The Aztec Avenger

CHAPTER FOUR

Denver had been a good boy. The Telecopier was waiting for me in my suite when I checked in to the Hotel Matamoros. It wasn’t time for the report yet, so I went down to the broad, flagstone terrace that overlooked the bay, sat down in a wide, wicker armchair and ordered a rum drink. I sipped it slowly as I looked out across the bay at the lights of the town that were just coming on, and at the dark indistinct hills rising above the town to the north.

I sat there for a long time, enjoying the evening and the silence and the lights of the town and the cool sweetness of the rum.

When I finally got up I went inside for a long, leisurely dinner, so it wasn’t until almost midnight that I got the call from Denver. I took it in my room.

I set the Telecopier up and put the handset in it Paper began coming out of the machine.

I scanned it as it slid out, until finally I had a small stack of paper in front of me. The machine stopped. I picked up the receiver again.

“That’s it,” said Denver. “I hope it’ll be of help to you. Anything else?”

“Not for the time being.”

“Then I have something for you. We just got the information in from one of our contacts in New York. Last night, three Frenchmen were picked up by Customs agents at Kennedy airport. They were caught trying to smuggle in a load of heroin. Their names are Andrè Michaud, Maurice Berthier and Etienne Duprè. Recognize them?”

“Yes,” I said, “They’re tied in with Stocelli on the French end of his narcotics operations.”

“You’ve been scanning the report as it came through,” Denver accused me.

I thought for a moment and then said, “It doesn’t make sense. These men are too big to carry the mer-chandise themselves. Why didn’t they use a courier?”

“We can’t figure that out, either. According to the report we got, the plane came in from Orly. Michaud picked up his bags at the luggage turntable and carried them over to the customs counter just as if he had nothing to hide. Three bags, but one of them was crammed with ten kilos of pure heroin.”

“How much did you say?” I interrupted.

“You heard me correctly. Ten kilos. You know what that’s worth?”

“Street value? About two million dollars. Wholesale? It’ll run about a hundred ten to a hundred twenty thousand for the importer. That’s why it’s so hard to believe.”

“You’d better believe it. Now comes the funny part. Michaud claimed he knew nothing about the heroin. He denied the bag was his.”

“Was it?”

“Well, it was an attaché case — one of the larger ones — and it had his initials stamped into it. And his name tag was fastened onto the handle.”

“What about the other two?”

“Same thing. Berthier was carrying twelve kilos in an overnight bag, and Duprè was carrying eight kilos. All together, it adds up to some thirty kilos of the purest heroin Customs has come across yet.”

“And they all say the same thing?”

“You guessed it. Each one puts his bag on the inspection counter bold as brass, just like there’s nothing in it but shirts and socks. They’re yelling it’s a frame-up.”

“It could be,” I said, reflecting, “except for one thing. You don’t have to blow some three hundred fifty thousand dollars’ worth of drugs to set up a frame. Half a kilo — hell, even a few ounces — is enough.”

“That’s the way Customs has it figured.”

“Was there a tip-off?”

“Not a word. They got the full search treatment because Customs knows about their operation in Marseille and has their names on the special list. And that’s what makes it even stranger. They knew they were on that list. They knew they’d get thoroughly examined by Customs, so how could they figure on getting away with it?”

I made no comment. Denver went on. “You’ll find it even more interesting when you put it together with another piece of information in the file we just transmitted to you. Last week, Stocelli was in Marseille. Guess whom he met with while he was there?”

“Michaud, Berthier, and Duprè,” I said. “Smart boy.” I was silent for a moment “You think it’s a coincidence?” Denver asked. “I don’t believe in coincidences,” I said flatly. “Neither do we.”

“Is that all?” I asked, and Denver said yes, wished me luck, and hung up. I went down and had another drink.

Two hours later, I was back in my room undressing when the phone rang again.

“I’ve been trying to reach you for a couple of hours,” Denver said with a touch of irritation in his voice.

“What’s up?”

“It’s hit the fan,” Denver said. “We’ve been getting reports in all day long from our men. So far, the tally is Duttoit, Torregrossa, Vignale, Gambetta, Maxie Klein and Solly Webber!”

I whistled in amazement Denver had just named six of the top narcotics racket men associated with Stocelli in his East Coast operations. “Give me the details.”

Denver took a deep breath. “This morning, at La-Guardia airport, the FBI arrested Raymond Duttoit Duttoit had come in on a flight from Montreal. Duttoit was searched and they found an airport locker key in his overcoat pocket. The suitcase in the locker was packed with twenty kilos of pure heroin.”

“Go on.”

“Early this afternoon, Vinnie Torregrossa received a carton at his home in Westchester. It was delivered by a regular United Parcel Service van. He barely had time to open it when he was raided by agents from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs who were acting on a tip. The carton held fifteen kilos of horse!

“Gambetta and Vignale were arrested this evening around seven o’clock by New York narco squad police,” he continued.

“They’d been tipped off by telephone. They picked those two up in Gambetta’s car in mid town Manhattan and found twenty-two kilos of heroin packed into the spare tire compartment in the trunk.”

I said nothing while Denver went on with his recital.

“About ten o’clock tonight, the Feds walked in on Maxie Klein’s hotel penthouse apartment in Miami Beach. Klein and his partner, Webber, had just finished eating dinner. The agents found fifteen kilos of horse in the compartment of the dining table, which the waiter had brought up with dinner less than an hour before.”

Denver paused, waiting for me to say something.

“It’s pretty obvious that they’ve been set up,” I mused.

“Sure,” Denver agreed. “Not only were the Feds and the local police tipped off, but so were the newspapers. We had one of our news bureau reporters at every one of these pick-ups. The story will be a page-one lead in every paper in the country tomorrow. It’s already on the air.”

“Will the arrests stick?

“I think so,” said Denver after a moment’s thought. “They’re all screaming frame-up, but the Feds and the local cops “have been waiting a long time to nail these guys. Yes, I think they’ll make it stick.”

I did some mental arithmetic. “That’s a total of one hundred and two kilos of heroin,” I said, “if you include what they picked up from Michaud Berthier, and Duprè two days ago.”

“Right on the nose,” said Denver. “With the stuff having a street value of between two hundred and two hundred twenty thousand dollars a kilo, it adds up to well over twenty-one million dollars. Hell, even at Stocelli’s cost of ten to twelve thousand a kilo when he imports it from Marseille, that’s more than a million one hundred thousand dollars, and that’s a lot of scratch!”

“Someone got hurt,” I commented

“Want to hear the rest of it?”

“Go ahead.”

“Did you know that Stocelli was in Montreal yesterday?”

“Yes. I talked to him there.”

“Did you know that he met with Raymond Duttoit while he was there?”

“No.” But with the information Denver had just given me, I didn’t find that too surprising.

“Or that the day before he met with Duttoit, Stocelli was in Miami Beach meeting with Maxie Klein and Solly Webber?”

“No.”

“Or that the week after he came back from France, he met with both Torregrossa in Westchester and with Vignale and Gambetta in Brooklyn?”

“How the hell do you know all this about Stocelli?”

I asked.

“Gregorius had us put a tail on Stocelli about three weeks ago,” Denver explained. “We’ve had two-and three-man teams tailing him twenty-four hours a day since then.” He chuckled. “I can tell you how many times a day he went to the john and how many pieces of paper he used.”

“Quit bragging,” I told him. “I know how good the information service is.”

“All right,” said Denver. “Now, here’s one I’ve been saving for you. Just before he was picked up by the Feds, Maxie Klein talked to Hugo Donati in Cleveland. Maxie asked the Commission to put out a contract on Stocelli. He was told it was already in the works.”

“Why?”

“Because Maxie was worried that Stocelli had framed Michaud, Berthier, and Duprè. He heard about Torregrossa, Vignale and Gambetta on the radio. He figured that Stocelli had set them up and that he was next.”

With good-humored sarcasm I said, “I suppose Maxie Klein called and told you personally what he’d said to Donati?”

“Just about,” said Denver with a laugh. “Ever since Maxie met with Stocelli, we’ve been tapping his phones.”

“Maxie’s not stupid enough to use the telephones in his hotel suite for a call like that,” I pointed out. “He’d have used.an outside paybooth.”

“He did,” said Denver, “but he’s careless enough to use the same paybooth more than once. We put taps on half a dozen booths that we found him using steadily in the last couple of days. It paid off tonight.”

I couldn’t blame Denver for feeling smug. His men had done a damned fine job.

“How do you figure it?” I asked, “You think Stocelli’s been fingering his own associates?”

“It sure looks that way, doesn’t it? And the Commission seems to think that way, too, since they’ve put out a contract on him. Stocelli’s a dead man.”

“Maybe,” I said, noncomittally. “He also heads one of the biggest families in the country. It’s not going to be easy for them to get to him. Anything else?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“I guess so,” I said. “If anything else breaks, let me know.”

I put down the telephone thoughtfully and sat in the armchair on the small balcony outside my window. I lit a cigarette, staring into the darkness of the soft Mexican night and reviewing the information that had been dropped on me so suddenly.

If what Denver had said was true — if there was a contract out on Stocelli — then he’d have his hands full for months to come. So much that he wouldn’t have time to bother Gregorius. In that case, my job was done.

Yet it seemed too simple, too fortuitous a solution to Gregorius’ problem.

I went over the facts again. And doubts began creeping into my mind.

If Stocelli really had set up the frames, he would have known that his own life was in danger. He’d have known that he’d have to go to ground until the heat disappeared. Certainly, he’d never come down here to Acapulco so openly.

It didn’t make sense.

Question: Where the hell would he go to get a hundred and two kilos of horse? That’s a lot of heroin. He wouldn’t get it from his Marseille friends — not if he was going to use it to frame them. And if he went to other sources, they’d have heard about so big a buy.

Question: Where would he lay his hands on more than a million dollars in cash to make the buy? Even in the underworld of the Mafia and the Syndicate, that kind of cash is hard to come by in one lump sum and in small, untraceable bills. No one takes checks and no one offers credit!

Question: Where would he have stored the stuff? Why hadn’t word gotten around about the stuff before it had been planted? Interpol, the French narcotics bureau — L’Office Central Pour la Suppression du traffic des Stupefiants — our own U.S. Department of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs — all should have heard about it beforehand from their vast networks of paid informers.

Another thought: If Stocelli could write off that large an amount of heroin, did it mean that he could lay his hands on even larger quantities?

Now, that was really something to produce chills in a person’s spinel.

Those questions and their numerous possible answers went around and around in my mind, like a riderless carousel with the wooden horses prancing up and down on their steel poles, and as fast as I reached for one idea, another would pop up that seemed more logical.

I finally became lost in a maze of frustration.

The biggest question of all was why Hawk had lent me to Gregorius? The clue lay in the. phrase, “lend-lease.” I was being lent, and Hawk was going to get something in return for my services. What?

And more than that. “No AXE” meant I couldn’t call on AXE’s facilities or manpower. This was strictly a private venture. Hawk was telling me that I was on my own!

Okay. I could understand that. AXE is a U.S. government super-secret agency, and this was definitely not a government job. So, no calls to Washington. No back-up men. Nobody to clean up the mess after me.

Just me, Wilhelmina, Hugo, and, of course, Pierre.

I finally said to hell with it and went downstairs to enjoy one last, pleasant drink on the terrace before I turned in for the night.