Twenty Blue Devils (4 page)
"Well, they don't pay them a living wage. It's the same thing."
"It's
not
the same thing."
"And what's more, they don't go in for organic processing on the Rantepao plantations. They use chemical nitrogen replacement."
"So? So do we. What do you suggest, bee pollination?’ Nelson screwed up his face in case she couldn't tell he was being sarcastic.
Maggie screwed her face right back at him. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Bee pollination—"
"People?” Nick said with a sigh. It was enough to quiet them down. “What do you say we just taste the stuff, okay?"
"The master speaks,” said Rudy.
Happily, it didn't take long. The coffee was variously dismissed as “misty,” “grassy,” and “hidey.” The grower, Nelson suggested indignantly, was trying to palm off last year's crop. The others agreed. No sale.
John had thought it was just fine.
"Well, that's that, then,” Nick said. “Good job, gang."
"About these accidents,” John said.
Nick clapped him on the shoulder. “We can talk on the way to your place.” He smacked his lips. “Hey, Rudy, pour us a cup of Blue Devil for the road."
Nick ran his hand over the pebble-grained dashboard. “So what's this, a Honda?” At half an inch less than John's six feet two inches, but with longer, looser arms and legs, Nick had had to scrunch himself up a bit to get into the front passenger seat. Maggie and Nelson sat behind, with Rudy between them.
"Right,” John said as they moved out of the little parking lot and south onto Highway 525, which ran down the center of Whidbey's long, snaky length. He flicked on the wipers against the half-mist, half-rain that was standard November weather. “'Eighty-nine Civic."
"I'll tell you what you ought to get next. An Infiniti J30."
"Why's that, Unc?"
"Why? Because it's got the best coffee-holder in the civilized world. Out of sight until you push a button, and then it rolls out of the console right where you can reach it. That's what I drive, an Infiniti. Holds two big cups."
That was Nick for you. When you bought a new car you didn't kick the tires, you checked out the coffee-holder. He really loved the stuff, you had to say that for him. “What's the price tag?"
"In the States? Around forty thousand, I think. A lot more than that in Tahiti, I can tell you."
John laughed. “I think I'll just buy one of those stick-to-the-dashboard things for two-ninety-five and keep the Honda for a couple more years. I work for the government, remember, not Paradise Coffee."
Nick smiled and squeezed his arm. “Just say the word, kid. There's always a place for another one of Pearl's boys."
He meant it too, John thought. Nick was a genuinely nice guy, easygoing and good-natured. John had always liked him; respected him too. Nick had convictions, decent ones, and when the chips were down he put his money where his mouth was. That was what had gotten him in trouble with the West Coast Mafia to begin with. It had been a dozen years ago, before John had joined the FBI; he had just started with the Honolulu PD then and what he knew about organized crime had come mostly from the newspapers.
At that time, Nick had been in the coffee business for about five years, but on a much smaller scale. He had managed to break into the American market, which was just beginning to show signs of life, but there were no Caffe Paradiso coffee bars yet, no whopping mail-order sales. And the Whidbey Island mastery wasn't even a gleam in his eye. Like other Pacific growers who shipped to this part of the country, Nick sold his green coffee beans through a small group of West Coast coffee brokers who dealt with restaurants, grocery stores, and the big commercial roasters. Things had gone well for a while. Paradise beans were building enough of a reputation to let Nick charge the higher prices that the sky-high Tahitian wages required, and his sales had been going up for four years in a row.
And then events on the East Coast intervened. Not long before, there had been a successful crimebusting campaign in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Mafia and Mafia-connected rings that had controlled everything from booze to bagels to knife-grinding were run out of business. A few gangsters from the Gasparone crime family went to prison. Others just dropped out of the limelight, lay low for a while, and then started showing up in other places and businesses around the country.
One of the places was the Northwest, and one of the businesses was coffee-wholesaling. Suddenly, the coffee brokers were whispering to the growers that things had changed, that if they expected the chain grocery stores and big roasters to handle their beans they'd better be prepared to deliver kickbacks. These illegal payments, running anywhere from two percent to ten percent of the price of the beans, were made directly to the brokers themselves, who then (supposedly) passed them on to the roasters and retailers. Without them, the brokers were now saying, they couldn't promise that they'd have much success in moving anybody's coffee. They were sorry about it, it wasn't their doing, it was just too bad, but their hands were tied and that's the way it was.
Whether it was actually kickback money or protection money was hard to say, because if you didn't pay it you didn't merely suffer from disappointing sales; bad things happened to you. Caffe Paradiso, operating on a tiny profit margin as it was, was one of the companies that dug in its heels and resisted, and three months after their second refusal to pay ten percent they found out that two hundred bags—ten tons—of choice Blue Devil had “accidentally” been sitting in a Portland warehouse for four weeks in half a foot of filthy water from a broken drainpipe. It had had to be written off because the insurance wouldn't cover negligence. A little later, a truck with another ton was hijacked fifteen minutes after leaving the Tacoma docks. The robbers were never identified, but the trucker got a friendly warning to the effect that he'd be better off not doing business with Paradise in the future. A friendly warning and two broken hands.
Nick went to the police but nobody was able to do anything about the new racket until one of the creeps in the thick of it, a shyster-accountant named Tony “Klingo” Bozzuto, suddenly changed his spots, working with the FBI for months to gather evidence (which wasn't difficult to come by inasmuch as Bozzuto handled the gang's books) and then testifying against his cronies in court. At that time, two dozen coffee growers were asked by federal prosecutors to submit depositions about the kickbacks and to appear in court if necessary. Only three had the nerve to do it, and one of them was Nick. He'd prepared an eight-page affidavit and shown up in court in Seattle, ready and willing to testify. In the end, the prosecution hadn't had to call him, although his deposition figured strongly. Guilty verdicts came in, the racket was smashed, and a fair number of the men involved went to prison.
All of this John had known before and still he hadn't gone along with Brenda's notion that gangland retaliation was behind the incidents in Tahiti. But the computer search he'd done at her insistence had made him rest less easily. What Brenda had suggested was true: while most of the convicted mobsters had gotten out of jail a long time ago, three of the big ones—"the three G-Men,” Tony “Zorro” Gasparone, Dominick “Nutso” Guardo, and Nate “The Schlepper” Grossman—had made the mistake of appealing their convictions on technical grounds. They had won a retrial a few years later, only to wind up with stiffer sentences than they'd started with. The three of them had been released in the last couple of years and were supposed to be living in Los Angeles, Queens, and Orlando and keeping clean, but who knew?
And there was something else John hadn't known.
"Nick, I was looking through some old newspaper reports. When they hauled off Tony Gasparone at the end of the trial he turned around and pointed at you. You and some others.” John demonstrated, pointing with his right hand at Nick's temple, forefinger extended, thumb cocked.
"Did he? I don't remember."
"Yes, he did."
Nick shrugged and waved a dismissive hand. “Aaahh, what can you do? The guy was a big talker, that's all."
"Nick—"
But they had pulled up to the ferry-loading dock in Clinton and were waved by the crew aboard one of the old, green-and-white ferries for the brief trip to Mukilteo and the mainland. As the engines started up and the ship slid smoothly over the ruffled gray expanse of Puget Sound, Nick looked placidly at his nephew.
"John, I know what you're driving at, and I appreciate your concern. But forget about Gasparone; the guy was showing off. Look, sometimes we go for years up at the farm without any accidents, and other times they gang up on us. Okay, we've had a string of problems lately. It's just things averaging out, that's all. Believe me, there's no vendetta going on. Even if there was, Tony Gasparone's got bigger fish to fry than me, take my word for it."
That's what John thought too, but he wasn't quite as confident of it as he'd been before he'd seen the files, and it made him feel better to hear Nick say it.
"Well, I'm not so sure,” Nelson proclaimed from the back seat. “I told you twelve years ago that it was a mistake to get involved, and I still say so. You can't go around filing depositions when you're dealing with human scum like—"
Nick laughed. “Nelson, give it a rest, will you? If I thought there was anything to it, I'd be the first one to ask for some help from J. Edgar Hoover over here, believe me."
"Yeah, like hell you would,” John said.
Nick laughed again, which was meant to close the subject, but Nelson, warmed up now, wasn't about to comply.
"Nick, sometimes I don't understand you at all. You're just sticking your head in the sand. Now, we all know that John has been talking to Brenda about this. Are you going to deny that, John?"
John glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “Not me."
"I wouldn't think so. Well, I was against bringing John into this in the first place, you all know that, but now that he is in, I think we should get his help."
"Oh, hell,” Nick grumbled and slouched down into his seat with his arms folded.
"John?” Nelson said in the peremptory tone that had been raising the hair on the back of John's neck for over thirty years, since he had been eight and Nelson had been twelve anyway, and probably before then.
"Nelson?” he replied mildly.
"Now, then. I want you to find out how we can get in touch with this Gasparone person. With the others too."
That caught John by surprise. “Get in touch with them?"
"Exactly, I think it's time to lay things on the table with them. They may be gangsters but they're also businessmen. They may have something in mind, some sort of...remuneration. We're in a sound financial position now. We can afford to negotiate, to work things out."
"Forget it,” Nick muttered without turning around.
"It's not a good idea, Nelson,” John said firmly. All the same, in one respect Nelson did have a point. When sleaze-bags like Gasparone got even with people for doing them wrong, they went out and blew their heads off, or maybe just their kneecaps if the original offense wasn't too bad. The point was to make it clear to others that it wouldn't be a good idea to do the same thing. But when they started in on piddly little things like a minor injury or accident here or there— such as the happenings on the plantation—you had to assume that they were after something; some kind of cooperation, or compliance, or kickback.
That is, if they were involved at all.
"Nick,” he said, “they haven't been in touch with you, have they?"
Nick looked sulkily at him. “Are you kidding me?"
"What about anybody else that might be speaking for them? Somebody in the coffee business that could be backed by them? Anybody, well, suggesting that—I don't know, that you ought to give them special terms, or—"
"In
touch
with me? No, give me a break."
Nelson took up the attack again. “Just because they haven't approached us doesn't mean we can't approach them. I'm only saying that if they feel they have a grievance, the sensible thing—"
"Lord, don't you love it!” Maggie cried with a laugh. “Nelson the Ethical. God forbid that we file a deposition against these lousy creeps back then when it counted, and now he can't wait to sit down and negotiate with them."
"I'm only saying—” Nelson began.
Nick cut him off. “Nelson, will you use your head for once? If these cruds wanted to get back at me for what happened in Seattle, why go all the way to Tahiti to do it? And do
what
, when it comes down to it? Bribe our employees to lose a few records...to jam the pulper? Hell, no, if they had a score to settle with us, they'd just burn down the building right here on Whidbey Island. It'd be a whole lot easier. That shack would go up like kindling."
Rudy, who had been minding his own business, sat up with a jerk. “Oh, thank you very much. That'll help me sleep nights."
"Or blow it up, or something,” Maggie suggested. “That's what I'd do."
"Wonderful, even better,” said Rudy.
"Weil, how do all of you explain it then?” Nelson said hotly. “How do—"
"Hey!"
Nick sat up in the front seat and twisted around as the ferry settled squishily against the Mukilteo pilings and John turned on the car's ignition. “Can I just say something? Enough, already Now, we're going to be at John's place in forty minutes. I haven't seen Marti in a long time, and it'd be nice to talk about something else besides all this warmed-over crap. Okay?"
"Suits me,” said Maggie.
Rudy held up his hands, palms forward. “Hallelujah and amen to that."
Nelson stared out the window and grumped an inaudible response.
Nick eyed John. “You too? Can we talk about something else for a while?"
John threw in the towel. “Okay. As long as it's not coffee."
"Fair enough.” Nick settled comfortably back. “Ah, I always look forward to seeing that lovely bride of yours. You really lucked out there, old son."
"I'm not gonna argue with that,” John said.