"Maybe it wasn't big enough," "Three hundred grand in stolen property?"
I whistle long and low through my two front teeth.
"Why would they let it go?"
"You might want to ask the man when you see him," he says. seaport villace is Disneyland on the warer, without the rides. A lot of shops.
People milling in and out, licking icecream cones and periodically looking for a bench on which to rest their weary feet along the meandering boardwalk that fronts the bay.
Today it is not very crowded. A few tourists shopping in the traps for something to take home.
We climb a flight of stairs to a landing that spans the walkway below and makes like a bridge over two small shops. We arrive at the entrance to a restaurant. It's closed.
"You're sure he said to meet him here?" Murphy doesn't answer, but taps on the door with a set of keys.
A couple of seconds later, a man wearing a dark sport coat, pleated slacks that hang on him like an oversized flag, and a dark turtleneck sweater opens up.
"How ya doin', my friend?" He's talking to Murphy. "Come on in." The man must be about six-nine, not just tall, but big. His clothes come from Omar the tentmaker. He's wearing a pair of dark glasses that cover half of his face, wraparounds like the windshield on a sixties Cadillac. On his left wrist is a gold watch, a Rolex the size of the mirror on the Hubble telescope. He shakes Murphy's hand, then looks at me.
"Ha ya doin'?" I get the quick treatment, the kind that tells me I'm being studied from behind all that glass. What hair he has left is dark brown and slicked back, forming a ponytail at the rear of his head.
"Bob's waitin' for ya out on the deck." He nods toward Murphy, who leads the way.
I can feel the bigger man's hot breath on the back of my neck as we walk through the empty restaurant and out onto the deck that overlooks the water. When I get there, I see his partner. He is almost as big, leaning against the railing, smiling in our direction.
"Hey, Murph. Been a long time. How's business?" The entire time he's talking to Murphy, he is looking at me.
"It's good," says Murphy.
"This must be your man." The guy leaning against the railing is the size of your average mountain. Shoulders and hindquarters like a sumo wrestler, with dark glasses just slightly smaller than his companion's.
He has curly blond hair, receding at the sides like a glacial retreat, and forearms like Popeye, well tanned.
"Bob. This is Paul," says Murph.
My hand goes out and gets lost in his grip--evoking memories of holding my father's hand when I was six.
"Paul ... ?" He leans toward me, his voice on an audible quest for my last name. "Paul what?" he says.
"My friends just call me Paul, Bob." I smile and lift my dark glasses out of the breast pocket of my coat, then slip them on. We stand on the deck looking like the Blues Brothers.
Bob has a face like the lunar surface, pockmarked with craters you could get lost in.
"Have a seat," he says.
Murphy has kept the faith. Apparently he hasn't told them my last name or the reason I am asking questions about Jessica Hale.
We pull up chairs and sit around a table that looks as if it hasn't been wiped down since Christmas. Bob looks at his elbows after resting them on the glass surface.
"I think this is what the EPA calls paniculate matter," he says. He laughs it off and wipes the back of each arm with the opposite hand.
"Gonna have to get after the tax boys," he says. "You'd think they'd take better care of their property. You met Jack?" says Bob.
"We've met," I tell him.
"They shut this place down a few months ago," he tells me.
"Nonpayment. We got a few places like this around town. We don't like to get rid of 'em too quickly. They come in handy--for gatherings like this," he says.
"Where we gonna get lunch?" says Murphy.
"We thought you were bringing it." Bob laughs big and broad.
He doesn't have the look of a man who's missed many meals.
"I can have Jack there beat around behind the bar and see if he can find a bottle. On second thought. Don't bother. This shouldn't take that long. Maybe Paul here will spring for lunch down the way after we're finished." He looks at me as if I'm going to open my wallet and give him a peek at my credit card.
"I understand you're looking for Jessica Hale," he says. "Can I ask why?" Right to the point. No beating around.
"You can ask," I tell him.
Our eyes lock behind dark glasses.
"I thought we would be exchanging information," he says.
"You first."
"What do you want to know?"
"Why the federal government turned her loose on major drug charges."
"Why do you think?" he says.
"Because you wanted something from her in return." He makes with the fingers of his right hand like a gun and lets his thumb drop like a hammer.
"What was it the government wanted?"
"That's two questions," he says.
"Yes, but you never answered the first one."
"Why do you want to know?"
"Now you answer a question with a question. Fine. I'm assuming that if the woman was on drugs at one time, she may have slid off the wagon, if she was ever on it. Old habits, old friends, whoever supplied her might know where she is. You might know who that is. That might provide a lead."
"It won't."
"How can you be so sure?"
"Because we're lookin' for her, too. She owes us some information.
Part of a deal that she didn't deliver on. We've checked her old haunts.
She hasn't been to any of 'em. We know. We've squeezed the people who are there. If they'd seen her, they woulda told us."
"Why do you want her?" I ask.
"Have you ever heard of a man named Esteban Ontaveroz?"
"No"
"Also known as El Chico,Jefe, Enfermo de Amor. The last one means love stick."
"Man don't suffer from low self-esteem," says Jack.
"He's believed to have been involved in the killing of eighteen people in a little town north of Ensenada about a year ago. You may have read about it. They shot kids, women. One of 'em was pregnant.
Took 'em out on a patio and laid 'em facedown, then did 'em with machine guns, execution style." Bob picks up an envelope from the chair next to him and pulls out a picture, four-by-six glossy, and lays it on the table in front of me. It shows a tall, swarthy man, hollow cheeks, talking to another guy across the top of a car. The other mans back is to the camera, but the ponytail and the size of the body, shoulders like a bull, bear a striking resemblance to his partner, the one he calls Jack. The picture possesses the grainy character of having been taken from some distance, magnified and cropped.
I look, shrug my shoulders. Shake my head. "Never seen him."
"Deals drugs. Supplier up out of Chiapas. A businessman. You might call him a transporter."
"No, he'd probably call him a client," says Jack.
"Be nice." Bob looks up at his partner, then back to me.
"Mexicans tell us that Ontaveroz has a fleet of planes to make Fedex jealous. And a motto."
"And it ain't "Fly the fuckin' friendly skies," " says Jack. "Plata o plomo," says Bob. He looks at me to see if I get it.
"No?" I shake my head.
"Silver or lead. Bribes or bullets. You either take his money or you better have your funeral plan prepaid. He used to work the middle between suppliers farther south, Guatemala, Colombia, Costa Rica, but he's been coming north lately, spending more time, expanding into the States. He has connections with the Tiajuana Cartel. They control half the U.S.-Mexican border. Juarez Cartel has the other half. They say they're ten times more powerful than the American Mafia at its height.
They spend more money on bribes each year than the Mexican government spends on law enforcement."
"About twice as much," says Jack.
The way he says it makes it sound as though he's tasted their money, a thought I keep to myself with this bull standing behind my chair.
"We've had him, this Ontaveroz, under surveillance, on and off, for better than five years," says Bob. "One of our major breaks was Jessica Hale. She and Ontaveroz lived together for more than a year. "She spent some time down in Mexico with him, living the high life, Acapulco, Cancun, Cosamel. She did provide some transportation.
Moving product from Mexico across the border."
"But we think that was incidental to their relationship," says Jack.
"Sounds like you were in the bedroom taking pictures," I tell him.
"We got solid information. You want pictures, we can get 'em," says Jack.
"I'll bet you can."
"Jessica knew intimate details about his operation," says Bob.
"The one source who could connect Ontaveroz with some major deals."
"She also knows where some bodies are buried," says Jack. "And I'm not speaking metaphorically. She has enough to put him away for a long time, maybe life over there." He's talking about Mexico. "On this side, a couple of states I can think of would like to inject him with something besides his own product. That's what she had to offer."
"You say she didn't deliver?"
"Not to match the proffer she gave to get the deal," says Bob.
"She fed us some information, testified in a few cases, trickle here, trickle there, allowed us to nail some small fry. We took a couple of Ontaveroz's buyers down, crippled his organization for a short time.
But the big enchilada slipped off the platter when she disappeared."
"In view of the people who cut the deal," says jack, "the lawyers at Justice, Jessica didn't fulfill her obligations. They'd like her back.
Now tell us," he says, "what's your interest?"
"I'm not particularly interested in Jessica, only as a means to an end.
It's her little girl I want. She's eight years old. Legal custody reposes in the grandparents."
"And you work for them?" he asks.
I nod.
"Tell me, are you a lawyer? An investigator?"
"I'll tell you after you tell me who you work for." He just smiles, trying to read my eyes through polarized glass.
"Her parents, Jessica's, do they know anything? About her friends? Her dealings? Where she might be?"
"If they knew anything, I wouldn't be talking to you."
"They knew about Zolanda Suade," he says.
I look at Murphy. A man with this many connections has to feed them something to keep the channels open. But he puts his hands up in protest.
"They already knew," he says.
"We had her under surveillance a month ago, right after Jessica disappeared," says Bob. "Which begs the question: Why didn't you tell us about her?"
"Client confidence," I tell him.
Bob reaches over on the chair next to him, picks up a newspaper and flops it on the table in front of me. The headline blaring across the top two columns: ADVOCATE FOR BATTERED WOMEN MURDERED "I guess you could
say that source has dried up," he says. "So you figure Suade helped Jessica and the child disappear?"
"That's the theory," I tell him. "What led you to Suade?" I ask.
"We knew Jessica had made contact."
"Letters from prison," says Bob. "Their mail is censored. When she got out, Suade was already on the list of her contacts."
"Who else?" I ask him.
"Now you're getting personal." He smiles as if this is out of bounds.
"You don't have any idea where she is?"
"I was hoping you could tell me."
"If we knew that, we'd go pick her up," says Bob.
"While there's still something to pick up," says Jack.
"What do you mean?"
"We're not the only ones looking for her."
"Ontaveroz?" Bob hesitates just a beat. "It'd be wise if we cooperated,"
he says.
"Kept in touch."
"Why is that?"
"We have a mutual interest. You want the little girl. We want her mother. Ontaveroz doesn't like the idea of Jessica walking the streets knowing what she knows."
"Even though she hasn't given him up? If what you're saying is true, she did two years and never mentioned his name."
"That was then. This is now," says Jack. "There's a certain sense of insecurity that runs through these people. Comes with the turf," he says. "We also have information that before she went down she stashed some cash. Probably what she's living on now, purchase money belonging to the man and his friends for stuff she'd trans ported across the border a few weeks before her arrest. They want it back.
"But mostly, they just want her dead," says Jack. "Which, according to my calculations, could be a serious complication for the little girl."
this morning we are heading Downtown, away From the substation at Imperial Beach. This to avoid the media, which have now grown to the usual circus. Suade's murder is taking on a dangerous dynamic.
She may have had a checkered past in life, but in death she is beginning to take on the proportions of a mythic figure. There has already been one piece on national news, not the cables, but the networks, featuring her murder. It was billed as the latest highprofile crime against women.
Feminist groups are on the tube beating their drums. They are calling it a gender crime, and trying to fit it into a hate category.
It seems lately that every crime of any note is a national crime.
Welcome to the electronic village. If your death garners enough pixel images on the million or so cable channels that now bless the airwaves, your demise runs a chance of entering the lottery to become the "crime of the century." The assumption is that Suade's death is the work of a demented spouse, some middle-aged angry white male, a husband of one of the women being shielded by her organization.
But unfortunately for us, the cops are about to shatter this theory.
The call every lawyer dreads came this morning. "Are you prepared to surrender your client?" It was a courtesy from Floyd Avery, lieutenant at homicide. The alternative was that they would arrest Jonah at his home in front of all his neighbors with video vans parked out front.
Jonah has been under close surveillance for more than a week.