Deadly Waters (2 page)

II

02/15/06 21:09 Pacific Standard Time

John Taylor drove himself back into San Francisco and sat in a small bar on Powell Street. It had a lovely bay window overlooking the historic cable line. By nine o’clock he was still looking out the window at the bright neon lights below him and was well into his fourth Scotch and soda. Somewhere behind him were the bay and the black, lapping waters of the ocean. Between the Pacific and the cable line on Powell was a warehouse full of luxury goods from East Asia, and over the door of the warehouse’s loading dock was painted a sign in three foot high letters that read: TAYLOR IMPORTS. John’s grandfather, whose name had also been John, and an Italian man named Giovanni had climbed a makeshift scaffold on a hot summer day in 1917, a quarter century before the present John Taylor was born, just to put the sign there. His grandfather and Giovanni had drunk a beer when they were done painting, and the old man had declared: “This sign will be up here as long as there’s a San Francisco.”

John Taylor knew the story well, because his old man had told it to him every time he was in his cups. Whiskey, thought Taylor, made the men in his family talk too much. He was thankful the old man was not alive to see this day.

He watched the city lights glow as the night grew darker and made a game of counting the ever changing line of car headlights on the street. What would he do in the morning? Not going to the office, as he had done for the past four decades. Someone else, a youngish, sharply-turned out friend of Darrin Benton, would be going there at eight o’clock. Taylor’s ex-wife was living in Eureka with a performance artist and his estranged son had decided not to go to Venezuela or become a potter, and was presently living in Los Angeles; both supported with John Taylor’s money. The son considered himself a neo-Marxist, at the moment, and had decided that any work done in this world ruled by capitalist roaders like his father was not worth doing. The ex-wife thought the performance artist was a genius and was probably the only person in the world who did. Both the ex-wife and the son despised Taylor, and the more money he gave them the more they detested him. When they heard of the sale of his business they would each want millions of more reasons to hate him.

“Maybe I’ll go to Vegas,” he told the disinterested bartender. “Place everything on number twenty-three and let it ride. I’d probably lose, but I’d be a legend.”

“Yeah,” said the tender.

“Twenty-three was my number in school,” said Taylor. “Football team. I wasn’t big, not like I am these days. I could run like crazy back then.”

“A lot of you guys could run back then,” said the barkeep as he cleaned a glass with his towel.

“I could have been an actor,” said Taylor. “Not a leading man, more of a character guy. I was Horatio in
Hamlet
and Prospero in
The
Tempest
. I was a lot of ‘o’ fellows. I was Falstaff in my college troupe. I was him in those... you know, those... plays.”

“You were a very good Falstaff in
Henry
the
Fourth
,
Part
One
, back when we were at Stanford, John,” said someone behind him.

“’You and I have heard the bells at midnight...’etcetera, etcetera,” said Taylor, making a flourish with his hand and halting in mid-sentence when he could not remember the rest of the line. “Who is that?” he asked, turning about.

He saw a small man, impeccably neat and of about Taylor’s years, but one whose health was considerably more robust than his. The stranger had jet black hair and eyebrows and was dressed in a brown camelhair suit and butter-soft leather gloves. He grinned at John as if he knew something Taylor did not, which Taylor himself knew meant only that the man might know almost anything that did not touch upon Taylor’s former business.

“Do I know you, sir?” asked Taylor, seeing something familiar in the stranger’s round, olive face.

“I’m Erin Mondragon, John,” said the man and held out his right hand. “Class of ’65. We were Indians together, none of this ‘The Cardinal’ nonsense back then.”

“You were Caliban!” recalled Taylor, remembering the play they had done as students.

“’Ca-Ca-Caliban, get a new master, be a new man,’” said Mondragon.

“My God,” said Taylor and put his hand to his forehead. “You were...let me see... you were Al Harris’ roommate! You and he closed down some bars down in Palo Alto back in your salad days. You look great.”

Erin was indeed looking slim and fit, much fitter than Taylor, who sucked in his own rounded stomach to make himself a little more presentable. “I heard,”-- suddenly recalling something he had read in the newspaper years before--“I heard, I don’t know how to say this. I heard you were, you see…”

“That I was in prison?” said Mondragon nonchalantly. “May I join you, John ?” He

sat himself and his drink at Taylor’s table.

In the brief time he had to reflect upon what he had just said, Taylor realized he should not have said anything about Mondragon’s past that was so obviously unpleasant. “I’m sorry, old man,” said Taylor, embarrassed to have touched upon such a sensitive matter.

“Don’t be,” said Mondragon. “I was in for only a year and a half; did it all in a minimum security federal prison down in Boron. That’s the treatment they dole out to tax evaders.”

“What did you...?” asked Taylor with some hesitation.

“Nothing,” laughed Mondragon and waved the matter away. “There’s the rub, as Billy Shakespeare would say. I didn’t do anything. I may have failed to dot every ‘I’ in my time. Not on this occasion. You may remember, my family was in agriculture.”

Taylor recalled that the Mondragons had owned land in the Central Valley since before California became a state. They had been among the few old Spanish families to support General Fremont and the Golden Bear Republic, and had consequently been able to hang onto most of their wealth when California had entered the Union. The Mondragons had grown cotton when the first wells were drilled after World War I, and avocados and seedless grapes after the irrigation canals were dug.

Taylor also remembered Erin at Stanford as a carefree party-giver who had broken the hearts of countless co-eds and managed somehow to graduate from the prestigious business school despite having twice been on probation. The last Taylor had heard of Mondragon, the last before he had read of Erin’s prison sentence, was that he had taken over his father’s estate.

“I was in debt,” said Mondragon, taking a discrete sip from his drink, “what with the farm prices being so low for so long. I was caught in a tight place between the government and a developer. The state wanted to designate half the farm protected wetlands; the developer wanted a place to build condominiums. This isn’t boring you, is it, John?”

“No,” said Taylor, again gazing out the big bay window at the city’s lights and pondering things he would rather not ponder.

“Anyway,” said Mondragon, “my accountant--I made the mistake of letting someone else do my taxes--somehow made a series of deductions that were interpreted to be illegal. This happened at the time I was trapped in my impossible situation. I sold as much land as I was allowed to sell in order to cover what I supposedly owed. I could not sell enough, as the state prevented me from selling the irrigated land they had deemed ‘wetlands,’ as if I were growing grapes in a swamp. What I could raise was not enough to satisfy the court. Then came the prison sentence. I know now my accountant--my former accountant, I might say--was the brother-in-law of a certain developer. In the end I lost everything; to the state and to the certain developer. Everything.”

“Did you go bankrupt, Erin?” asked Taylor.

Mondragon sighed. “That was the one disgrace I avoided. After the lawyers and the government vultures and real estate criminals had picked my bones, there was enough to get started again, once I had done my time behind bars. As I say, I lost everything else. Just as you lost your company today.”

“You know?” asked Taylor.

“Heard it through the grapevine,” said Mondragon. “One learns how to listen in prison. As well as how to make new friends. I made lots of new friends in Boron. What do you plan to do, John, now that you have no responsibilities?”

While he waited for Taylor’s answer, Mondragon thought of that first terrible moment when the guard had closed the iron door behind him. Mondragon had looked about at the dirty steel toilet and at the weird, frightened Columbian named Gusman cowering in the corner. The idiot had thought his new cellmate was going to hurt him like the other inmates in the prison had. The poor, frightened little drug mule did not realize that this wealthy stranger was going to protect him during the next year and a half.

Taylor looked at Mondragon more closely. He did not recall the young Erin being very perceptive or even particularly interested in other people. Nor did Taylor understand why a man of Mondragon’s social station would have a butterfly tattoo on his wrist. Erin noted Taylor’s interest in the tattoo and pulled down the sleeve of his shirt to hide it.

“A souvenir from another jailbird,” he explained. “In there it meant something.”

“What does it mean?” asked Taylor.

“I can’t recall at the moment. I’ll have to look it up in an encyclopedia.”

In truth, Mondragon had designed the butterfly pattern himself. He had read of a French convict on Devil’s Island who had worn a similar tattoo. He had one on his wrist and so did Gusman, the drug mule he had befriended. Mondragon had told the poor fool that the symbol meant they were now brothers. He later put a similar tattoo on the wrist of a Navaho boy he also met in prison. Mondragon offered a similar tale of brotherhood to the gullible youth, and the young Navaho believed him as much as the Columbian had.

Taylor laughed and felt more at ease with his old friend after Erin made the odd statement about an encyclopedia. “Sure. Why not look it up in the Bay Area Register,” he said. “Tell me: what do
you
do these days? Do you have any responsibilities now?”

“I hang out. Mainly I invest. I’ve done quite well in the market. So has everyone else, I suppose, these past few years. My strategy is simple: I buy short in a stock as soon as it peaks on the Dow. Hewllet-Packard was my latest; it was up there in the stratosphere five years ago. Do you ever fish?”

“You mean in the ocean?” asked Taylor, thinking of the excursion boats that daily went to sea from the city’s marinas.

“That’s for old men,” said Mondragon. “I meant fly fishing. On the Colorado River. I go four, five times a year. Come with me sometime. Catch up on days gone by.”

“I don’t know,” said Taylor, who never had many interests outside the family business. “I never was much into outdoorish things. What do you hear from your old roommate Al Harris?”

“Al became an engineer,” said Mondragon, his mood becoming noticeably more somber at the mention of Harris’ name. “Aerospace. Very fancy government stuff. He worked for Boeing in Seattle during the Seventies. Had his own consulting firm until six years ago.”

“And?” said Taylor.

“He was doing something for the Air Force,” said Mondragons. “Something very intimidating. High explosive projectiles on satellites or something. His son--his name’s Ed--he was an engineer in his father’s firm. In 2000 the Air Force decided they could do the same research in Bhopal, India, for half as much, so they cancelled Al’s contract. Unlike me, he went bankrupt. Then he shot himself. In the mouth with a forty caliber revolver. I can even tell you the make of the gun: Smith and Wesson, double action, an antique. Not like Al at all. He preferred the latest model in firepower. His son found him on the living room sofa.”

Taylor tried to imagine someone he once knew lying in a pool of blood and gore on a living room sofa. He had never seen a human being shot, but he had heard that an exiting bullet makes an ungodly mess.

“Christ almighty,” said Taylor, and took a large swallow of his Scotch. “I didn’t know.”

“I still see his boy Eddie now and then,” said Mondragon. “A fine young man. Works for a little firm in Wisconsin that makes airplane kits. He’s still torn up about his dad.”

The two men were silent for nearly a half minute. Taylor pushed his drink away, for he all at once felt a bit uneasy in his stomach.

“How about you?” he asked Mondragon. “Do you have kids?”

“No,” said Mondragon, recovering his smile. “But I do have four ex-wives.”

“You’ve been busy,” said Taylor. “I wonder when you have time to fish.”

“Yes, very busy,” agreed Mondragon. “Too busy. The ex-wives keep a man on the move. One step ahead of their attorneys. While I was in prison I made a settlement with each of them. They thought I was a bad bet to make back then. Little did they know.”

He threw back the remainder of his drink and stood from his chair.

“Sorry about your trouble with—what’s his name? Benton?” he said to Taylor. “I know his type. He is one of the new men replacing us codgers. We--you and I and poor old Al Harris—we’re the dinosaurs Benton and his smarmy sort feast upon. They’re going to eat us up someday, if we don’t kill ourselves first. I know, I’m being overly negative. I tend to do that ever since I had my own troubles. Did I tell you they made my farms into a wildlife refuge?”