Chapter Twenty-eight

Ed Wilkes and I boarded the Concorde in Paris just after seven PM, and got off at Kennedy two hours earlier, local time. We had outrun the sun. My luggage consisted of a toothbrush stuffed in my shirt pocket and a paperback novel. My other jeans and shirt had been so stained with Davis’ blood that I had dumped them, and I would hardly need a pack full of camping gear in New York City.

We checked into a medium priced hotel. I left Ed making phone calls and went out to buy some fresh clothing and a suitcase. Then I stayed out, sightseeing. I had been to Washington, to Europe twice, through much of Canada, and from San Francisco to Marseille via the Panama Canal and the Caribbean. For a small town Wisconsin boy, I had gotten around. But I had never been to New York City.

*       *       *

Ed Wilkes’ phone calls had given us some new information. He had claimed that his wife had left a suitcase aboard one of the cruise ships. When they had not been able to locate the nonexistent bag, he suggested that they check with customs to see if they were keeping it. Customs officers, he was informed, were present whenever a ship landed, and any abandoned luggage was seen by them before being stored by the cruise line.

“I timed him,” Ed explained. “From the time he put me on hold until he told me that the bag was not there it took six and a half minutes. He could possibly have called somewhere or just checked a list, but more likely he looked in a nearby room.”

We parked our rented car between two dumpsters across the street from the pier.  Most of the pier was taken up by a warehouse.  On the right was a driveway, wide enough for a pickup or front end loader.  There were wide yellow strips painted on the macadam to guide passengers to the embarkation lounge.  Half way down the building was a sign with a stylized gull and the words Gull Lines, in English and Norwegian.

Wilkes turned to me and asked again, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Not particularly, but I will.”

“If the luggage is clean, it will cause no problems, but if it isn’t, it would be better if no one saw my face. I might run into some DEA officer who knows me.”

I nodded. 

“If they stall you, they are probably calling for help. If that happens, get out fast. If we get separated, you have the number to call.”

I nodded again. I didn’t like this. Facing an armed assailant on a darkened Venetian bridge was one thing. Getting the entire bureaucratic might of Washington on my back – now, that was scary.

Wilkes slumped down behind the wheel where he could watch the entrance from behind a newspaper. I went down the yellow macadam road to the Gull Line offices. Beyond the glass doors, all was modern and cool, with a hundred steel and plastic chairs linked together and bolted to the floor, a TV, now blank, placed high in a corner and a glass partitioned ticket counter. Not unlike an airport or modern bus terminal.

A uniformed girl sent me a pert smile from behind the counter, and asked if she could help.

“I’m here to pick up some unclaimed luggage. It belongs to Ramona Cabral. She came back from Bermuda on the fourteenth of April.”

“Wow, that’s a long time for luggage to go unclaimed. What happened?”

“A honeymoon.”

“Lucky girl. Still, three months?”

“Actually a honeymoon and a divorce.” more tomorrow

Here is the crux of the problem. When drugs – and it doesn’t matter if you are talking about cocaine, pot, or alcohol – become scarce and expensive, they are profitable to sell. Every junkie who feels the pinch when he buys, knows that he could make money if he were selling. It is a grass roots movement. Every junkie wants to sell, but that only works in an expanding market. Any student from Economics 101 knows that. Like a pyramid scheme or a chain letter, the result is middle management types recruiting new customers in the xerox room, mechanics selling baggies behind the garage, and sixth grade junkies selling to third grade wannabes.

More enforcement means higher prices. Higher prices mean more pressure on users. That pressure sends the users-turned-sellers looking for new customers.

More enforcement means more drug users. QED.

When his leave was over, Cabral resigned from the FBI and ran for the state senate. And lost. But he learned from the experience and four years later he won the seat he still occupies. His platform was moderate, but his hidden agenda was legalization. He introduced no drug legislation during his first term, but soon after his first reelection, he authored a bill to legalize marijuana in California. It failed, and he spent the rest of that term mending fences and explaining his position to anyone who would listen. He almost lost the next election. A month after, he introduced a second legalization bill.

Two decades later, his yearly legalization bills were a constant in California, like the swallows returning to Capistrano. They always failed, but every year a few more of his fellow Senators voted with him.

*       *       *

“Senator,” I said, “I follow your arguments. It doesn’t matter if I agree with them. What I don’t see is how you jumped from that to suspecting drugs in Raven’s luggage.”

“Look at it as a problem in economics, Ian. If enforcement increases drug use, it also increases drug profits. Up to a point. No enforcement means low prices. Perfect enforcement, if that were possible, would mean no sales. Somewhere in between is the optimum level of enforcement to maximize drug profits.”

“OK.”

“I set out to calculate that optimum level, and I found that we are right at that level now in California.  It is too close a match to be a coincidence.”

I shook my head at the implications. Ed said, “Gunn, the big dealers are calling the shots. And nothing scares them so much as the fear of legalization.”

I thought he was paranoid.

I was only half right. more tomorrow

“A double barreled attack. Destroy any chance that Raven might have information, and discredit me at the same time, through her.”

“That’s why the luggage came on through. It’s probably loaded with drugs.”

“And it would look like Raven was smuggling.”

“And like I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite.”

*       *       *

When I asked the luggage question, I didn’t have a theory. I was just fishing for useful knowledge. The Senator’s reaction took me by surprise, and made no sense until I heard the story behind it.

Senator Daniel Cabral has a scar, low on his left side, just above his belt, the size of a dime, and a matching scar, slightly higher, that covers three square inches of his back just above his belt where partially successful plastic surgery left a white and lumpy mass. Entry wound and exit wound for a 38 caliber bullet. The other five bullets went through his partner.

He didn’t show me the scar, of course, but it was part of the story he and Ed Wilkes told me that night in Paris.

Dan Cabral was born in California of Mexican-American parents. His ancestors had been citizens for ten generations. He didn’t speak Spanish until he was ten years old and spent a summer with an uncle in Sinaloa. His parents were wealthy. His grandfather had bought farmland which had been in the path of growth. His father had sold it for development, reinvested, and repeated the process several more times. By the time Cabral was born, there were millions in the bank and in real estate.

Daniel had gone to college and, over his parents objections, had joined the FBI. He did well. The FBI needed Chicano agents to deal with Cuban refugee problems around Miami. Later, when Cabral became too well known there, they sent him to deal with drug smuggling across the Texas border. He spent two years, then transferred to Calexico to continue the same work.

Cabral had been with the FBI seven years when an arrest went bad on an empty road in the middle of the Mohave Desert. As he was falling, hit in the side, he shot the two smugglers who had killed his partner. One died there in the dirt beside his stalled truck. The other ran a hundred yards into the sage brush and bled to death. So did Cabral, nearly, before help came.

They gave him a commendation and four months leave to recuperate. He spent it thinking about all the things he had seen, and came to the conclusion that drug enforcement was causing the drug problem. 

I didn’t entirely buy his argument, but it went this way.

A drug user needs his drugs. If they are available at a reasonable price, he uses them. Sometimes he destroys himself, and sometimes he doesn’t. Lots of prominent citizens have gone through a successful lifetime on drugs without being found out. But if the drugs become too expensive, problems arise. To support his habit, the user might spend money that should have gone to his family, or rip off car stereos, or hold up a convenience store.

Or he might become a supplier. more tomorrow

“Don’t mind me,” I said. “I find all this fascinating; even the seventy-five percent I don’t understand. But I do have one question. Where does Raven’s safety figure in all this double dealing?”

Daniel Cabral had a temper, no matter how much he had trained his face not to reveal it, and that made him mad. I didn’t care. I didn’t give a damn about the Senator’s political agenda. I just wanted Raven to be safe.

“My daughter’s safety comes before anything else,” Cabral said evenly. “However, at the moment there is nothing I can do for her. She will call home and find out everything that has happened, or one of your street musicians will find her and notify Hayden. Until that happens, there is nothing I can do for my daughter. All I can do is try to keep my career from going down the toilet because of her stupidity.”

“And if it came to choosing between your daughter’s safety and your career?”

“The safety of my family comes before anything else!”

No qualifications. No equivocation. I liked that. I also realized that Raven’s lifestyle had made him consider the possibility long ago.

I spread my hands in friendly surrender.

“Let’s get back to your story.” Wilkes said.

“Not yet,” I said. “There are some loose ends dangling. Senator, were you ever notified that Raven was missing? And what became of Raven’s luggage on the cruise ship?”

“I was not notified. When she didn’t show up at the airport as scheduled, I checked back and there was nothing the cruise line could tell me. I assumed that she had gone off somewhere without telling me. She does that. It is her way of declaring her independence.”

There was a great deal of impatience in Cabral’s voice, the legacy of years of dealing with his wayward daughter.

“And the luggage?”

“It was being held for her. She had not claimed it. I assumed she would, and gave it no more thought.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why? How could it make any difference?”

“Why depends on a basic assumption – was Davis smart or stupid?”

“I vote for stupid,” Wilkes interjected.

“Maybe. But I was impressed by the way he handled the situation in Venice.”

“He died.”

“Luck. There was some skill on my part, but mostly it was luck. Let the same situation develop twenty times, and nineteen out of twenty I would be the one to die.” It was something I had been thinking about a lot.

“Look at what happened on the ship. If I hadn’t been there, how would it all have ended?”

Wilkes admitted, “He would have succeeded completely.”

“And would have escaped without a trace.”

“Yes.”

“So why leave the luggage aboard? Raven and I talked about this on the way to Europe, and we concluded that he would drop it overboard. That way, no one would suspect that Raven never made it back to New York. No one ever checks to see who gets off of a ship or plane. They just take names when you get on. They would look for clues to her disappearance everywhere else but on the cruise ship.”

“An oversight?”

“Possibly. Or perhaps he had a reason for the luggage to make it back to the states. But I have no idea what reason that could be.”

Cabral turned pale. He and Wilkes exchanged glances. Wilkes said, “Of course!” more tomorrow

Chapter Twenty-seven

When I got back to the suite, Cabral had gone out. Wilkes had been waiting for my return, in case Joe Dias called early. After he left, I paced the room for a while, dispirited and irritable, then tried to catch up on some sleep. Uselessly. I alternated tracing cracks in the ceiling and staring at the phone.

I did have a life. Or at least, I used to have one. I had places to go and things to do. But I knew that I would make no move to leave. It wasn’t just Raven, either; there were too many unexplored possibilities in this new situation.

Wilkes and the Senator came in just as the phone rang. It was Joe. After I hung up, the Senator asked, “Well?”

“A week ago, someone torched Harvey Jacks’ office. Joe’s investigator talked to his wife. She didn’t know much, but she said Jacks had bragged about working for a big-wig in Sacramento. And Jacks had said she, not he, when referring to the big-wig. But he never named her. Seems he was very closed mouthed.”

“What was left of the office?”

“Not much. Joe’s willing to investigate further, but he did this much as a favor to me. I won’t ask him to do more without paying him. He has a living to make.”

“Call back and hire him in my name.”

I did, then covered the receiver and asked, “Anything else?”

Cabral looked at Wilkes, who shook his head. After I had hung up, Wilkes observed, “If Jacks was into blackmail, he would have had more than one copy of his evidence, and it wouldn’t have been in a file cabinet in his office.”

“Likely.”

“Let’s go back to the beginning,” the Senator said. “We’ll hear your story again, Ian, and look for anything we might have missed so far. I am not clear on timing and motivation, and I don’t understand how Davis and Alan found you so quickly in Marseille.”

I told the story again, sexually censored. I was talking to Raven’s father, after all. Wilkes sat at the table with a pad, taking notes. Cabral said nothing until I reached the fight on the Wahini in Marseille. Then he interrupted, “How much time was there between when Ramona called California and when the thugs jumped you?”

“Mid-morning of one day until the following evening. Maybe thirty hours.”

“Ed, make a note to check every airline with departing flights for Europe, particularly Paris, starting at the time of Ramona’s call and carrying forward twenty hours. Look for James Davis and anyone with a last name of Allen or a first name of Alan, under any variation of spelling. I’m particularly interested in how they paid for their trips.”

“Senator, you are asking a lot. The Bureau isn’t going to do that just as a favor. If you want to keep using them, you are going to have to make an official report on what happened to your daughter.”

Cabral said, “Shit.” It was the first coarse thing that had cracked his urbanity. Either he was beginning to accept my presence, or this was cutting close. Maybe both.

It helped bring some things into focus. Raven’s loose living would be an embarrassment to the Senator. What had happened to her since Bermuda would be a tabloid reporter’s dream come true. I could see the headlines in the Enquirer.

“Dammit, Ed, we need that information.”

Wilkes did not answer.

“You’re right, of course. It is asking too much. But we need to know. How else can we find out?”

“I could go ask,” Wilkes said.

“And flash your badge. That would be the end of you with the Bureau.”

Wilkes shrugged.

“No, Ed, I won’t let you. Besides, I need for you to stay inside.”

“I can find out without showing a badge or admitting my name. There are ways to finesse these things, but I would need to be on the spot.” Then he glanced sideways at me and raised a questioning eyebrow.

“Don’t mind me,” I said. “I find all this fascinating.” more tomorrow