Finnegan's Week (3 page)

“This isn't getting us anywhere, Jules,” his father said, “so I might as well tell you that I've had my will rewritten. When I die you're getting an allowance of two thousand dollars a month for five years. And that's it.”

“
And
the house?”

“No house, no property of any kind, no insurance. No more than two thousand a month for five years. You won't starve, but you'll have to get off your butt and make something of yourself.”

“And where does the balance of your estate go?”

“To various charities.”

Jules put the glass on his father's desk, then turned and headed for the door of the study. But he paused and said, “Thanks, Dad. Thanks for giving me everything, and then taking it away. You've been swell. And please don't tell me it's for my own good.”

“I wouldn't tell you that, Jules,” Harold Temple said. “Not anymore.”

“Maybe I should just move out now,” Jules said, and was shocked when his father replied, “That might be a good idea. Get out on your own and start scratching like everyone else has to do.”

That evening Harold Temple wrote his son a check for $5,000. He called it “seed money.” And that was that.

Jules packed his things and left the next morning, moving in with Margie, a divorced cocktail waitress he'd been dating. She said he could stay until he got on his feet. It was while living with her, after he'd grown desperate, that Jules Temple again became an entrepreneur.

The idea came to him when he was baby-sitting for Margie, who had the late shift at a nightclub in downtown San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter. He'd spent night after miserable night in front of the TV, drinking the cheap Scotch that Margie bought at discount outlets. Margie's seven-year-old daughter, Cynthia, had been begging him to play dolls with her when it happened: the idea!

He'd heard of the pedophile's motto: “Eight is too late.” Cynthia was only seven, but she looked even younger. She was very pretty, but not a terribly bright child, not nearly as bright as Jules's own daughter had been at that age. Cynthia was a lot like her mother, he thought.

The next day Jules was in several adult magazine and book shops in downtown San Diego looking for chickenhawk and pedophile publications. When he got back to the apartment, he studied many photos of naked children in provocative poses. Then he homed in on the ads in those publications to learn how they were set up.

Later that evening when Margie was at work, Jules suggested to Cynthia that they play “movie star.”

“You have to promise me that you won't tell Mommy,” he said. “Cross your heart. It's
our
secret.”

“Okay,” the child said, and obeyed her director's instruction to the letter.

Jules did her makeup as best he could, using Margie's cosmetics. He believed that scant clothing would be more titillating than nudity, so he posed her in panties and ballet slippers, trying to imitate the young models. Essentially, he wanted a seven-year-old Madonna.

Jules knew that he didn't dare have more than one photo session because Cynthia might accidentally spill the beans. By the time that Cynthia
had
informed her mother of Jules's “movie star” game, Margie had already kicked him out for making long-distance calls,
lots
of long-distance calls all over the country that he said were “just business.” Margie never understood that his business intimately concerned her daughter.

Jules had bought ad space in three pedophile publications. His ad included a photo of the child and listed a post office box in downtown San Diego. Within two weeks, more than sixty pedophiles had responded in letters directed to “Samantha's Uncle.”

Almost all the pedophiles used post office boxes of their own, or general delivery, and within days each would receive glossy photos of the little girl. Along with the photos was a typed letter:

Dear Sir
,

My name is Samantha. I am six years old and have been taught many things that will please you. If you would like to meet me and learn what I can do, please call my Uncle Desmond any time between 10:00
A.M.
and 2:00
P.M.
PST
.

Love
,

Samantha

Jules Temple went to the trouble of switching his answering service every two months during a year in which letters were exchanged with pedophiles as far away as Alaska. He ultimately received more than two hundred phone calls, and decided that nearly half of them were worth tape-recording surreptitiously.

During the pedophile's recorded conversations with “Uncle Desmond,” Jules would usually manage to solicit a callback number, and surprisingly, the caller often gave his true name and address when asking for more photos, this after long and lascivious conversations with Uncle Desmond about Samantha.

Shortly thereafter, selected “Friends of Samantha” would receive a small parcel from Uncle Desmond which they would excitedly open, only to find an audiotape rather than more photos. On the audiotape would be the caller's own voice recorded during his lewd conversation with Uncle Desmond wherein he'd negotiated terms for the use of Samantha. The conversations included specific questions and answers about all the things Uncle Desmond had taught the little girl. There wasn't a caller who wasn't stunned to hear how explicit his own excited phone call had been.

At the end of the tape would be a message from Uncle Desmond that varied slightly, depending upon how much Jules had been able to learn during his conversation and correspondence with the pedophile, and how much Jules sensed the pedophile was worth. The message was:

Hi
(using the caller's name).
I have several more copies of this tape which I am considering sending to your local police department, as well as to the FBI and to your local newspaper. I might even include a copy to your closest relative. I think you know who I mean, don't you? I shudder to think what your family and friends will say when they hear your own voice telling me what you want Samantha to do to you and how much you are willing to pay for it
.

You are very lucky that I happen to need money at the moment. If you will immediately send cash in the amount of
(this would vary),
I will send you the duplicate audiotapes of your phone conversation telling Uncle Desmond what you intend to do to this helpless little six-year-old. I'd better hear from you by next week
.

Jules Temple would often go so far as to hire a street person to pick up envelopes from his post office box and carry them to his car parked a safe distance away. But finally, Jules decided that he needn't have gone to such lengths. He was always overestimating people, and in this case he'd overestimated the authorities. About half a dozen pedophiles summoned up the nerve to go to the police and admit to being extortion victims, but the police and postal authorities had never got to a post office box that hadn't already been closed.

In that one year, Jules made $123,000 (tax free, of course) before the pedophile publications began printing warnings about Uncle Desmond. Cynthia's photos ended up in the files of several law enforcement agencies, but never were traced back to her or to her mother.

During that same year Jules Temple's father died after his second stroke, having kept his word to leave his son a stipend only. Jules did not visit his comatose father in the hospital, claiming he was too busy expanding his capital base. Having acted upon a hot tip from a country club acquaintance, Jules had invested the money in a mismanaged waste hauling company, a business field that was opening up with unlimited possibilities for someone like himself. Jules called his company Green Earth Hauling and Disposal.

One of Jules's first moves as a waste hauler was to form a corporation with a bogus president, in this case a former real estate agent of Mexican descent who'd worked for Jules in land development. Raul Medina drew a salary of $1,500 a month for doing nothing more than signing documents from time to time. Raul Medina never set foot in Green Earth Hauling and Disposal, spending most of his time at home nursing a chronic back problem.

Jules owned forty-nine percent of the stock in the Green Earth corporation and the other fifty-one percent was “owned” by Raul Medina. All of the trucks, equipment, and material assets were transferred to the company by Jules, who took back a note from Raul Medina for twice the assets' value. Jules subleased the property to the company for twice what he paid to his landlord, and siphoned off all profits except for the $1,500 a month that Raul Medina received.

Because of Raul Medina's Hispanic surname, Jules had been able to secure government contracts that non-minority haulers could not get. And Jules was often contracted to haul hazardous material from military bases, some of which came from military facilities halfway around the world.

The generator of hazardous waste would list in the Environmental Protection Agency's “cradle to grave” numbered documents what the contents of the waste consisted of. The waste could then theoretically be easily traced from the generator of the waste, through the transporter, and finally to the disposal facility. Ultimately, the disposal facility was supposed to inform the EPA when the waste was incinerated or otherwise destroyed.

Four years later, after Jules found a promising buyer for his business, he and Raul Medina signed documents wherein the major stockholder paid off all notes and commissions to the minor stockholder, receiving nothing from the sale. But Raul Medina had no complaints. The $1,500 a month had been nice while it lasted, and Jules promised him that if his next commercial endeavor could benefit by minority preference, Jules and Raul Medina could make a similar arrangement.

Green Earth Hauling and Disposal had prospered because Jules Temple was a businessman who quickly discovered ways to cut corners in order to avoid the red tape inherent in this industry. Some of the ways in which he did that were exotic, some were quite simple, but Jules seldom tried to cut corners with military waste, not unless it could be ascertained that it could be safely mixed with other waste he was hauling.
Safely
for Jules only meant that it would be untraceable to him.

Sometimes, Jules just couldn't resist saving time and money with the waste generated by civilian companies, such as one called Southbay Agricultural Supply. The owner of the company was an ex-farmer named Burl Ralston who was making a lot more money selling supplies than he'd ever made on his sorry hundred-acre farm in the Imperial Valley. Burl Ralston was not a man for unnecessary paperwork and he was not one to ask a lot of questions, not when Jules Temple was consistently able to undercut the competition with his hauling bids, thus saving money for Burl Ralston.

Southbay Agricultural Supply and Green Earth Hauling and Disposal had just struck a deal whereby Jules Temple's employees would pick up a fifty-five-gallon drum full of something very toxic: Guthion. The pesticide had been consigned to a customer in Arizona, but had got mixed inadvertently with a small amount of weed oil, so it had to be disposed of ASAP. Jules Temple's low bid was for $500 to haul the Guthion, but as frequently happened with Jules, he wanted
cash
from Burl, to be given in an envelope to the driver. Green Earth's truckers were accustomed to receiving cash, and after successful transactions, Jules often would slip a $20 bill to the trucker as a “bonus” for good work.

From Jules's point of view, he could not afford to haul extremely hazardous waste if he had to transport it to a Texas incinerator for legal disposal, so he decided that item #11 on the manifest should list the Guthion as “waste flammable liquid.” That way it could be hauled to a disposal site at a Los Angeles oil refinery when Jules had another load heading that way.

When the cash deal was struck, Jules said on the phone, “I'll do the manifest for you, Burl, so you just have to sign off and pay my driver. What's your EPA number?”

Thus, when truckers Abel Durazo and Shelby Pate showed up at Southbay Agricultural Supply in their twenty-four-foot bobtail van, Abel handed the completed and numbered seven-page manifest to the waste generator, Burl Ralston, who signed off without worrying about item #11 on the manifest. He could honestly say that “waste flammable liquid” was a legally correct description of a little oil and a lot of Guthion, if not morally correct. But Burl Ralston was confident that Jules would see that it got disposed of properly, with no harm done.

After the haulers left Southbay Agricultural Supply with the envelope containing $500, Burl Ralston put one manifest copy into an envelope to send by certified mail to Sacramento; then he filed his copy. The truckers had not asked Burl Ralston for a precise description of the material in the drum. In fact,
no
waste hauler had ever asked him. But Burl Ralston had informed Jules Temple that it was Guthion, hadn't he? And the skull and bones placard was on the drum, wasn't it? Burl Ralston went back into the warehouse to continue his inventory without giving that drum of poison another thought. It was Jules Temple's problem now, and probably would be the last deal they ever did together in that Jules was selling his business.

Trucker Shelby Pate folded the manifest copies around the money envelope, and put the packet in the zippered pocket of his leather jacket.

C
HAPTER
3

“B
ad Dog” was not a respectable name for a young woman, her mother had said to her when she was home on leave.

“It's just navy, Mom,” Bobbie had insisted. “Gimme a break!”

“Navy? I call it crude. That's the kinda brutal attitude toward women that caused the Tailhook scandal where all those horny pilots mauled the women in that Las Vegas nightclub.”

“Hotel. The Las Vegas Hilton. And they're aviators. They land on carriers at night in pitching seas. They're
aviators
.”

“Rapists is more like it. A hundred drunken rapists. I know what they land on at night.”