Good Junk

by Ed Kovacs

  “No, brother. Maybe that cash in your bag is funny money. We met today just for you to take a look; that was the agreement. I don’t have one of them special pens to make sure the bills are real and not counterfeit. You know, like the clerks have at the Circle K? Not that I ever have a hundred-dollar bill, if you can feel my pain, but I seen them clerks do it. Even some nice old white lady gives them a hundred- dollar bill, they pull out that special pen, brother.”

  Tong hesitated. I watched through the camera as he slowly replaced the Niton gun into the oversized shoulder bag. He didn’t remove his hand from the bag.

  “Damn, what if he’s reaching for a gun?” I asked Honey, as we watched the action go down. I pressed TALK on my comm unit. “All units, standby, he might be going for a weapon.”

  Honey got out of the carriage, ready to run.

  “Get laptop,” said Tong.“Then you call me.”

  “Okay,” said Decon.“Get the million ready, my Asian brother-man.”

  I watched as Tong walked out onto Decatur and hailed a cab that then lurched into traffic.

  The fish had gotten a taste of the bait.

  Decon waited five minutes, then entered the café’s restroom, where I knew two of Harding’s local FBI cohorts were waiting to take possession of the real GIDEON sample and supply him with a fake. I wanted the local feds to have possession of the super-secret piece for a number of reasons, including the fact this was an inter-agency operation that required mutual trust, even if we were under the official radar of our respective headquarters. FBI CI-3 was to be kept out of the loop, which would allow for the locals, if we could pull this off, to reap the hosannas.

  I watched as Decon emerged from the bathroom with the fake sample in the laundry bag, then got on a motorcycle I’d provided and roared off.

  The day was off to an okay start, but Decon had some explaining to do.

  “What are you trying to pull?”

  I stood over Decon on Pravda’s back patio. We had both surreptitiously entered via different approaches, neither of which involved a door. I was sweating. My skin itched under all the bandages which felt oppressive due to the heat.

  “I thought I did good.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “He squeezed me on the money, so I squeezed back.”

  “If you had taken the five hundred K, we’d be done, we’d be finished. He wanted to do the deal!”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t have one of those counterfeit indicating pens.”

  “Hey, Einstein, we’re trying to arrest the guy. If he’s paying with phony money, it gives us another beef to hang on him.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “And how did you know about the laptop?”

  “Well, let me ask you this. Why did you endanger me and subject me to interrogation and scrutiny by the counterintelligence boys from Washington with the big bulges and attitudes to match?”

  “When did I do that?”

  “The CI-3 pricks came to my crypt crib. After we did our little break-in at Michoud. They knocked me around, man, looking for the missing sample and a Defense Department laptop. You telling me you don’t have it? You gonna lie to me about that?”

  “I didn’t dime you to the feds. And nobody followed us out to Michoud.”

  “So how did they find me and know my name? They were probably following you when you showed up at the cemetery the night you found me sleeping and scared the piss out of me, if you happen to remember that unfortunate circumstance.”

  That was entirely possible. And I knew the CI-3 agents had been interviewing practically anyone connected to me and asking about the missing items.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before that the FBI showed up?”

  “What difference would it have made? I cursed you six ways from Sunday to them. Told them you rousted me for the bronze plaque I stole from the old CBD building. They were satisfied I didn’t know anything about the missing government stuff.”

  “All right. But we’re not putting any laptop into play, understand? Call Tong back and tell him it’s gone, you can’t get it back. You do the deal for half a million, period. Tell him to call you at nine o’clock tonight, and that you’ll do the exchange in Metairie. When he calls at nine, you’ll give him the location in Metairie where we’ll do the buy.”

  I stood over Decon and listened as he made the call to Tong, following my instructions to the letter. Tong agreed, but Decon looked a little dejected as he terminated the call.

  “Do I get to keep the money?”

  “You get to keep living.”

  Their names were Jerry and Mario, and the pattern never altered. Building security video showed that every weekday, at 11:45 AM, the two male staff members in Clayton Brandt’s company left the office for lunch. I guess it was a holdover military-precision kind of thing. The two young men, both clean-cut, ex-air force and in their late twenties, frequented many different eating establishments near One Canal Place, but they always rode the elevator down to the lobby, and today was no exception. Except today they didn’t make it to the lobby.

  Kendall got into the elevator with them on the twenty-fourth floor and pushed the button for fifteen, where Honey and I waited with Detectives Mackie and Kruger. When the doors opened, we flashed our shields and removed Jerry and Mario from the elevator car. I had arranged for the use of a vacant office suite and had video cams set up. We brought the men in for a frank discussion, the kind usually held in an interrogation room downtown.

  “Do you want to be sitting at the prosecutor’s table or the defense table?” I asked.

  “What?” they said simultaneously.

  “You are both guilty—you, Jerry and you, Mario—of being accessories to conspiracy to commit murder. Do you understand that?”

  Mario’s mouth dropped slightly open, and Jerry’s eyes widened.

  “And I wonder what might be in your computers,” said Honey. “Upstairs? Maybe evidence that Brandt Holdings transshipped weapons illegally to embargoed countries? Countries not under any special waiver provision. Abetting that makes you guilty of a couple more felonies. Federal ones.”

  Honey and I already knew such evidence existed in those computers, since I had downloaded exactly that.

  “Search warrants are a wonderful thing,” I said, waving an official-looking document that was actually an extended warranty for my big-screen TV. “Let me refresh your memories. Yesterday, not long after two Russian assassins tried to kill me in my home, you, Jerry, came out of Clayton Brandt’s private office and said something to Mario, here. Am I jogging your memory, Jerry?”

  “We—we—are we under arrest?” stammered Mario.

  “That can be arranged very quickly,” said Honey.

  “Unless you cooperate. Unless you do the right thing. I want to help you. I’m willing to give you more of a chance than those killers gave me, but you’ve got just this one shot at it.” I wanted to help them about as much as I wanted to get a proctology exam. Honey and I had sized these two up from the day we first showed up at Brandt’s offices; they were simply clerks and weren’t going to take a bullet for the boss.

  “Maybe we should get a lawyer,” said Jerry.

  “Maybe you should. But if you ask for one, I can’t help you. And even some slick lawyer from D.C. won’t be able to save you from the evidence we have, enough to bury you both. Now you know what I’m talking about, Jerry, what Brandt said on the phone yesterday. And so do you, Mario. You heard what he said, Jerry. And once you hear something like that, you’ve been exposed.”

  Jerry and Mario were smart, but not street-smart. The hardened thugs of NOLA would never talk to a detective, period. They knew how to work the system too well. Our homeboys would provide no alibi that would cross them up later; they’d make no statements of any kind. The local recidivists understood detectives would lie through their teeth and that it was perfectly legal to do so. They knew we were never interested in helping them, only in sending them to the Big House. So eliciting confe
ssions in New Orleans was nearly impossible, unless you were dealing with rank amateurs. Add in the unwillingness of witnesses to come forward and you have the main reasons the homicide solution rate in the Crescent City ran so low.

  “The detectives are now recording this conversation, okay?” I pointed out to Jerry and Mario. I legally had to do this, get it out of the way quick, and then continue my manipulation. “But what you have to realize is I’m offering you a get-out-of-jail-free card. I guarantee no charges will be filed against you if you tell me the truth. I’m just asking for the truth. It’s probably something your parents told you to always tell. Tell the truth and you walk. Lie to me, withhold important information, and you’re looking at a very unpleasant future.”

  “Do you know what it’s like to do time in a hell-hole? Like our state penitentiary in Angola? They still have chain gangs,” said Honey.

  “So tell me about what you heard, Jerry.”

  Jerry and Mario looked at each other. “Can I make a call?”

  “Yes, if you want me to arrest you first. Then you’re entitled to one phone call.”

  “Tell him Jerry. I didn’t sign on for any of this,” said Mario, sharply.

  “You heard him, Jerry,” added Honey.

  “Okay, okay. We’re just employees. We do what we’re told. I went into Brandt’s office yesterday to have him sign some papers.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Ah, about one in the afternoon. He was on the phone—”

  He stopped, looking like he was having second thoughts.

  “Who was he talking to?” I asked.

  “Gee, one o’clock,” said Honey. “That was soon after the Russians tried to kill you, Detective Saint James. Maybe we should just charge them with Murder One.”

  Honey’s comment prompted Jerry to blurt out, “He was on the phone to Grigory Pelkov.”

  We all listened as Jerry gave it all up, pretty much matching word for word what I already had on tape. The recording Kendall had made as a result of the software I’d secretly installed in their computers wouldn’t have stood up in court, but with living, breathing witnesses whose revelations were now being recorded legally, we had enough to arrest Clayton Brandt, an event I had already scheduled on my calendar. Jerry and Mario sang like birds; they were just hourly employees, after all, and not making the big green. Jerry admitted that he was the phone liaison for the crooked port inspector, Terry Blanchard, and that he and Mario had been dropping off Blanchard’s thousand-dollar bribes on a monthly basis. It was Jerry whom Blanchard had called the day Harding and I showed up at the port. Mackie and Kruger could now get a search warrant for Brandt Holdings and legally seize all kinds of damning evidence in the staff computers.

  “Jerry, Mario. Who killed Del Breaux and Ty Parks?”

  “We started to think it might be you,” said Mario.

  “Me?”

  “We figured it was the only way you could expose and stop the operation.”

  The statement floored me. Could that really have been the killer’s goal in all of the murders? To shut down the arms trafficking operation? If so, it lent credence to Harding’s fingering of Decon to me early on. The notion seemed outlandish—I’d removed Decon as a suspect—but the honest truth was, I only knew of one such person who had an ax to grind in terms of shutting down the smuggling operation: Daniel Hawthorne Doakes, aka Decon.

  Jerry called Brandt’s secretary and said he and Mario had gotten food poisoning from lunch and were both too sick to return to work today; they hung up before she could ask any questions. Then Mackie and Kruger took them into unofficial protective custody. I only needed them on ice until tomorrow.

  I couldn’t get Decon on the phone. After our meeting at Pravda, Kendall had escorted him to the French Quarter Holiday Inn, where I had rented adjoining rooms. So I called Kendall and he put me on hold. When Kendall came back on the line, he said Decon must have given him the slip; he wasn’t in his room. A troubling development to say the least.

  Could Decon really be the killer, or at least be complicit? As far-fetched as it seemed, I had to give it more consideration. He alone of all the suspects had no alibi for any of the murders. Then I began to reconsider my previous conclusions that multiple killers had to have carried out the murders. Decon was the quintessential loner. If I asked myself if I could have done the killings without help, the answer was yes. But Decon? I couldn’t picture him muscling a big guy like Del Breaux around a parking lot. Still, Decon could have some kind of psychosis, perhaps revenge-based, that motivated him to do whatever was necessary to terminate any and all connected with the arms dealing. How else to explain why he was risking life and limb in the sting operation? He was either after some kind of revenge or he was simply crazy enough to cowboy up against the unknown, for no good reason. And that made less and less sense. Trying to solve murders purely based on motive was a weak approach, but the fact was, Decon wanted Brandt’s operation shut down—a secret government operation—and the murders of the last week were accomplishing exactly that.

  Honey and I drove over to Decon’s crypt crash pad, but he wasn’t around. We conducted a perfunctory search of his belongings, comprised of a lot of dirty, insignificant crap. After fifteen minutes, I motioned for Honey to follow me out of the ungodly chamber.

  “We should keep looking for Decon.”

  “We won’t find him if he doesn’t want to be found.”

  “What if the Chinese grabbed him?”

  “I doubt that. He’s up to something and I can tell you that it’s not good. Why did I ever trust him?”

  “We canceling the sting? Because there is no sting without him. He could be setting up his own swap, to try and pass off the fake sample.”

  “That wouldn’t work. Tong will check it again with the Niton gun before he hands over any cash.”

  “But I wouldn’t put it past him to—”

  “What do you want me to do?” I snapped at Honey. The Decon turn of events threatened to unravel much of what I had planned. If he had committed the killings out of some obsession with demolishing a smuggling ring that the authorities seemed unable to stop, well, I’d never make a case. Decon knew practically everything I had, while I knew precious little that he had.

  I didn’t lose my temper often, but when I did it took off at Mach 5. “I’ve given everything I’ve got to this investigation: my time, my money, my flesh and my blood, my heart and my soul. I didn’t ask you to talk the chief into making me a detective, and I’m not sure I want to keep the job. So I’m really sorry if I can’t solve this thing in some ridiculously short time frame and it reflects badly on you. But screw Decon. For all we know he’s the damn killer. And if that’s the case, don’t look for him to turn up anytime soon. If he surfaces, we’ll go forward with the sting. If he doesn’t, I’ll add him to my to-do list, right under the entries: find the killer of Del Breaux, Ty Parks, Leroy and Jimmy Jefferson, Herbert Rondell, Eddie Liu, Terry Blanchard, and Grigory Pelkov.”

  After my mini-blow-up, I left Honey standing there and stormed over to my pickup truck. I immediately started to feel bad, but I was too angry to go back and make amends. I was fatigued from lack of sleep and from the events of yesterday. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel stressed and paranoid about the possibility more killers were tracking me, waiting for the right moment to bust a cap up my ass.

  What made everything more frustrating was that I was now second-guessing myself and the whole direction of the investigation. I’d possibly been suckered by a con man named Decon, and on top of that, I absolutely hated deadlines. A deadline on a murder investigation was an asinine concept I should have never agreed to. Tell an electrician the wiring has to be finished by Tuesday afternoon or he won’t get paid, and the job will get done. Apply that formula to a homicide detective and what you will have is a lot of vacancies in the Homicide Section. Stupidly, I’d gone along with the idea, because of that gold shield I held in my hand. It had meant so much to me, I just cou
ldn’t let it go.

  But forty-eight hours to solve multiple murders? Hell, we hadn’t even gotten back any forensics from the Breaux crime scene yet. Not that forensics made too many homicide cases in New Orleans. Or in the real world. And if by some divine miracle from the goddess of justice I could close this out by tomorrow morning’s deadline, the chief would be emboldened to place a deadline on the next Five Alarm case I worked. Even if Chief Pointer couldn’t fire me because I’d been shot in the line, he could transfer me out of homicide, do a million things to make my life miserable and cause me to resign. He’d done it before, after all. Aside from everything else, I judged my performance to be pretty lousy so far, and I couldn’t even blame Bobby Perdue for that; I could only blame myself.

  As I inadvertently ran a stop sign on Dumaine Street, I thought, Maybe I just need to start cracking heads again. Throw the badge away, crack some heads, find the killer.

  If only it were that simple. I pulled the truck over, parked, and took a deep breath of steamy, magnolia-scented air. All the summer showers had made the city extra green. Fast-moving cotton-ball clouds flew overhead toward Lake Pontchartrain like they were late for an appointment with a rain god. I took another deep breath of heavy, sweet air and consciously hit my stop button on all the mental second-guessing. I needed to stay focused; elaborate plans had been made and were about to unfold. I took a moment to visualize how I wanted events to unfold, slid the transmission into drive, and headed toward the French Quarter to prepare for a very special dinner.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The elegant Restaurant August on Tchoupitoulas is consistently rated one of the best restaurants in a city rich with great restaurants. While tourists were a scarce summer commodity one year after the killer Storm, the legions of upper-echelon executives from charities and disaster-relief outfits, federal visitors with high GS ratings and expense accounts to match, “prime” FEMA contractors, corporate execs from outfits like Shaw Group and Fluor and James Lee Witt Associates, whose companies suckled on the government-funded recovery tit, and any number of celebrities in town to “show support” for the city by partying their drug-addled brains out with young hookers, kept the booking rate high at the august Restaurant August. Conveniently located right across from the Windsor Court Hotel, where Brandt insisted all out-of-town arms buyers stay, it must have been relatively easy to shepherd the visiting flock from hotel to pre-auction prix fixe feast, easing them into a better mood to part with hard cash for cold weapons.