Bad to the Bone (18 page)

Moodrow began to back across the room. Better to get out without doing any more damage. The Hanoverians were already beginning to relax. Sooner or later, one of them would decide to impress the boss.

“Wait a second. You came here to ask about Flo Alamare, right?”

“Keep going.” Moodrow stopped in the doorway to the outer office. The sentry he’d disarmed was moaning softly.

“A miserable bitch. Just like the mother. We threw her out two years ago.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s the reality of it.”

“Bullshit.”

Craddock folded his hands and began to speak rapidly. His breathing was shallow, his anger and fear barely under control. “Flo Alamare was always a problem. She liked to act out, to test us with displays of her anger. I can’t count the number of times she told me that one day we’d throw her out. ‘Dump me’ was the expression she used. I didn’t say it to her, but I did believe that she’d eventually go too far and I was right. First she began to use drugs, then to bring them into Hanover House, then to offer them to other Hanoverians. What could I do except ask her to leave? Which I did more than two years ago.”

Moodrow waited a moment before responding. “You’re not bad, Craddock. Your face doesn’t show any of the lie you’re putting out to me. That’s very good for an amateur. Take it from someone who’s done thousands of interrogations. But the thing of it is that I’ve got witnesses who say Flo Alamare was living here after you say she left. These witnesses will sign affidavits, give depositions, testify in court. That’s bad for you, Craddock. Bad for your bullshit commune, too. Of course, if you wanna give me the kid…If you wanna hand over Michael Alamare and answer a few questions about what happened to his mother…Plea-bargaining
is
the name of the game in law enforcement these days. Who am I to buck the tide?”

Craddock managed a smile. He was good at legalities. “What sort of ‘witnesses’ are we talking about? Are they, perhaps, former Hanoverians with a grudge against Hanover House? I know you don’t care for me or for the philosophy I espouse, but believe me when I tell you that hell hath no fury like a human being after a failed therapy. Patients, in the course of therapy, often reveal the most personal aspects of their pitiful lives. Later on, if things go bad, they resent having exposed themselves. It’s all so common really.”

He would have gone on, but Moodrow interrupted with a wave of the .45. “If that was true, I wouldn’t have to beg people to talk to me. You think you’re in control of your situation, because you’ve been getting away with your bullshit for all these years. You stood up to investigations, lawyers…everything they could throw at you. But as far as I’m concerned, all those little victories did was set you up. What is it that Rambo says in that movie? ‘I’m comin’ fa
you
!’ ” Moodrow paused long enough to smile. It was the first time, in the course of a long career, he’d dealt with a criminal who was both crazy and controlled. It was going to be better than he’d expected. “You got any idea how much money the widow’s offering for your ass? This is a bounty hunt for me. Like goin’ after a lion that kills sheep. If I bring back the hide, I collect the reward. Of course, like I said, you could always hand the kid over. I don’t
have
to skin the lion to get paid.”

from
The Autobiography of Davis Craddock

I
’M GOING TO GIVE
this chapter a title. I’m going to call it: “Munching the Meeses” or “Life’s Little Consolations.”

Of course, there’s a moral here. Something about snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Or finding the silver lining supposed to inhabit every cloud. Or strolling on the sunny side of the street. Or, simply and wonderfully put, how to take advantage of life’s little consolations.

I had nearly two hundred poochies by this time. They were more quarrelsome than ever. My Therapists needed weapons to keep the peace.

Whereas in the past I’d made sure that all my little poochies got laid, now I used sex as a reward. Indiscriminate fucking was restricted to the Therapists. Ordinary poochies were assigned wives.

(A perfect example of accepting those little consolations, by the way. I was besieged on all sides by relatives and lawyers and agencies. In some ways, my life was a living hell. [Do I sense a lack of sympathy for my plight? Remember, in the final analysis, there are only two categories: poochies and me.] But I made the best of it by enjoying the little things. Especially the assigning of sexual partners. By examining the files, I determined the most painful combinations. I put grossly obese men with women who worshipped athletes. I put obnoxious, angry women with men who feared their mothers. I put perfectly matched couples together, then ripped them apart a month later. It wasn’t much, let me hasten to admit the obvious, but the follow-ups offered just enough amusement to make life bearable.)

The worst part was the money. There was too much of it. Why do revenues running into the millions inevitably draw the eye of the greatest of cult killers: the Internal Revenue Service? Nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand dollars and they ignore you. Another grand and you’re public enemy number one.

We’d been a nonprofit organization for many years, but that only made it more interesting for the gray suits who came to examine the books.

Guess what condition the books were in? “We are scientists, sir, not
bookkeepers
.” (Imagine James Mason addressing W.C. Fields.)

Nevertheless, poor record keeping or not, they continued to harass me.

“Mister Craddock, was the five-thousand-dollar pool table in your private quarters purchased with corporate funds?”

“Yeah, I guess it was. Where do I pay the ‘tax plus penalties’?”

“Mister Craddock, did you funnel fifteen percent of all incoming revenues into many, extra-large, safety deposit boxes?”

“I’m being persecuted for my beliefs. Call the ACLU.”

Enough with the whining? Appetizers are fine, but let’s admit the truth: it’s the meat course that counts.

I had come to the point where I believed that my best move was to ride off into the sunset.
With
the contents of my safety deposit boxes tucked neatly into the saddlebags.

But running away doesn’t suit my style. Not that I couldn’t run, if I had to, but somehow my personal danger never became so imminent that instinct took over. No, what I did was vacillate until inspiration came. Curiously, it came through a combination of personal observations and a television show. Just as it had when I decided to build Hanover House.

My personal observations?

The neighborhood surrounding Hanover House is as drug ridden as any in New York. When we first established Hanover House, the drug of choice was heroin, with an occasional sprinkling of Angel Dust or methamphetamine. (Marijuana was taken for granted.)

Then cocaine and crack made their appearances and within a few months it seemed like there was nothing else. Whereas heroin junkies, undeniably dangerous when sick, kept their action off the streets, crack dealers chased people down the sidewalk.

“Jum’s, baby. The fines’, the bes’.”

The television show:

One boring evening, a Therapist named Flo Alamare and I (yes, I’d taken an intimate; which only goes to show that even psychopaths have feelings) were watching a PBS analysis of the drug trade on our 60-inch, rear-projection, Sony TV (purchased, by the way, with foundation funds). Though rather stylish, in its own way, the documentary lacked the glitter of network efforts. There were, for instance, no pictures of children selling crack to undercover cops. Only a sober professor, wispy white hair drifting away from his enormous skull, with a pointer and a series of slides.

The modern drug trade, he explained, began after World War II, when organized crime families began to smuggle heroin. The typical operation involved purchasing opium in southwestern Asia, transporting it to Marseilles or Palermo; processing it into morphine, then heroin; smuggling it into the United States.

Curiously, all of the above steps were accomplished within a few years. The problem was distribution. Customers. It took the mafia thirty-five years to establish the marketplace that existed when large quantities of cocaine first became available. It took ten years for cocaine to penetrate every aspect of American life.

The cocaine originated in South America and South Americans controlled the entire industry, which made prosecution extremely difficult. Ironically, the coke smugglers had established their routes in the late 1970s.

When the United States government began spraying the Mexican marijuana crop with the herbicide Paraquat, it created an enormous vacuum in the marketplace. The entrepreneurial attitude, as we all know, abhors a vacuum, and so, enormous quantities of marijuana began coming up from South America. Specifically, Colombia.

The switch to cocaine was simply a matter of dollars and cents (dollars and sense?). Cocaine, on an ounce-for-ounce basis, wholesale or retail, sells for nearly ten times as much as marijuana.

At this point, the old man on the screen made an abrupt switch to the problems associated with drug rehabilitation and my thoughts drifted away.

I had never, I reflected, seen a more simple example of laissez-faire capitalism. (Talk about caveat emptor!) A previously unknown human need asserts itself. Entrepreneurs spring forth to fill the need. A marketplace is established, growing slowly and organically until it can support the ultimate capitalist tool: the fad.

Which is what cocaine was, at first. A fad. Then the peculiar addictive properties of the cocaine fad drove the marketplace into a frenzy. There was money for everyone. It spilled over into ghetto homes that had never known a positive bank balance. It resulted in an orgy of expansion.

Enough with the lecture. On to ‘munching the meeses.’

After all, while interesting enough in their own right, drugs had nothing to do with me or with Hanover House. I had kept drugs out of Hanover House (more than one poochie was shown the door because of an inability to control his habits) for purely practical reasons.

I tried to switch my thoughts to an upcoming IRS interview. They were going to question me about a property on Long Island, a summer retreat that I called the Cycle Research Center. Ostensibly, the ‘cycle’ was the endless infection and reinfection of humans caught in the neurotic swamp of the nuclear family. In fact, it was used for no other purpose than to observe my poochies in their bikinis.

If rented, the property, just blocks from a white sand beach on Shelter Island, would have brought Hanover House a tidy sum. On the other hand, if I was using the house for my own purposes, the rent would be a perk and very, very taxable.

I was going to claim (at my attorney’s suggestion) that the house was a retreat for
all
Hanoverians, but the truth was that only a few Therapists knew about it. It wouldn’t take a hell of an investigation to prove me a liar.

The going rent for large summer homes on Shelter Island is about two thousand dollars a week in season. Add up the weeks and months and, even if I paid the ‘tax plus penalties,’ IRS auditors would have every right to ask where I’d gotten the money. Ugh!

Once again, the idea of a graceful retreat entered my consciousness. The powers that be had made it clear to my attorney: if I quit the guru business, I’d be allowed an unexamined exile.

Then Flo interrupted me. “Do you believe this?” she asked, pointing to the screen. “I mean, what’s next? First marijuana, then heroin, then cocaine. What’s coming next?”

What I wondered, later on, was how, with my background in chemistry, I hadn’t asked the very same question myself?

Here’s how it worked: I had extensive files on every one of my poochies and I went through them until I found John Blumberg. His father owned a chemical supply house in Queens. Even though John had broken off all relations with his parents, they continued to write him every week. He was an only child and had apprenticed in the family business.

I made John a Therapist, introducing him to Flo’s sexual prowess along the way. Within a month, when he was thoroughly addicted to the sex and the power, I approached him with my ‘Plan for America.’

“John,” I told him, “although I haven’t spoken of these matters before, I’ve been studying Eastern philosophy for some time. Especially the pharmacology of enlightenment. As a result, I’ve decided to set up a small lab and do experiments. Unfortunately, given current levels of drug-related paranoia, chemical purchases, especially by newly established labs, are often subject to special scrutiny. Let’s face it, John, the
last
thing Hanover House needs is another investigation.”

By this time his head was bobbing up and down and I had little trouble convincing him to reconcile with his family. A simple promise that Flo would continue to fuck the living shit out of him sealed the contract. He left Hanover House and, within a few weeks, resumed his place in the family business. Within two months, his firm was supplying us with chemicals.

Here’s how it worked: chemistry terrifies the average man. Directions like ‘stir and reflux for 27 hours.’ Or, ‘dissolve oily residue in 160 parts di-isopropyl ether.’ Or, ‘collect crystalline plates by filtration.’ Or (my personal favorite) ‘add 250 mg of compound C in 5.0 ml of tetra-hydrofuran to a stirred suspension of 200 mg of lithium aluminum hydroxide in 5.0 ml of tetrahydrofuran.’ All guaranteed to keep the potty flushing.

But the truth is that chemists are no more than cooks. True, the chemist’s pots and pans are more elaborate than the tools of the housewife, but the principle remains the same: ingredients are combined, then processed by various means. If the same ingredients are combined in the same proportion and under the same conditions, the results are
always
the same.

Here’s how it worked: my goal (after considerable research) was to marry an analogue of a medically useful synthetic opiate called fentanyl (which is ten times as powerful as heroin) to an analogue of synthetic cocaine. The resulting compound would combine the tranquility of heroin with the energetic euphoria of cocaine. It would also combine the eventual physiological addiction of an opiate with the compulsion to immediately repeat the experience which typifies cocaine.