A Simple Act of Violence (50 page)

Robey leafed through more pages. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘An article in the San Jose Mercury News, August 18th, 1996 . . .’ Robey leaned forward and handed the photocopied headline to Miller:

‘You know what a Memorandum of Understanding is?’

Miller looked up from the newspaper clipping. ‘A what?’

‘A Memorandum of Understanding.’

‘No, I’ve not heard of that.’

‘In 1981 the CIA and the Department of Justice made an agreement. That’s what it was called, a Memorandum of Understanding. It specifically stated that the CIA was released from any requirement to report drug-related activities by its agents to representatives or agents of the Department of Justice.’

‘You can’t be serious,’ Miller said.

Robey laughed. ‘I’m not serious, no. There’s no point in being serious about it. In fact it’s probably better to laugh at the sheer idiocy of what we have created here. Jack Blum couldn’t have said it better.’ Robey turned to his papers again. ‘ “In the process of fighting a war against the Sandinistas, did people connected with the U.S. government open up channels which allowed drug traffickers to move drugs to the United States, did they know the drug traffickers were doing it, and did they protect them from law enforcement? The answer to all those questions is yes.” And he went on to say that he believed a decision was made by those in power at the time. The decision related to the sacrifice, and he actually used the word sacrifice . . . he said that the American government made a conscious decision to sacrifice a percentage of the American population in order to raise the money to fight the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. That sacrifice was considered acceptable, because the people who would die as a result of cocaine coming into the U.S. were people that were considered acceptably expendable.’

Miller shook his head slowly and leaned back in his chair. Robey held up another sheet of paper. ‘This is a Senate Committee memorandum. It says, “A number of individuals who supported the Contras and who participated in Contra activity in Texas, Louisiana, California and Florida, have suggested that cocaine is being smuggled into the U.S. through the same infrastructure which is procuring, storing and transporting weapons, explosives, ammunition and military equipment for the Contras from the United States.” Another piece here: “Investigation further revealed that the Contras had direct supply lines into black gangs such as the Crips and the Bloods in L.A., and this huge supply of cocaine kick-started the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. Efforts by the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Customs, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement to identify and prosecute the three men believed to be responsible for the huge influx of coke into L.A. have been inhibited and railroaded by the CIA.”

Robey smiled again, that same expression that said everything and nothing simultaneously. ‘That, Detective Miller, is one of the very few monsters we have created. And your killer, your Ribbon Killer . . . well, he’s just another product of the same society that allows things like this to go unchecked. It’s a slow deterioration of liberties, a gradual war of attrition . . .’ Robey smiled. ‘You know what Machiavelli said about war?’

‘What?’

‘He said, “War cannot be avoided. It can only be postponed to the advantage of your enemy.” So that’s what we did in Nicaragua. We did not postpone the war and give the Sandinistas the advantage. We took the war to them.’

Miller’s head had started to hurt. ‘We have gotten off the subject,’ he said. ‘It’s getting late—’

‘I am sorry, Detective Miller. Sometimes I get a little heated about such issues.’

‘Might I use your bathroom before I go, professor?’

‘Of course. Out the door, turn right, end of the hallway.’

Miller left the room, stopped for a moment in the dimly-lit corridor to look back the way he’d come, and for a moment he felt like a thief, an outsider. He was tired, no doubt about it, but he felt as if Robey had battered him with information - things he did not want to know, things that were not relevant to the questions he’d asked. More than an hour he’d been there, and he was leaving none the wiser.

He stepped into the bathroom and closed the door.

Moments later, standing at the washbasin, he was compelled to open the mirror-fronted cabinet in front of him. For some reason he shuddered. The fine hairs on the nape of his neck stood to attention. He felt a bead of sweat break free from his hairline and start down his brow. It reached the bridge of his nose and he wiped it away. He felt disembodied, as if he was watching someone else as he hesitated before his own reflection.

He knew he shouldn’t, but there was something within, something deep that drove him to open that cabinet and look inside. His fingertips touched the cold surface of the handle. He tugged lightly. The door popped open with an almost indiscernible sound.

With his left hand he inched the door ajar and peered inside.

Anacin. Excedrin. A tube of Ben-Gay. One-A-Day Multiples. A bottle of Formula 44. A pack of Sucrets. Chloraseptic mouthwash. A tube of toothpaste.

And then right at the back, second shelf up, a brown plastic hairbrush. He reached in and gently lifted it out by one of its bristles. He stood there with the brush in his hand. He didn’t want to look. Had to look. Felt as if here he was committing the worst sin of all. He rotated the brush by its head, slowly, until the handle was clearly visible beneath the light above him. There was no question. A clear partial, in fact several of them, were right there on the smooth handle of the brush.

Miller’s breath caught in his chest. He dropped the brush into the sink and it clattered noisily around the drain and came to rest. He reached out suddenly and flushed the toilet handle. The sudden rush of water startled him. Miller hesitated for a moment, and then he took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, and once again lifting the brush by its bristles, he wrapped it in the handkerchief and tucked it into his inner pocket. He stood there for a moment, his heart thundering, his nerves like taut wires. A sense of nausea invaded his chest. He believed he might be sick right then and there. He washed his hands, dried them furiously on a towel hanging on the rail beside the sink, and then he opened the door.

‘You okay?’

Miller jumped suddenly.

Robey was standing right against the door, almost as if he’d been caught pressing his ear against it and stepped back suddenly for fear of being discovered.

‘Yes,’ Miller blurted. ‘Yes, yes, I’m fine . . . just tired.’

Robey nodded understandingly. He stepped back to allow Miller past, and then walked with him to the front door of the apartment. He opened it, and before he stood aside to allow Miller out, he turned and said, ‘Perhaps we will talk again, Detective Miller. I, for one, have enjoyed your company.’

Miller extended his hand and they shook.

‘I’m sorry I could not have been of more help to you.’

‘It was at least interesting,’ Miller said. ‘Goodnight.’ He stepped past Robey and out into the exterior walkway.

‘Have a safe journey, detective,’ Robey said, and closed the door behind him.

En route to Pierce Street Miller found it hard to concentrate.

He had forgotten to ask Robey how he knew Sarah Bishop’s trainer; to question him again regarding the afternoon of Saturday the 11th.

Tomorrow morning he would face Lassiter and Nanci Cohen, and what would he be able to tell them?

That he had stolen a hairbrush from Robey’s apartment?

At one point he pulled over to the side of the road. He opened the window and took deep breaths. A rush of nausea left his body damp with sweat.

After ten or fifteen minutes he wound up the window, started the engine, drove on toward Pierce.

 

Marilyn Hemmings was just leaving. ‘A late one?’ she asked.

Miller took the handkerchief from his inside jacket pocket and opened it up for her.

‘Whose is this?’ she asked.

Miller shook his head.

‘You don’t know or you’re not going to tell me?’

‘The latter.’

‘So you do know?’

‘Yes.’

‘And do they know you have it?’

‘I figure they will soon enough.’

‘And what do you want me to do with it?’

‘Can you take prints off of it?’

Hemmings looked at Miller, her expression one of concern, and then she took the hairbrush carefully by the bristles and turned the handle toward the light.

‘There’s some things I can look at here,’ she said. ‘This is from a suspect we don’t have on file, right?’

‘We don’t know whether he’s on file or not. We don’t have any prints for AFIS if that’s what you mean.’

‘But now you’re hoping we do.’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘I do this then I’m an accomplice to whatever it was you did, you understand that?’

Miller nodded.

‘So answer me this question . . . what makes you think that I’m gonna do what you want?’

‘Nothing. I don’t know that you are going to do it. I just figured that you might.’

‘You ever do something like this before?’

‘No, never before.’

‘This is on the Ribbon Killer guy?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘This conversation didn’t take place, you understand that?’

‘I understand.’

‘Call me in the morning, maybe ten, eleven o’ clock. I’ll see what we have.’

‘I really appreciate—’

Hemmings did not smile. She shook her head. ‘Go,’ she said coldly. ‘Get out of here. You didn’t come here tonight. I didn’t see you. Like I said, this conversation never happened. ’

‘I owe you.’

‘For what, Detective Miller? I didn’t do anything.’

Miller nodded. He turned and started walking. There was a line somewhere. He’d walked over it. It did not feel good.

 

An hour later, sitting at his computer, he typed ‘CIA Drugs’ into a search engine. He was offered thousands of pages to visit. He opened up a site and scanned what was before him:

Miller closed down the files, typed in ‘Nicaragua Oliver North Cocaine Smuggling.’

It was as if a different world had opened up before him, a world he had never questioned, never considered. Page after page of testimonials and documents were right there before him. He chose one at random, read through it with ever-increasing unease:

And another:

Miller closed the files. He shut the computer down. His eyes were gritty, his head pounded. He was hungry but could not consider eating. He did not want to know what had been done. He did not want to see the sacred monster.

Robert Miller just wanted to sleep, but he knew he would not.

Nanci Cohen looked at her watch for the third time in five minutes. ‘You have me only for a matter of minutes,’ she said abruptly.

It was a little before ten, morning of Friday the 17th.

Roth sat to Miller’s right, Lassiter to the left beside ADA Cohen.

‘So he let me in,’ Miller said.

‘And he told you what?’

‘He told me nothing,’ Miller said.

Nanci Cohen frowned. She reached into her voluminous bag for a notepad and a pen. ‘He told you nothing? How can he have told you nothing?’

‘I don’t mean that he told me nothing, he just told me a lot of stuff that I haven’t figured out the precise relevancy of yet.’

‘So?’ she asked. ‘What did he tell you?’

‘About cocaine.’

‘Cocaine?’

‘About cocaine smuggling in Nicaragua.’

Roth turned suddenly. ‘The newspaper clipping beneath her bed.’

‘The what?’ ADA Cohen asked, and then she nodded her head and smiled. ‘Beneath the Sheridan woman’s bed, right? He left a newspaper clipping there about the Nicaraguan election.’