Deadly Waters (36 page)

XCVII

01/02/11 11:08 PST

During his long sleep the small seed Bob had planted in the detective’s micro recorder had sprouted into another sensational episode that had quickly reached full blossom in both the national and local media. The police had recovered the bus station’s security camera, and its badly singed tape showed a hulking pale man investigators quickly identified as Jimmy “Quiet Hands” Rogers, alias “Carnie,” and an unknown man opening a suitcase milliseconds before the explosion that had killed eleven people, including the two men on the film.

Further investigation of the ruined station showed that the corpses of the two men closest to the suitcase had been blown to tiny pieces, indicating the epicenter of the blast had been in their immediate vicinity, making the suitcase the explosion’s likely point of origin. This information likewise was leaked to the news people as soon as it was discovered, and within hours of the surveillance tape being broadcast, two men appeared at a Mission District police station and said the second man with Rogers was one Michael Laskowski, or “the Crow,” as he was known in criminal circles.

Other members of the general public approached newsmen to proclaim that Rogers and Laskowski or someone who resembled them were on the Bay Bridge on New Year’s Eve when John Taylor died.

“Thus the two biggest stories in the nation are tied one to the other by two mysterious men found dead in a bus station,” was how Maria Contral, a pretty local news anchor, put it on the New Year’ Day six o’clock broadcast. “The two career criminals, perhaps responsible for their own deaths and those of eleven others in a downtown bus depot, also may have murdered one of the two businessmen the government is investigating for possible involvement in the 2009 terrorist dam attacks,” she breathlessly told her vast and growing audience.

By the morning of the Second the police had found Rogers and Laskowski’s black Camero parked near the destroyed station. At least one witness from the Bay Bridge had verified the license plate as that of the car that had been parked behind John Taylor’s Buick. The rumors went into overdrive later that morning when an unknown source told
The
Chronicle
that the late Rogers had once done some work for Erin Mondragon’s security company.

By eleven o’clock the flock of media folk gathered about the base of the Mondragon Building awaiting the opportunity to get a picture of the notorious Erin had more than doubled. Mondragon no longer went for coffee at the shop down the street; he stayed in the upper stories of his skyscraper and provided no photo-ops or answers to anyone.

“This unfortunate accident--or possible suicide--that has taken John from us will change nothing,” he told the team of attorneys in his conference room on the twenty-first floor. “There is still no physical evidence tying me to any crime. The federal prosecutors have the testimony of some convicted terrorists. That’s everything they have in their quiver. Then there is this phantom; this Mathers person. It seems, I am told, the feds don’t know who or where he is.”

“Please, Mr. Mondragon,” protested one of his highly paid lawyers, “you needn’t worry yourself with mapping the legal strategy. We will handle that. You only have to tell the truth, as you know it.”

“I see us as all being on one team,” said Mondragon, fully aware of the attorney’s meaning and unruffled by the man’s insubordination. “We will fight this battle together.”

Mondragon went to the window and peeked through the blinds at the never absent crowds on the grounds outside his building. The eleven lawyers and five secretaries present waited in silence until he had finished contemplating the scene.

“John Taylor was a troubled man,” he said. “He stopped on that bridge. God knows why. Jack tended to frighten in heavy traffic. The authorities were hounding him. He felt they were closing in. That’s why he jumped.”

“Then you think it was a suicide?” asked one of the braver members of the legal team. “Have you ever known John Taylor to be suicidal?”

“He knew people were following him,” said Mondragon, rapping his finger on the window pane. “He panicked. What other explanation could there be?”

Several of the attorneys glanced at each other.

“Tell us,” said the brave attorney who had asked if Taylor were ever suicidal, “did you know this Rogers person? What did they call him? Carnie? We need to know. For the sake of preparation, you see. Anything you have to tell us is privileged, of course.”

“Whatever are you driving at, J.C.?” asked Mondragon, deigning to look directly at the man. “You don’t think I had anything to do with John’s death, do you?”

J.C.’s backside sank an inch deeper in the cushion of his chair. The other lawyers looked to the piles of documents they had before them and pretended Mondragon’s gaze did not frighten them too.

“We have to ask...” said J.C., and glanced about for support.

“You have to doubt me?” asked Erin, and turned his eyes back to Market Street, twenty-one stories below him.

“We don’t doubt your innocence,” said J.C.

“Then you need not ask me any more questions to which you already know the answers,” said Mondragon, and clapped his hands together, signaling that the matter was closed, never to reopened. “Now, who have the feds tapped to take us on? I need backgrounds, trial records, political connections: everything necessary to fight the whole battle.”

“They’re a bunch of career government prosecutors, people too dumb to get into private practice and make real money,” stated one attorney, and the others, including the upbraided J.C., smiled in agreement.

Mondragon was not pleased, for he was not thinking of the trial, which still lay many weeks in the future--if it ever happened--but of the phantom, this Bob Mathers, who Erin knew had contributed to spreading the stories about Taylor and the two murderers. He wished he could find Mathers today, wished to eliminate this unseen opponent more than anything else. He also knew not to undertake a large scale search for Mathers until the question of his trial was past and the media’s attention had shifted elsewhere.

Already the television networks were filing suits to broadcast Mondragon’s court case, and his high profile, highly photophilic attorneys and the politically ambitious prosecutors could be trusted to preen and perform before the cameras as much as the judge allowed. Mondragon knew that the lawyers’ actions would highlight his every maneuver, making it impossible for him to move against the former sheriff’s deputy for months to come.

Spring would turn to summer and the cool rains of summer to the colder rains of fall before Erin was a truly private citizen again. Before that time came he must play defense, do nothing to give Mathers another opportunity, let the attorneys drone on and on until the public grew tired of wondering about Mondragon’s guilt.

“I should be the one to speak first,” one of the lawyers in the conference room said while Mondragon was lost in thought. “I’ve been in front of the Supreme court seven times.”

“I’ve got the most experience in front of a camera,” said another.

“The camera doesn’t lie, but it can be fooled,” countered a third.

Another mental memo to self, thought Mondragon, continuing to watch the restless crowd below him: When this over, fire every last one of these buffoons.

XCVIII

01/04/11 10:10 PST

Bob Mathers was learning that Mondragon left little for others to find in the ashes of his latest crime. Bob tried querying old associates of the late Laskowski and Rogers and discovered that the FBI had contacted the same people within hours of the bus station bombing.

“You with the cops?” was the first question every tattooed barmaid and junkie asked him when he tried to question them. “I already talked to the feds. I don’t know nothing.”

“I’m a private investigator,” Bob tried telling them, a bit of information that impressed none of the unwashed denizens of the Bay area’s worst bars and flop houses.

The first woman he told he was not a cop tried to kick him in the groin. A bartender he questioned pulled a shotgun on Bob and told him to start running. Most of the low lifes he spoke to simply said they had never heard of anyone named Laskowski or Rogers. On the Internet Bob located the address of Carnie Rogers’ half-sister in Oakland. Upon arriving at her door the woman denied she and the late Carnie were related and that if Bob came to her ramshackle house again he better be wearing a badge and have a warrant in his hand. Then in Berkeley, in one of the dirtiest saloons Bob had entered in his lifetime, a place where the floor was slippery from day-old vomit, a prostitute carrying a bat tattoo on her forehead told him he was again wasting his time asking her questions.

“Unless you’re one of them what pays,” she said to Bob.

“What?” asked Mathers.

“On TV,” she said, pausing to take another puff of her cigarette, “they say some of you people pay big money for insider stuff you can put in your papers.”

It occurred to Bob that because he was not a cop the woman presumed he was from

one of the tabloids that paid money to its sources. Since he had once worked in co-ordination with Henry Peppers of
The
Sensation
, Bob decided he would not be misleading her too far if he said he was.

“My people in New York,” he said, “will pay five figures for anything with legs.”

“Not enough,” she said and swiveled about on her bar stool so that her back was to Bob. “What is five figures?” and did some calculating on her fingers. “Maybe only $10,000. Not enough to risk your life for.”

“Up to six figures,” said Bob, though he did not know what information she had.

“You got a deal, Bubba,” she said and raised a drink to him, “provided you get the cash in my hand.”

Minutes later Mathers was on the phone to Henry Peppers in New York. The veteran newspaper warrior was not enthusiastic about paying money to anybody, particularly a barfly in Berkeley.

“Buddy,” Peppers told him, “we don’t pay six figures to nobody unless they knew where Bishop Pike is and have pictures of LBJ on the grassy knoll, with the smoking rifle in his hand.”

“How about $50,000?” asked Bob.

“Am I Mother Teresa?” said Henry. “You think I’m running a charity here? This little girl will have to give us a red meat exclusive. Even then, fifty is still too much.”

“Twenty-five?” said Bob.

“I’ll wire you five thousand,” decided Peppers. “Tell her she’ll get another twenty-five if we can verify her story with two other sources.”

“You people at
The
Sensation
vet your stories that much?” asked Bob.

“How would she know one way or the other?” said Peppers. “We got a couple platoons of shyster lawyers here at the paper; they’ll each say a contract isn’t a contract unless there’s mutual benefit. Believe me, sweetheart, we’ve seen the inside of a courtroom before on this same issue. Is she good to go?”

“You’re sure this is legal?”

“Bubba, if we worried about legal and not legal,” said Henry, “we wouldn’t get nothing done.”

Bob picked up the money at a Western Union and returned to the barmaid with the promise of another $95,000 if her story panned out. From the way she snatched the money out of his hand Mathers surmised that she had never seen that much money before.

“Sure, Carnie was in here all the time,” she cheerfully told Bob. “That other guy, the fat little grease ball Laskowski; that wasn’t really his handle. People, the ones what knowed him, called him Sparky Southern.”

“Sparky?” said Bob.

“Cause he got high on gasoline,” explained the barmaid. “They joked had anybody lit a spark around him he’d explode. I didn’t know much more about him. Carnie said Sparky did time for some creepy sex offender stuff, and things had been really rough for him in prison.”

“He was a registered sex offender?”

“I expect no friend of Carnie would have been registered for anything,” laughed the barmaid. “He was from some little town up north. Algonquin, Acquarias, something like that.”

“Alturas,” suggested Bob.

“That’s it!” she said and nearly burned Bob with her cigarette when she excitedly raised her hand.

“He and this Carnie were together a lot?”

“Not really,” she said. “I got a picture of him, of Carnie, I mean,” she said and took an ancient wrinkled Polaroid from her purse; it showed a cluster of dirty men at a Christmas party, one of them the late Carnie, dressed from the soles of his shoes to his collar in black leather. “He’s the one looking like a stick of butter in clothes. That’s a year old.”

“He had money?”

“At times. Carnie’s money came and went,” said the barmaid. “Feast or famine, like they say.”

“Did he ever say for whom he worked?”

“That’s a good one. Carnie didn’t exactly take home a paycheck, honey. What he did was dirty stuff. You know, he hurt people, basically.”

“Did the name Erin Mondragon ever come up?”

“Only on the evening news,” she said. “I know, I tried to connect the dots myself. Carnie was very close-mouthed about everything he did.”

“I can take this with me?” asked Bob of the picture.

“For a hundred grand, you can take me home,” said the barmaid.

Bob settled for just the picture.