Faces of the Gone: A Mystery (19 page)

He had one of those Jets firemen helmets sitting on one of his bookcases, a miniature Jets helmet next to it, and a framed ticket hanging on the wall from Super Bowl III, one of the rare proud moments in the franchise’s otherwise abysmal history.

Behind his desk was one of those panoramic photos of Giants Stadium from a Jets- Bills game. On the desk, next to the usual wife-and-kid pictures, there was an autographed picture of Richard Todd and a football that had been signed by Joe Klecko, Marty Lyons, and Mark Gastineau.

A short, thin, energetic man with thinning hair and a dark suit walked in the room.
“Hi, Pete Sampson,” he said affably. “Nice to meet you in person.”
“Carter Ross,
Eagle-Examiner,
” I said as we exchanged an extra- firm, manly-man handshake.
“Sorry about the wait,” he said, smiling thinly. “I was in a meeting.”
“The wait wasn’t that bad. It gave me time to put my anus back in place after the body cavity search I got at the front door.”
“Yeah, that,” L. Pete said. “But, you know—Oklahoma City, 9/11—the rules have all changed. When the threat level is high, this place gets locked down tighter than Mother Teresa’s twat.”
Lovely image. Don’t get me wrong, a little small talk was a good way to start an interview. But since I didn’t want that talk to center around a dead nun’s genitalia, I switched topics.
“So, I’m guessing from your decorations you’re a fan of the Sack Exchange,” I said.
“Best defensive line in football. Too bad Miami was able to slow ’em down in the mud at the Orange Bowl that one year.”
“A. J. Duhe,” I said.
He shuddered. Having lived in New Jersey most of my life, I was accustomed to the inner torment suffered by Jets fans. “Well,” he said. “I’m guessing you didn’t come here to interview me about how the AFC East is stacking up.”
“Not really,” I said. “But to keep this in football terms, my friends at the Newark police tell me they’ve handed off the Ludlow Street quadruple homi cide to you guys.”
L. Pete paused for a beat, just long enough for me to hear the gears switching in his mind.
“Well, as you know, the National Drug Bureau is a federal agency ultimately responsible for fighting this nation’s war against illegal narcotics smuggling both at home and abroad,” he said, like he was quoting from a brochure. “And from time to time, we here at the Newark Field Office use that authority to claim jurisdiction over crimes we believe are extensions of that war.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “So . . . you’ve got this Ludlow Street thing all figured out, then?”
“I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation,” he said, smiling at me.
I matched his insincere smile with one of my own. Time to use the stick.
“Well, don’t take this the wrong way, Pete,” I said. “But this son of a bitch blew up my house this morning and killed my cat. So I didn’t really come here to get a polite no comment.
“Now, we can do this one of two ways,” I continued. “I can team up with a forensic accountant and crawl through every line of your budget. No matter what we find, we’ll run a headline that says, ‘The drug war’s answer to the $1,000 hammer,’ along with grainy head shots of you and your bosses that make you look like criminals. And your wife can explain to her friends at playdates that the article wasn’t really
that
bad.
“Or you can spare me the runaround and we can play nice and share some information. It’s up to you.”
It was empty saber rattling, of course. My bosses frowned on using the newspaper to carry out reporters’ vendettas. And, in any event, I didn’t really have the time—or the interest—to do the kind of intensive reporting I had just described.
But L. Pete, who looked like he had just taken a very large bite of lemon, didn’t necessarily know that. I think my sudden lack of house and cat gave me just enough credibility as a crazy that he was taking me seriously.
“I, uh . . .” he began. “Will you excuse me for a moment?”
He left without another word and, I’m sure, headed next door to ask his boss what to do with the lunatic reporter in his office. I hoped they would come to the conclusion I needed to be placated.
He returned five minutes later.
“Can we be off the record?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Good,” he said. “I’ve been authorized to tell you certain things but not other things. You understand we have people in the field working on this and the wrong information in the wrong hands could be disastrous. We’re not putting our people at risk, no matter how many exposés you write about us.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
He paused then said, “The first thing I’m authorized to tell you is that we have good reason to believe this is the work of José de Jesús Encarcerón.”
“I’m supposed to know who he is?”
“Colombian drug lord, and a real badass one,” L. Pete said. “Some of the things he’s done make other drug lords look like street-corner hustlers. Our agency has a file on this guy that could fill your garage.”
“I don’t have a garage anymore.”
“Right. Sorry. Point is, we’ve been after this guy for more than five years now. And I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but those bodies down on Ludlow Street are just four more debits on a very large tab.”
“So this guy sits in his palace in Bogotá, orders the hit, and the local muscle takes care of it?”
“Something like that, yes,” L. Pete said.
“So why don’t you start by going after the local muscle?”
“I’m afraid that falls under the category of things I can’t tell you.”
“And Encarcerón’s people are responsible for distributing ‘The Stuff’ brand?”
“Can’t tell you that, either,” L. Pete said, shifting his weight uneasily.
“Why, because he’s slipping it past you guys at the airport and you’re embarrassed by it?” I said.
He just shrugged. “Despite what you might assume about how we’re spending taxpayer money here, we’re actually quite close to putting a case together against this guy. But we have to proceed carefully or we could screw up the whole thing.”
Now it was my turn to shrug.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t care if or when you get around to putting away this José de Whatever guy. I care about the guy who tried to put a stick of dynamite up my ass this morning. Specifically, I’m a little worried he’ll return to finish off the job.”
“Well, that gets around to the other thing I’m authorized to tell you.”
“Which is?”
“I wouldn’t press too hard if I were you,” L. Pete said.
“Oh?”
“We have good reason to believe Encarcerón’s people consider this matter settled. All the loose ends are tied up. All the evidence is destroyed. They want to go back to business as usual. But if a certain newspaper reporter kept nosing around, kept making himself a pest, they might feel the need to exterminate the pest.”
“That sounds a bit ominous,” I said.
“Call it what you want,” L. Pete replied. “I call it prudent advice. These are some bad
hombres
we’re dealing with. I am urging you in the strongest possible terms to leave the Ludlow Street investigation to our agents and trust we’ll get the job done. We can’t guarantee your safety if you keep sniffing around.”
“I see,” I said. “Are you authorized to tell me anything else?”
“Nope,” he said cheerfully. “But when we’re ready to announce our charges against Encarcerón, I promise we’ll give you an exclusive interview. Seems like you’re owed the pleasure.”
“Terrific,” I said, though I really meant the opposite of terrific. I had no intention of waiting for L. Pete and his fellow flatfoots to get around to making a case against some international drug lord.
But, at least for the time being, I had to keep up appearances.

. Pete and I swapped phone numbers and bid each other a fake-fond adieu, then I departed the National Drug Bureau’s fortress with a friendly wave to the square-jaw boys. Despite my new information, I still felt wary of large men in white vans. Not to say I didn’t trust our government but . . . well . . . I didn’t trust our government. And since them being wrong could result in me being dead, I felt caution was still advisable.

At the very least, I wanted to educate myself more about this José de Jesús character. So I spurred my Malibu back to the office, where an hour of trolling through clips on Lexis-Nexis laid out a fairly complete life story. He was young for an intercontinental villain, just thirty-four. A poor street thug from Bogotá, he got his start in the business in the mid-1990s, which turned out to be a fortuitous time for an ambitious would-be drug lord: Pablo Escobar had just been killed, and the instability created by his passing made it easy enough for Encarcerón to rise up the ranks.

He was pretty much your garden-variety ruthless sociopath. He terrorized and/or eliminated anyone who dared oppose him, kidnapped and/or imprisoned anyone he didn’t feel like killing, bribed and/or murdered any government official who tried to slow him down, and generally didn’t play well with others.

His nickname, La Cabra—the Goat—derived from an infamous episode early in his career. He’d killed a rival’s entire family, decapitating them and placing goats’ heads on top of the stumps. Charming.

As L. Pete said, U.S. law enforcement and U.S.- backed Colombian authorities had been after the guy for a while. Within the past few years, La Cabra had climbed the ranks of the NDB’s Most Wanted and the price on his head had reached $2 million.

But Bogotá was a big city and Colombia was an even bigger country. He never stayed in the same place long. And he was generous enough with the spoils of his enterprise—hosting huge cookouts, sponsoring sports teams, paying hospital bills for indigents— that people in the
barrio
never gave him up. Of course, fear played a part, too. Legend had it, he had once been tipped off that someone in the neighborhood was going to inform on him. The would-be snitch’s body was dragged through the streets by two horses. One towed the head and torso, the other the butt and legs.

So, yeah, he was on Santa’s naughty list. But I couldn’t drive away the thought that something didn’t feel right. Why would a drug lord in Colombia concern himself with a few Newark street dealers? And, even if he did, why kill all four at once? And why leave their bodies where they could be so easily discovered? I can’t pretend I knew a lot about the preferred modus operandi of the Colombian cartels, but this didn’t feel like it.

Besides, the identity of the person giving the orders in South America was, in some ways, just academic. There was still someone on this side of the equator pulling the trigger. And it bothered me that my government, in its zeal to put La Cabra’s head on its mantel, was treating this trigger-puller like he was such a trivial piece in a larger game.

Because I knew how this stuff worked. The foot soldiers would be given lighter sentences in exchange for their testimony against the Big Boss.
Yes, your honor, I murdered four people and torched all those buildings, but La Cabra made me do it.
Van Man would do twenty or thirty years but would end up enjoying his old age as a free man. Meanwhile, his victims got no reprieve on being dead.

But there was one way to possibly change that equation: if I could get to the foot soldier first and put his name in the paper, there would be pressure for the NDB to do something about it. The families of the victims would be clamoring for justice, and this crime had become high profile enough that they might be able to get someone with pull—a congressman, maybe—to listen.

So I just had to find a way to infiltrate a Colombian drug lord’s local organization, implicate it in a major international drug-smuggling ring, and find compelling evidence it had committed a series of heinous crimes. I could have that wrapped up by, what, dinnertime?

Or not.
Knowing L. Pete wasn’t going to be any assistance mapping out La Cabra’s network, I had to leverage the information he had given me to try to get more from somewhere else. And, really, I could only think of one guy I knew who might even
have
more information. I picked up the phone and dialed Irving Wallace, hoping his part of the government—whatever part that was—had an agenda different enough from the NDB that he wouldn’t mind being helpful.
“Yes,” he said.
“Hi, Irving, Carter Ross from the
Eagle-Examiner
.”
Pause. “Are you in your office?”
“Yeah.”
Click.
Ten seconds later, my phone rang.
“Carter Ross.”
“Hi, it’s Irving.”
“You want to explain to me why that was necessary?” I asked.
“Because someone could have been impersonating you.”
“Besides Buster Hays, no one knows we’ve ever spoken,” I said. “And I’m sure Buster isn’t sharing.”
“Good thing, too,” he said. “I understand your sources get their houses blown up.”
Obviously, someone had been watching the news.
“Cheap shot,” I said. “Now that you’ve hurt my feelings, you have to help me. What can you tell me about José de Jesús Encarcerón?”
“I don’t know. That he’s not very nice, I guess,” Wallace said. “I’m just a lab guy, remember? I know what his drugs look like after they’ve been passed through a spectrometer.”
“Aw, come on. I’m sure you hear little tidbits from . . . whoever it is you work for.”
“Say the magic words.”
Magic words? What magic words? Oh.
“Off the record,” I said.
“Very good,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“Well, I want to know what kind of muscle he has on the street here.”
“Where, in Newark?”
“Yeah.”
“He doesn’t,” Wallace said.
“What do you mean? Of course he does.”
“In the Northeast, guys like Encarcerón just supply the product. They’ve never been able to get down to the street level. I’m not sure they even want to. They’ve always left it to the local thugs.”
“Someone told me—off the record, of course—that Encarcerón’s people here are responsible for Ludlow Street,” I said.
“Really?” Wallace said, sounding surprised. “Is it someone who knows what they’re talking about?”
“They ought to.”
“Huh,” he said. “Sounds to me like someone is trying to snow you.”

made Irving Wallace promise to call me if he heard anything—a lot of good that would probably do—and was just about to settle in for some serious head scratching when the three o’clock editor’s meeting let out and Hurricane Tina washed ashore on my desk.

“Goddammit, Carter. Where the hell have you been?” she said with quiet intensity.
“I had an errand to run,” I said. “We were out of nondairy creamer in the break room.”
“You prick,” she bristled. “If I have to surgically attach an electronic monitoring bracelet to your balls, I will.”
“Watch out,” I said. “That might lower my sperm count.”
“Yeah? You should see what dying does to your sperm count.” “Ah,” I said. “So
that’s
why you haven’t gotten into necrophilia.”
She had clearly been outzinged. So rather than hit me with another comeback, she put her hands on her hips and pursed her lips. A lock of hair fell across her face and I felt the urge to tuck it behind her ear for her. But Tina was determined to stay indignant, so she blew it out of the way and continued scowling at me.
“So do you want to fill me in on what’s been going on around here?” I asked.
“No. I want to wring your neck. But I’ll tell you anyway: Whitlow, Hays, and Hernandez have been putting together a story on today’s series of fires and explosions that we will link to the
Eagle-Examiner’
s front-page report about the Ludlow Street murders.”
I nodded.
“Their story will not carry a byline,” she said. “That’s our new policy. Until this Unabomber-wannabe is caught, all Ludlow Street stories are unbylined.”
“What, no one else wanted the joy that is filing a total home destruction insurance claim?”
“In other news,” she continued. “We’ve received and declined about twenty interview requests for star investigative reporter Carter Ross.”
“Aw, damn,” I said. “How am I supposed to get my fifteen minutes of fame?”
“Well, given how you did with your first five on the
News at Noon,
I’d say we’re doing you a favor.”
Now I was outzinged. I thought about sharing what I had learned from my new buddies at the NDB but decided it could wait.
“I’m still pissed at you,” Tina said. “But if you behave yourself for the rest of the day, I’ll make you my world-famous veal scaloppine when we get home tonight.”
“Consider me on my best behavior,” I said, raising three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
“Yeah, I almost believe that. I’m telling the security guards in the parking lot that if they see you unaccompanied, they should shoot to maim.”
“Good thing they’re old and blind,” I said.
“You better hope so,” she said.
She stormed off, taking her Category 5 wrath with her. I was just starting to scan my e-mail box—spaces in Human Resources’ Ramadan Awareness seminar were going fast—but before I could learn what I needed to be aware of (besides hungry Muslims) Tommy approached my desk.
“Is it safe?” he asked.
“You mean if you continue standing here will someone try to firebomb you and your Gucci shoes? I make no guarantees.”
“No, I was talking about Tina,” Tommy said. “I think I’d rather take my chances with the bomb.”
“She’ll get over it. How was Booker T?”
“I would say your friend in the van saved the City of Newark a lot of money in de mo lition.”
“You ask about Red and Queen Mary?”
“Yeah. No one had seen them this morning. But as of a half hour ago the fire department hadn’t recovered any bodies, so maybe there are none to recover.”
The cynical side of me wondered how hard they were actually looking. Anyone trapped in that building would be a person who long ago ceased to be of much consequence to society.
“What about Brenda Bass?” I asked.
“I made the usual round of calls to the hospitals and got the usual crap about confidentiality laws. But on a hunch I called the burn unit at University Hospital and one of the nurses slipped.”
“Slipped?”
“Yeah, she was like, ‘How did you know she was here?’ And I was like, ‘I didn’t, honey, you just told me.’ ”
“Wow. The intern with the veteran move. Nice job,” I said. “Anyway, how’s your story coming?”
“Eh, you know what a joy it is working with Buster. If he calls me ‘little girl’ one more time he’s going to have to remove my queer Cuban foot from his ass.”
“I love it when you get all butch.”
“I really sounded tough just now, huh?” he said, then giggled.
“I was definitely scared for a second. Look at me, I’m trembling,” I said, holding out my hand, which was rock steady.
“Yeah, anyway, screw you,” Tommy said. “I only came over here to tell you about this guy who called for you. The clerk transferred the calls to me, because the guy said it was about Ludlow Street. But he only wanted to talk to you.”
Tommy handed me a number on a torn piece of Chinese menu.
“The guy have a name?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t say. He sounded like some gangbanger. That’s why I didn’t want to give him your cell number. He sounded pretty scary.”
“I’m not afraid of him. I’ve got a queer Cuban ass-kicker who will protect me.”
“Don’t you forget it,” Tommy said as he walked away.
I looked at the menu/message slip for a moment. I generally have a pretty good memory for phone numbers, but this one wasn’t jostling any brain cells (though it was making me hungry for mu shu pork).
I briefly debated whether to call the number. I was, at least according to some, a known enemy of La Cabra. There was no telling who might be trying to lure me into certain doom. Why wouldn’t the guy give his name? Why insist on only talking to me? It had the classic markings of a trap.
But I gave in pretty quickly. Ultimately, the journalistic flesh is weak: an anonymous source calling with information is just far too great a temptation to resist. I mean, maybe this was my Deep Throat, the guy who would meet me in the parking garage and tell me everything. Besides, what would one little phone call hurt?
So I dialed.
“Yo,” said a voice I couldn’t place.
“Hi, this is Carter Ross, from the
Eagle-Examiner,”
I said.
“Yo, Bird Man! Thanks for putting in your article that we didn’t have nothing to do with Dee- Dub.”
It wasn’t Deep Throat. It was Bernie Kosar from the Brick City Browns.
“I promised you I would,” I said. “I mean, you made me an honorary member. It seems to be the least I could do for you guys.”
Especially with sources who, on occasion, shoot people.
“Yeah, it was cool. My mom even clipped it out and saved it. It’s the first time we been mentioned in the paper for something positive, you know?”
“Well, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to feature you in the ‘Good Neighbors’ section just yet, but I’m glad it’s something,” I said. “Anyway, what’s up?”
“I got someone here you want to talk to. Can you come out to Brown Town right away?”
“Brown Town?”
“Yeah, you know, the place where we, you know . . .” “Smoked that fine marijuana?”
“Yeah,” Bernie said, laughing. He cupped the phone, but I could hear him say to his buddies: “Bird Man wants to know if this is where we ‘smoked that fine marijuana,’ ” he said, imitating my voice with exaggerated diction, then got back on the phone.
“You got a funny way of talking, Bird Man. It’s like listening to the announcer in one of them antidrug videos. Where do white people learn to talk like that, anyway?”
“We take special classes,” I replied. “I’ll be right over.”
“Okay, hurry up. This guy ain’t going to hang around all day.”