Strachey's Folly - Stevenson Richard - Страница 36

Suter studied the horizon thoughtfully. After a moment he said, "I've decided that there is some background I can give you that will put things into perspective. In fact, when I heard that you might show up here, it became obvious that I'd have to ex­plain a couple of things about the Krumfutzes in order to get you off my back, as well as for your personal safety and your boyfriend's."

I waited.

"It's about drugs," Suter said.

"Drugs and the Krumfutzes? That sounds unlikely."

"Not Betty, just Nelson. If you knew this man, you wouldn't find any of what I'm about to tell you surprising at all."

"Fill me in."

Suter sighed. "Here's the situation. The situation is, it all has to do with a drug operation, and drug-money laundering, and Nelson's greed, and Hugh Myers, a Log Heaven businessman who put a lot of money into Betty's first congressional cam­paign. There's no way I can tell you or anybody else what I know—or what some people think I might know—about the Mexican end of the operation. But I can tell you that Nelson Krumfutz is a very bad and dangerous man."

When I didn't react to this and just sat watching him, Suter went on, "Okay, here's the deal. The deal is, when the Log Heaven furniture factories folded up about ten years ago, the GM dealership Nelson owned with Hugh Myers nearly went belly-up. Hugh had other investments to fall back on, but Nelson was in deep shit financially. Betty was still teaching high school Spanish at the time, and Nelson went with her on one of the Spanish club's spring-break trips to Mexico. Nelson met some people down here who saw the shipment of GM products from the Chi­huahua assembly plants to U.S. dealerships as a means for smug­gling coke. The deal saved Nelson's ass. He didn't actually have to make a profit on all those cars he brought into Central Penn­sylvania. He just had to disassemble and remove the packages sealed into the seat backs. It wouldn't surprise me if the entire eight-mile-long Log Heaven dike-levee system is stuffed with new Buicks and Chevies that Nelson didn't need to sell."

Suter watched for my reaction to this story, which was, "Hmm."

"Quite a production, wasn't it?"

"Remarkable."

"So the point is," Suter went on, "Nelson got nailed by the feds not for the drug operation, which they don't know about, and which Nelson and Hugh Myers have since sold to another GM dealer in Wilkes-Barre, but for pocketing a quarter of a mil of Hugh's and a couple of other guys' campaign money—all of which was part of some crazy-ass scheme Nelson and Hugh de­veloped for laundering the drug profits. If you really want to know how it worked, you'd have to ask Nelson. But of course if you did that, then he would tell the Mexicans you know about him—and them—and they would kill you. That's what they do. With no hesitation whatever, they kill you. So now do you un­derstand what your problem is with this thing, Strachey? And mine?"

"I'm starting to. If you're telling me the truth, Suter."

He laughed once. "Do you really think I could have made that up? I've never been big on conspiracy theories to explain evil in the world. So my mind just doesn't work that way."

"So Betty wasn't in on this . . . this drug-running opera­tion?"

"No. I don't think she ever even suspected. Betty is ripshit over Tammy Pam Jameson, but that's something else. Nelson not only ruined Betty's political career, but then he moved in with Tammy Pam, who he'd been keeping on the side up in En-gineville for ten years. Not that Betty doesn't have her own ro­mantic idiosyncrasies. She likes to pretend that she's the first queen of the Mayas, and she hires Mexican guys to fuck her and then kneel at her feet while she rips their hearts out for break­ing warrior training. She doesn't rip their real hearts out naturally. Betty's a good egg. She uses beef hearts that she picks up when they're on sale at the Log Heaven A and P."

I remembered the scene I had briefly witnessed through Mrs. Krumfutz's back window, which added to the plausibility of Suter's lurid tale. "That's pretty wild, Suter. How do you know about Mrs. Krumfutz's playacting habits?"

"Alan McChesney told me. He used to be on Betty's con­gressional staff. He caught her at it once, and anyway word got around among the Central Pennsylvania illegals on how to pick up a couple of extra bucks. Of course, she made them do yard work, too. If George Bush had been reelected, Betty would prob­ably have been his second-term ambassador to Mexico. That's the job she was after, and she certainly would have livened up the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. It's a stodgy place, from what I hear."

A sudden motion off to the left of the terrace caught my eye, and I glanced over in time to see not a drug-gang assassin with an automatic weapon aimed at Suter and me, but a plump iguana disappearing into a crevice in the rocks.

I said, "So it's your opinion, if I've got this right, that my ap­proaching Nelson Krumfutz would be not only highly dangerous but redundant, since he'll probably go to prison anyway?"

"Of course. Nelson is fucked no matter how you cut it. And nobody is going to lay a glove on the Mexicans anyway. So why should you or anyone else risk your lives for nothing?"

"You might as well tell me what happened to Maynard. Was it the quilt panel? Did someone think Maynard spotted something on the quilt panel with your Krumfutz manuscript on it? Did you put something incriminating in the manuscript? Something that might be discovered if you were killed?"

Suter gazed at me with a look of fright, which, at the time, I interpreted as a man confronting a dramatic sign of his own mortality. "Yeah, something like that."

"Who put the panel with your name on it in the quilt?"

"I honestly don't know. But I'm sure it was meant to intim­idate me. Which, when I heard about it, it sure as hell did."

"And Maynard was shot and his house ransacked both as a way of eliminating him as a source of information on the Mexi­can end of the drug operation, and as a warning to me or my boyfriend, Timothy Callahan, or anyone else Maynard may have spoken to about—about this thing Maynard actually knew noth­ing about?"

Suter slowly nodded. "Yeah . . . yeah."

"If that's true, it's disgusting."

"I know it is. I know."

"And what about Red Heckinger and Malcolm Sweet? Who sent those two buffoons to scare me off? You or the drug cartel?"

Suter gave me a droll little grin. "They're friends of mine who used to work for Betty. They're harmless. Red and Malcolm don't even know about the drug operation. I told them you had a lot of wrong ideas about me, and would they help me get you off my back? I also wanted to save you the trouble of coming down here only to be convinced that there was nothing you needed to do to apprehend the North American who was once directly involved in the drug scam, since the law had already got­ten its meaty paws around Nelson Krumfutz's skinny neck. But I guess Red and Malcolm weren't as convincing as they could have been as mob enforcers."

"No. They were just a couple of putzes."

"You could have saved yourself the airfare, Strachey. Not that I'm not enjoying your company. I am. You're an extremely attractive man. You come across as a kind of straight Tom Sell-eck. That's one of my favorite types."

"I believe you mean one of your several hundred favorite types. So, what's the deal with Jorge? You've never stayed with one man this long before. Is he not really your boyfriend? In your letter to Maynard, you described yourself as still unlucky in love. Is Jorge's father the head of the drug cartel, and is Jorge really your jailer?"