Chapter XL
CHAPTER XL
When I was certain that Louis and Angel would be showered and dressed, if not decent, I called to suggest we meet for lunch at Hot Suppa on Congress, since by that stage I’d been up and about for so long I was beginning to hallucinate.
I parked in the Walgreens lot, Walgreens now standing at one apex of a triangle dominated by two boutique hotels, Congress being the new location of choice for upscale, tony places to stay, leaving Commercial for the chains. The latest addition, the Longfellow, hosted a spa. I couldn’t recall ever having visited a spa. I was pretty sure Louis had, though, which he confirmed when I joined him and Angel at the restaurant.
“See this skin?” he said. “You don’t get skin like this at my age unless you care for it, ‘Black don’t crack’ or not. You use retinol?”
I told him that I didn’t think so.
“You got to use retinol, except it may be too late for you. Your face already looks like the sole of an old shoe.”
“Do you use retinol?” I asked Angel.
“He barely uses soap,” said Louis. “Hand him a bottle of retinol and he’d try to drink it.”
Angel, calmness personified, let the wave break over him and recede. He was too occupied by the menu. Hot Suppa formerly opened for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but not necessarily all three on any particular day, so it could be hard to remember which days it opened for which ones, or at all. Now it was strictly breakfast and lunch, with Southern food to rival even the Bayou Kitchen—though I wouldn’t have suggested this to Louis, who regarded the Bayou Kitchen as a sacred space. Louis ordered the shrimp and grits, Angel the chicken and waffles, and I the Hollis: two eggs, toast, bacon, with hash browns instead of grits. This caused Louis to wince, but I’d never understood grits and never would. They reminded me of something out of Dickens, gruel and grits not being unrelated.
“You see this?” asked Louis, sliding a newspaper across the table. The lead article concerned the Italianate Victoria Mansion, one of the loveliest buildings in the city, constructed as a summer home by a Mainer–turned–New Orleans hotelier named Ruggles Morse in the mid-1800s. It was common knowledge that Morse had been an ardent supporter of the Confederacy and permitted slave auctions in his hotels, in addition to owning slaves of his own. Before the Civil War, Louisiana was a slave economy. If you did business there, it was slave business, and some of that money had made it north to Portland, leaving its legacy in the form of the Victoria Mansion. Had it not been so beautiful, it wouldn’t have been so problematic.
“Do you have a solution to this thorny Portland quandary?” I asked Louis.
“Time-shares,” he replied. “We run an annual lottery for Black folk and the winners get to stay at the Victoria Mansion for a week, meals included.”
“A ticketed lottery?”
“Dollar a shot. We’re not greedy.”
“It’s certainly an unconventional approach,” I said. “I can have Moxie draw up some paperwork so it looks fully thought through when you present it to the board.”
“Sounds good,” said Louis. “I ought to give him a call, have him set up a meeting.”
“No, I think you should turn up cold. Make it a surprise.”
“So as not to give him time to get away, you mean?”
“That too. Then again, Moxie might agree just to see the looks on the faces of the board. He has a strange sense of humor.”
Our food arrived. While we ate, I updated Louis and Angel on what I’d learned from Jason Rybek, and for what it was worth, Donna Lawrence. In turn, Louis had made those promised calls regarding Devin Vaughn.
“Yeah, Vaughn is in trouble,” said Louis. “He’s overstretched financially because he didn’t have the resources to properly weather the pandemic, but he may also have made some bad calls on cryptocurrency.”
“That hardly makes him unique,” I said. “Smarter people than him have fallen into the same traps, and dumber people have survived them.”
“But how many of those people,” countered Louis, “also had a quarrel with a cartel boss?”
On his phone, Louis pulled up a mugshot of a man in his fifties who looked like he’d swallowed a swarm of wasps, but not before they’d done their best to sting him to death. Even his mother must have squeezed her eyes shut and hoped for the best before kissing him.
“Meet Blas Urrea,” said Louis, “contender for the title of Guerrero’s ugliest man. Oddly, it’s said that he’s restrained by cartel standards, but that’s a low bar. It probably just means that he kills quickly unless he’s bored.
“So: Devin Vaughn ultimately wanted to go straight, but to do that required significant investment to grow his legitimate activities, which meant he had to expand his criminal dealings, and that expansion inevitably resulted in disagreements—because for someone to gain, someone else has to lose. When it came to cannabis, even heroin and cocaine, he could reach an accommodation by agreeing to pay a percentage of the action to the locals, but other disputes proved harder to resolve, particularly once he expanded into illicit fentanyl, which is where the real money is right now.
“If you’re dealing in fentanyl, you’re buying from the PCC, a loose affiliation of drug lords based out of S?o Paulo in Brazil, of which Urrea is—or was, of which more in a moment—a member in good standing. Urrea started out strictly as a supplier, but he, like Vaughn, is also a fan of trade-based money laundering. Urrea similarly aspires to legitimacy, if not actual respectability, with clean investments to form the basis of his bequest to his family. He’d prefer to build that bequest in the United States. In Mexico, he’ll be bled dry, and there’s no guarantee that his kids will be able to hold on to whatever he’s built after he’s gone.”
I watched pigeons fighting over a discarded sandwich on the street outside. Just because a metaphor is handed to you on a plate doesn’t mean you should ignore it.
“Initially,” Louis continued, “Vaughn bought cocaine from Urrea, and later fentanyl produced in China and exported to Mexico, all packaged and ready to be shipped north. Vaughn was a good customer, so in return, Urrea introduced him to his contacts in the Colombian illegal mining sector, allowing Vaughn to purchase gold at forty to fifty percent of its standard value, with Urrea taking a commission for brokering the deal. Vaughn then used tame aggregators—more commission for Urrea—to blend the illegal gold with legally sourced stock, and they in turn passed it on to refiners, also friends of Urrea’s, who melted it together and re-formed it, so now there was no way to trace the origin of each bar. A portion of the gold, though, Vaughn arranged to be shipped directly to the U.S., concealed in batches of scrap aluminum because it seems it’s now easier to smuggle gold than hard currency.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Blas Urrea is also in the scrap metal business.”
“If something can be bought or sold at a profit, Urrea is interested, especially if illegality becomes virtually indistinguishable from legality. He really does want his family to be clean within a generation.”
“Urrea and Vaughn would appear to be brothers from other mothers,” I said. “So what went wrong?”
“Guided by Aldo Bern, Vaughn used to invest in traditional financial instruments: bonds, funds, and equities bought and held through platforms in the Caymans, the Virgin Islands, and Labuan, an offshore territory run by the Malaysians,” said Louis. “But Urrea encouraged Vaughn to approach Los Brokers, a money-laundering network out of Bogotá, Colombia. Los Brokers used front companies and fake export contracts to move funds for their clients, with a lot of Vaughn’s money passing through Mexico and Costa Rica before ending up in U.S. accounts—or, more commonly, being converted into cryptocurrency. And before you ask, Urrea received a kickback from clients he referred to Los Brokers and entrusted them with some of his cash. But Urrea may have a bank of his own in Mexico, so he didn’t need Los Brokers the way Vaughn did. Urrea also regarded Los Brokers as having too many moving parts, leaving the network vulnerable. In return for referrals, they gave him a favorable rate, which he took advantage of when it suited him.
“Then, in 2021, the Colombian government moved against Los Brokers. All their channels were frozen, and Vaughn lost heavily—could have been as much as twenty million dollars. Urrea, though, was untouched. He made the last of his transfers twelve hours before the Colombian authorities pounced, and later claimed it was pure coincidence. Maybe it was, but Vaughn chose to believe otherwise, just like he doesn’t believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. But Vaughn was a clown for taking Los Brokers at their word about crypto, because Urrea surely didn’t. Whether he shared his reservations with Vaughn remains to be seen, but my guess is he kept quiet.
“That seems to be the origin of the dispute between Vaughn and Urrea, exacerbated by Vaughn trying to expand into markets ostensibly controlled by other clients of the PCC, who went crying to their contacts, who in turn advised Urrea to bring Vaughn under control or cut him loose. As a result, Urrea may have decided to seriously damage Vaughn using Los Brokers and let his rivals or the U.S. government do the rest.”
Louis took a moment to order a refill of coffee but also to reconsider some aspect of what he’d just shared. I thought I might be able to follow the direction of his thoughts.
“Could Urrea have been trying to ruin Vaughn from the start?” I asked.
“If not from the start, then shortly after. Why work to build your own empire in the United States when you can take over someone else’s? That prospect must have been at the back of Urrea’s mind, but he might have waited until Vaughn became overextended before pulling the trigger.”
“And if we’ve come to that conclusion—”
“Vaughn will have reached it as well,” said Louis. “So his luck goes from good to bad, then bad to worse, and it doesn’t look set to recover anytime soon, all of which he blames, rightly or wrongly, on Blas Urrea. Now Vaughn is reduced to shedding assets at fire-sale prices, and he can’t lay hands on fentanyl because the PCC has cut him off. Vaughn is desperate and wants to hurt Urrea, because if he can make Urrea look weak, he may be able to work his way back into the PCC’s good graces.”
“You mentioned that Urrea was trying to secure his family’s future,” I said. “Which means he must have children, even grandchildren.”
“No grandchildren yet, but four kids—two girls, two boys—and nieces and nephews in the extended clan.”
“And they’re all safe?” I asked.
“The source I spoke to didn’t say otherwise, but I can check.”
“Can I ask who this source might be?”
“You can ask.”
“I may be better off not knowing.”
“If you’re worried about it getting back to Urrea that we’re asking questions, it won’t. My source has no love for him.”
The loneliness of a drug lord. No wonder singers wrote narcocorridos about them.
“Assuming Wyatt Riggins wasn’t lying to Rybek,” I said, “and Devin Vaughn paid a team to target children in Mexico, it would make sense that those children were somehow linked to Urrea. Vaughn would have no reason to avenge himself on anyone else down there.”
“If that was Vaughn’s intention,” said Louis, “he must have been very sure that whatever he did would leave Urrea with no room to maneuver. Urrea’s not a man to turn the other cheek, and not just because one is as ugly as the other.”
“But I still don’t understand what advantage Vaughn thought might be gained by kidnapping children,” I said. “What’s he going to do, hold them for ransom until Urrea admits that he set out to ruin him and makes up the losses?”
“People have engaged in kidnapping for less,” Angel pointed out.
This was undoubtedly true, but it still sat awkwardly with me. Nevertheless, if Vaughn’s financial situation was as wretched as it appeared, he might not have been thinking straight when he moved against Blas Urrea; that, or he figured his predicament couldn’t get any worse. On that front, at least, Vaughn was mistaken, since Urrea might be tempted to set aside his reputation for comparative restraint and skin him alive.
“What about Seeley, the one who bothered Riggins’s stepbrother?”
“I got silence when I dropped the name,” said Louis.
“What kind of silence?”
“The kind that doesn’t speak volumes. There was no echo. But if I was Blas Urrea, I’d have someone on this side of the border, someone I could trust—not Latino either, but white and superficially respectable.”
“Define ‘trust,’?” I said.
“Agreeing to a price for a service and keeping to the deal. Not playing off one side against the other.”
“A lawyer?”
“Too limited. Also, lawyers aren’t above introducing themselves as lawyers—they have no shame—and Seeley gave the preacher nothing. The American contact wouldn’t be a hired gun either, or not exclusively. More of a fixer.”
“But not above handling the rough stuff?”
“Not above it, but prefers not to. Clean hands.”
“So who gets blood on theirs?”
“Whoever Urrea has sent north to assist.”
“That’s quite the insight you have into the souls of men.”
“Women, too. I’m an equal-opportunity misanthrope.”
I’d finished eating, leaving half my food untouched. I’d overestimated my appetite, but I’d also lost some of what I originally had. I realized that, in a moment of weakness, I’d wanted Urrea’s hunters to catch Wyatt Riggins because Zetta Nadeau would be safe once they did.
“How much of this will you share with Zetta?” Louis asked.
“I may tell her that, like Jason Rybek, she should take a short vacation where nobody knows her and Spanish isn’t even spoken in a Mexican restaurant. After that, I’ll see if anyone in the U.S. military will talk to me about Riggins or provide a lead on his buddy and co-conspirator, Emmett Lucas. If I can get to Lucas, I’ll be a step closer to Riggins.”
“Or,” said Angel, “you could just advise Zetta to find another boyfriend, especially if Vaughn’s people can assure her he hasn’t been dumped in a barrel of acid by Urrea’s hunters. That would allow you to walk away.”
“I could do that,” I said, “but where would be the fun in it?”