He was a forensics expert, but he knew the streets. He had come out of the South Broadway barrio, and he worried about his community. Now every politician was worried about illegal drugs, and the white middle class and its professionals were turning on to heroin, but in the final analysis dope still created more havoc and pain in the black and Chicano barrios. Those who could least afford it looked for the numbness it brought to hopeless lives.
“Why do they keep Garcia in the dark?”
Howard glanced at the door, even though they were alone in the small room. “There’s two ways this lays out. One, someone very high in U.S. Customs and the DEA is working for the cartel. So protection comes directly from D.C.”
“Or?”
“Or Garcia does know, and he’s been bought.”
There it was, Howard’s theories presented in a matter-of-fact manner, and both were very disturbing. Sonny couldn’t believe that. No, not Garcia.
But his old mentor, Manuel Lopez, would say: when it comes to making money, suspect everyone. The old Manuel Lopez rules: Everyone is capable of murder. Everyone is capable of taking a bribe.
What if the junk being shipped in had the protection of someone very high in the DEA? If that was so, they could bypass the local cops. The local narcs looked for drug shipments coming through the city at the train station and at the airport. Once in a while they got a tip and busted someone making amphetamines in a kitchen lab.
But the really big shipments were traced by Customs and the DEA, and if the DEA didn’t let the local police in on what it knew, they had no other way of getting the information.
“Not Garcia,” Sonny said.
“I’m just laying out the possibilities,” Howard replied. He got up to refill his cup. “I don’t like it either. I trust the man. I’ve known him since he was a rookie, and he never took a dime.”
Howard sighed. “But I’ve also seen better men tempted. You can’t get this size of a shipment in without paying big money for the law to look the other way.”
Sonny knew that. The whole thing was getting dirty, very dirty. He rose. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“De nada. Sorry I had to give you this stuff, but it’s all we got. I think Dolly pours her leftover chemicals in it. Anyway, watch your step, bro. You’re being tailed.”
“Garcia?”
“Nope. FBI. You’re on their list.”
“Yeah. They dropped in on me this morning. It’s Stevens and Martinez who keep coming around. Bueno, I’m on my way.” He shook hands with Howard.
“Watch out for those fancy ladies.” Howard winked.
Sonny left city hall and headed for the public library. It’s like looking for buried treasure, he thought, and remembered that New Mexico was full of lost gold-mine stories. Fool’s gold, the worthless iron pyrite of legend that had led many a man into the deserts to die of thirst.
His great-grandfather had once fallen in with some prospectors who swore they had found a gold mine. Two skeletons in Spanish armor guarded the treasure. La Mina de los Dos Españoles they called it, high on Ladrones Peak, a volcanic heap buzzing with rattlesnakes. They had a map; they swore there was enough gold in the mine to fill a bank vault.
They persuaded Elfego to go with them. They loaded burros with water and food and set out. For two months they wandered around the Jornada del Muerto desert and the surrounding peaks.
Lost, hungry, dying of thirst, the men found nothing. Elfego Baca gave up the search and returned home, swearing he would never leave the confines of the Río Grande valley again. The two prospectors returned soon after, crazy from the search, the packsaddles of their burros loaded with fool’s gold. Worthless stones. The assayer in Socorro laughed them out of his office.
For weeks the two were the butt of jokes in the Socorro saloons, but they didn’t give up their dream. They kept putting aside supplies until they had enough to start the search anew. Both were gone one early morning in June, walking south, into the heart of the Jornada del Muerto. They were never seen again.
History was full of the stories of men who had come to New Mexico in search of gold. It all started with Cabeza de Vaca, who was shipwrecked in 1528 somewhere near Galveston, Texas. He and his companions traversed the region, lost for eight years, crossing the Río Grande at present-day El Paso and finally heading south into Mexico. His reports told of the Seven Cities of Cibola, and the gold to be found there.
Gold fever. But it was not the land or the people that had filled him with fever, it was his desire to find gold.
So the first European to set foot on the land had wandered lost in the deserts and mountains of the region, dreaming of gold. Cabeza de Vaca, the first hombre dorado, the man who lost his soul in the desert and reported the Indian pueblos were made of gold and precious stones.
His stories fired the imagination of men in Mexico City who dreamed of finding great riches. The explorations from Mexico began. Fray Marcos de Niza was sent north, and he came back with even more fantastic stories.
Gold fever.
What would it buy: eternal youth, eternal happiness? Once the españoles smelled gold, there was no stopping them. Wave after wave of the conquistadores came, explorers looking for the Seven Cities of the Antila, the homeland the Aztecs called Aztlán, the paradise where streets were reportedly paved with gold.
They found no gold in the Indian pueblos. The real gold was in the gift of prayer the Pueblo people practiced in their ceremonies, and this the españoles were too blind to see. Those greedy for gold had missed the spiritual fountain that was the gift of the Río Grande pueblos.
At the library Ruth Jamison had more information for him, including a small file on Alisandra Bustamante-Smith, the journalist from Colombia. A couple of the other names on the list he had given her had underworld connections, not big-timers, but mafia gofers. These are the grunts, Sonny reasoned, the ants who carry the sugar away to feed the addicted country.
But when would the dope be dropped? Where? Had it already been delivered? And why the air war? Why was Secco a target? Where did Veronica’s death fit in? Those running dope knew a lot of noise would only draw the cops. Maybe they didn’t care about the local cops; as Howard suggested, their protection came from higher up.
No, nobody in the business wanted the kind of attention Raven had created.
Maybe Veronica’s and Secco’s deaths were simply to throw the local cops off the dope trail. Create confusion and in the melee, the shipment was dropped, cut, and distributed.
“What now?” Ruth asked.
“Start talking to these folks,” Sonny answered. “How can I thank you?”
“Stay safe,” she said.
“I will,” he assured her. He riffled through the papers. On top was a recent article by Maria Alvarado, a reporter for the local daily who had done an interview with Alisandra.
“Can I use your phone?”
Ruth led him to an office with a private phone. He sat and read through Maria’s article, then called her. “Can you help me get to Alisandra Bustamante-Smith? I need to talk to her.” He was direct, to the point.
“Heard you were working for the balloon fiesta,” Maria replied.
“Yes,” Sonny admitted. It was all over town by now.
“You connect her to the fiesta murders?” Maria asked.
“No. I just need to talk to her. She may know something, that’s all. But I need you to introduce me.”
“She’s not involved, Sonny. It’s the farthest—”
“I’m not saying she’s involved. I just need to talk to her.”
There was a pause, then, “I’ll call her.”
“Thanks, Maria.”
“I owe you one, Sonny. But go easy on Alisandra. She’s really a sensitive soul.”
Yeah, Sonny thought when he hung up the phone, aren’t we all.
Alisandra Bustamante-Smith and her family were staying at La Posada downtown. Sonny lounged in the library until he thought Maria had had enough time to call Alisandra. He s
canned books on the CIA’s role in the Colombian drug-trafficking fields. The money being made by the drug lords was immense, more than the public could ever imagine. Drug money was buying governments, polluting governments.
He called Alisandra from a public phone outside the library and introduced himself. He told her he was a friend of Maria Alvarado, and Alisandra Bustamante-Smith acknowledged that she had just heard from Maria, but what did he want to talk about? When he told her he was interested in Mario Secco, he heard her voice go cold. She was reluctant to answer questions. She said she had read about the murders, and she understood that time was of the essence, but she knew nothing.
“I have a theory,” Sonny said, pushing his luck in order to get to see her. “I think Mario Secco was killed over a shipment of dope coming into the city. I know you fought the Medellín cartel in your country. Any information I can get might stop this shipment from hitting the streets.”
He waited. He heard her sigh, then a long, contemplative pause followed by “Okay. I’ll meet you.”
Sonny suggested the coffee shop at La Posada.
Fifteen minutes later Sonny sat in a booth having coffee and watching the door. When Alisandra Bustamante-Smith walked in, he recognized her from a faded black-and-white newspaper photo in Ruth’s file. But the photo hadn’t captured her beauty.
She was a dark, lovely woman. She entered the coffee shop and surveyed it, lowering her dark glasses. Sonny waved and she walked quickly toward him. He rose to meet her.
“Buenos días, Señor Baca.” She smiled and offered her hand.
“Buenos días. Un placer,” Sonny answered. Her hand was cool to the touch. She was a slender woman, svelte. Her eyes were dark and intense.
A few years ago she was a knowledgeable journalist who was evidently on the verge of exposing government leaders involved in the Medellín cartel in Colombia, and then came the tragic murder of her husband.
“Please join me.” Sonny motioned and they sat. “May I order you something? Coffee or tea?”
“Coffee, please,” she answered.
She looked at him intently, and he knew she was wondering how far she could trust him. Was he naive enough to think he could stop a cartel shipment from coming into the States? She, too, had once been the idealist. She had set out to expose those in charge of the drug problem in her country, and she lost. She hadn’t talked to anyone about anything associated with her work in years.
“Thank you for agreeing to see me,” Sonny said.
“Maria tells me you’re a private investigator. A detective. She also told me you’re working for the balloon fiesta.”
Sonny nodded. “The fiesta wants me to find whoever killed Mario Secco. The publicity isn’t good for them. But I have my own motive. The man who killed Secco also wants to kill me, and he may hurt innocent people. With or without the fiesta, I have to get him.”
“Maria also told me you don’t report to the police.”
I’ll have to take Maria to lunch, Sonny thought, thank her for the good referral. Alisandra had learned to not even trust the police.
“Why are you here?” Sonny asked.
“My husband used to fly hot-air balloons. We came for the fiesta,” she replied. “But you know that.” She paused while the waitress served them coffee.
“Not a good time to be a tourist in our otherwise friendly city,” Sonny said.
“A tragedy. My instinct was to leave yesterday, but we wanted our son to see the folk art museum in Santa Fé.”
“What do you know about Mario Secco?”
“My, you get right to the point, Mr. Baca.”
“Sonny, por favor.”
“Sonny. I like that. You have anglicized your name.”
“The schools do it for us,” Sonny answered. “I was named after my grandfather, Elfego Francisco Baca. It was a mouthful for the teachers to pronounce.”
“How sad.” Alisandra sighed, and sipped her coffee. “You lose your heritage a piece at a time. I read the history of Elfego Baca when I studied in the States. He was a Robin Hood.”
“Yeah, a Robin Hood of the Río Grande.” Sonny smiled. “We don’t have many.”
“No, you don’t have many. I did my undergraduate work at Yale. There were no Chicanos there, but what your writers and poets were writing interested me. I read all I could.”
“We’ve been here a long time.”
“True,” she continued, “and the country hasn’t yet recognized your potential. Not even Mexico has recognized your power. Men like Cesar Chávez made Latin America aware of your importance.”
“And now he’s dead,” Sonny said. “And there’s no one to take his place.”
“A leader like that comes once in a lifetime,” Alisandra said softly, sipped her coffee, and looked at Sonny. “We are violent animals. If one group acquires power, it will not share it with the other. That is the way of history. You Chicanos will have to take power by force, or you will remain the marginalized ‘Other’ that the society needs as a scapegoat.”
“You, too, come right to the point,” Sonny said. The woman knew her history, and she told it like it was.
“In my country we have struggled to change the situation,” she replied.
Her voice trailed and Sonny followed her gaze out the window. Second Street was nearly empty. A woman in blue crossed the street, peered into the coffee shop window, smiled as she seemed to recognize Sonny, then walked away.
“Someone you know?”
“No.”
“Were you followed?” The tone of caution went up a notch in Alisandra’s voice.
“No, I took care. The call was from a public phone. I parked blocks away, walked here.”
She smiled, a brooding smile. “We take all the precautions, and still—” She sighed softly. “So, you want to know about Mario.”
“Yes.”
“More than the papers report?”
Sonny nodded.
“He has a reputation. He was well known in Colombia. I’m sure the FBI knew he was here. The Freedom of Information Act should get you his file.”
“That takes too long,” Sonny replied.
He felt her hesitancy, so he took the time to tell her of his connection to Raven.
“So you believe this man you call Raven is involved in this shipment of drugs into the country,” she said when he had laid out the bare outline of his theory.
“Raven plots destruction,” Sonny said. “Whether it’s blowing up a WIPP truck and claiming he wants to alert the world to the dangers of nuclear waste, or selling dope, he craves destruction. Let’s assume Mario Secco was in charge of this shipment coming in from Colombia. And further assume that he hired Raven to orchestrate the deal. Why did Raven turn on Secco? Who else is involved?”
He paused. She glanced toward the door that led to the lobby. Cautious, she was very cautious.
“One can never be too careful,” she said.
“It’s okay,” Sonny assured her, and reached out to touch her hand. She was a frightened woman, and she needed to be reassured. She had put her life and the lives of her family on the line, and she had lost.
“In Bogota I learned this business from one of my colleagues, Emilio Aragón. He knew everyone connected with the cartels. He knew the drug lords of the cartels, the men in government who protected those demons, and he knew the rats in the back streets. Six months before my husband was murdered, Emilio disappeared. We have this new class of people in our country, los desaparecidos. The disappeared. They say the drug lords make people disappear, but the fascists in the police and the military can also make anyone disappear. One of the reasons I was going to publish my story on the drug cartel was for Emilio. They knew we were working on the story together. By disappearing him they hoped to scare me away. I didn’t scare so they killed my husband.”
“I’m sorry,” Sonny said.
“I think of my husband and Emilio every day. But one picks up the pieces and goes on.”
He thought of Diego
and his family and other homeless families who were disappearing daily. Not victims of fascist police, but victims of the society that discarded them.
“It is difficult for me to talk about my situation. After my husband was killed, I realized the police were not to be trusted, and worse, the web of deceit led through the police into the newspaper itself.”
“Your paper?”
She nodded. “You see why I have lost my faith. I only want to be left alone. I remarried, a professor where I teach. Thomas Smith, a kind man who knows nothing of the world of crime. I have my child, a good job. I teach in a small community college in Texas. Over half of my students are Mexicanos. I’m content. Maybe there is such a thing as destiny, and to be a teacher here is a good thing.”
“But you won’t talk to the FBI,” Sonny said.
“No, of course not. I have a deal with them.”
“A deal?”
“There is a certain photograph—” She paused, looked into his eyes, again measuring what she could confide, then reached across the table and touched his hand. “I have to trust you,” she said in a whisper, and leaned forward. “You see, Mario Secco was my brother.”
Sonny drew back. Had he heard correctly? Was this the Alisandra Bustamante-Smith, once the best-known journalist in Colombia, the expatriate now living in Texas? The story of her husband’s death had created international headlines. But there was nothing about Mario Secco being her brother in the papers or in her file.
“Few people know,” she continued. “Probably the fact is buried in secret FBI files. Mariano Bustamante, my brother, left home at an early age, traveled to Italy on a freighter. For a few years he worked on these ships. When he could speak Italian, he began to work for a very rich man. An Italian shipbuilder. Mariano was always attracted to money. He wanted to be rich, because for him money bought happiness. Drugs are the false promise for such young men. He returned to Colombia and became a man who delivered drugs to Europe. I found this out during my investigation.”
Ah, that was it! Sonny thought. She was going to finger her own brother in her never-published expose. And worse, her own brother could have ordered, or known about, the hit on her husband. The business was deep and dark and ugly.