Blood of My Brother

by James Lepore

  “Sorry about that,” said Bryce.

  “De nada.”

  “I’m divorcing their mother.”

  Isabel said nothing.

  “I divorced them a long time ago. I just pay their bills. For now.”

  “You don’t have to apologize for them.”

  “I do, and for myself. I’m sorry this is how we had to meet. We might have enjoyed each other under different circumstances. I know you have to spy on me. It could have been me, and not Paredes, who was stealing.”

  Isabel did not answer immediately. He had it exactly right. She would be spying on him, and sleeping with him would be a way of getting closer to her subject. With these thoughts her old hopelessness returned, like a shroud on her shoulders; but it did not fit as comfortably as before, which frightened—and exhilarated—her.

  “But you are still alive,” she said.

  “I’m valuable, for the time being. But they’ll want me dead soon, whether I’m stealing or not.”

  “Why?’

  “Because Rafael will soon be president. I can ruin him—all of them. So you see, I might as well steal. Perhaps I can take a great deal of their money, ruin them, and then die.”

  “Suicidio.”

  “Perhaps.”

  If they are going to kill him, anyway, thought Isabel, then why am I here? Staring at Bryce Powers, she saw the answer in his deep, hazel eyes. Herman, her keeper, had decided that she would give one more performance before she died. Despite the wisdom she had gained from all her suffering, she had never realized until this moment that such a death was inevitable for her. The last drop of pain had fallen upon her heart.

  “Permit me a question, Senor Powers.”

  “Bryce would be fine.”

  “Bryce.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “If I was your partner, and we stole money little by little, when would we have enough, and how would we get away?”

  Isabel followed Bryce Powers’s eyes as he looked at her face, and then at as much of her body as he could see before the table blocked his view.

  “We’re talking hypothetically, of course,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “Let’s have dinner; we’ll talk it over.”

  “Bueno.”

  “Bueno.”

  30.

  9:00 AM, December 17, 2004, West Palm Beach

  In 1979, Bryce Powers, building on the success of his four Texas properties, bought two hundred acres in West Palm Beach, across the bay from Palm Beach—where condos were not allowed—but which he hoped would lend its cachet to the first project he would develop on his own. It did. The eighty luxury condominiums he built were sold out well before construction was finished. West Palm Beach eventually became laced with freeways and strip malls, but Royal Palm Plantation, with its charming, user-friendly golf course, pool, and Spanish Colonial clubhouse, surrounded by lush, tropical green, remained an enclave of privilege and privacy. Twenty-five years later, Bryce Powers & Company was still managing the property. Bryce owned one of the units personally, using it from time to time as a getaway until the time of his death.

  All this Jay had learned via his involvement in the Powers divorce case, and passed along to Frank as they drove north on Route 95 on the morning after their dinner at El Pulpo. They would try to find someone at Royal Palm who knew Powers, while Angelo traveled to Jupiter, also up the coast, to show Danny’s picture around. Frank did not have much hope for either endeavor, especially Angelo’s, but no good investigator would leave them undone.

  They slowed down and stopped at the end of the long, palm-tree-lined entrance drive, and Frank rolled down his window for the guard who came out of the gatehouse to greet them.

  “Good morning, sir. Can I help you?”

  “Detective Dunn,” said Frank, holding up his badge. “New Jersey State Police. We’re investigating a homicide involving a Jersey resident. We’d like to speak to the person in charge.”

  The gatehouse was coated with white stucco and had an orange tile roof. Bougainvillea was growing on trellises on two of its walls. The guard, young, blond, muscular, went into it. He came out a few minutes later and told Frank that Mrs. Bradley, the manager, would see them at her office, located down a curving road just past the clubhouse on the right. As they drove they saw that all the buildings on the property had the same tropical charm as the gatehouse. They found the office and parked in front. Inside, they were greeted by a fortyish, freckled, fair-haired woman who introduced herself as May Bradley, the property manager. She guided them through the reception area, where two secretaries were working, to a small conference room at the back of the building.

  “Can I offer you anything, gentlemen?” Bradley said. “Coffee, soda?”

  “No, thank you,” said Jay.

  “I’m good,” said Frank.

  They were seated at a handsome oak library table that was the centerpiece of the dark-green-carpeted, well appointed room.

  “I’ll need to see some ID,” said Bradley.

  “Sure,” said Frank, pulling out his badge and Essex County identification card, and handing them to the property manager, who looked carefully at them before handing them back.

  “This is my assistant, Detective Cassio.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “We’re looking for a woman,” Frank replied. “About five-seven, long dark hair, mid-twenties, possibly Hispanic.”

  “Yes, I explained all this to the FBI.”

  “Was that Special Agent Markey?”

  “Yes, in the beginning, then an Agent Ted Stevens was here last week.”

  “We’ve spoken to them. Do you mind going over it with us? We need to double check a few details. Do you know this woman?”

  “Mr. Powers called me about a year and a half ago and told me that a friend of his daughter’s would be using his condo.”

  “What’s his unit number, by the way?”

  “Seven Royal Palm Drive.”

  “Go on.”

  “He told us her name was Isabel Perez, that she traveled a bit, and would be coming and going. He gave her a set of keys. That’s it, basically.”

  “When was she last seen here?”

  “At the end of last summer, maybe early September.”

  “Has she returned?”

  “No. The police have the apartment sealed.”

  “Did Mr. Powers visit her here?”

  “Not that I know of, but Nancy, one of the secretaries out front, says she saw them together on Worth Avenue one time.”

  “Did Isabel have any friends or boyfriends that visited her?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Does the gatehouse log visitors in and out?”

  “No.”

  “Did Markey or Stevens interview any of the guards?”

  “I’m not sure. I think Stevens did last week.”

  “Did she have any friends or relationships on the staff?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Not sure?”

  “I saw her talking a few times to one of the grounds keepers.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Alvie. Alvaro Diaz.”

  “Is he still here?”

  “No. He retired last year. He was in his late sixties.”

  “Where did he live?”

  “Miami. I told all this to Agent Stevens.”

  “The thing is,” said Frank, “we checked out his address, and no such person had ever lived there. Can you recheck it for us?”

  Bradley picked up the phone and asked Nancy to bring her Alvaro Diaz’s personnel file

  “Has anything unusual happened here in the last few months?” Frank asked when Bradley put the phone down. “Violent crime, reports of trespassers, that kind of thing?”

  “We had a burglary here last week.”

  “A residence?”

  “No. Here in the office.”

  “What did they take?”

  “Nothing.”

 
“Nothing?”

  “Right.”

  “What did the police say?”

  “They said the thief must have panicked.”

  “Did an alarm go off?”

  “We didn’t have an alarm. We’ve since put one in.”

  “Did you tell Agent Stevens about the burglary?”

  “Yes. He was here the next day, right after the West Palm Police.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.”

  Nancy came in with Diaz’s file, which she handed to Bradley. When she left, Bradley opened it and said, reading from the file, “Here it is: 11566 12th Avenue, Southwest.”

  “That’s the address we have,” said Frank.

  “He drove up here every day from Miami?” Jay asked.

  “Yes, he said he liked the ride.”

  “Who was his supervisor?” Dunn asked.

  “Frank Barnes. He’s on vacation at the moment.”

  “We may need to speak to him.”

  “Fine. Just call me. I’ll make him available.”

  “Did you have a relationship with Bryce Powers, outside of business?”

  “No.”

  “One last thing,” said Frank. “Can you describe Alvaro Diaz for us, beyond his age.”

  “He was a sweet old man, small, wiry, a little stooped from gardening for twenty years. Very tanned and leathery from all the sun, beautiful white hair, Cuban. He gave me cigars for my husband at Christmas. I didn’t get any this year.”

  On their way out of the complex, Frank stopped Sam Perna’s tanklike Buick Riviera at the gatehouse, and went over to the handsome young guard who had greeted them earlier. Frank offered the man a cigarette, which he declined. The two chatted for a few minutes, Frank smoking, the guard keeping his eye out for incoming traffic, which was nonexistent. They shook hands, and Frank returned to the car.

  “What did he say?” Jay asked when they were underway.

  “He described her the way everyone has: long, dark hair; blue eyes; a great body. He hit on her a couple of times in the beginning, but she turned him down.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. Two young Mexican guys were here about a week ago. They said that Isabel was their sister, that she was missing, and they were very worried about her. They asked if she was especially close to anybody at the complex. He told them the only person he ever saw her talk to was Alvaro Diaz.”

  “Was that before or after the break-in?”

  “The day before.”

  Jay pulled the Miami map they had picked up that morning out of the glove compartment, studied it for a minute, and then said, 12th Avenue Southwest runs right through Little Havana. I guess that should be our next stop.”

  “Let’s talk to Angelo first,” Frank said. “It’s his backyard.”

  31.

  9:30 AM, December 17, 2004, Miami

  The morning after his telephone conversation with Markey, while Jay and Frank were interviewing May Bradley, Gary Shaw was called into Jack Kendall’s office.

  “Good morning, Gary,” Kendall said. “Coffee?”

  “No, I’m good.”

  “I hear El Tigre turned into a pussy.”

  “He did. Somebody got to him.”

  “I talked to Lloyd Dodson just now. He says Lambert won’t throw it out. He doesn’t have the balls. He says if the jury gets it, they’ll do the right thing. Liz will show them the way.”

  Shaw, contemplating the twists and turns of the Taylor case and of justice in America in general, did not answer immediately. Dodson was the Dade County District Attorney. Bill Lambert, up for reelection later that year, was the trial judge. Liz was Elizabeth Siegal, the Assistant DA trying the case.

  “Let’s hope so,” he said finally.

  “I got a call from Chris Markey last night at home,” Kendall said.

  “Right. I talked to him, too,” Shaw replied. “Did he tell you?”

  “He did. Too bad about Princess Di. He might have helped.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Markey wants us to put somebody under in Little Havana.”

  “What about the Beach? It’s their case.”

  “They don’t have the resources.”

  “It’s not our thing. We’d have to call Special Investigations.”

  “I talked to Joe Powell. He can give us the Ramirez kid. That deal at the Port is finished.”

  “Markey really wants us involved?”

  “Yes. It’s a homicide, and he and I have worked together before. We’ll do a task force. Us, SI, and Markey and his people. You’ll run Ramirez.”

  “What’s the story?”

  “We’re looking for Isabel Gutierrez Perez, aka Donna Kelly. She was a courier. Drug cash. She handled about ten million a year, going back to 2001, 2002. It was laundered through a big real estate company in Jersey.”

  “The murder-suicide.”

  “Right. But it wasn’t. Powers—he’s the owner—and Isabel were probably skimming.”

  “She gets away.”

  “Right, but not far. The people she was working for killed Powers and his wife, and a Jersey PI, and last week an old guy in Newark who ID’d the shooters, two young Mexicans.”

  “So they must be looking for her.”

  “Markey believes they want her very badly, as does he, of course.”

  “Who are they?”

  “People high up in the Mexican government.”

  “How high up?”

  “He didn’t say, but it must be high. He was pretty intense on the phone last night. Maybe it’s the president, or someone one near him.”

  “Christ.”

  “He’s been working on this for over a year. He believes if he’s traced her to Little Havana, then so have the bad guys. He’s flying in this morning. We’re meeting him this afternoon, with Powell and Ramirez, at the Miami field office. We’ll drive over together.”

  Kendall, a white man five years younger than Shaw, had been made chief of homicide after a series of successes in highly publicized cases, the most recent being the arrest and conviction of a young white narcotics detective who had killed and robbed a black drug dealer, then dumped his body in the Miami River. Gary Shaw had been among the handful of senior detectives who had been mentioned as possible candidates for the job when it came open. It would have been a nice way to end his career, but Shaw was not too disappointed. The pay wasn’t much more, the responsibilities were heavy, and the politics, racial and otherwise, were a pain in the ass.

  At one thirty Shaw and Kendall got into Shaw’s unmarked car and headed to the FBI’s field office in downtown Miami.

  “Anything new?” Shaw asked, once they were underway.

  “Markey’s in. He called me a few minutes ago. He asked me to send someone to talk to Dixie at Dixie’s Do’s.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He’s being thorough.”

  “Like Princess Di kept a diary.”

  Kendall laughed, and then said, “He’s a tough guy. I worked with him a couple of years ago on a drug sting. He doesn’t like to be disagreed with, and if you cross him he’ll make your life miserable. A word to the wise.”

  “You know me, Jack,” said Shaw. “I never buck the system.”

  Shaw and Kendall were greeted by Jack Voynik, who introduced himself as one of Markey’s assistants before leading them into a second-floor conference room. Around the rectangular conference table were six chairs, and on the table in front of each chair was a yellow legal pad, a pencil, and a manila folder.

  “There’s a briefing memo in the folders,” said Voynik. “Chris is downstairs meeting with Officer Ramirez of your department. He’ll be up in a few minutes. The memo will bring you up to speed. I’ll be back with Chris.”

  “Briefing memo?” said Shaw after Voynik had shut the door behind him.

  “This is how Markey operates,” said Kendall. “You’ll never see a witness statement or an official report unless he thinks you have to. We might as well read.�
��

  Shaw opened his manila folder, read the memo, and learned the following: two members of a DEA/FBI task force had been killed—shot in the heart and beheaded—in Tijuana in early 2003 at an isolated airfield in a sting that went bad. The two Mexican members of the team were not killed, and their stories were not convincing. One of them was found dead in the trunk of his car six months later; the other disappeared at around the same time, and was presumed dead. Both Mexican agents had been interrogated repeatedly by the FBI, with nothing to show for it. The Mexican government was AWOL. Pronouncements of aggressive investigation and imminent arrests from Lazaro Santaria, the attorney general, were painfully transparent public relations bullshit.

  Another DEA/FBI task force was put together, headed by Chris Markey. After a year of hard work with little to show for it, Markey’s team received a tip from a Houston informant identifying Isabel Perez as a courier of drug cash with significant ties to Herman Santaria, Lazaro’s multimillionaire brother. Apparently someone in the informant’s family had been killed—beheaded—on orders from Santaria, a few months earlier.

  This was last summer. Markey’s people watched as Isabel, her home base Bryce Powers’s condo in West Palm Beach, picked up cash at various locations around the country, each in the vicinity of a Powers property, and deposited it in a local bank. In August, she and Powers spent a weekend together at a luxury resort in the Colorado Rockies. Phone taps yielded nothing. Markey had obtained a search warrant, and was about to execute it, when Bryce and his wife were killed. A team of agents went through Powers’s financial records and quickly found wire transfers to overseas banks totaling forty million dollars between 1996 and 1999. These matched up with the deposits Isabel had been making, less a 10 percent broker’s fee to Powers.

  Powers’s records also revealed that Herman Santaria was a co-managing partner in the four properties developed by Powers in Texas in the seventies; that H.S. & Company was formed as a corporation in Texas in 1972 by a Houston law firm; and that its sole shareholder, and recipient of over one million dollars in phony maintenance fees per year, was the same Herman Santaria. An hour before he and Kate were murdered, Powers called Isabel and, with an FBI agent listening in, told her that he was worried about getting killed, and that the “stuff ” he had given her was her only protection against the same fate. If she was arrested, she could hand over “de Leon and both Santarias” on a silver platter.