Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) (18 page)

Marty sensed my discomfort. He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Everything points in that direction, Leo,” he insisted. “If there was anything else to do here in Seattle, I’d be doing it.”

I wanted to argue, but Marty was right. Whatever had turned Brett Ward’s life upside down had originated up in B.C. Everything from the license plates to the shootout with the Provincial Police that heralded the beginning of the end of Brett’s boat repo business. All of it started in Canada.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll drive.”

Looked like a Canadian cop convention. Multiple plainclothes officers represented the Provincial Police, the Vancouver PD and the RCMP. Another six uniformed constables lined the walls. Inspector Anthony Hargress of the VPD handled the introductions. Marty and I shook hands all around, sat down at the foot of the table, and got our notebooks out.

Hargress looked like he didn’t get out much. Fifty-something, losing sight of his belt buckle and his hairline at the same time. Poster boy for the Pacific Northwest pallor, that cadaveric hue one gets from living where the sun is, at best, an infrequent visitor.

“ST Emtman and Saint David’s Transport are part of Billy Bailey’s far-flung empire,” Hargress began. An angry murmur crawled around the room. Hargress looked at Marty and me. “Which, in case you were wondering, explains the unusual level of interest in this room today.”

As a matter of fact, I had wondered about that very thing the moment we’d walked through the door. Either it was a slow crime day in B.C. or Marty’s interagency request for information on Saint David’s Transport and ST Emtman had touched an unanticipated nerve within the Canadian law enforcement community.

The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. “Billy Bailey?” I said.

“Billy Bud,” growled the Mountie on my right.

“Ah,” I said. “Not the Melville character, I take it?”

Apparently my comic renown had once again failed to precede me.

Hargress cleared his throat. “For the benefit of our guests…” he began in a tone that reminded me of an annoyed schoolmaster forced to repeat himself.

Billy Bailey, or more formally, William Somerset Bailey III, would go down in history as Canada’s most famous and certainly most successful drug trafficker. Billy Bud, as he came to be known, parlayed a small-time pot-growing operation into an international pot-smuggling cartel that supplied major portions of the weed consumed on the West Coast of the United States. Thousands of tons of B.C. bud flowed over the US border and, much to their collective chagrin, nobody on either side of the border seemed to be able to do much about it.

Billy was beyond slick. He understood how to keep his business at a distance. Over the years Canadian and American authorities had arrested an army of mules and seized tons and tons of pot, even taken down some of the movers and shakers within the organization, but had never gotten close enough to Billy to make a collar.

Worse yet, the scope and audacity of Billy’s operation had turned him into a national folk hero. Hargress reckoned it was the tunnel that pushed Billy’s image over the top. The minute he brought it up, I recalled the headline: Border Breached. Seems Billy and his minions had excavated a tunnel beneath the international border. A tunnel big enough to drive pickup trucks through. Had a nasty winter storm back in 1998 not exposed the south end of the tunnel to the U.S. Border Patrol, it would undoubtedly still be in operation today. Not one, but two
National Geographic
specials had documented Billy’s colorful and meteoric rise to prominence.

As if to rub salt into the wound, Billy Bailey then morphed into the face of a national movement advocating the legalization of marijuana, appearing in an assortment of omnipresent television ads, eventually making himself the most recognized face in British Colombia. Another, angrier, rumble of discontent filled the room.

And then, after nearly twenty years of interagency detective work, just at the point where the authorities thought they might make a case against Billy for conspiracy, he did the unthinkable. He went straight. Bought a couple of small businesses and turned them into gold mines. Seemed his knack for commerce proved every bit as successful in the legal sector as it had in the drug business, so he bought a couple more, and then a couple more until he was making more money in his legal endeavors than he was from trafficking drugs, at which point he parceled out the drugsmuggling operation to his underlings, and became a legitimate businessman of national repute.

“Cheeky bastard’s running for Provincial Parliament,” somebody added.

“Cheeky bastard’s going to win,” another voice answered.

Hargress laced his fingers behind his back and looked directly at Marty and me.

“The man has been making a monkey of us for twenty-five years, so I’m certain you gentlemen can imagine why any potential opportunity to do battle with Billy Bailey has our undivided attention.”

Marty cleared his throat and picked up the conversational thread. He explained that Rebecca Duval was a vital and much-respected force in the Seattle law enforcement
community, explained why the SPD had not gotten involved until now and then deferred to me.

I’d jotted down a few notes, so I was reasonably well prepared. Thirty seconds into my little recitation, however— the first time the words “Jordan Koontz” left my lips—the room came unglued.

“That’s gotta be Junior,” Hargress said.

Crosstalk buzzed like an angry hornet.

“Excuse me?”

“Jordan Koontz and Lui Ng are Junior’s little playmates,” he said.

“Guess we’re a bit behind the curve here,” Marty admitted sheepishly.

Hargress nodded toward the Vancouver PD contingent sitting on my left. “Roddy,” he said. “A little background perhaps.”

Roddy levered himself to his feet. Roddy was 180 pounds of sinew stretched over a six-foot frame. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find out that he ran marathons in his spare time. He swept his close-set eyes over the assembled masses and explained that Junior Bailey was Billy Bud’s only child. Seems Junior had grown up as heir apparent to the drugsmuggling operation and had more or less geared his career expectations to a life of crime. As luck would have it, however, just about the time Junior reached the age of majority, his father had the unmitigated gall to go straight, dashing the poor boy’s criminal hopes on the rocks of respectability.

Not to be denied what he considered to be his birthright, Junior Bailey used his multimillion-dollar trust fund to finance his own life of crime, mostly pimping and loan-sharking operations.

Unlike his famous father, however, Junior showed precious little criminal acumen. Only his father’s influence and a crack legal team hired expressly for that purpose had thus far managed to keep him out of jail.

“Junior the Genius,” someone muttered.

Hargress pinned us with his gaze. “I assure you gentlemen the designation is purely ironic. Junior Bailey is as dumb as the proverbial bag of rocks.”

“Thinks he’s a gangster,” Roddy added disgustedly. “Keeps Billy Bud busy trying to keep him under wraps and out of the lockup.”

“I looked Koontz up on the Internet,” I said. “What about this Ng guy?”

“Lui Ng,” Hargress explained. He spelled it. “Former leader of the Golden Dragons street gang. Half Laotian, half Chinese. Mr. Ng likes to shoot people.”

“He’s Koontz’s lover,” Roddy threw in.

“No kidding?”

“And not the way you imagine, either,” he said with a bob of his eyebrows. “Ng’s the top. Koontz is the bottom.”

My mind offhandedly rejected any image of those two coupling in any manner whatsoever, once again confirming survival as the first instinct of human nature.

“Ng’s a person of interest in at least five murders,” Hargress added. “Junior uses them as his personal body-guards, his entourage, as it were.”

“So…not to belabor the obvious, but what you’re telling me is that whatever is going on in Seattle is connected to Junior Bailey, rather than his father. Is that right?”

“Almost surely,” Hargress said. “Billy doesn’t break the law anymore. He’s too worried about his image and his political future.”

I mentioned the black Hummer.

“ST Emtman’s company trademark,” Hargress said.

“Billy’s got fifty of them,” someone said disgustedly.

“Fifty-three,” one of his colleagues amended.

I segued to what I knew about the boat repo where the owner had pulled a gun on Brett Ward and the Canadian cops, hoping that somebody sitting there at the conference table could throw a little light on the subject, as, somehow or another, that was the moment when things had begun to unravel for Brett Ward and I needed to know the hows and whys of it.

I wasn’t disappointed. Seemed that no matter which side of the border you were on, taking shots at police officers was considered extremely poor form.

“On the island,” somebody said.

“Dashwood,” one of the cops amended. “Out at CrossCurrent Marina.”

“Local guy named Trevor Collins. Took a nick out of one of our constables,” the provincial cop added.

Hargress nodded. “We thought the most interesting aspect of the matter was how quickly Mr. Collins was free on bond. Hard to imagine why someone would put up one hundred thousand dollars to get a lowlife like Mr. Collins back on the street.” Seemed like there was a punch line waiting somewhere in the weeds, so I kept my mouth closed and waited for it to arrive.

“We can’t be sure…,” Roddy began cautiously. “…privacy laws being what they are regarding bonding agencies,
but we managed to trace the bond to a law firm. Teglow and Murphy from down in Surrey.”

Another murmur of interest swept over the conference table. Seemed the name was familiar to them. Hargress once again pinned Marty and me with his gaze.

“Teglow and Murphy regularly represent Junior Bailey’s legal interests.”

“How’s this Collins guy connected to Junior?” Marty asked.

“They went to high school together. Quite chummy we’re told.”

“You know,” said the other Provincial Police officer, “I’m thinking that Billy Bud might be interested in hearing what Mr. Waterman has to say.”

“He does dote on that boy,” Roddy noted with an ironic twist of the lips.

For our benefit, he explained. “Junior thinks he’s defying his father by being in business for himself. In reality, Billy runs his show for him. Behind the scenes, of course, but they’re his old suppliers and cronies. He just lets Junior think he’s in business for himself.”

I could see where they were going with this. They were thinking they might be able to get to Billy Bailey through his son, and they were hoping I might serve as a handy catalyst to do so. They were quite rightly assuming that leverage on Junior was the next best thing to leverage on Billy Bud himself, especially if they had the likes of Marty and me to run interference for them. Anything went wrong and they could just say, “Oh, you know how crude those Americans are.”

Roddy leaned over the table and looked me in the eye.

“Would you like to talk to him?” he asked.

“Is that possible?” I asked.

“Billy loves to talk. Mostly about himself. I’m sure he’d be glad to bandy a few words with you.”

I thought about it. The sense of urgency that was churning my insides wanted to go back to Seattle. To…to…that was the problem, to what I didn’t know; I didn’t have a plan anymore. Maybe find the stripper and see if there was anything there. Maybe start all over again. Other than that, I was pretty much at a dead end.

“We’ve gone to Rome,” I said with some reluctance. “Guess we might as well see the pope.”

Roddy turned out to be his last name. Detective Sergeant Tony Roddy said it would probably take an hour or so to put together the meeting with Billy Bailey. He explained that Billy always insisted on having his attorney present and to just hang in there, they’d make the arrangements as quickly as possible.

Faced with a delay, we asked if he would kindly point us toward a restaurant where we could catch a bite. He recommended the greasy spoon across the street from Provincial Police headquarters. What I had presumed to be a comment on its menu, in fact, turned out to be its given name, the Greasy Spoon. Needless to say, the bill of fare more than lived up to the signage.