Deadly Waters

by Theodore Judson

  Bob picked up the money at a Western Union and returned to the barmaid with the promise of another $95,000 if her story panned out. From the way she snatched the money out of his hand Mathers surmised that she had never seen that much money before.

  “Sure, Carnie was in here all the time,” she cheerfully told Bob. “That other guy, the fat little grease ball Laskowski; that wasn’t really his handle. People, the ones what knowed him, called him Sparky Southern.”

  “Sparky?” said Bob.

  “Cause he got high on gasoline,” explained the barmaid. “They joked had anybody lit a spark around him he’d explode. I didn’t know much more about him. Carnie said Sparky did time for some creepy sex offender stuff, and things had been really rough for him in prison.”

  “He was a registered sex offender?”

  “I expect no friend of Carnie would have been registered for anything,” laughed the barmaid. “He was from some little town up north. Algonquin, Acquarias, something like that.”

  “Alturas,” suggested Bob.

  “That’s it!” she said and nearly burned Bob with her cigarette when she excitedly raised her hand.

  “He and this Carnie were together a lot?”

  “Not really,” she said. “I got a picture of him, of Carnie, I mean,” she said and took an ancient wrinkled Polaroid from her purse; it showed a cluster of dirty men at a Christmas party, one of them the late Carnie, dressed from the soles of his shoes to his collar in black leather. “He’s the one looking like a stick of butter in clothes. That’s a year old.”

  “He had money?”

  “At times. Carnie’s money came and went,” said the barmaid. “Feast or famine, like they say.”

  “Did he ever say for whom he worked?”

  “That’s a good one. Carnie didn’t exactly take home a paycheck, honey. What he did was dirty stuff. You know, he hurt people, basically.”

  “Did the name Erin Mondragon ever come up?”

  “Only on the evening news,” she said. “I know, I tried to connect the dots myself. Carnie was very close-mouthed about everything he did.”

  “I can take this with me?” asked Bob of the picture.

  “For a hundred grand, you can take me home,” said the barmaid.

  Bob settled for just the picture.

  XCIX

  01/11/11 12:18 PST

  “It was one Howard Southern, alias ‘Sparky,’ alias ‘Mike Laskowski,’ in the bus terminal with Rogers,” Special Agent Meyers told his superior Mr. Dollworth in the soundproof confines of the Bureau’s San Francisco office.

  The two men were poring over a newspaper report that revealed that Mr. Howard Southern, also known as Sparky Southern, Shorty Laskowski, the Crow, Dr. C, and Greaseball, was the second much mangled corpse in the Van Ness station next to that of Carnie Rogers. He had lived under so many assumed identities the original investigators had labeled him with a false one.

  “Planting bombs in public places was definitely not Southern’s style,” continued Agent Meyers. “I can find nothing in his record other than sex crimes.”

  “He and this Carnie character needed money,” said Agent Dollworth, who had been in a furious snit since he lost John Taylor. “Or perhaps they were targets. The tragedy of it is the goddamned newspapers got his true identity before we did.”

  Five days earlier The Sensation had sent forth another special edition to the check-out counters of North America. The real names of the two mystery men in the bombed station had thus been revealed to the general public sooner than the federal or state authorities uncovered any portion of the story. The government had refused comment when The Sensation hit the streets. Now that the respectable press had chimed in, the FBI and other government agencies had to prepare public statements admitting that the scurrilous Sensation had it right all along. No one in authority was saying a word about the second revelation, for the tabloid had somehow produced an unidentified man who was supposedly an employee of Erin Mondragon’s security firm and who may have had contact with Carnie Rogers.

  Now, almost a fortnight into the new year, the word was out that certain journalists were paying money to credible sources, and those who had known the two deceased thugs to tell (or make up) whatever they knew about Rogers and Southern. A convicted burglar told a cable television program he knew the two criminals killed in the bomb blast had been homosexual lovers, which was a lie, but one that further piqued the public’s interest in the strange pair and encouraged still more underworld figures to emerge, several of them telling tales about a big job the two men had boasted about on the last day of their lives.

  “Someone in the coroner’s office leaked the autopsy reports to the media,” said Agent Meyers. “As he was a sex offender, the state had a sample of Southern’s blood; everyone knows for certain it’s his body.”

  “Knew before we did,” snarled Agent Dollworth.

  “I’m afraid so, sir,” confessed Meyers.

  “These people granting interviews,” said Dollworth, visions of the chilly Fairbanks office becoming increasingly vivid in his thoughts. “We talked to them. Some of them several times. You know where this is headed? I’ll tell you where it’s headed: one of these bozos is going to tell one of these tabloid scum these two punks were working for Mondragon. Which they were. Their car was full of illegal electronic crap two punks from Skid Row shouldn’t know existed. You think we can keep that little detail out of the news? You know something else? This shit keeps piling up in public, and they won’t be able to sit a jury against Mr. Mondragon. You know something more? We’re going to round up every whore, every pimp, every fence and every scumbag that knew these two characters and hold them until they start telling the goddamned truth!”

  C

  01/11/11 15:02 PST

  A less confident man might have felt the noose tightening about his neck as the new revelations continued to erupt in the media. The federal prosecutors were already making noise about revoking bail. Erin Mondragon was not one to be frightened by mere reality. He remained calm and stayed on the course he had plotted with his attorneys.

  “They still have no evidence,” he told his increasingly nervous legal team, who were more and more often called into the Mondragon Building to confer with him. “They’ve got the Colombians jailhouse stories, period. This smoke and mirrors nonsense in the news is not admissible in court. It’s conjecture that’s gotten out of hand.”

  “I hate to bring this up,” said the always doubtful J.C., “there was today a news story of a cleaning man once employed in this building.”

  “The one claiming to have seen this Carnie fellow in this building the evening before John died?” said Mondragon, not appearing at all upset to hear mention of the latest media revelation.

  He paced the floor, hands behind his back, while the lawyers sat and listened. “Napoleon addressing his lieutenants” was what his attorneys called this arrangement, but not to Mondragon’s face.

  “Yes,” said J.C.

  “He went on vacation,” said Mondragon. “The cleaning man. Back to El Salvador. Seems he came into some money.”

  “A relative die?” asked J.C.

  “One could,” said Mondragon, but no one laughed at his joke.

  “The federal team has brought in Richard Cloot, from Illinois,” said one of his female attorneys.

  “Who is...?” asked Mondragon.

  “An ambitious young Turk from Chicago hot to become a federal judge.”

  “Ambition is a terrible thing in an attorney,” said Mondragon, and this time everyone present laughed. “God forbid that any of you ever place your career plans above the interests of your clients. Ambitious Mr. Cloot may be; he still goes into battle without a weapon. He will have the same hot air and rumors his associates already had. Repackaging the same nothing will not impress any competent judge. And why, ladies and gentlemen, do they have nothing?”

  None of the lawyers wanted to hazard a guess in response. As he was the bravest and no dou
bt the most foolish of the eleven assembled attorneys, J.C. could not stand the silence too long and had to say something.

  “Because they don’t get paid enough to do anything right?” he said.

  “Because I’m innocent!” said Mondragon and stomped his six hundred dollar shoes on his five hundred thousand dollar authentic Persian carpet to underline the sincerity of his declaration. His answer was one none of his attorneys had considered.

  CI

  01/14/11 11:29 EST

  Sometimes the smallest, most unappreciated detail can be the overlooked flaw that undermines the best general’s plans. A single rotten timber may bring down the soaring cathedral, and a single rivet in the battleship’s hull may sink the mighty ship as surely as a bomb would. So a conspiracy may be undone by its weakest member.

  By mid-January an FBI researcher had found plans for explosive devices on one of the late Ed Harris’ computer disks. Some of the plans were for a small torpedo armed at the tip with a shaped charge. Another agent combing through the likewise late Colonel Method’s telephone calls traced them to a cluster of telephone booths in southern Idaho. More field work located the Twin Falls boarding house where Method had lived under an assumed name. Therein the FBI had found shelves of journals written in the Colonel’s hand detailing the last two decades of his secretive activities. This later find was a decidedly mixed blessing to the government, for there was plenty of information in Method’s journals to embarrass them and fatal to dozens of prominent reputations, if they ever became known to the general public. The new evidence convinced the few doubters left in the Justice Department of Mondragon’s guilt; these same people likewise knew much of the new evidence was too dangerous to present in court.

  “He did it, and very well may walk,” the attorney general explained to the president as they sat inside the safe confines of the Oval Office.

  “Can’t we do something off the radar screen?” asked the chief of staff.

  “Such as what?” the president said.

  “You know...” said the chief of staff, and left it at that.

  “The man is watched twenty-four hours a day,” said the attorney general, amazed by the chief’s inferrence. “By us and by his own security people.”

  The chief of staff shook his head, and the president was left wondering what the two men in his office were discussing.

  Thus the investigators did not find the fatal flaw in Mondragon’s conspiracy, as Harris and Method had not been the weakest link in Mondragon’s chain That defect revealed itself on a Tuesday morning when a young man in a blue work shirt and denim jeans and whose long hair was the color of straw stepped up to a microphone at an informal news conference in downtown Los Angeles.

  “My name is John Stansen Taylor the Third,” the young man in his early thirties told the meager group of eight journalists who had been summoned to the sidewalk in front of a boxy office building, by one of the city’s most celebrated public relations agents. “I am the only child of John Taylor, Jr., the man killed on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco this New Year’s Eve. My mother and I...” He paused and pointed to a handsome middle-aged woman dressed in black for the first time in her life. “We have come here to tell the world we have in our possession letters from my father, letters that incriminate him and his friend Erin Mondragon in the terrorist attacks of May 2009.

  “My father was a troubled man burdened with a guilty conscience. I long knew something was troubling him. His letters suggested he had done something illegal. I did not know what he had done until his last letter arrived just days before his death. Prior to that final letter, he always wrote to me using the vaguest terms possible. My mother and I, I am here to declare, are innocent of everything.”

  Each of the eight journalists present noted the two innocent people had come to the press conference accompanied by no fewer than four attorneys.

  “Here, for example,” said young Taylor as he produced a folded page from the leather satchel resting at his feet, “is a letter my father wrote me in December of 2009.”

  John Taylor the Third coughed into his fist before he read aloud:

  “‘The Indian boy haunts me, Johnnie. Last night I was sitting at the front window, maybe I had been drinking a little, and a face appeared on the glass, the face of the Indian boy right before a terrible man murdered him. I tried to speak to him and tell him I had nothing to do with his death. I would have stopped his murder if I could have. I said these words to him. He kept on staring at me until I had to run into the bathroom where there are no windows for him to look through.’”

  “My father could be incoherent at times,” the young man paused to tell the reporters. “He is referring to a Navaho man named Wayland Zah, whom my father apparently saw murdered by another member of the conspiracy.” He read on: “‘I looked up to see him in the mirror, pointing a finger at me and moved his lips and speaking not a word. I recognized the accusation his lips were making, the same accusation 84,000 faces make to me every night while I lie awake in bed.’”

  The speaker paused again.

  “What could my father be referring to besides the 84,000 people killed in the Colorado River disaster of May 2009? Here,” he said, fishing another paper from his satchel, “is a letter from March of last year.”

  “‘Why did I do it?’” read young Taylor. “’Why did I let my desire for revenge upon that arrogant snipe Darrin Benton get the better of me? I should have let him have Taylor Imports. Thousands would now still be alive.’”

  “As you will now see, my father did not reveal the particular nature of his crimes until the last week of his life, only days before his tragic death on the Oakland Bay Bridge,” said young Taylor. “I will read now from that particular letter, the one I was telling you of before,” said the young man, who had been an English major at UCLA for the past eleven years, “and this one leaves no doubt as to what he and the others did.”

  He read from John Taylor’s final letter: “‘One by one, all of us involved in the conspiracy—Harris, Method, Greeley—have died. God has been watching us from Heaven since the day we first went to Venezuela to meet the forty Colombians. He is now taking each of us, one by one, each in his due time. I am very afraid, but I know, as distant as we are, you must have some compassion still for your old father. Only one hand cherishes the other. Though our hands can betray us, only one hand cherishes the other.’”

  The reporters present asked what the last part might have meant. Young Taylor replied that his troubled father at the end of his life often spoke in strange riddles. Because the journalists knew nothing of the Taylor family’s history, they were unaware that the John Taylor standing before them had never responded to his father’s letters; he had, however, always deposited the check his father sent to him each month.

  The estranged son had never once in the past fifteen years dialed his father’s home phone or sent him so much as a postcard to the father he considered a capitalist enemy of the people. The reporters would learn in time that after the elder Taylor’s death, John Taylor the Third and his mother had discovered that the old man’s will left the majority of his estate to a foundation conducting cancer research.

  Time would also show that mother and son had already contacted a publishing company about creating an instant book and that they were negotiating with two of the major networks in regards to a television movie. On that Tuesday morning in downtown Los Angeles, mother and son did not mention any of these developments or that their public relations agent had created the press conference to generate publicity for his clients and so aid them in their negotiations.

  “How close were you to your father?” one of the reporters present asked.

  “Very,” lied John Taylor the Third.

  “Why didn’t you bring forth this information sooner?” asked another. “Thousands of your fellow citizens are dead. Don’t you think you have an obligation to help the government get to the bottom of all this?”

  “My late father prevaricate
d many times,” said young Taylor, repeating the line he and his mother had agreed to take, should they ever be asked this question. “We could never tell whether he was speaking the truth or just rubbish. As I’ve said, he wasn’t specific in his letters until he sent the last one. This last one ties everything together.”

  *

  Erin Mondragon would have endured anyone else making similar revelations; even after the media jumped on the development--and against all sane expectations--made the story more sensational than it had been before. He might have weathered the storm. He knew what relentless bloodsuckers John Taylor’s son and ex-wife were, and for the first time he began looking toward the exit doors. He did not meet with his lawyers for two days. He preferred to sit in his penthouse living room and watch the now around-the-clock, wall-to-wall coverage of what the media called the Colorado River Conspiracy. The news organizations had called in the experts: the all-knowing college instructors of terrorism, the hatchet-faced security specialists, the reserved former intelligence officers speaking in nebulous metaphors, and the famous lawyers--the many, many famous lawyers--each of them furious at some other lawyer and vigorously arguing a point of law that was well beside the point--and Mondragon perceived that everything about his crimes was now fully known, for the media called the legions of experts into a story only when there is nothing left to say. KILLER IN OUR MIDST was the three-inch high headlines on the front page of the Saturday edition of The Chronicle one of his bodyguards left at his penthouse doormat, which told Mondragon the jig was truly up, for if even the daily newspapers knew, then everyone did.

  CII

  01/15/11 07:21 PST

  Mondragon was not the only man to realize that the time had come for him to run. Bob Mathers showed up Sunday morning at Felix Collins’ desert trailer and banged on the door until the sleeping hacker roused himself from his dirty, disheveled bed.