An Absence of Principal

by Jimmy Patterson

  Garrison noticed that Alex seemed to loosen up a little with his comforting words. But not a lot.

  She continued to look around. More frequently her eyes would meet a stranger who offered a smile and nod.

  “So,” Garrison said, trying to make her feel a little more comfortable, “tell me a little more about yourself.”

  Alex finished her last bite of chocolate cake and took a drink of her latte.

  “I only moved here last month,” she began. “ ‘Why Midland?’ is probably your first question. I’ve often wondered that and I don’t really know the answer clearly yet. It’s a nice enough place. The people are just as you say — friendly. It’s a ten-minute drive to pretty much anywhere. Except maybe from one corner of town to the other. Then it’s eleven. But people stare at me … as though they’ve never seen someone like me before.”

  “Most of them haven’t,” Trask said. “You do look a little out of place. In a good way, of course.”

  Alex changed the subject as abruptly as she had walked into Trask’s world two days earlier.

  “Mr. Trask, have you ever wondered what goes on in the life span of cocaine? Or have you ever wondered how many people lose their life as a 20-pound block of coke goes from being farmed and harvested to delivered to the end user? Have you ever given that any thought?”

  He was even more puzzled now.

  “I don’t suppose I have, no,” Trask said.

  “How can you defend someone accused of murder in a bad drug deal if you don’t even know what goes on during the course of the life of cocaine?”

  Garrison wondered if Alex had some sort of agenda. Her vague presentation made him even more intrigued on the one hand. On the other, he was unsure he wanted to play along. There simply wasn’t any time in his busy day. But he figured he could give her a lunch break or two. See what she had to offer.

  “Can I tell you a story, Mr. Trask? Maybe steal a little bit more than the usual hour for lunch?” she asked.

  She brushed her long red hair back from her face in a way that made it impossible for even the happily married Garrison to refuse.

  He nodded approval, not knowing that what he was about to hear would change much over the course of his next few weeks.

  “Well, I suppose I have a few minutes. We’ve got a man to defend, so we don’t have a lot of time, but we can pick up where we leave off later on if we don’t finish here today.”

  “We won’t. Finish today, I mean,” Alex said assuredly.

  She paused for a moment to collect her thoughts before beginning a story that was hard to tell.

  “Full disclosure now,” Alex began. “I recently spent some time out of the country, Mr. Trask. Cocaine follows a very distinct life path and it doesn’t care who gets killed along the way. The people who handle it, farm it, process it, transport it, store it and deliver it care even less. What I’ve seen you couldn’t make into a movie, and you wouldn’t believe, even as seasoned as you are in your job defending these two-bit users and killers and street sellers, what happens out there beyond this country.”

  Garrison dabbed at his mouth after finishing the last swallow of his coffee, his eyes staying on Alex as she spoke.

  She had provoked a reaction from Garrison. Just a small tilt of the eyebrow, but Garrison began to wonder just what kind of a background his new employee brought with her.

  “I’ve heard a few stories,” he said. “But I probably don’t know as much as I should. We’re fairly insulated here in West Texas. We like to think we’re frontier-living, modern-day cowboys. But that’s not the case.”

  She nodded to the server who refilled her latte cup with a decaf. She again nudged her hair back out of her face with a move of her left hand, a nervous habit Garrison thought, then poured sugar into her cup, stirred, and began her story.

  “Two years ago I told my husband that I had been transferred to a remote part of South America because of my job. We were going through a rough spot, but he never much liked my work even though he knew what I did when he married me.”

  “What kind of work did you do?” Garrison asked.

  “I was a field agent for DEA. You may or may not know this, but you go where they send you, or you lose your job or get stuck on a desk in some remote part of the country, and you also lose any feeling of security against the narcotic underworld that you felt the agency might have somehow been providing for you. Anyway, my transfer as I called it, was a bit of a lie to Pierce, my husband. In all the time I had put in with DEA I had always been fascinated with tracking one or two single kilograms of coke, step by step. I thought it would help me understand my job better, and frankly it had always fascinated me since I was young and would turn on the TV and see the stories about smuggling and how it was responsible for so much of our crime here. I wanted to learn what all went into two kilos, from when it is planted all the way through the end-game scenario, when someone puts it up their nose, or lights it, or shoots it or flushes it down a toilet. And I did that. Most of the way. I convinced DEA to let me take it on. And it was good for them because I was excess baggage. And they looked at it as an opportunity to collect more intellectual property on the enemy, if you will — the narco-terrorists of the Latino underworld. So what I did was quite simple: I followed two grams of cocaine from harvest onward.”

  Alex took a drink from her cup of decaf, careful to wipe away a spot of it from the corner of her mouth with an extended pinky.

  “I met a woman named Maria in the Aguileres region of Argentina in 2001. I’m fluent in a number of Spanish dialects. I think you can probably see that with a little brown hair coloring I could pass for a Latino if I had to. Maria and I became good friends in the short time we knew each other.”

  “I’ve heard of the Aguileres region,” Garrison said. “Learned about it during some training with the feds early on. It’s been targeted by the narco cops for a number of years, I know. I apparently don’t need to tell you that. It’s small, fairly remote as I recall. So, did you just wander into town one day? Weren’t there some suspicions about who you were?”

  “It’s small, but not so small that people would notice you just because you come into town one day. Maria was my age, thirty-five. Beautiful woman. Some of the villagers would often confuse us; some thought we were sisters. Las hermanas. Some even thought we were twins. Las dobles, people would call out to us as they passed us in the market.”

  Alex quickly went through her cup of coffee. She admitted to Garrison that she had told Maria she was a student from America and was studying the agricultural region of South Central Argentina for her doctoral thesis and would she mind being her guide and friend during her stay.

  “It was a lie, of course,” Alex admitted. “I was just looking to go as unnoticed as possible and to have a place to lie down for a nap now and then. I spent most of my overnight hours working in those fields to see what I could see. That’s when a lot of the covert operations occur. Maria never caught on.”

  “Mi hijos, andale!” Maria said every morning at the same time. Moments later she would rush her three sons out the door to school and peek through the back window to see if Reuben, her husband, was still in the field working and that he was OK.

  “I remember one morning,” Alex said. “I will never forget it.”

  Alex paused, looking to regain her composure, Garrison noticed.

  “Maria looked out the window. I had been staying with them about three months and had collected about as much information as I needed there, and so I told Maria I would be leaving the next day. There had been some movement out in the warehouse. It looked like the kilos I’d had my eye on were about to be moved.”

  During their conversation, Maria peered out the kitchen window. She let out a brief shriek and bolted in her husband’s direction.

  The sugar fields of the Aguileres region of Argentina a
re thick with vegetation. Some are secluded in mountains and others are concealed behind acres and acres of sugarcane, behind hundreds more square yards of coca, a substance in much higher demand in the United States than sugar. When Reuben went to work every morning, he assured Maria he was tending the sugar cane fields for the region’s largest sugar supplier, La Familia de Puente. Reuben told Maria repeatedly he could not be bothered while he was on the job because his boss had always punished his workers for becoming distracted. So Maria stayed away. For years she raised the children while Reuben worked. He was seldom away from the field that was just adjacent to his and Maria’s house. Sometimes late at night when Maria and the children had gone to bed, Reuben would receive work-related visitors into his home.

  “The night before, Maria told me she woke up and was thirsty. She went into the kitchen for a drink of water and heard some voices raised. There was a noise, like someone pushing a chair or a table into a wall, and then Reuben’s visitors left,” Alex told Garrison. “Reuben didn’t come out of the room for the rest of the night, which was unusual for him.”

  “When Maria saw her husband that next morning in the fields, what she witnessed was horrifying. Even at a distance of more than 50 yards she could tell whatever was happening was not right and her Reuben was in trouble. She forgot all the rules and ran to him, trying to help.

  “When she got to him, Reuben was bleeding out,” Alex said. “He had a deep gash in his neck, and seconds after she came to him, he was dead. He had been severely beaten before his throat was slit. She cried out and clutched him in her arms knowing that the father of her children and the one true love in her life was gone. She would never know why Reuben had been brutalized in the sugar fields, because she would never know he was involved in cocaine farming. She always thought it was simply a work dispute that had taken an ugly turn. In some respects, I’m sure that’s what it was.”

  Alex had tears in her eyes when she turned to Trask.

  “Maria and I had a special friendship together even though it was for just a short time. We were like sisters, just like the people had noticed in the streets. She had children, three of them. I had a daughter I loved very much back at home in Fort Worth. Seeing Maria’s compassion and loving care as a mother made me want to abandon my mission and go home so I could be a better mother.

  “I had noticed that the cocaine that I had tagged to follow was still in a metal lean-to for several days after it had been harvested. I was able to stay with Maria to help her get through the first few days after Reuben’s murder.”

  Three weeks passed. Inconsolable, Maria stayed mainly in her bedroom, emerging each day only long enough to prepare her children their meals. Frederico, 13, was an eighth grader; Manuel, 11, was in the sixth grade and Reuben, Jr. was 8, a first grader, and a near miniature duplicate of his father.

  It was one night in October as the weather began to grow warmer that Maria received a call late at night. She walked into the family room at the small farmhouse, shaking almost uncontrollably.

  “Who was it?” Alex asked Maria.

  She said nothing.

  Alex walked across the room and sat next to Maria on the couch.

  “For hours, Maria was unable to speak or convey anything to me, and the next morning when the boys came into the kitchen for their breakfast, Maria told them she was not taking them to school that day.”

  Alex paused and regained her strength.

  “We are leaving. I will need your help, boys, loading only what is most necessary to take.”

  “But Mama, why?” Reuben Jr. asked.

  “Maria, who never raised her voice a day in her life, yelled at little Reuben that morning,” Alex told Garrison. “He began to cry and ran from the room. Frederico and Manuel did as their mother said, and packed the family’s suitcases.”

  Alex looked away from Garrison. Tears rimmed her eyes.

  “Maria and her boys got in the car that morning and left. Abruptly. Apparently she had been intent on taking them somewhere safe, somewhere where there would be no way to trace any of them. During the phone call she had taken overnight she had apparently learned that her husband was involved in the drug trade. Reuben’s bosses, the ones who murdered him, I think, likely told her that her sons were next. So they left as quickly as they could. But you cannot escape the cartels, Mr. Trask. Not in South America. Not anywhere south of our borders. And in some places, within our borders.”

  “What happened to Maria?” Trask asked her.

  “I jumped into Reuben’s car and began to follow her. I had to find out what I could from her. I couldn’t just let her disappear, even though I was in her home under false pretenses. She was a good person. We had become friends. I finally caught up to her and the boys; I pulled up next to her at a traffic light. I tried to get her attention. She was crying so much that I wondered how she could see to drive. The light turned green and she sped off. On the edge of town, I was still about two car lengths behind her as she made her way north out of Aguileres. She sped off and pulled even further ahead of me, and I could see Maria’s car as it darted in and out of traffic. When we were north of town it was just me following Maria. She kept speeding up and pulling away from me even though I don’t think she really ever realized I was behind her.”

  “A black Suburban sped up and passed me; I hadn’t seen if it had been following me. It pulled up even with Maria. Two windows opened on the passenger side and automatic machine guns trained down on her and the car.

  “I learned later that over a hundred shots were fired at Maria and her boys. The last shot was a kind of small rocket that was fired at the rear of the car. It punctured the fuel tank and Maria’s car exploded. Police said later they were never able to identify any of the bodies in the car, but found four different sets of dental records that were a match. They were killed for nothing.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Garrison found it difficult to shake the visual images that came with Alex’s story. Now was not a convenient time to have an emotional distraction.

  “The court remands the defendant to custody and sets bail for the defendant, Tony Nail, at $250,000,” the judge said. “Further, the charges are upgraded from suspicion of murder, to murder in the first degree, and given the fact a drug transaction was allegedly a part of the crime, the case will be handled in the federal court system.

  “But your honor, my client has been a model citizen and he is accused of a crime he did not commit,” Trask argued.

  “Save it, Mr. Trask. Your client is accused of murder. I don’t care if he’s the President of the United States of America, he’s not walking when we haven’t determined yet if he has or hasn’t been falsely accused.”

  “There is nothing violent in his past. He has no record, for heaven’s sake, your honor. Nothing!” Garrison argued. “He’s a good man. A minister whose only purpose in his work is to help others come to a better life.”

  “That’ll be all, Mr. Trask,” the judge said.

  “But your honor!” Trask pleaded again. Halfmann again brought his gavel down hard, ushering in an abrupt end to Trask’s insistence. The judge followed his gavel pounding with a hasty exit from the courtroom. Suddenly, there was simply no one remaining in the courtroom with whom Trask could argue.

  Was he or wasn’t he guilty? Trask had asked himself that question repeatedly about his friend and client since hearing Alex’s story, and although her experiences had nothing to do with Tony Nail’s life, he still couldn’t help but bring it all into question, including the innocence of a man he had never doubted before.

  In the seedy, desperate underworld of narcotics trafficking, Rule No. 1 is to bring the money. The only variations in that rule existed between those with a sense of morals and those without. At the highest levels of the trafficking world, murder was a daily occurrence. If the money wasn’t delivered at the pre-appointed time, someone w
ould pay with his or her life. The higher-level bosses were the people in the trade with little or no conscience. Life to them was as meaningless as swatting at a fly. The lower-level street dealers, some of whom might have become involved in the trade out of necessity or coercion, and were now in without a way out. Some of the lower-level operatives may value life a little more. Although they were striving for the same end result: survival. In fact, at the lower levels, many tried to avoid violence where possible. Because they often knew they were just as susceptible to being killed. And they had families, too.

  It was with the street-level dealers’ immediate superiors, men and sometimes women who had ties to the lieutenants in the cartels, where the disregard for human life began in earnest.

  “What’s next?” Nail asked.

  “Right now, you will be escorted back to your cell, Tony. If you have the means to pull together $25,000 cash for bail, you’ll be released. If not, you’ll remain in custody for now,” Garrison said.

  Nail sat, trying to understand how his life could go so wrong so quickly.

  “I’m a custodian, Garrison. I don’t make that much money in a year.”

  “Let me see what I can do,” Garrison told his friend. “Let the deputies take you back. Say a prayer. Say two or three prayers. Pray constantly. I’ll get to work on this. And I’ll be in touch.”

  Alex had snuck in at the back of the courtroom and was watching the interaction between the two men.

  “Good morning,” Garrison said to her after Nail had left.

  “You have quite a compassionate streak in you,” she said.

  “Tony and I go back a long ways. We grew up together. I don’t think he’s involved in this. I only want to clear his name, and I want to find out who’s responsible for the murder and for setting Tony up. That’s where you’re going to come in.”