Fields of Wrath (Luis Chavez Book 1) (15 page)

Glenn suspected Henry loved the honors and attention and actively courted them by being elusive. That Glenn had to accept them on his behalf to avoid embarrassment and maintain relationships with important boards and governmental agencies added to Henry’s enjoyment—or so he thought. Adding to or perpetuating the Legend of Henry Marshak was Glenn’s least favorite activity.

“My brother would love to be here to accept this honor,” Glenn said, pausing to acknowledge knowing chuckles from the audience. “But we all know the story of how hard it is to drag the old farmer from his fields. May his diligence and dedication be a lasting inspiration to the students of this university.”

Peals of applause came in earnest now. Some stood and the rest followed. Glenn had fought his daughter on the “diligence and dedication” line, even though he knew it struck the right closing beat of humility. He strode off the dais to a barrage of photos, handshakes, claps on the back, and looks of familiarity from people he was sure he’d never seen before. He responded in kind, though all he really wanted was to find his driver and get the hell out of there.

He finally pushed through the throng, the car within sight, when a man of his own age and privileged tax bracket stepped forward, hand extended.

“Donald,” Glenn said, shaking his hand. “Does my family have you to thank for sponsoring this honor?”

Donald Roenningke, the semiretired CEO of Crown Foods, shrugged and opened his hands in supplication, which confirmed to Glenn he had nothing to do with it whatsoever.

“Maybe I just wanted to catch you in a festive mood,” Donald said with a wry smile.

“I’m assuming this has something to do with our meeting last week?” Glenn asked.

“Oh, you had them quaking in their boots, my son included,” Donald said, sighing. “Did it feel good?”

Glenn snorted.
Of course it did.

“Then you’ll be happy to know that we’re giving in to most of your demands,
except
the length of the contract. You wanted twenty years before it could be renegotiated? I’ll give you ten. That’s final.”

“You’re banking on me not being alive?”

“Yes,” Donald said flatly. “Jason’s not you. Let him carve out his own legacy.”

“Like you’re doing for Andrew?” Glenn scolded. “Or is this tough love meant to force him to rise to the occasion, one CEO to another?”

“Maybe it’s both.”

Glenn smiled but saw that something was still bothering his counterpart.

“What is it?”

“In the spirit of cooperation, there’s something I feel I should bring to your attention,” Donald said. “We received a packet of information concerning possible criminal activity within your company.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“I know, I know,” Donald said, raising a hand. “We get things like this all the time. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred there’s nothing to it at all. But this came to us over the weekend. It’s pretty alarming stuff.”

“Alarming how?”

Donald nodded to his driver, who came over with two large padded envelopes. He handed them to Glenn, who eyed them as if he’d been given a dead animal.

“You can see for yourself. The contents suggest you’ve been using illegal labor in your fields. But instead of a few here and there slipping through the cracks, they show a pattern of illegality, comparing it to an organized crime syndicate, right down to violence and even murder.”

“Oh, come
on
,” Glenn shot back. “How can you even pay attention to something that preposterous? It’s like a tabloid story.”

“I agree. When we looked into it ourselves—”

“When you did
what
?”

“When we looked into it
ourselves
,” Donald continued, “we came up dry. But our investigation is still open. Unless, of course, you could refute these charges yourself. It would save a lot of time.”

“Are you saying the contract hinges on that?”

“I’m saying this is the largest deal my company has ever considered. We can’t take chances, even with unlikely fairy tales. Let me know, okay?”

XVIII

Oscar’s ringtone wasn’t easy to ignore. A popular
narcocorrido
from the ever more popular El Komander, it cut through any conversation with its jaunty lyrics celebrating murder and drug smuggling over a traditional, almost mariachi-style melody. When it broke the silence in the small motel room, Oscar’s eyes popped open, and he rolled out of bed to find the phone.

“Sí?”
he said, plucking the cell from a pile of clothes on the floor.

“Oscar,” a familiar voice cooed, equal parts bemusement and condescension. “How’s my boy?”

Jesus Christ,
Oscar thought
. Not who I thought I’d hear from today.

“I’m good,” Oscar croaked. “How are you?”

“That remains to be seen. It seems a friend of ours has come back to us.”

Oscar sat up straight and tried to clear his head. He needed to be in a more lucid frame of mind for this conversation. It occurred to him that the room was empty. He glanced to the bathroom door and saw it open a crack. The shower was running and he could just make out the person inside.

“Oh?” he managed to reply. “Who’s that?”

“The young man to whom you gave a ride up into farm country last week.”

As Oscar struggled with a response, his eyes fell on the pile of clothes that didn’t belong to him. He fixed on a bra, noting its impressive cup size.

Oh yeah, the blond,
he remembered.

She’d been in her thirties, with magnificent legs, fantastic tits, a hard, flat stomach, and a tight, round ass—not the most common sight on a white chick, particularly one that had kicked out a couple of kids. He’d thought she’d sneak out after he’d fallen asleep. Not only had she stayed the night, she’d left the bathroom door open.

An invitation if he’d ever seen one.

“Luis,” Oscar said, inspired to hurry the conversation. “Yeah, I saw him. Was a real surprise. But you had to know he was here, right?”

“Yes, but you sought him out. Invited him by. Did him a favor. I find that curious.”

Great. He’s got eyes and ears in my crew. I’ll have to deal with that.

“He asked me for help, not the other way around. And I’m not a guy who likes to get his information secondhand. So yeah, I went to see that it was him.”

There was a pause.

“Maybe that’s true,” the voice said. “But we need to keep better tabs on him. It seems like he’s up to all sorts of unpriestly activities up there. And you can look in on him in ways I cannot. Understood?”

“Sure,” Oscar said.

“Excellent. We’ll talk soon?”

Oscar hung up without replying. Any more time on the phone and the woman in the shower might give up on him.

“Important phone call?” she chided when Oscar stepped in behind her.

“I am an important person,” he declared.

She laughed. He put his hands on her hips and mouth against her skin where her shoulder met her neck. She moaned obligingly and put one hand on his leg, the other on his erection.

As he kissed her, Oscar realized he’d either forgotten her name or she hadn’t even offered it the night before. If he’d thought to, he should’ve stopped on the way to the shower to search her purse for an ID.

Oh well.

The accounting firm was located on the bottom two floors of a modest professional building a stone’s throw from several gated communities. The other occupants were two dentists, an optometrist, a lawyer who specialized in small claims, and a tax attorney.

Luis checked the dashboard clock as they pulled into the parking lot. It was a few minutes short of noon.

“Wait,” Maria said as Luis reached for the door handle.

“Why?”

“If we get one shot at this,” Maria said, eyes on the building’s front door, “we have to make it count.”

Luis settled back in the passenger seat. He expected Maria to explain, but she said nothing. People began to trickle out a few minutes later, likely on their way to lunch at the fast-food joints nearby.

After another minute Maria opened the car door.

“Let’s go.”

The inside of the building was functional and anonymous. Any business could move in, establish itself, endure a few downturns, disappear, and be replaced by someone doing the same with minimal cosmetic changes.

Maria moved through the lobby with purpose, Luis hurrying to catch up. The security guards glanced up as she passed but were distracted by Luis’s collar. Maria kept walking toward the double doors leading to Suite 100 and entered without knocking.

Three women were arranged behind a single long desk. Two were on the phone. Maria approached the one who wasn’t.

“Can I help you?” the young woman asked.

“We’re here for the Higuera files,” Maria announced.

The woman stared back without recognition. She glanced to the women on either side of her, but they used their calls to keep out of it.

“Did you talk to someone in particular?” the receptionist asked.

Maria held up her file of bank statements.

“We just came from the county assessor’s office. We were told the files were here. Santiago Higuera? He was my brother. The one killed in Mexico.”

Conversation stopped as everyone froze. Even Luis was taken aback by the starkness of Maria’s statement.

“Oh. I’m . . . I’m so sorry,” the receptionist stammered. “What can we do for you?”

“My brother was a client of this firm,” Maria said. “You kept copies of his employment and tax forms, among other things. We are in the process of donating the property to St. Augustine’s Church in Los Angeles.”

Luis winced at the lie but said nothing.

“The county assessor assured me the files would be ready to be picked up when I got here from the city. Father Chavez was able to get time away from the parish to help carry them.”

The receptionist waited for Maria to continue. When she realized it was her turn to speak, she nodded. “I don’t think Janette’s left for lunch yet. She’ll know what to do.”

“She’ll know where they are?” Maria insisted.

“She’ll know where they are,” the receptionist confirmed.

“Great!” Maria enthused. “We’ll wait here.”

The receptionist rose, seemed to wonder for an instant how it was she came to be hypnotized into this task, then headed back into the office.

Luis eyed Maria with bemusement.

“What?” she asked. “They don’t teach you that in the seminary?”

Twenty minutes later the receptionist returned. She was trailed by a second woman, as well as two young men pushing handcarts laden with banker’s boxes.

“We’re pretty sure this is all of it,” chimed the receptionist, triumph in her voice.

“How sure?” Maria snapped back.

The receptionist was cowed. The second woman, Janette, stepped forward.

“It’s everything that was back there,” she said. “We would’ve liked to make copies, but as you seem to need them now . . .”

Maria ignored the tone and nodded to the young men.

“If you can help us get these to the car, we’ll bother you no more.”

As Luis watched Janette consider this, even he was impressed with how well Maria had pulled this off.

Ten minutes later they rolled into a supermarket parking lot a few blocks up from the accounting firm. The pair immediately dove into the boxes. Unlike the ones at the county assessor’s office, these files were in disarray.

“I can’t find anything in here,” Maria said. “It’s like they just dumped everything in boxes to get rid of us.”

“That’s exactly what they did,” Luis replied, setting one box aside for another. “Doesn’t matter. If it’s all here, we’ll sort it out.”

It started small. Luis found a stack of white employee tax forms buried under a stack of returns. They were all marked as having come from the year before. He counted them as he went.

“How many workers did you say were accounted for last year?”

“Seventy-one,” Maria remembered. “Why?”

“I’m up to ninety-one.”

Maria gasped. Luis realized the thin chance that her brother might not have been involved in some kind of illicit activity had just evaporated.

“What does it mean?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Luis admitted. “I think we have to keep going. We have to know the whole story.”

When they finished going through all the boxes, separating the different forms, they’d counted over seven hundred workers white-sheeted through Santiago’s farm that year, over eight hundred the year before, six hundred the year before that, and another seven hundred before that.

What was worse was they all had foreign passport numbers or civil IDs. They’d all signed in their own handwriting. They’d all filled out the requisite biographical information. To dummy up this many fake people would be near-impossible. But if all these people really were somewhere working the fields of the Santa Ynez Valley, where were they?

When Luis finally came across one with Odilia’s name, he blanched.

“Here it is.”

“I don’t get it,” Maria said. “What’s the scheme here? Why would you fake papers? If you’re using illegal workers, why would you then register them with the state as employees? It doesn’t make sense. How could my brother have died to keep
this
a secret?”

Luis thought he finally knew the answer.

“It’s laundering. But instead of money, they’re laundering people,” he said, paging through a few more of the forms. “If on paper they’re paying all this money out through Santiago’s farm, then they must have been using him as some kind of front. The government thinks all these people are working there, but they’re really somewhere else, likely doing the same job but off the books.”

“I don’t understand. Why do this?”

“You hear stories like this all the time. Recruiters trawl through Mexico and South America promising jobs up north,” Luis explained. “‘Don’t be like those
pendejos
who hop the border only to spend their lives dodging INS,’ they say. ‘We’ll make it legal by putting you right into a job when you land. You just owe us a small fee. And if you don’t have the money now, well, you can work it off when you get there.’”

“That was Santiago,” Maria said slowly. “He was so excited. He’d been guaranteed a job. But when he called for me, he didn’t want me following in his footsteps. He said, ‘I know people now. You don’t have to go through what I did.’”

“He already had his own land?” Luis asked.

“Yeah. I was surprised, but this was my big brother. In my eyes there was nothing he couldn’t do. How did he get it?”

“That’s the rest of the scam,” Luis surmised. “He probably worked his ass off for them to pay off the debt. But rather than release him, they proposed a trade. He gets land of his own, but he has to work as a front company for them. But that’s the insidious part of the scheme.”

He held up all the forms with Santiago’s signature on them.

“Whoever’s behind it gets all the illegal labor they want,” Luis continued. “But if INS or somebody shows up saying this is a big scam, who gets busted? The grower using these hundreds of workers? Or the guy whose name is on all the documents?”

“Jesus Christ,” Maria exclaimed. “He was being set up.”

“Probably without even knowing it,” Luis guessed. “Until Annie Whittaker came along and filled him in. That’s when he agreed to expose the whole thing to the district attorney.”

“And that’s when they killed him.”

The pair fell silent for a long moment. But then Luis remembered something Maria had said earlier.

“The buyer for the farm. The one that showed up on your doorstep offering to pay too much. Did they have a name?”

“The Marshaks. Probably the biggest farming concern up there. Why?”

Luis didn’t respond, but a theory began percolating in his head.