the first being a white Chrysler on a display platform.
The guy got out limping and dripping, and with his head down, plowed into a fan from Billings, Montana, provoking a beer-bath and a popcorn blizzard. But then he was pounced on by Nelson Hareem, who’d daringly maneuvered his golf cart alongside the runner and leaped, like a cowboy bulldogging a steer.
When deputies and security people and tournament marshals finally got to the scene of the crash-and-splash, there were fifty golf fans encircling the antagonists and enjoying the battle. Nelson had the guy in a choke-hold and was scissoring the guy’s ample waist with his stubby legs. The chokee’s hat had fallen off and Nelson was delighted to see that the guy was balding! Nelson had a mouse under his eye and his shirt was almost torn from his body. The pocket of his trousers was ripped, but he still had his gun and his pluck.
Nelson looked up at a uniformed sheriff’s deputy who’d just arrived and was trying to figure out who the hell was the good guy, or if there was one. “This is the guy you been lookin for!” Nelson cried, meaning the airport fugitive.
But to Nelson’s great surprise the suspect croaked, in unaccented American English, “Get this red-headed kangaroo off me! I’m not gonna give ya no trouble!”
The deputy dragged the suspect to his feet, patted him down, and found three wallets inside his Jockey shorts, all of them belonging to sadistic golf fans who’d been enjoying John Lugo’s misery.
Nelson was exhausted and confused and decided not to tell them much at all, except his name, and that he was an off-duty policeman.
The deputy handcuffed the pickpocket and said to Nelson, “We’ll take your statement as quick as we can and let you get back to the tournament. That was a great piece of work. This guy musta been going through that crowd like dysentery.”
As a second deputy helped Nelson to his feet, a uniformed Palm Springs policeman ran up. He was Bob Hope’s driver and bodyguard for the day.
The Palm Springs cop said, “Kinda ruined your tournament, didn’t it?”
“Gotta be a cop twenny-four hours a day, I guess,” Nelson mumbled.
“We need more guys like you on our department,” the Palm Springs cop said. “What’s your name, Officer? Maybe you’d like to meet Mister Hope? If I know him, he’ll say something like, ‘That pickpocket ended up with a real bad lie!’”
It was reported on the news that one of the contestants and witnesses, former astronaut Alan Shepard, was asked if he’d ever seen a more remarkable sight in all his golfing experience.
He said, “Not since I hit that golf shot on the moon.”
When he awoke on Saturday morning he had actually thought of attending Mass, but then it seemed a sacrilegious thing to do on the day that he was to carry out his mission. He thought a long time about it. Would God have more pity on him or less if he went to Mass? Would God even look with favor on a prayer for protection, or be angry that he’d offered it, under these circumstances?
Finally, he’d decided not to attend Mass. He had dressed, shaved and gone downstairs to the hotel’s breakfast room for coffee. He bought the Los Angeles Times, a huge newspaper by his standards, and began searching for stories about U.S. crimes in order to reassure himself that what he was going to do was correct, that they would have been laughed at if they’d taken their scanty information to the U.S. authorities and said: “Here, solve the murder of a good policeman, our friend Javier Rosas. And more importantly, provide his family and friends with retribution.” That this was their only chance for justice in a country that releases men on parole after they mangle or murder children.
The police in his country knew how to deal with men like that. In his country they could even prosecute one of their own citizens for committing a crime in the United States, but how many gringo criminals had ever been extradited to Mexico for trial? And yet everyone knew that it was common for U.S. lawmen to ask favors of the judiciales, who would often arrest a wanted Mexican and deliver him to the U.S. authorities at the international border. Of course, the gringos could never return such a favor because their laws wouldn’t permit it, because they were morally superior.
Yet the fugitive couldn’t place all of the blame on the gringos, No, it was nearly as much the fault of the corruption within their own system, especially within the Federal Judicial Police of Mexico.
He was proud to be with the Judicial del Estado, the State Judicial Police. He had been a policeman for eighteen years, but he would be ashamed to be with the federals. The federals had no intention of helping the state police. On the contrary, it was apparent that they’d inform on them if they could. Anything to protect their mordida. The bite. The graft on which they survived, all of them, even the state police, even himself.
Gringo police would never understand. They didn’t have to buy their own weapons and ammunition, pay for their own car radios, and repair their police cars out of their own pockets if they wanted to do the job properly. They didn’t have to buy and develop their own film of a crime scene, and compensate laboratory people from their own pockets just to get them to respond to a crime-scene investigation. And they didn’t have to pay their own typists! The gringos could get in their big new American police cars and do what they had to do without worrying about whether one or two vouchers a month would provide enough gasoline.
Oh yes, they could ridicule the police of Mexico, because they didn’t have to live on the equivalent of $550 a month, and support children in a place where food was more expensive than in the States. Where everything except housing was more expensive than in the States, in an economy that had been in recession for years. Easy for them to think of him and his comrades as bandits with badges because they took money sometimes, money they used to do their jobs and to feed their children.
The fugitive had his new blue leather bag with him at all times. The weapons were in it, an untraceable 9-mm Beretta that had been stolen in the north, but ended up south in Mexico, the thief having been killed by state police in a failed holdup. The knife was there too, a killing knife. Swiss- or perhaps German-made, it was supposedly a favorite of foreign military personnel involve
d in clandestine activity. The fugitive couldn’t imagine using that horrible instrument to stab or hack at the flesh of a human being, but they had insisted that he have it. One of his comrades had also wanted him to take an AR-15 with its thirty-round magazine they called cuerno de chivo, horn of a goat. He had told his friend that the suggestion was ridiculous. If he couldn’t do the job with reasonable weaponry it couldn’t be done at all.
He liked to think that he had been sent because he was such a dogged manhunter, a policeman who never gave up, but of course one of the main reasons was that he had a natural talent for language and spoke English better than just about anyone in his sector, primer sector, based in Mexicali.
There wasn’t nearly as much U.S. currency in the bag as when he’d arrived, that was for sure. It was mostly very dirty money, confiscated from drug dealers and car thieves. Some of it was a bit cleaner, having come from U.S. insurance companies. The state police would receive a “reward” from the insurance companies for getting the cars back in proper condition, about $500 per car. Yes, that money was a bit cleaner. The money had been pooled and entrusted to him to use because his comrades wanted to get justice for Javier Rosas, who’d been a good policeman, as good as any, and a good man.
The fugitive remembered the time he’d worked on a case with Javier Rosas in the segundo sector of Tijuana. They had arrested a team of American bandits who’d tried to rob a diamond merchant from Tijuana, shooting one bandit, capturing the other two. When Javier Rosas made the bandits pose, holding their weapons for photographers, the U.S. police had ridiculed him for it. The fugitive had tried to explain to Javier Rosas that the gringos did not understand their ways, and that he should try not to feel insulted. Now, after reading news accounts about people who were paroled after strangling children, free to murder again and again, he thought that perhaps they never would understand each other, the people of the neighboring countries.
But then, the state police couldn’t even trust their own federals. An informant had told them that the drug runners who’d murdered Javier Rosas had made a point of stealing for the federals their favorite make of car, a Chevrolet Suburban with four-wheel drive, to be offered as mordida. The smugglers always dropped off at least one car for the federals whenever they made a big cocaine run from Mexicali to Los Angeles.
The fugitive asked himself what the gringos would do if it had been one of their men who’d been brutally murdered? They’d shown what they’d do after a DEA agent was kidnapped in 1985 by a gang of Guadalajara drug dealers and mercilessly tortured for days, his cries and screams recorded on tape by the criminals. That tape was found and later played before a U.S. jury hearing evidence against a Mexican doctor who’d allegedly participated in the torture.
What the DEA had done was to have that physician abducted by federal judicial police and brought across the border, where he’d been arrested by the U.S. officers. What would’ve happened if the Mexican police had abducted a U.S. citizen and brought him to Mexico for trial? Probably another Mexican War, only this time they’d take everything south to Mexico City to claim as their fifty-second state. That’s what the fugitive thought, and why he had no other choice in the present matter.
Javier Rosas had never cared who was supplying cars or money to the federals. Javier Rosas was an honest man who’d wanted to be a policeman all his life, but had been one for only six years when he was murdered. Once, the fugitive and Javier had spoken of a confrontation in Tijuana, when the federal and municipal police had almost gotten in a gun battle with each other after the municipal police surrounded federal police headquarters during a dispute. Javier Rosas said the federals could never be trusted. He had no use for them and was positive they were protecting the cocaine runners he was after.
Ten kilos of cocaine from Peru were to be delivered to L.A. from Mexicali. The informant of Javier Rosas knew very little about a person in Palm Springs who was acting as middleman in the transaction. Ten kilos were significant enough for the informant to go to the home of Javier Rosas and get him out of bed to say that perhaps he knew where the cocaine was.
Unfortunately, Javier Rosas couldn’t reach his comrades that night and had decided to investigate the matter himself to see if the information had substance. The informant told him there were only two couriers, but when Javier Rosas broke into their hotel room and confronted them at gunpoint he’d discovered that there was a third, standing behind him with a gun.
The other state police later learned all of this from that third courier after they’d caught the drug runners while they were queued up at the border waiting to cross. The first two were killed outright when the state police rushed the car. The third died later of “heart failure” during interrogation.
The fugitive had always hated that part of interrogation—the Pepsi challenge—the carbonated beverage shot up the nose until the suspect thinks his brain is exploding. But the murderer of Javier Rosas got more, he got the wires applied to his genitals. The point was, they all knew that in the end, he was no longer capable of telling lies.
About all he could say was that a phone call to an unknown number in Palm Springs was made from a pay phone by one of his dead companions. And that the man on the line told them in pocho Spanish how to handle the unexpected dilemma they were then facing: a state judicial police officer, handcuffed, a gag in his mouth, completely at their mercy.
The unnamed Palm Springs middleman told the drug-runner to pick up the cocaine as planned and proceed across the border in the car as planned. And the Palm Springs middleman also said that they’d have to kill Javier Rosas to guarantee their chances.
He’d made an ugly joke about it, a joke which became the only clue to his identity. The joke had to do with a tombstone and orchids.
The Furnace Room was getting pretty good play that Saturday afternoon. The Bob Hope Classic had been on TV, so the boozers had had an excuse to get bombed early under the pretext of watching a major sporting event.
Long before the TV coverage had ended, all of the male pensioners had about used up every hilarious golfing witticism ever uttered (“A short drive’ll do just great, if you can keep your putter straight”) on every female younger than the Tabasco sauce in their refrigerators.
By 4:00 P.M., Lynn, Breda and Nelson were occupying Lynn’s favorite table beside the defunct fireplace, and the old babe at the next table was trying to sound like Dinah Shore, warbling “Something to Remember You By.”
Nelson was wearing an oversized white cotton tennis sweater loaned to him by Lynn after a quick stop at the mansion for repairs. He had a Band-Aid over his eye where Breda had done some nursing, but he was still pumped, with every reason to believe that his heroics would get him an audience with the Palm Springs chief of police, according to Bob Hope’s cop-driver.
Lynn held up three fingers to Wilfred Plimsoll, who poured another round. Then Lynn said, “Do I have the I.Q. of a rodeo clown, or what? All our work’s been more irrelevant than an Emmy award and Baghdad Betty. More irrelevant than the eggbeater and Jimmy Carter.”
Then everyone tried to top the others by coming up with examples of useless irrelevancy. It ended when Nelson cited the Secret Service contingent assigned to guard local resident Gerald Ford. Nobody could top that one.
“At least it looks like Nelson’s gonna be rewarded,” Breda said, “for doing what’s always got him fired in the past. Beating the hell outta the wrong guy.”
“I can’t wait for my folks to see my picture with Bob Hope,” Nelson said. “That reporter promised he’d send me an eight-by-ten!”
Lynn just couldn’t get over it. He said, “Do you realize we haven’t the faintest idea who the real guy is and what he wants with John Lugo? Not even a miniclue!”
“I still wanna get him,” Nelson said, flush with the thrill of victory. “Maybe he’ll make his move at the party tonight. There’ll be hundreds a people there.”
“We’ll catch that guy when California condor eggs go for two bucks a dozen at your su
permarket,” Lynn said.
“I think we should go to Lugo’s party anyways,” Nelson said. “His lawyer said we only gotta mention our names to the guy at the shuttle bus.”
“Where’s the bus leave from?” Breda asked Nelson.
“Smoke Tree shoppin center. Because a the tombstone deal, Lugo hired a couple uniformed security people to check invitations at the bus.”
“I wouldn’t mind just being at a party like that,” Breda said.
That, of course, got Lynn interested. “Well, I guess we might give our case one last shot,” he said. “Nelson can do his thing tonight, maybe pounce on every guy that’s bald. He’d probably end up with a couple a jewel thieves and Sean Connery.”
“Everybody starts arrivin right after dark, so we can relax and have another drink if ya want,” Nelson suggested.
“Drinks’ll be free up there,” Breda observed. “Now that I have an early morning appointment with Rhonda Devon to tell her that a silly little mixup at a lab caused her problems, and she doesn’t owe me another dollar, I can’t pay for your drinks anymore.”
“Oh, lemme buy a round,” Nelson said.
“No more for me, Nelson,” said Lynn “but since you insist, well, okay.”
When Nelson ran to the bar to get the round of drinks Lynn said to Breda, “He makes me know my age. When I’m around him I feel as up-to-the-minute as polyester. I got my forty-fifth coming up in a couple weeks!”
“You’ll understand if I don’t come to the party,” Breda said. “I’ve already attended one of your parties”
“It ain’t easy,” Lynn said gravely, “being our age and looking down the tunnel. Is it? I’m so old I can remember when Jack Nicklaus was fat.”
Fugitive Nights Page 27
