Pale Kings and Princes (2 page)

He nodded, took another tiny sip of his martini. Rita drank some of the melted ice water in her glass and gestured at the bartender.

"There's farmers all over down there, cultivating coca leaves. A farmer gets about a hundred to a hundred fifty kilos of leaves, distills them down into about one kilo of dry paste."

Rita yawned. The bartender took her order for another round.

"The farmer usually deals with a guide, a kind of agent. If the farmer's Peruvian, the guide's the same. Brings the buyers, almost always Colombians, to the farmer. Meets them at the border and brings them in and agents the deal. None of them trust anybody but their own kind. Peruvians only deal through a Peruvian guide, Bolivians only through a Bolivian guide, you see?"

"Tribal," I said.

"Yeah, sure, they're about two hours out of the Stone Age up in some of those mountains down there. Anyway, the buyers take it back across the border into Colombia and process it at a base lab, that goes then to a bigger lab, near one of the cities, and gets turned into crystal."

The bartender brought the drinks. Fallon looked a little surprised to see his second martini. His first was only half sipped.

"I've fallen among hard drinkers," Fallon said.

"Adamantine," Rita Fiore murmured. Fallon glanced at her and frowned and then looked back at me and got back on ground he understood.

"Crystal is made out of base from all over. Like wildflower honey, you know. It's just generic coke. They take all the base, dump it in together and process it. People talking about pure Colombian coke are blowing smoke. It's something their supplier tells them, makes them feel smart."

"When do we get to the Wheaton part, Phil." Rita was leaning her right elbow on the bar, her closed fist against her right cheekbone. She was into her third Scotch.

Fallon smiled. "Women," he said to me. "They want fast when you want slow, and they want slow when you want fast." He shook his head in puzzlement. Rita gazed into the mirror back of the bar.

"Anyway, we're getting to Wheaton," Fallon said. "Once they got crystal they smuggle it into the U.S.A. Mostly in south Florida for obvious reasons. Sometimes they mule it in in small amounts. Sometimes it comes in three hundred kilos at a time. Usually the wholesaler goes to the point of entry, say some beach house in Florida, inspects the stuff, buys his share, and brings it home."

"Is Wheaton a home?"

"Probably," Fallon said. "Anyway, the wholesaler's got it in some safe house back home, say Wheaton. Then he weighs it, tests it, and this'll vary, but he may cut it, then he packages it and sells it to a distributor, who resells it in small lots to dealers. This guy may cut it too, or he may do the first real cut. The dealers cut it and subdealers cut it, and some was probably stolen along the way by guys working for the smuggler and replaced with a cut, and so by the time your sophisticated scholar athlete, say, gets a gram or two for his head it's about twelve percent cocaine. Hell, half the people doing blow are reacting to the cut, they get pure coke they think it's no good."

"Prices?" I said.

"Varies. Depends on how bad it's been stepped on along the way. At the moment, around here, a hundred, a hundred-twenty dollars a gram."

"What do they cut with?" I said.

"Oh, Christ," Fallon said. "Lidocaine, mannitol-which is a baby laxative-lactose, sucrose, vitamin B, caffeine, speed, benzocaine, stuff we haven't figured out yet."

"Could we focus on Wheaton a little more," I said.

"Focus," Rita said, "they don't even know us."

"Who doesn't know us," Fallon said. Rita smiled and shook her head.

"Wheaton," I said.

"Town's got a twenty-man police force, three detectives. In the last year we've made sixteen arrests in coke traffic that have ties to Wheaton. People we arrest in other places have bank accounts in Wheaton, they own bars in Wheaton, they have relatives in Wheaton. There's ten-year-old kids coming into banks in Wheaton and buying bank checks for nine thousand dollars."

"Good paper route?" I said.

"Sure," Fallon said. "Place is a sewer, but all the manpower goes to Miami. It's the glamour spot, you know. The plum assignments are there, the press coverage is there. We're up here sucking hind tit." He looked at Rita.

Rita drank some Scotch while exhaling smoke and the squat glass of amber liquid looked like a small witch's cauldron when she put it down, with the smoke drifting off the surface of the Scotch.

"So I'd appreciate any help you can give us," Fallon said to me.

"Sure," I said.

"Like what have you got so far," Failon said.

"Reporter for the Central Argus, kid named Eric Valdez, went over to Wheaton to do some investigative reporting and got shot and castrated."

"He was investigating cocaine?"

"Yes."

"His death cocaine-related? I haven't seen anything."

"Local cops say it was personal. Valdez was fooling around with someone's wife."

"They know whose wife?"

"Not that I know of. Valdez was supposed to be something of a womanizer."

"Where was he when I needed him," Rita said.

"And the paper hired you to go down and look into it?"

"Yeah."

"Be careful," Fallon said. "A man alone doesn't have much chance."

"Thank you Harry Morgan," I said.

Fallon looked puzzled again. "To Have and Have Not," Rita said to him. He still looked puzzled. Past his shoulder at the foot of the stairs, I saw Susan. She was wearing a broadshouldered red leather coat with the collar turned up.

"Ah," I said. "My dinner date is here."

Rita looked across the room at Susan. "That's her," she said.

"That's Susan," I said.

Rita stared at her. "No wonder," she said.

The Wheaton police station is in the bottom of the red brick Gothic Revival town hall at the south end of town which is near the bottom end of the Quabbin Reservoir which is about a hundred miles west of Boston and much farther than that from everywhere. The chief's name was Bailey Rogers and he was explaining to me the futility of my venture.

"The whole thing is a fucking media invention," Bailey told me. "There's people do coke here. There's people do coke in the city room at the Central Argus too, whyn't you go investigate them."

"They hired me to come down here," I said, "Probably a ploy to throw me off the track."

"And I don't need any big-deal Boston wiseass dick to come out here and piss all over my town, you understand."

"You don't?" I said.

Rogers had a fat neck. The rest of him was middling to big and in okay shape, but his neck spilled out over his collar and his face was very red. He leaned forward in his chair with the palms of his hands resting on the arms of the chair as if he was going to leap out of it.

"No, I don't, and don't get smart with me either, buster, or you'll wish you were back in Boston."

I smiled at him admiringly. "God," I said, "you're tough."

"You think I'm kidding you?"

"I think a kid came down here to do a newspaper story and somebody killed him and you don't know who, and you're blowing around so I won't notice."

"Dumb bastard had it coming," the chief said. "You can't fuck around with those people's women like he did. He was begging for it."

"What people," I said.

"The Colombians. You know what they're like."

"There's a lot of Colombians here," I said.

"Sure, about five thousand. Came up to work the mills, only the mills closed so now they mostly stay home and pump the old lady and collect welfare."

"But no coke?"

"Sure, some coke, like I say there's coke everywhere. But there's no more here than anywhere else. If we had a bunch of Canucks here on welfare the question wouldn't even come up. But just because they're Colombian . . . does this look like Miami?"

"A lot of Miami doesn't look like Miami," I said. "What makes you think Valdez was killed by a jealous husband?"

"He was dicking everything that wiggled," Rogers said. "When we found him his nads were gone. What would you think."

"Suspects?" I said.

Rogers spread his hands. "We hauled a bunch of them in, sweated them, nobody would give us anything."

"Anybody specific?" I said. "I don't mean to be nosy, but if you know he was getting it on you must know some names."

"Listen"-he glanced down at my card tucked under one corner of his desk blotter-"Spenser. You start asking around down in that neighborhood and you'll end up with your balls missing too."

"League of Women Voters would sponsor a day of mourning," I said. "You got a name?"

Rogers shook his head. "No, for your own good. You stay out of it. We've checked this out, and there's nothing there. I got no right to be giving out the names of people who've been cleared of suspicion so you and that fucking newspaper can harass them."

"Bailey," I said, "I appreciate your position. Your position sounds to me like bullshit, but I appreciate it. On the other hand, you have to appreciate my position. I come in here friendly, even charming, respectful of your law enforcement experience, and ask you to help me solve a murder which took place in your jurisdiction, and which you haven't solved. You tell me to screw. Now if I go back to my employer and say I tried to solve the crime but the police chief told me to screw, what kind of a letter of recommendation do you think he'll write for me on my next job?"

"I don't give a fuck," Rogers said.

"Bailey, I believe you. That's probably the department motto. But it's no help to me. What I'm going to have to do is stick around this Rural Roach Box and find out what's happening and maybe, because you are not pleasant, maybe I'll demonstrate, while I'm at it, that you are an incompetent horse's ass."

The red tone of Rogers's fat face and neck deepened. "You be careful," he said. "You be goddamned careful."

I stood up and walked to the door. I opened it and stopped and looked back at him. "You too," I said. Then I walked out and closed the door, and giggled while I walked through the squad room. You too. Ah, Spenser, you thespian devil you.

Valdez had stayed at the Reservoir Court, a three-story cinder block motel with a bar and restaurant in a one-story wing off the west end of the building. The cinder block was painted green and a fake mansard roof of plastic shingles modified the third floor. The plastic roof was some of its charm. The fact that there was no other motel for fifty-two miles was the rest of its charm.

I put my extra ammunition in a bureau drawer, put my clean shirts on top of it, put my shaving kit in the bathroom, and went down to the bar. A large blackboard on an easel at the entrance to the bar/restaurant had today's specials chalked on it. There was Salmon Loaf at $5.95 and a Polish Platter for $4.95. New Wave.

It was three-thirty and the place had two customers and a woman tending bar. I sat on a barstool and ordered a draft beer. The bartender drew it for me and put it carefully down on a little napkin that would, of course, stick to the bottom of the glass when I picked it up to drink.

"Run a tab?" she said.

I nodded and she rang up the drink and put the bar bill in front of me facedown. The room was paneled in dark plywood, grooved to look like planking. There were pictures of trout and eagles and bears and deer and hunting dogs on the wall. I drank a little beer. The napkin stuck to the bottom of the glass. I pulled it off, and crumpled it up and put it in an ashtray.

"Staying at the motel?" the bartender said. She was wearing black slacks and a white blouse with a canvas hunting vest that had ammunition loops sewn across the front. Her very bland hair was pulled back to a French twist, and her eyes were brightly underscored by powder-blue eye shadow. Her eyebrows were narrow and dark. She wore a small maroon nameplate that said "Virgie" on it in white lettering.

"Yes, I am," I said.

"Traveling through?"

"No, I'm in town for a while."

"Really, business?"

"Un huh."

"Surprise," she said.

"Why?"

"I been working bars a long time. I kinda figure by now I can spot people. Didn't have you figured for a businessman."

"Why not?"

"Don't have the look," she said. "You know, tired, a little overweight, look like they're in a hurry even when they're at the bar. Usually they smoke, they drink hard stuff, they act macho. You haven't even made a virgin joke about my name."

"I got no sense of humor," I said.

"Maybe the opposite," Virgie said. "I had you figured for some kind of forestry/ conservation outdoors type. Get a lot of them out here. Quabbin's a big wildlife sanctuary."

"I know," I said.

"Or maybe a jock, except you're kind of old."

"But lithe," I said, "and still vigorous."

Virgie grinned. "Bet you were, though," she said. "You weren't born with that nose."

"Used to box," I said.

"See," Virgie said, "I know something." I drank some beer.

"So what kind of business you in?" Virgie said. She was leaning her left hip against the beer chest below the bar. Her arms were folded, and she talked to me by turning her head left toward me.

"Detective," I said. "I'm here to see if I can find out what happened to Eric Valdez."

Virgie straightened and turned fully toward me. "Jesus Christ," she said.

"There's that," I said.

"I don't know anything about it," she said.

I drank some beer. Virgie walked down to the other end of the bar and began to slice lemons into neat half circles. Probably struggling with her libido. I drank the rest of my beer.

"May I have another beer, please, Virgie?" I said.

She came down and drew the beer and put down a new paper napkin and set the beer in front of me. She rang up the bar bill and put it back down in front of me.

I said, "Virgie, are you mad 'cause I'm a detective?"

"I got nothing to do with that Valdez thing," she said.

"Never probably ever even heard of it," I said.