“Tell me what Junior wanted to know,” I said.
“First, just to be clear, I told him that I couldn’t get involved with a criminal organization,” Barry said. “I didn’t come right out and say it, but I intimated to him that the snitch factor was too high for my liking, and he seemed agreeable to that. Some kid off the street gets pinched, and all of sudden I’m doing fifty years.”
“Probably only ten,” I said.
“I couldn’t do ten minutes,” Barry said. “You know you’re not allowed any kind of skin lotions in some prisons? I’ve got an eczema thing on my knees that, untreated, could be a real problem.”
“Barry,” I said.
“Right. So he asked me about the best way to launder his money so that he could still invest it, so that he could make his money work for him. He actually said that. I told him the only positive illegal marketplace right now was in religious groups and faith-based non-profits. The FBI and IRS are so busy chasing all the shady mortgage lenders and refinancers and sham banks that they just don’t care about the little guys when there are billions of bad dollars floating around in the banks and the automakers and the insurance companies. You don’t see any churches asking for bailouts. So I told him, kind of joking—you know, levity, like I said before—that he should start a church. How much could it cost to start a church?”
“It could cost eternity,” I said.
“Hey, I don’t play the morality card with these people. They want to defraud God, have at it,” Barry said. “I’m just offering opinions. Good, solid, fact-based opinions.”
The sad truth was that Barry was correct. Running an illegal operation through a church is one of the safest routes an enterprising businessperson can take. Cash donations are difficult to track, but they are the stock and trade of many small churches and one of the easiest ways to clean dirty money. It’s also one of the easiest ways to defraud people. If you want to get someone’s personal information, tell them you’re working for God and that you need their help. Offer to pay someone a small amount of money for a task, and they’ll give you the keys to their entire life in return, all in the form of the W-2 and I-9 forms they’ll need to fill out to get paid. It’s a small investment for the possibility of a wide return.
It also made his shakedown of Father Eduardo all the more clear-cut: He didn’t just have a church; he had an entire faith-based organization of small businesses and had the ear of important people ... which meant the mere idea that the FBI, IRS or any other organization might decide to investigate it without probable cause seemed remote.
Of course, working the money through a church had a side benefit: It’s nearly impossible to get a warrant to bug a church. It’s not that the idea of sanctuary still exists from medieval times, but what someone says to his clergy is privileged, just as if he were speaking to his lawyer. Even the nice relic from the Bush administration—the warrantless wiretap—would be pretty far out-of-bounds inside a church, but particularly since this was a church that was actively helping people with the aid, probably, of government subsidy.
Junior was smart, but he wasn’t smart enough to know all of this from his perch inside a prison. But Barry, well ... Barry knew his industry better than anyone in Miami, so everything I knew, Barry had imparted to Junior, too. Junior was wise enough to go to him; Barry wasn’t wise enough to run the other direction, which I told him, with more than just a little regret.
“Mike,” Barry said, “it’s not like the Girl Scouts show up at my house with questions about how to move their cookie money around. Good people don’t need me, present company excluded.”
“Did you tell Junior all of this before or after he paid you?” I asked.
“He’d already made a down payment,” Barry said, though he seemed a bit unsure about that answer. “I let him put the rest on a layaway plan.”
“You’ve become the Kmart of money launderers.”
“We actually had a trade agreement at first,” Barry said. “He had some credit cards he needed to get rid of; I had a guy who would buy them. I don’t like to work in trade usually, because it’s a dirty business. People always end up thinking that they can get more out of you than if you pay cash, which is sort of what happened with Junior. He came back with more questions, and I told him I needed to be paid this time, which is when things got dicey.”
“So you received stolen property from the Latin Emperors and then sold it?”
“If you want to look at it that way,” Barry said.
“Is there another way of looking at it?”
“I guess not,” Barry said. “I guess it’s pretty much 3-D as it is.”
“4-D,” I said.
“I’m not familiar with that,” Barry said.
“It’s called reality,” I said.
“I’m just trying to find some middle ground with you, Michael. I came hear willingly to talk to you, Mike. You don’t have to interrogate me.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said. “If Sam hadn’t found your number on Junior’s phone records, you’d still be in the same place you were: hiding.”
“What would I need to hide from?”
“I don’t know, Barry. Why don’t you tell me?”
“You went to his place, right?”
“Right.”
“Pretty sweet setup, wasn’t it? That was my consulting work right there. Pretty proud of that.”
“You told him to buy that house?”
“No,” Barry said. “But I told him to quit-claim it to Julia Pistell. And I told him about, you know, a lot of secret criminals-only stuff.”
“You mean the rental houses, the security cameras someone stole from RadioShack and the cars with the dealer plates?”
Barry looked fairly astounded. “How’d you know?”
“I’m a spy,” I said. “And the work is shoddy.”
“I just told him what to do,” Barry said. “I didn’t go in there with a hammer and chisel.”
“It’s good enough to fool a fool,” I said, “which means he’s probably very safe there from the local police and anyone not trained at Quantico.”
“Well, anyway, he was happy with that work, and that’s when he gave me the money, and that’s when I called him on it being crap. He didn’t like that.”
“So you told him how to make good money?”
“I might have given him some hints, yes.”
“And what did you get for that?”
“He said he’d give me a hundred K from the fine cut,” Barry said, “plus ten grand of real money if I served as, you know, a quality-control expert. So I went down to the hotel—and yes, before you ask, I told him to do this at the hotel, okay?—and saw what they were making and it was surprisingly good for a bunch of amateurs. But I told him that I wasn’t going to take any of that pre-’96 money. That’s like waving a huge red flag. Who has that much money all from one year, you know? You gotta get a mix from the last ten years to make it look right, but they didn’t have that technology, which I told them. So I said I wanted my money all in cash, that I wasn’t taking their rags.”
“Did you add ‘or else’ when you made this demand?” I said.
“Well, I implied it.”
That’s what I was afraid of.
“How did you do that?”
“I said I had guys who, uh, worked for me who, uh, were, uh, ex-, uh, military and CIA and uh, other, uh, agencies of the, uh, spy variety and who, uh, might have been involved with some large-scale terrorist actions in, uh, the greater, uh, Ireland area. And, uh, that, uh, if I didn’t get my money, well, he’d be hearing from him.”
“Him?”
“Him. Them. You know.”
“And that’s when he threatened to kill you?”
“No, worse,” Barry said. “The cops showed up at my mother’s house. Guess that’s my last known.”
“That’s worse?”
“I told you,” Barry said, “I’ve got eczema on my knees. My mom was out of town, so the cops put a pretty big scare into my aunt Lois, who’s down from Ocala to watch the cats, water the plants and such, so she called me and I figured it was time to lie low for a piece. So I’ve been sort of waiting it all out at sea. Hopped on a friend’s houseboat and have been just sort of chilling in international waters for a couple days. Until Sam called. If I’d known the Latin Emperors had cops on the payroll, I’d have just kept sailing until I hit Australia. But it makes a lot of sense now, since they told my aunt that they were just coming by to see if I was still alive, which, at the time, didn’t sound like what cops normally go around saying.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” I said.
“I didn’t know what to do, Michael, on account of—well, the, uh, fact that I may have misrepresented our working relationship to Junior.”
It was then that my mother finally broke and stopped eavesdropping from the sink area—where she’d been washing the same dish for the previous ten minutes—and sat down at the table next to me. She lit up a cigarette and exhaled the smoke directly into Barry’s face.
“Ma,” I said.
“Shut up, Michael,” she said.
Barry smiled. “Wow, that was pretty cool. That’s your
mom
. I guess I never really understood that she’s your
mom
, so she can tell you to shut up. Wow.”
“Shut up, Barry,” my mother said, and he did. “Do you mind, Michael?”
“Have at it, Ma,” I said.
“You know what your problem is, Barry?”
“Uh, no, Mrs. Westen,” he said.
“You consort with assholes. I’m sorry for my language, Barry, but that’s the truth. Did I hear you say the police came to your mother’s house?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Barry said.
“Do you know what that would have been like if she’d been home? You would have ruined her whole week. Maybe her whole year. Do you have any skills, Barry, other than whatever criminal things you do with Michael?”
“No,” Barry said, “that’s all I’ve got.”
“Well, then, you’d better be a bit more selective with the people you work with so that Michael doesn’t need to come in and save your ass like he does with everyone else. Do you understand?”
“Uh, yes, Mrs. Westen.”
That made my mother happy. She stubbed out her cigarette. “Now, can I get you some pot roast, Barry?”
“Sure, that would be great, Mrs. Westen,” Barry said.
She stood up, reached across the table and mussed up Barry’s hair. “That was a good chat. We should do that again.” She turned to me. “Michael, help this idiot out before he gets his mother killed.”
And suddenly I had another unpaid client. That made three.
11
You can do all the planning you want, but when it comes to fighting a battle, eventually you’re going to need guns.
Unless, it turns out, you’re defending Father Eduardo Santiago.
“That’s the first thing,” Father Eduardo said. “And I am firm on this.” He’d come to my loft that same evening so I could explain to him all that we’d learned and all that was at risk, including what Fi had learned about Leticia, which seemed to break Father Eduardo’s spirit more than any other single detail. But before I could even tell him my plan, he made the proclamation about the guns, which was no insignificant thing, since I generally keep two pieces on me at all times, as does Sam. I suspect Fiona tries to form a more rounded-looking number, like six, but all of that is really predicated on her outfit.
Sam and Fiona, who were both standing in my galley kitchen, sighed audibly and in perfect synchronicity. Barry was also in my loft, because he was too scared to go anywhere else. I’d instructed Barry that under no circumstances was he to let his fear manifest into a situation where he thought he should hit on Fiona—something he does on a fairly regular basis—because I was pretty sure Fiona would react with malice. And to keep that from happening, I’d instructed Sam to fix Barry a drink containing as many varieties of rum as he could find, which in short order had knocked Barry out.
“Do you understand what you’re saying?” I asked.
“Do you?” Father Eduardo said. “Seventy-five percent of the people who work for me—nearly everyone!—are convicted felons, parolees, ex-gang members. If someone under my guise comes onto my property with a gun and is anywhere near them, they could all go back to prison. I will not put them in that position.”
“What about knives?” Fiona asked. “Or swords. Swords would be fun, Michael.”
“No concealed weapons,” Father Eduardo said.
“Grenades?” Sam said.
“I still have some C-4,” Fiona said. “We could blow up Junior’s car in the parking lot. That would solve this all very quickly. Make it look like an accident.”
“How are you going to make a C-4 explosion look like an accident?” Sam said.
“I have my ways,” Fiona said.
“No,” Father Eduardo said. “No. No. No. I cannot have any of this. Do you understand? I am a man of faith. I will not let you blow up his car. I cannot have my campus turned into something on CNN. Don’t you understand?”
I did. Really. It’s just difficult to imagine fighting a gang without ammo.