The Quality of the Informant cc-3

by Gerald Petievich

  "Are you still interested in finding Paul LaMonica?" she asked.

  "Yes."

  "If I tell you where you can find him, what will you do for me?" she said tersely.

  "What do you want done for you?" Carr rubbed his temples. The hangover would not go away.

  "I was booked on attempted murder," she said. "I want the charge dropped to assault with a deadly weapon. That's all I'm asking."

  "What kind of injuries on the victim?" Carr said.

  Rosemary Cramp's chin quivered. Deftly she used an index finger to wipe a tear out of each eye. "The whole thing was a misunderstanding. She was high. We were arguing over someone and she threw a clock radio and just missed my head. I grabbed a knife. I don't remember what happened exactly. All she has are a few cuts on her arms." She looked at the ceiling for a moment.

  "I can talk to the D.A. and to the judge if you're convicted … let 'em know you cooperated on a case," Carr said. "Of course you know that's no guarantee that anything can be done."

  She folded her hands and stared at them. "You can find Paul LaMonica at a bar called Teddy's in Ensenada. It's a place where all the American fugitives hang out. It's down by the ocean. The last time I spoke with LaMonica he told me that's where I could find him. He floats back and forth across the border, but he uses phony I.D. that he makes himself. Your only chance of catching him is down there." She combed her hair with her fingernails.

  "What kind of car does LaMonica drive?" Carr said.

  "All different," Rosemary Cramp said. "He rents 'em with counterfeit I.D., drives 'em for a couple of weeks, and then dumps 'em."

  "Friends?"

  "He's a one hundred percent lone wolf," she said. "Take my word for it, the only chance you have of busting him is in Ensenada. The owner of the bar is a coke dealer named Teddy Mora. He owns some property in Hollywood. All I know about him is that I once fronted him a couple of phony bonds and he never paid me for 'em." She wiped her eyes again and sniffled.

  "Thanks for the tip," Carr said. "And I'll see what I can do to help."

  Rosemary Cramp nodded without looking at him. She pushed her chair back and stood up.

  "Just a sec," Carr said. He tilted his head in the direction of the blond deputy. "Do you know that deputy's name?" he asked.

  "Betty Sanders," Rosemary Cramp said. "She was working the max unit when I did time in here a few years ago.

  "Thanks again," Carr said.

  Rosemary Cramp turned and shuffled to the inmates' door. She walked out of the room without looking back.

  Charles Carr glanced at his wristwatch. It was almost 8:00 A.M. On his way out, he stopped at the bulletproof window. The blond deputy looked up from a pocket novel.

  "How about breakfast?" Carr said.

  "Not unless you can remember my name."

  "Betty Sanders, how could I forget!"

  Betty Sanders smiled. "We'll have breakfast at my place." She pulled a ballpoint pen from the flap pocket above her badge and wrote something on a notepad. She tore the page off the pad and shoved it through a slot below the window. Carr saw that it was an address in Highland Park. "I wouldn't expect you to still have my address. You probably threw it away. Cops always throw ladies' addresses away." She looked at her watch. "See you there in an hour." She made another mock kiss.

  Carr gave a little wave. He found his way through the jail courtyard and a guard allowed him to exit the front gate. At a bank of pay telephones in the corner of the parking lot, he dropped in a dime and dialed.

  "Homicide, Higgins."

  "Charlie Carr…A cutting in Hollywood last night…the suspect was booked for attempted murder under the name Rosanna DuMaurier…" Carr spelled the name. "She's working for me. I need the beef dropped to assault with a deadly weapon. Can you help?"

  "I'll see what I can do," Higgins said. He spelled the name back.

  "Appreciate it," Carr said and hung up.

  The house was an older stucco construction with a red-tiled roof and arched doors and windows; one of the handful of two- and three-bedroom architectural designs that had multiplied, amoebalike, across Southern California to form its chaotic suburbia.

  Carr knocked and the door swung open. Betty Sanders, wearing fresh lipstick, makeup, and a pink jogging suit, stood in front of him holding a spatula. She pinched him on the cheek and trotted back into the kitchen. "I hope you're hungry," she said. Carr closed the door. He strolled across a living room decorated with oversized pillows and stereo equipment.

  "I've been married to three cops," she said. "They had three very different personalities, but the one thing they had in common was that they were all hungry twenty-four hours a day. My first husband used to eat a whole loaf of French bread with peanut butter and jelly just for a snack. He would gain weight, then stop eating for a month to trim down. Crazy."

  Carr wandered into the kitchen. He removed his coat and hung it on the back of a chair. He sat down while Betty Sanders mixed strong Bloody Marys. She handed him one and they clinked glasses. Then she returned to the stove. He sipped and felt the vodka's warmth travel from throat to stomach. He closed his eyes for a moment. Had the headache gone away?

  "When I gave you my number I knew you'd never call," she said. "I can always tell. If a guy puts the number in his shirt pocket, he'll never call. If he puts it in his wallet, there's a fifty-fifty chance." She flipped bacon and turned toward him. "May I ask you a question?"

  Carr sipped again. He nodded.

  "What do you think of me?"

  "What do you mean by that?" he said, trying not to sound flippant.

  "As a person," she said. "What do you think of me as a person?"

  Carr stood up and took another drink. Having set the glass down, he stepped to the stove and turned off the burner. He took the spatula out of Betty Sanders's hand and dropped it on the counter. He kissed her. She threw her arms around him. After a while, their mouths parted.

  "You can't answer that question, can you?" she whispered.

  His hand reached for her crotch. She closed her eyes. Her hips moved to him. They kissed again. They held hands on the way to the bedroom. Sitting on the bed, they stripped off each other's clothes.

  "I want you to shower with me first," she said. He got undressed and followed her to the bathroom. They showered and rushed back to the bed. Without drying off, they made love. Betty Sanders's love moans seemed to get louder and louder. As she reached her height of passion, it occurred to Carr that the neighbors might call the police to report a screaming woman. Finally, they were spent. At her insistence, they showered again. As Betty Sanders pulled on her jogging suit, she said, "I like you. I really mean that."

  Carr yanked on his trousers. "I like you too," he said.

  "No you don't," she said. After a couple of brush strokes through her hair, she hurried back to the kitchen.

  As Carr finished dressing, he heard the sound of eggs frying. He combed his hair.

  The phone rang and Betty Sanders picked up the kitchen extension. "I'm really tied up at the moment, Bob," she said without attempting to lower her voice. "Try me tomorrow." Kiss sounds.

  Carr joined her in the kitchen and they shared breakfast. During the meal, they discussed the possible deputy sheriffs' strike until they began to repeat themselves in agreeing with one another. They lit cigarettes. Carr looked at his watch.

  "I know," she said. "It's time for you to get back to work."

  The telephone rang. She answered it. "Sorry, John, but I'm kind of busy today. Try me day after tomorrow." More kisses into the receiver.

  Carr stood up to leave and she led him to the door. They kissed. "Thanks for the breakfast," Carr said.

  "You're a very sneaky person," she said. "After you left the jail, that prisoner told me you asked her my name."

  Carr smiled. "I confess."

  She opened the door for him. He stepped out. "I'll call you sometime," he said.

  "Sure."

  Chapter 19

  Carr stepped into N
orbert Waeves's office. Waeves was sitting behind an oversized desk covered with disassembled pipes, tobacco-stained rags, and pipe cleaners. Without looking up, Waeves scraped tobacco sludge off a pipe stem and wiped it neatly on the corner of a rag.

  "You wanted to see me?" Carr said.

  "Sit down," Waeves said without looking up.

  Carr remained standing.

  "Tell me about your proposed trip to Ensenada," Waeves said in the tone of a grade-school teacher.

  "I have a couple of leads on LaMonica," Carr said. "I need to check some things out down there."

  "I take it you're aware that the operations manual requires headquarters' approval for any investigation outside the continental limits of the United States," Waeves said. He still hadn't looked up. He took a penknife and dug into a pipe bowl shaped like a man's head.

  "The manual also gives the agent in charge the authority to send agents out of the U.S. on any case he designates as a priority investigation," Carr said.

  "The word priority has different meanings to different people," Waeves said.

  "I'm sure headquarters will approve the trip," Carr said. "LaMonica is a federal fugitive. He murdered one of our informants."

  Waeves rapped the pipe on an ashtray. "Headquarters requires an operations plan for such trips."

  "I'm not asking to go to Mongolia. Ensenada is a two-and-a-half-hour-drive from Los Angeles. I'm told that the police there are cooperative."

  Waeves lifted a pipe stem to his lips and blew. Using a corner of a rag, he dabbed at the device and then examined the stain on the rag. "For the time being I'm going to disapprove the trip," he said.

  "Why?" Carr asked angrily.

  Waeves looked at him disdainfully. "I'm going to deny travel permission because it sounds to me like you're going off…uh…half-cocked, shall we say?"

  Carr turned and walked out of the room. He returned to his office and fell into his desk chair.

  Kelly was writing a report. He put down his pen. "What did he want?" he said.

  "He refused to let us go below the border," Carr said, looking at the wall.

  "Let me guess," Kelly said, holding an arm out in traffic-cop fashion. "He quoted the manual, right?"

  "Right."

  "Which means, one, that he doesn't want to go to the trouble of writing an operations plan; and two, he won't deem the case a priority. That figures. He doesn't know how to write an operations plan because he got his promotions by kissing ass in D.C. while he was an instructor in Agent Training School. He probably wouldn't recognize an operations plan if one jumped up and bit him. As far as deeming the case a priority investigation, no way. That would mean taking a stand on something, choosing one way or the other. Therefore, what you see is what you always get. No waves."

  Carr picked up a partially completed form titled "Request to Use Government-Owned Vehicle for More Than One Calendar Day" off his desk. He tore it in half and tossed it into the wastebasket.

  Kelly's face turned red. "Of all the briefcase-carrying, useless-as-tits-on-a-bull bureaucrats living on the face of the planet Earth, No Waves is the worst. I really believe that. One minute after I retire I'm going to walk right into his office and sock him in the goddamn mouth. I'm going to knock every one of his teeth out." He slammed fist into palm.

  Carr got up from his desk and walked to the window. It was rush hour. Buses and cars were lined up at entrances to freeways. People couldn't wait to get out of the city.

  It was daybreak.

  Jack Kelly sat at a tiny table next to the kitchen window and finished off his usual three eggs and six slices of bacon. He was dressed in Levi's, boots and a flannel shirt.

  The first rays of sun glistened off the dew collected on the sides of an olive drab pup tent pitched in the backyard. Next to the tent, an L.A. Rams pennant topped a broomstick flagpole.

  "The boys didn't get to sleep out there till midnight," Rose Kelly said. "They were roughhousing."

  Kelly chuckled.

  "Will you be back for late Mass on Sunday?" Rose said, speaking to the stove. Her long red braid twitched back and forth on her shoulders as she labored. She wore a housecoat. Rose Kelly was the kind of woman who would not allow her husband to leave the house without eating. Perhaps for this attribute alone, Jack Kelly would have chosen her for a wife.

  "I'll sure try," he said.

  Rose Kelly refilled his cup from a steaming coffeepot, then sat down at the table. "You haven't been fishing in years," she said.

  "Spur of the moment idea," Kelly said, staring into his cup. His hand drummed fingers.

  "Just you and Charlie Carr?"

  "Uh, right," Kelly said.

  "Isn't Mexico kind of a long way to go for fishing?"

  A horn honked. Kelly jumped up. He pulled a baseball cap out of his back pocket and pulled it on. Rose stood up, kissed him on the lips, and gave him a hug. "I know it has something to do with your job," she said apologetically as she nuzzled his neck.

  "God bless you, Rose," Kelly said.

  She followed him to the front door. Outside, Carr sat behind the wheel of his sedan. Fishing poles protruded from a rear window.

  "Please be careful," Rose Kelly said as her husband walked out the door and down the driveway.

  LaMonica dropped pesos into a pay phone hanging on a wall next to the hotel's reception desk. He told the operator to make the call collect from Roger Brown. After a minute or two, Omar T. Lockhart clicked onto the line.

  "Have you considered my client's offer?" LaMonica said.

  "Yes, we have," Lockhart said.

  There was a silence.

  "Are we going to be able to go any further?" LaMonica said. He held his breath.

  "I have been authorized to meet with you once more," Lockhart said. "I'd prefer to have the meeting here in Houston."

  "Sorry," LaMonica said. "You'll have to come back down here. My client demands this." Another silence.

  "Very well," Lockhart said, sounding angry.

  It was siesta time. LaMonica and Lockhart sat at one of the poolside umbrella tables, Sandy between them. A sunburned young woman in her early twenties splashed around in the shallow end of the greenish pool with a man of the same age. They swam away from and then toward one another lazily, like goldfish in a bowl.

  Lockhart had neither smiled nor so much as touched the margarita sitting in front of him during the entire hour or so of half whispered, half spoken negotiations.

  "Fifty thousand is my last offer," Lockhart said. "It's a company decision and it's final. I have been authorized to tell you that you can take it or leave it." Rivulets of perspiration extended from the fat man's sideburns to his jawline.

  "I'll take it," Sandy said. "But I'm getting screwed and it's just not right." Haughtily, she folded her arms across her chest.

  The fat man dug a handkerchief out of his back pocket and unfolded it. Covering his face with the cloth, he wiped from side to side. He looked at the hanky and stuffed it back into his pocket. "My employer insists that the transfer itself take place in the United States."

  With eyes closed, Sandy shook her head. "No way," she said.

  "We're not going to negotiate on this point," Lockhart said, "because I'm sure you don't really expect us to bring fifty thousand dollars in cold cash across the border." He stood up and straightened his wrinkled trousers.

  "You will if you want the checks," Sandy said.

  "No, young lady, we damn well won't," Lockhart said. "Texans don't do business that way. You'll come to the U.S. to do the final deal or it will not be done at all." His eyes bugged with hostility.

  LaMonica's hands made a "go easy" gesture and he winked at the security man.

  "I'll expect to hear from you soon," said Lockhart. He turned and trudged along the edge of the pool and through the hotel lobby.

  "I'm not going across," Sandy said. "I told you I wouldn't go and I wasn't bullshitting. I have the creeps just being here in T-Town. You've heard the stories about the feds kidnapp
ing fugitives and driving them across. I'm not going to take a chance on going back to eating off a plastic tray and sitting in a room with fifty bull dykes just to watch a television program."

  LaMonica leaned closer to her. "You're not looking at this realistically," he said. "These people are ready to pay. You and I will get twenty-five thousand fucking dollars apiece! We will be out of this shitty border scene. I'm talking about freedom, Sandy. A ticket out."

  Sandy's fingernails played a tune on her lower lip.

  "I'll be with you every step of the way," LaMonica said confidently. "We can pull it off without any problems. I know we can."

  "I've heard that before," Sandy said. "Besides, you don't give a shit about me or any other woman. For you, women are just something to use."

  "We're both going to be there. We're both wanted in the U.S. I'm not asking you to take any risk I'm not taking. In fact, if something happens I'll let you hand me up. I'm giving you my permission to tell the cops I forced you into the operation against your will. You can cut a deal and testify against me. I'm giving you my permission to do that if anything happens. I swear."

  "Deal or not, I've still got an escape warrant that would put me back in the joint," Sandy Hartzbecker said. "That's what it all comes down to."

  LaMonica grabbed her arm. "No," he said, speaking through gritted teeth. "What it all comes down to is that fat motherfucker Lockhart sitting across the border with fifty grand wrapped in rubber bands and whether we go over and take him off or just sit here and listen to one another talk about it. I'll tell you this much: With or without your help, I'm going to go up there and try to take the man's money. I'll hold a gun to his head if I have to."

  Sandy pulled her arm away. She stood up and faced the pool. She watched the two human dolphins as they continued to splash around. It was a long while before she spoke.

  "I want Mr. Cool to be there with me," she said. "That way I know I won't get ripped off."

  LaMonica grimaced. "Involving other people in our business is suicide. It's unnecessary."

  "It's the only way I'll do it. I mean that."

  LaMonica sat for a while without speaking. "Okay," he said finally. "You're risking as much as I am by letting him in on it. Go ahead and call him. Tell him we'll do the deal at the Sandstone Motor Lodge on Interstate Five just south of San Diego. He should get a room there day after tomorrow and wait for us."