The Sweet Goodbye, page 2
“Town’s doing OK though, isn’t it? Don’t scare me, Mr. Lee. I just got here.”
“We’re surviving, Danny, like every mill town in Maine is surviving. You came here looking for work, so you must know a thing or two about surviving. Have you taken to it?”
“I think it’s better than the alternative.”
“The wise man’s answer. I should buy you a drink for that.”
“I’ve had enough for tonight. Thanks, Mr. Lee.”
“Said I should buy you a drink. Didn’t say I would. I don’t pay for clichés. The Ben E. King story was worth a drink. Better than the alternative—that doesn’t get you much around here.”
“Well, I’m still calling it a night. Would you like me to get you a cab before I go?”
Lee seemed to consider it a minute before saying, “That won’t be necessary.” Then he took a phone from his pocket, and using the careful gestures of a truly plastered man with experience at being truly plastered, he sent a text. He was careful and slow about it. I doubt if there would have been a single typo.
“I have a ride coming,” he said, and put his phone away. We walked outside and stood under the awning. It was snowing heavier now, the flakes falling through the arc of the streetlights and making the street darker than it would have been normally.
“Thank you for the drinks,” I said, and Lee waved me off, an actual reverse swat of the hand. Coming from him the gesture didn’t seem dismissive or patronizing, didn’t anger me the way it might have coming from someone else. We talked about the snow and whether it might be the start of a storm, Lee saying it didn’t look like it.
We hadn’t been doing that more than a minute when a Honda Civic pulled up to the curb. The car had Bondo spots on the hood and rust around every tire well. A woman was driving.
Her head was turned and I never saw Pearl Lafontaine that night. Just saw her yellow dress, so simple it looked like plainsong to me, the zipper in back slipped down an inch. When she leaned over to unlock the passenger door, she kept her head turned and all I saw was that dress and a flash of red curls, a long, lithe body twisting in the interior darkness of the car.
“Good luck out on the Algoma,” said Lee, shaking my hand one last time before he got in the passenger seat.
I watched the Honda pull away from the curb, its tailpipe exhaust mixing with the falling snow so that the tires were hard to see, made the car look like a parade float drifting down the street. I remember that. Their car seemed to drift away.
3
THE NEXT MORNING I pulled open the curtains in my motel room and saw that it had kept snowing. It had capped the roof peaks and church spire around the Three Pines Motel, powdered the streets, dusted the fences; it made the world look clean and innocent for a change, as though the world got up that morning and decided to dress for a wedding. I looked at the snow and decided to walk to my meeting with FBI special agent Paul Linton.
Linton was angry, so I wasn’t in a hurry. He’d phoned last night to make sure I knew he was angry, calling as soon as I’d lost sight of that Honda drifting down Delco Street. Linton was in his mid-thirties, in good shape, looked like a former athlete at some Ivy League school, although he could swear like a drill sergeant. I didn’t mind the swearing. It was the greased-back hair and yellow ties I might find unforgivable before the investigation was finished. He had been monitoring me from a surveillance van parked blocks away, by way of a camera hidden in a streetlight across from the Starlight.
“What the fuck did you just do?” he asked when I’d answered his call.
“Had a couple of drinks in a nightclub. Not a bad place, really.”
“You were not fuckin’ authorized to make contact with Travis Lee. You were just supposed to keep eyes on him.”
“You’d rather I let him get mugged? It was a field decision. I’ll stand by it.”
“Damn fuckin’ right you will. Debrief tomorrow, nine a.m.”
I showered and got dressed, ate a bowl of cold cereal, then another. There was no hot plate in the room. Just a small fridge. I wondered what it would take to be trusted with a hot plate at the Three Pines Motel. I put on my work boots and parka, and by eight fifteen, I was walking down the service road behind the motel.
I had been in Maine for nearly two months, but hadn’t seen much of the city. I had spent most of my time in the North Maine Woods, where Lee Forestry had lumber camps and timber rights.
The service road ended at Dickinson Street, a main east-west thoroughfare into downtown Birmingham, and I was soon walking past redbrick duplexes with exterior stairwells and small wooden porches, fenced gardens the size of compact cars. The air was cold and my breath came out in small clouds that spun a few seconds before fading away.
A few blocks from the river, I walked past the remains of the Davidson-Struthers Footwear factory. It took up two city blocks, all red brick and busted windows. I found out later that Davidson-Struthers used to be one of the largest shoe factories in New England—had a near monopoly on white spats for a while—and was one of the first large factories to close in Maine, before the textile mills even. That morning the factory reminded me of some beast the city had slain but forgotten to drag away.
I tend to work in places past their best-before dates—mill towns that no longer have a mill; fishing ports where the fish are remembered like mythical beasts; towns and cities where the workforce is unemployed, working recall hours or gone. People having their financial security threatened are what a lot of crime depends upon. From what I’ve seen, they might even be the straw that stirs the drink.
The Portland FBI field office seconded me just before Christmas. I stand six foot one, weigh around two hundred pounds most days. I like undercover assignments where I can grow my hair long and I was having no trouble passing as a forestry worker in Birmingham, Maine.
It was the Boston field office that had first noticed the money—a wire transfer of a hundred thousand dollars going from an ecstasy dealer in Rothwell Heights into one of the corporate accounts of Lee Forestry Products. It was sloppy and something had probably gone wrong with the transfer, but it got the Feds looking into Lee Forestry for the first time.
The company was family owned, fifth generation, all assets and equity split between two brothers, Tucker and Travis Lee. In the fourteen months since that wire transfer, the FBI had located $251 million in the company’s bank accounts that lacked “provenance.” That’s the word the forensic accountants like to use to mean no legal or plausible reason to exist. It’s a polite word. Allows the accountants to avoid words like “crooked” or “dirty.”
That one of the oldest lumber companies in Maine could be a tier-one money launderer was odd right from the start. What made the case odder was that no one knew where the money was coming from.
A lot came in wire transfers that couldn’t be traced back to an original source, but just as much came in cash deposits that went right from cube vans into the vaults of the Birmingham branch of North Maine Savings and Loan. Lumber used to be a cash business, and there were still old timber boys with backwoods mill yards who operated that way—but a quarter-billion dollars?
Six months ago an FBI agent had gone undercover at a Lee bush camp in the North Maine Woods to try to figure it out. He was a good agent, one who had worked many years in Brownsville, Texas, going about as deep underground there as it was possible to go. Some in the bureau had considered him a rising star.
His body was found three months after he went into the Woods, bobbing under the ice of Baron Lake, about a mile from the bush camp. There had been no indication the agent was under suspicion. No warning signs. No one knew if the drowning had been an accident or murder.
I got the call two months after that. About normal, I would say, for a high-level racketeering investigation, the time needed for senior law enforcement officers to accurately assess just how badly their case had exploded.
* * *
—
THE SURVEILLANCE VAN was parked on Dechamps Street, four blocks from the boarded-up remains of the Davidson-Struthers Footwear factory. I knocked twice on the back door, and it slid open. There were three men in the van. When I entered, two of them took off their headphones and left. The man who stayed behind sat on a bench at the far end of the van.
Paul Linton was wearing a dark blue suit with a yellow tie that morning, the tie knotted so tightly, it looked like a suspended kernel of corn glowing in the semidarkness of the van. “I was told you knew how to do this sort of work,” he said when I sat. “After what I saw last night, I’m beginning to wonder if I was fed a ton of horseshit.”
It was a line he had clearly rehearsed, so I let him enjoy it a few seconds before speaking. “I don’t know what you’ve been fed,” I said. “I do know I didn’t have much choice about last night.”
“Really? What about letting shit happen? I thought nonintervention was a credo for you deep-undercover boys. Like fuckin’ Star Trek or something.”
“You think we’re on a spaceship?”
“Don’t be fuckin’ cute, Pet—”
“Barrett.”
“What?”
“The name I’m using is Barrett. Never use another name. That’s the protocol. You should know that.”
Linton leaned back and gave me a nasty look. “You were not authorized to make contact with Travis Lee. You were only there to help us keep surveillance on him for one night. Do you have any fuckin’ idea how much your little stunt might have cost this investigation, Barrett?”
“Probably jack,” I said, flashing him a smile. “Nothing Lee said in that nightclub was going to end up in court. There’s nothing there you can use. And what do you think it would have cost the investigation if I’d sat on my ass and let him get his head kicked in?”
“Pretty dramatic. Those men could have rolled him and taken off. No harm, no foul. That’s probably how it would have played out.”
“That fat fuck was going to kick Lee in the head. No way he was walking away without doing that. Do you need me to file a report on last night?”
Linton glared at me and I knew what he was thinking. He was wondering if I knew what I was doing by asking a question like that, getting angrier and angrier when he kept coming up with the right answer. As soon as a report gets written, it gets filed and then it becomes discoverable evidence that needs to be turned over to defense lawyers when charges are laid.
But if nothing Travis Lee said in the Starlight was going to be part of the investigation, then Linton could skip the report and maybe even feel clean about what he was doing. He wasn’t burying evidence. Just not doing his job.
“So nothing at all from your barroom chat with one of the main suspects in this investigation?” he asked.
“He misses the old cod boats. The ones with the colored sails. If you can do something about bringing those back, he’d appreciate it.”
“A comedian. Somebody should have warned me. Hold off on the report.”
Linton rapped on the side panel of the van and the two other agents returned. They gave me only a cursory nod of their heads before slipping on their headphones. I stood and let one agent, the shorter of the two, take back his rolling desk stool. They were more wiretap and rolling-surveillance operatives than field agents, but they both carried weapons and I figured they both wanted to shoot Linton by now. They had been working with him for six months.
The van was set up with the bench on the passenger side of the vehicle and a bank of four video monitors suspended above a desk on the driver’s side. Three of the monitors were turned on and I bent to look at them. Two of them showed the street outside the surveillance van, front and back. The third showed an office, three men sitting around a desk. One of the men was Travis Lee.
“Want to see a bit of the show?” asked Linton.
“Sure.”
4
THE FBI’S PLAN was simple. A quarter-billion dollars in mystery money should have set off all sorts of warning bells at North Maine Savings and Loan. Not a single chime had rung.
The bank manager had to be part of the money-laundering scheme. His name was Robert Powell and he was a high school friend of Tucker Lee. I hadn’t seen any surveillance photos of him and leaned in to take a look—balding, wire-rimmed glasses, mid-fifties, a paunch that was present even though I couldn’t see it. Robert Powell was what central casting would have sent me if I’d asked for a small-town banker.
Linton had made his play three weeks ago and the banker caved in the first meeting, started crying and saying he had been forced into it, back in ’08, when it seemed like the sky was falling—the sky or capitalism, it had seemed the same thing back then. He’d only done it to keep the mills open. He kept crying and saying that until Linton showed him the ownership papers for a forty-four-foot Sea Ray that he moored at Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale and the deed for a Bahamian country home in his wife’s name. Then Robert Powell stopped crying and asked what it would take for full immunity.
Quite a bit, as it turned out, but Powell agreed to all of it. He would wear a wire. His phones could be tapped, home and office; a camera could be put in his office.
Most important, he agreed to kick the Lee money loose.
That was the play. The banker was going to tell the Lee brothers they needed to get their money out of his bank. They were going to be given less than a week to do it. Linton was going to sit back and see where they ran.
* * *
—
TRAVIS LEE DIDN’T look as bad as I would have expected. The suit looked freshly pressed. His hands weren’t shaking. Compared to his brother, you might even say he looked healthy.
Tucker Lee wasn’t that tall but he must have weighed close to two hundred fifty pounds, maybe more. The bank chairs were wooden and he kept crossing and recrossing his legs. The chairs were probably a tip of the hat to the forestry industry and what it meant to Birmingham. Tucker Lee looked like a man who could have done without the homage.
“Are these Henderson chairs, Bobby?” he asked the banker.
“They are, Tuck. Might have been your family’s wood that made them, back in the fifties.”
“I’m sure it was. We had that contract. It was Hendersons that were on the Charlie Rose Show. Till he got canned. These look like the same chairs.”
“Any idea how much a chair like that would be worth today, Tucker?”
“Don’t tell me, Bobby. It’ll just piss me off.”
The two men laughed. Travis Lee smiled but didn’t laugh. The office they sat in was nondescript in every way except for the wooden chairs and the black-and-white drawings on the walls, drawings depicting log runs from the nineteenth century. The old squared-timber runs. They had the same runs in the Upper Michigan Peninsula. Men would have died on every one of those runs, signing on in the spring and never knowing if they were coming home that summer. No different from combat. No different from heading out to sea.
They died after they were drowned or got crushed between the booms, or murdered by one of the criminal gangs that had sailed the St. John back then—the Shiners, the Travelers, the Pat Lowry Gang. There were a lot of ways to die on those squared-timber log runs.
It was squared timber—the wood once used to build naval ships—that made the Lee fortune. Andrew Lee arrived in Portland in 1845 from Aberdeen, a young forward-steerage merchant who quickly saw that the only serious money being made in Maine was by men who sold squared timber. In 1847 he bid on timber rights so high up the St. John River the land was nearly touching the Canadian border. No one had ever bothered bidding on those rights and Lee got them for a pittance.
The river was wild up there, with class III rapids, waterfalls and eddy pools. The cost of building dams and chutes to get timber to market was considered prohibitive. No one understood why Lee had purchased the rights, and as he had not been in Maine long, the more experienced lumbermen in Portland snickered at him. Wondered if the lad had bothered to look at a map.
Andrew Lee surprised everyone by not bothering to build chutes or dams. He just ran the rafts down the river and sold whatever wood made it through. It was so dangerous, it was a wonder anyone took the work, but that was another thing Andrew Lee figured out early: there were always desperate people in this world, and if you had left Europe, the comfort and predictable routine of Europe, for a cabin in the Maine woods, you were one of them.
Every spring men would come crawling out of the forest like bears from hibernation, eager to sign up for the Lee log runs, men with gaunt faces walking beside women with night-terror eyes holding the hands of children so malnourished you could almost hear their bones creak whenever a stiff wind passed over them. All that history had been alchemized into black-and-white etchings of men piloting Huck Finn rafts down calm rivers.
“Well, shall we get started, Bobby?” said Tucker Lee, repositioning himself in the chair one more time. “Travis and I are just dying to know why you needed to see us this morning.”
“Yes, thanks again for coming in so early. I’m afraid there are a few things we need to discuss.”
Powell looked nervous when he said that and Tucker Lee stared at him before saying, “What sort of things are we talking about, Bobby?”
“The sort of things you’re probably thinking about, Tuck. Our sideline business.”
“What about it?”
“I can’t do it anymore.”
Tucker stared at his brother, then back at the banker. “I don’t think you can just quit, Bobby. I can’t just quit. This is something that needs to be discussed. What is the problem exactly?”
