Reckless Endangerment (5 page)

As if reading his thoughts, Keegan said, “Well, it’d be hard for him to lose this one, all the physical evidence we’ve got. Meanwhile, I also heard today from representatives of our fine Jewish community, Rabbi Lowenstein foremost among them. I told him you were representing the office for all matters connected with the Shilkes case. I told the same to Haddad.”

“This is now a special project?”

Keegan smiled. This was something of a joke between them. Karp’s absurd title meant that the D.A. could dump upon him anything the D.A. did not want to handle for any of a variety of reasons. Things, for example, that had to be done but which were not politically expedient for the D.A. to do himself—distasteful things, like firing old crocks whom Keegan knew personally, or things for which the D.A. had to maintain a modicum of deniability. Karp did not object to this, particularly. He was learning a good deal about how politics worked in the big city, and while he understood that he would never make a politician himself—he lacked that essential agreeableness necessary to the political life—he made (somewhat to his own surprise) an excellent politician’s assistant. He had an infallible memory for detail. He had, unlike most staffers, an exhaustive knowledge of the actual workings of a prosecutorial organization. He was devoid of sympathy for the incompetent. He was dead loyal and as close-mouthed as an elderly Mafioso. And he could unholster, when required, a terrifying presence.

“Right,” said Keegan. “So you’ll see Haddad. And Lowenstein. You should get on well with the rabbi.”

Karp brought out a leather-bound notebook and made a note. “Yeah, we can compare circumcisions. Haddad won’t object to dealing with the
yiddim
on this?”

“Fuck ‘im if he does. This is New York. Now, what about Morilla, my other hemorrhoid?”

“Well. Roland’s confident on it. Frank Czermak’s the lead.”

“Roland’s always confident. I don’t like your face. What do
you
think?”

“They have the murder weapon with José Obregon’s prints on it in the brothers’ apartment, and he’s got a heavy sheet for drugs and violence in Mexico. They’re clean here, though. That’s about it. Something else still could turn up. …”

“That’s pretty thin. The cops really like these guys, huh?”

“They love them, as does Roland. I’d guess it’s a strong probable for conviction on the top count at trial.”

“Not good enough. A cop killing—what I don’t need is the police commissioner, bless his heart, in my office playing ‘Flowers of the Forest’ on his bagpipes. Look, sniff around this, would you? Make sure there aren’t any nasty surprises.”

Karp was surprised. “What, in Roland’s face? He’ll go ballistic.”

“No. I mean privately. Don’t mess with Czermak or anything, but keep me up to speed.” He stood up abruptly and walked to the closet where he kept his suit jacket. “I got a banquet to go to. Anything else?”

There was not. Karp went to his own office, next door, and started to make calls.

In the mess hall at one of the ten jails of Rikers Island, Jesus Obregon, called Jodón, wrinkled his nose in disgust and pushed away his plastic tray. “I can’t eat this garbage,” he said to his brother José. José looked up at his brother from his own tray, where he had been concentrating on shoveling the watery stew, potatoes, and canned corn into his mouth, and said in tones indicating surprise, “It’s good, Jodón. It’s much better than the food in Zaca.” José had spent four years in the maximum-security wing at Zacapoaxtla, the legendary penitentiary where the federal government of Mexico keeps its incorrigible criminals. Jesus Obregon, in contrast, had never spent a day in jail until this recent fiasco.

“Yes, for you,” Jodón said, “for you it is fine, but you know I have always had delicate health, a sensitive stomach.” He looked around the noisy, cavernous hall. “This place is going to kill me, José. I will die here, far from home.”

José looked down at his brother, wiped the grease from his chin, and said, “If we increased the
mordida
for the Ape … ? “The Ape” was their uncharitable epithet for Roland Hrcany. “Or it might be that one of the guards could become reasonable.”

Jodón shot a disapproving look at the other man. It disturbed him when José tried to generate ideas, or, in fact, when his little brother did anything at all without first being told to do so. He was trying to construct in his mind some way of blaming José for this disaster, but could find none, which made him even more disconsolate. Coming to New York had, after all, been his idea. He had left his profitable business as one of the links in one tributary of the vast braided river of heroin routes that led from the south to the great drug markets of North America. He could have spent his life running product from the western ports of Mexico or from rural airstrips, up from Hermosillo to Nogales and the border, and grown rich and respected. But the thought of being forever a medium-sized fish in a small pond irked him. He felt capable of larger things. So, as he sat in his comfortable house with the new refrigerator and color TV and stereo system, with the shiny Buick in the dusty street outside, he considered his career choices. The first step was to take over the Escondido organization in Nogales. To do that he needed money, huge quantities of money, money to bribe the people Escondido had protecting him on both sides of the law (and this would be particularly expensive because, naturally the local and federal police were already extracting from the regnant cartel all that they thought the traffic would bear) and when bribery was not possible money to pay
chuteros
for the requisite murders. Where to get the money? Going into business on his own, locally or in California, Arizona, or Texas, would be simple suicide. Not Denver or Chicago either: the Mexican gangs were well established there. But New York … that was different, a virgin field. Jodón had seen all three parts of
The Godfather
several times each, and so he was reasonably familiar with how things were done in that great city. If the Mob was fat and arthritic, as seemed the case, then the only other competition would come from
los negros
and
los puertorriqueños,
which Jodón considered no competition at all.

So the plan was put into action. Slowly, so as not to arouse suspicion, Jodón started buying heroin on his own. In six months he had accumulated two hundred kilograms of the pale brown powder, which he kept secreted in the walls of his bedroom. Six weeks ago he had packed the thick plastic bags containing the drug into the rocker panels of the Buick and rewelded them. Or rather José did. José was also the one who drove the loaded car across the border, while Jodón waited in the Ramada Inn in Tucson. This was the way they divided the work of their enterprise: Jodón made the plans, and José took the risks and performed the necessary actions, which was only fair considering their respective physical endowments. The brothers were the result of a mating between a small, elegant pimp from Nogales and a very large Hermosillo prostitute. Jodón had taken after his father, José after his mother. People in their Hermosillo barrio looking at the boys standing beside each other were reminded of a rooster keeping company with an ox; these were their earliest nicknames, and provided a source of local amusement until Jodón decided he didn’t like it and told his brother to make it stop. Which he did. Still, people had to call him something besides Jesus, a name many Latino youths bear, and which, out of respect, is always converted into a nickname for daily use, usually Chucho or Chui, but in this case the choice was Jodón, which means ruthless, opportunistic, deceptive. Jodón did not mind this.

The brothers had driven together in the Buick from Arizona to New York, obtained an apartment on Avenue C, and, somewhat later, a woman for Jodón, a Dominican-American named Connie Erbes. José did not want a woman, as he was married with five children. He used whores instead. Business, once they put samples on the street, was not slow in arriving, because their merchandise was very pure. Jodón expected word to filter up the lines of dealers until it reached someone who could move weight, and so it did.

The man was extremely plausible, although, since they had no business contacts in New York and naturally could not ask their own
cartelistas
for advice, they had to make him as right with only their own instincts. He called himself Lucky. He had the sharp clothes, the large white car with the smoked windows, the retinue of sullen dark men that marked a legit big-timer dealer. But Jodón was careful. He sniffed around. He found that yes, Lucky was a dealer on a substantial scale. He bought large and sold large. Jodón set up a moderate buy: five kilos of ninety percent pure product, two hundred grand. The deal went off like clockwork. Lucky was friendly, delighted to have found so good, so economical, a supplier. Immediately after the deal the Obregons moved out of their apartment to a place in Washington Heights, taking Connie, their money, and the bulk of their dope. There they lay low and waited. José ventured out and made a few buys in various parts of the City. Sure enough, their dope was moving through the usual channels, chopped to bits but still recognizable. The usual bulk suppliers were malignantly interested in the new source. Lucky was moving the dope on the street, ergo was definitely not a cop.

Jodón set up another deal, a much bigger deal: fifty kilos, two million dollars. He rented an apartment in East Harlem for the transaction. He hired a half dozen guards for the transport. He had a local man watch the meeting site for a week beforehand, to make sure no one was casing the venue. On the day of, Jodón was trembling with nerves. He snapped meaningless and contradictory orders to José in the driver’s seat, snarled at Connie as she tried to calm him.

Right on schedule, however, there came Lucky, with two men, one hauling a large blue Samsonite case. Handshakes all around. The case opened, the neatly wrapped hundreds in stacks of $10,000, two hundred of them, in lovely green rows. The two tin trunks unlocked, the bags sampled, tested, smiles all around.

Then chaos. The door smashing inward, the room full of uniformed men and detectives. Lucky and his guards beaten down, handcuffed. A gun in Jodón’s face, cuffs on his wrists, dragged down the stairs. Where were his guards? Fled, the bitches! Then the ride in the van with José and Connie, his mind frozen, refusing to believe the disaster, the beautiful money gone, his merchandise gone and then … nothing. The van stopped. They heard laughter, slamming doors, cars pulling away.

They waited in silence, then escaped from their cuffs, which is easy if there are at least two of you and no one is watching. They emerged from the van to find themselves in a waste area, strewn with trash, under an expressway.

Back in the Washington Heights apartment, Jodón got drunk and beat Connie until his hands ached, but neither action relieved his profound depression. Because he was drunk, he did not respond when José emerged from his room, a bemused expression on his moon face and expressed puzzlement that the pistol he had brought to the meeting, and which he had thought confiscated by the police, was back in his room, and, by the smell, had been fired recently. Then the real cops showed up.

Jodón had to admit, although only to himself, that he had been greedy and stupid. He should have made a few small deals and gone away. Made a few small deals and gone away again, moving slowly, spreading the risk among a number of buyers. He should have arranged the buy at an out-of-town site, in the open, at a place with many roads. That was how it was done among the big men.
Poco á poco se va lejos.
Next time he would do it that way, little by little. But first he had to get out of the present situation.

Obviously, a bribe was not going to work. He still felt embarrassment when he thought of how the Blond Ape had spurned his offer. He recalled the gold watch on the man’s wrist—he had never seen anything so marvelous, a watch made out of a gold coin! And his suit, his shoes! He should have realized that a man who collected the sort of bribes available to a prosecutor in New York City would have been insulted with his petty hundred thousand, although that sum would have easily purchased a brace of federal judges in Mexico.

Another way, then, one that would combine revenge with escape.

“
Hijo de la chingada madre!
” he said between his teeth. José, standing next to him in the exercise yard, started and said, “Who?”

“Who do you think? That one who cheated us, who set us up with the police. I tell you what we have to do, my brother. We must have him found, this Lucky, the
pato
! We must have him go to the police with the evidence necessary to expose what he did, how he killed the policeman Morilla and blamed it on us. He must be in jail, where I am now. Only then will I have his throat cut.”

José nodded appreciatively. It was an excellent plan. José did not mind jail as much as Jodón, but he would have preferred to be elsewhere. Slowly, as he considered it, a small flaw in the plan dripped through his muddy brain to the centers of comprehension.

“But, Jodón—why would he do that? He is safe and we are in here, no?”

Jodón rolled his eyes and rapped his brother sharply on the crown of his head, as he had done for as long as either of them could remember. “
Pendejo!
We will have to call someone, who will find him and convince him to do this.”

José started to laugh. He had a hearty, bubbling laugh, and he gave it full play as he thought of some person trying to convince Lucky to confess to a murder of a policeman in order to free the Obregons. “Who … who … who, could do that, Jodón?” he sputtered. “God Almighty? The Virgin Mary? The Devil?”

“No,” said his brother, maintaining his dignity. “I will send for El Chivato, from Nogales.”

José stopped laughing. “Oh, El Chivato,” he said, “yes, then of course. If he will come.”

After speaking on the phone with John Haddad and Rabbi Lowenstein, Karp called his wife at her office, and got instead her receptionist and general factotum, Sym McCabe. Sym was one of the waifs Mrs. Karp used to staff her complex life.

“Whom shall I say is calling?” said Sym.