CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Before I left the office I gave Toby the contact numbers of Muldoon and Hotchkiss and told him to get Peet’s license number and info to them in case they wanted to pull him in for their own purposes. Then when I got to the house I made a call to Mack Reynolds, my old friend who was the FBI SAC in Houston. I found him at home, and we had a heart-to-heart talk. He moved fast. Thirty minutes later Hotchkiss called my cell phone to tell me that he would be happy to buy me breakfast at the Caravan the next day.

*   *   *

When I got to the restaurant that morning I found Hotchkiss waiting for me with a pair of coffee cups and two menus. We made small talk until after the waitress had poured our coffee and taken our orders. Then we got down to business.

“I hope you don’t take it wrong,” he said, “but we just didn’t feel free to give you the whole story the other day. In fact, we thought maybe we’d said too much as it was.”

“I understand,” I said and gave him a rundown on our session with Willard Peet. “I also know that Sipes has to be the man in Houston that Peet was talking about last night.”

“He is. This fits in with some other information we’ve gotten. Apparently, Sipes has some missing cocaine.”

“How in the hell did you find that out?” I asked.

“We’re keeping close tabs on the man. And that’s all I can say about that. But he has jumped into the cocaine trade with both feet. For a while after that trial in Fillmore, he confined his criminal activities to laundering drug money for other dope dealers through a bank he controls in the Cayman Islands. We’ve had him under scrutiny for years, but he’s managed to avoid any further indictments. He even married a divorced socialite who came from one of the oldest families in Houston. That gave him a little veneer of respectability. But guys like him can’t stay straight, and now it’s coke. Mack assigned me to the Zorn-Sipes connection full-time. We’ll be working together if that’s no problem with you.”

“Glad to have the help. Where does Zorn fit in the scheme?” I asked.

“He brings the coke up from Houston and holds it here in town for a buyer from Dallas. The people from Dallas check the grade on the stuff, then make a call on their cell phones authorizing a wire transfer to an offshore account. Other people down in Houston get on their computers, and, once the money is in the bank, Zorn releases the coke.”

“What’s to keep the Dallas people from just smoking Zorn and taking the merchandise?” I asked.

“It just doesn’t work that way anymore. At least not with these people. You’ve got old, established customers buying from old, established suppliers. A lot of this stuff gets cooked up into crack and sent on further north. Too much profit to get greedy. Everybody stays cool, and everybody makes out good.”

I sat back and thought for a few moments. “I never made Zorn for anything like this. Wonder what happened?”

“Who knows? I think he’s always been a nickel-and-dime chippie nibbling around the edges of the crust. I guess he decided he wanted some of the pie.”

“How much is Sipes paying him?”

“Ten thousand a trip.”

“Why haven’t you just nailed Zorn holding the stuff and made him roll over on Sipes? Seems simple enough.”

Hotchkiss shook his head. “Even with Zorn’s testimony we need something else to connect Sipes to the drugs. You see, he never actually touches them himself. You can imagine what a really good lawyer like Bean or Holbrook would do to a guy like Zorn on the stand. Besides, Zorn and the Dallas connection is only one conduit that Sipes has going. There’s another guy in San Antonio and another in Little Rock, both doing the same thing.”

“How do they handle the logistics of it all?” I asked.

“Zorn gets a call from a prepaid cell that tells him to go to one of several safe deposit boxes in various banks scattered around Houston. Actually, they’re safe deposit bins, the kind businesses rent. The coke is waiting in hermetically sealed containers, along with Zorn’s fee. The deposit boxes are rented to a seemingly legitimate export company in Peru that has no known connection with either Sipes or his bank.”

“So who puts the coke in the bank box?”

“A couple of college boys. Can you believe they’re both honor students?”

I shook my head in wonder. “Where in hell do they get it?”

“Right off the boat. And they get paid very handsomely to make the delivery to the bank. Being smart boys, they have sense enough to know not to try to screw Sipes. The truth is that they’re just a couple of dipshit rich kids getting some cheap thrills and picking up a thousand apiece for each trip to the bank. We’ll eventually get them, but there’s no point in busting either them or Zorn right now until we have a positive link to Sipes. The DEA is working the case too. We’re on top of the money-laundering angle.”

“How’s that working out?” I asked. “You guys have gotten your wires crossed with them in the past.”

“Not a chance this time. The whole thing’s being coordinated by the attorney general’s office. Nobody is going to jump without the go-ahead from Washington.”

“Where did Lester Sipes come from?” I asked. “I know about the rodeo circuit, but what’s his background?”

“He grew up dirt poor in the worst part of Fort Worth. His dad was a well-known hood named Dewey Sipes who hung around those old gambling dives out on the Jacksboro Highway and ran with guys like Tincey Eggleston and Asher Rhone. Hell, he was tough enough to work for Benny Binion in the policy racket back in the 1940s. If you’ve ever heard any of those names, you’ve got his number.”

“I’ve heard them all.”

“Then you know that Lester was to the manor born, so to speak.”

“Anything else you need to tell me?” I asked.

He gave me smile as bland as the one I’d given him the first day we met. “Only that we thought we had Sipes on money laundering a few months ago, but a witness disappeared and the case fell apart. So remember that anybody who gets tangled up with Sipes is dealing with a guy who didn’t hesitate to do away with a federal witness. That’s pretty heavy in my book. And if that isn’t enough, try this. He had another old friend of his who screwed him a couple of years ago, but not nearly as bad as Zorn has.”

“Yeah?”

“They fed that guy to the crabs off the South Jetty down at Galveston. A piece at a time. Meat cleavers and bone saws.”