Pale Kings and Princes

“Probably,” Fallon said. “Anyway, the wholesaler’s got it in some safe house back home, say Wheaton. Then he weighs it, tests it, and this’ll vary, but he may cut it, then he packages it and sells it to a distributor, who resells it in small lots to dealers. This guy may cut it too, or he may do the first real cut. The dealers cut it and subdealers cut it, and some was probably stolen along the way by guys working for the smuggler and replaced with a cut, and so by the time your sophisticated scholar athlete, say, gets a gram or two for his head it’s about twelve percent cocaine. Hell, half the people doing blow are reacting to the cut, they get pure coke they think it’s no good.”

“Prices?” I said.

“Varies. Depends on how bad it’s been stepped on along the way. At the moment, around here, a hundred, a hundred-twenty dollars a gram.”

“What do they cut with?” I said.

“Oh, Christ,” Fallon said. “Lidocaine, mannitol — which is a baby laxative — lactose, sucrose, vitamin B, caffeine, speed, benzocaine, stuff we haven’t figured out yet.”

“Could we focus on Wheaton a little more,” I said.

“Focus,” Rita said, “they don’t even know us.”

“Who doesn’t know us,” Fallon said.

Rita smiled and shook her head.

“Wheaton,” I said.

“Town’s got a twenty-man police force, three detectives. In the last year we’ve made sixteen arrests in coke traffic that have ties to Wheaton. People we arrest in other places have bank accounts in Wheaton, they own bars in Wheaton, they have relatives in Wheaton. There’s ten-year-old kids coming into banks in Wheaton and buying bank checks for nine thousand dollars.”

“Good paper route?” I said.

“Sure,” Fallon said. “Place is a sewer, but all the manpower goes to Miami. It’s the glamour spot, you know. The plum assignments are there, the press coverage is there. We’re up here sucking hind tit.” He looked at Rita.

Rita drank some Scotch while exhaling smoke and the squat glass of amber liquid looked like a small witch’s cauldron when she put it down, with the smoke drifting off the surface of the Scotch.

“So I’d appreciate any help you can give us,” Fallon said to me.

“Sure,” I said.

“Like what have you got so far,” Fallon said.

“Reporter for the Central Argus, kid named Eric Valdez, went over to Wheaton to do some investigative reporting and got shot and castrated.”

“He was investigating cocaine?”

“Yes.”

“His death cocaine-related? I haven’t seen anything.”

“Local cops say it was personal. Valdez was fooling around with someone’s wife.”

“They know whose wife?”

“Not that I know of. Valdez was supposed to be something of a womanizer.”

“Where was he when I needed him,” Rita said.

“And the paper hired you to go down and look into it?”

“Yeah.”

“Be careful,” Fallon said. “A man alone doesn’t have much chance.”

“Thank you Harry Morgan,” I said.

Fallon looked puzzled again. “To Have and Have Not,” Rita said to him. He still looked puzzled. Past his shoulder at the foot of the stairs, I saw Susan. She was wearing a broad-shouldered red leather coat with the collar turned up.

“Ah,” I said. “My dinner date is here.”

Rita looked across the room at Susan.

“That’s her,” she said.

“That’s Susan,” I said.

Rita stared at her. “No wonder,” she said.

3

The Wheaton police station is in the bottom of the red brick Gothic Revival town hall at the south end of town which is near the bottom end of the Quabbin Reservoir which is about a hundred miles west of Boston and much farther than that from everywhere. The chief’s name was Bailey Rogers and he was explaining to me the futility of my venture.

“The whole thing is a fucking media invention,” Bailey told me. “There’s people do coke here. There’s people do coke in the city room at the Central Argus too, whyn’t you go investigate them.”

“They hired me to come down here,” I said. “Probably a ploy to throw me off the track.”

“And I don’t need any big-deal Boston wiseass dick to come out here and piss all over my town, you understand.”

“You don’t?” I said.

Rogers had a fat neck. The rest of him was middling to big and in okay shape, but his neck spilled out over his collar and his face was very red. He leaned forward in his chair with the palms of his hands resting on the arms of the chair as if he was going to leap out of it.

“No, I don’t, and don’t get smart with me either, buster, or you’ll wish you were back in Boston.”

I smiled at him admiringly. “God,” I said, “you’re tough.”

“You think I’m kidding you?”

“I think a kid came down here to do a newspaper story and somebody killed him and you don’t know who, and you’re blowing around so I won’t notice.”

“Dumb bastard had it coming,” the chief said. “You can’t fuck around with those people’s women like he did. He was begging for it.”

“What people,” I said.

“The Colombians. You know what they’re like.”

“There’s a lot of Colombians here,” I said.

“Sure, about five thousand. Came up to work the mills, only the mills closed so now they mostly stay home and pump the old lady and collect welfare.”

“But no coke?”