THE FOURTH WATCH (15 page)

"So, what happened then?" I asked. "You didn't
want to get in, didn't like the risk of it all?"

"Well ... in a nut-shell ... yeah." His pipe
had gone cold during his story and he fired it back up and then
said: "Hey look, if Red was the best, I was second best, you know
what I mean. I'm not blowing my horn here but, you know, when Red
jumped ship, they sure didn't want to lose me to. I played it to my
advantage. Made like I might jump with Red. The Japs bowed and
scraped, and threw yen at me. I didn't play Red though. I told him
what I was doin' and it was all right with him. But he told me up
front. He said, 'Jed, I tell you what. I unerstan' that you don't
want your balls out there like mine, and if you play this thing
right, you might get more then rice out of those fuckers, but if
you don't come in now, you can't come in later.'" Archer gave me
that soft chuckle of his again. "What he meant was as a partner.
Red could see into the future, the bastard. He knew that I'd get
sick of it later. Hell, he told me that if my scam with the Japs
didn't pan out, I could still come in with him! Now let me tell
you, that gave me the swollen balls I needed to work them for a
sweet package. But that worked for Red to. He knew that when he was
starting, he needed to be on the buying end himself ... you know
... to set it all up. Well, the pay was good where I was at, and I
became the number one barbarian on the payroll, but in the end, all
the bowing and tea's and double-talk thick with meaning that I
wasn't hardly smart enough to follow wore me down. When I showed up
on Red's door-step a couple years later, he needed me, and he paid
me well and, hell, he has made me pretty damn rich over the years,
and goddamn ... he'd give me anything I asked for, but he never
made me a partner. And you know that's how it should be, because I
didn't take the risk that he did. He pulled it off on his own, and
it wasn't until now, with him gone and his wife and kid ... well
... maybe not having the ... " he waved his hand at me "anyway, so
no, I'm not a partner."

"Okay," I said. "That went pretty well. Let me
try another question. How do you like working for
Teddy?"

''I'm retiring," he said, and sucked on his
pipe stem, his narrow eyes locked with mine.

I sat there in silence and gave
him a chance to run off at the mouth on that one. Nothing happened.
I trolled a little. "Apple sometimes
does
fall a bit far from the tree,
is that it?"

He smiled, then he laughed and this time he
boomed with laughter. “I don't know nothin’ about that, Mr. Knight.
I'm just dog tired and ready to lie down on the porch, is
all."

“
Yeah, looks like you're killing
yourself around here," I said scanning his office with my
eyes.

"Well, you know, these days I just kind of
smooth out the rough spots," Archer told me, his eyes smiling. "We
got a fleet of buyers running around now, mostly good people with a
nose for the business. No need for me to be in the middle of things
if I'm not adding anything to the discussion, know what I
mean?"

"I do," I said, "so let’s talk about the rough
spots then. What was going on around here just before Mr. Whorley
died? What was eating at him? What do you know about
that?"

He didn't flinch, not one bit, but the smile
drained out of his eyes and he looked at me squarely. After a time
he pointed the stem of his pipe at me and said: “Now, Mr. Knight,
what's your game? You know, I like Miss Carolyn, I really do, which
is why I agreed to see y'all, but, like I said, I'm rich and I'm
retiring, so if you and I are gonna waltz around this office any
more, you're just gonna have to tell me what's up."

What the hell, I decided, let’s get this thing
out on the table. "Carolyn Whorely thinks that her father’s death
was a homicide," I told him evenly, never taking my eyes off his.
“She thinks the cops decided that it was an accident, and that they
are not taking the possibility that he was murdered seriously. She
feels that they think she is just a grieving kid who can't let
daddy go. She has retained me to look into it. I started looking
for answers but all I'm finding are more questions. She tells me
that for a few months before he died Mr. Whorley was obsessed with
something around here. That he was not normally detail oriented,
but suddenly he was driving everyone crazy, digging into everyone's
job, mapping out the buyer's movements and stuff like that. Say's a
week or so before he died it looked like he had found whatever he
was looking for. That he was back to his old self again, and then,
the next thing you know, he was dead. Carolyn wants to know if her
father was killed and if so, why. I was skeptical, might be that I
still am, but, I don't know, I need to start getting some answers
that make sense. So what do you think? What was Mr. Whorley looking
for just before he died and what did he find?"

He looked at me across the desk for a long
moment, and then he looked away toward the windows. I could see his
mind churning through the possibilities. I guessed that he wasn't
thinking about this for the first time. Suddenly he whispered a
single word: "Smugglers."

I blinked. "What?"

"Smugglers,” he said. "You asked me what I
thought Red was looking for around

here…turnin' over all the rocks. I think he was
looking for smugglers."

"Now how do you know that?" I stammered, my
heart picking up a beat.

"I don't know jack-shit, Mr. Knight, you asked
me what I thought."

"Alright," I said, "why do you think he was
looking for smugglers, and what do you mean, 'smugglers'
anyway?"

He shrugged his heavy shoulders and resettled
himself in his chair. "Just a feeling I got, you know, from the
types of stuff he was looking into. I mean he wanted to know how
our stuff cleared customs, where it went before it was distributed
to stores, that kind of thing. He was focused on Taiwan, seemed to
me. I asked him what the hell was eatin’ him, but he just waved me
off and told me it was something personal, that he'd let me know if
it turned out to be anything. But I think he figured that somebody
was using us to move something into the country. Cash maybe…or
drugs…or maybe even legit stuff, avoiding duties. He never so much
as hinted that to me, but, like you say, he liked to play with his
toys and make the big decisions. He didn't like to get down in the
minutia of day to day operations. But somethin' sure had his
attention for a while there. He was after something. When it all
seemed to blow over, everyone was relieved. Seemed like he found
whatever he was lookin' for and, whatever it was, he was done with
it." Archer turned toward the window and seemed to watch the rain
for a moment. His eyes took on a far away look. "Now thinkin' back,
maybe it wasn't so much that he was done with it as it was...I
don't know ... that he was at the bottom of it." He blew out a long
breath and sat quiet for a moment. "After he died, I never thought
about it. Never made any connection like that. But ... " his head
nodded up and down at the window, his mind filling with
possibilities.

"Well, you did this kind of work, Mr. Archer.
How would someone go about doing something like that, smuggling
stuff I mean."

He looked over at me, back from where ever
he'd been. "Well, I don't know. I guess it would depend on where
you were smugglin' it from, and to. Most of our stuff comes direct,
because our stores are all here in the states, though we sometimes
ship stuff from Europe into someplace else first, if we are
combining product."

I leaned forward in my chair. "How would that
work?"

It was settling on him now. His mind was
working it over. "You know, let’s say I can get a hundred thousand
wheels out of Germany for twenty cents apiece. Now let’s say I find
a Chinese factory makes rickshaws. Well maybe we can tweak this
thing and get the rickshaw guy to make little wooden wheelbarrows.
What the hell, all a wheelbarrow is, is a backwards rickshaw,
right?

"So I ship my twenty-cent wheels from Germany
to China. Let's say it cost me another twenty cents a wheel to
ship'em over. It wouldn't be that much, but let’s just say. Now I
get the rickshaw guy to make me the barrows for three bucks apiece.
The Chinese factories are always looking for work. No shit of a
lie, they got factories over there still making muskets! It's true.
They got a billion people to deal with. You got a factory making
muskets, employing everyone in a town, you just don't shut the
factory down. It's not like you're doing it for profit. It's the
government, you know what I mean? Got to keep the fuckers working.
Wouldn't want to have them sitting around doin' nuthin' ‘cept
thinkin' about how much it sucks bein' a communist.

“
So I work a deal and I get the
rickshaw guy to assemble my wheels onto his backward rickshaws for
another, say, thirty-cents a copy. You know what I got here. I got
a cute little green wheelbarrow that folks all over New England
want to fill up with flowers and park on a pile of wood chips out
on the front lawn. By the time I get them assembled and shipped
back to the States and get 'em in the stores over here, I still
ain't got ten bucks into'em, and you know what? They're flying out
the door at $29.95!" Archer was smiling with the memory.

''I'm guessing that's a real life for
instance?" I said.

"Yep, that was a good one, but I'm getting'
sidetracked here. Loading Dock is mostly all here in Massachusetts.
Red was talking about picking up a chain of stores in the South,
and maybe some out West, economies of scale, and all that. But
that's another story, and it’s not gonna happen now anyway. If you
were gonna do this thing you'd need some help on both ends, I
guess. Customs folks are just like anyone else. They get
comfortable in their routine. We bring so much crap into this
country everyday, and it comes from all over the goddamned place.
The stuff from the Far East usually ships into Seattle. We're well
known to those folks out there, and we buy stuff by the container
load. Big, huge containers that get loaded onto ships by crane, you
probably seen them on TV. The Taiwanese or Chinese or Koreans or
whoever, checks it all onto the ships, and customs in Seattle
checks it all in when it gets to the States. After a while, seeing
the same shit come in day in and day out, how close do they look,
know what I mean. Then the containers get loaded directly onto rail
cars, and they travel to The Port of Worcester," he gave me that
soft chuckle of his again. "That's a real designation, believe it
or not. Last time I checked Worcester was a little short on
beachfront property! But anyway, Worcester is one of the only
destinations in New England that can take double-stack container
cars, which makes it a busy place. Stuff heads out of Worcester all
over the Northeast. Our trucks are ready for the product when it
arrives, it’s already cleared customs, so off it goes to the
warehouses where it gets sorted out and shipped off to the stores.
It's a pretty smooth operation. But you know, when stuff is moving
in that kind of bulk, if you knew the system, and had some help at
the right spots along the way, you could hide some serious shit in
those containers over there, and then pull it out when it got over
here, know what I mean?"

I knew exactly what he meant, and I was
starting to think that something other than accidental drowning
might have happened to Red Whorley.

"You said before that if you had to guess
where Red was looking for whatever it was, you'd guess he was
looking at Taiwan, why is that?"

"I don't know, really," he said, squinting as
he thought about it. "He was looking at everything, don't get me
wrong, financial stuff, individual store operations, profit by
product ... down to the item ... that kind of thing. He kept coming
back to the buyers though, and I don't know, it just seemed like he
was paying more attention to Taiwan than, say, Mexico City or Rio
or The Netherlands ... we do a lot of business in those places too.
I couldn't swear to it, but that's what I think. I think he was
checkin' on those guys."

I nodded. "When you say 'those guys,' who do
you mean?" I asked him. "Do you have an office there or something,
or do they shuttle back and forth from over here. The same people
all the time, or in some kind of rotation? How's that
work?"

His pipe had gone cold again. He banged it out
and laid it down in the ashtray. "A little bit of all of that," he
said. "When I say Taiwan, I'm really talking about a whole theater
of business. Our office is located there. A guy, name of Ray
Santamano, runs it out of Taipei. Four others work out of that
office: Ernie Alacantra and Linn Tasi. Between the three of them
they cover China, Taiwan, Japan- not that there is ever much of
anything goin' on there anymore- and South Korea. I think that was
the neck of the woods attractin' Red's attention. Then there are
two other guys, Henry Waters and Steve Talbot, who are kind of
rovers. They cover Singapore and all the little tigers on down to
Australia. It's kind of a mishmash, you know? Little organizations
sometimes have some really good buys that we can take advantage of,
so we have a couple of troops patrolling the area. Those guys are
moving all the time, but they report in to Ray."

I had taken out my notebook, and I wrote down
the names as he told them to me, asking him to spell them. I was
thinking about the world that these people covered, the different
governments and cultures and businesses. Finally I sat back in my
chair with it all clogging my mind. I couldn't think of anything
else to ask him.