Ground Truth (11 page)

Buena suerte, my ass. We’ll see who needs good luck the most.

JACK PULLED OFF Paseo Triumfo de la Republica into the drive of the pink and beige Hotel Rialto. Next to the main entrance a sign bolted to the cut stone read,
“Five Star ***** Finest Hotel in Juarez.”
He noticed that the guest parking lot had a gatehouse and a guard with a very ugly automatic shotgun on a sling. Wonder what the second finest hotel is like? That guard might need a machine gun.

At the front desk, he said to the clerk, “Good evening. I have a reservation. Name’s Strider.”

After asking twice for the spelling of his name, the clerk frowned and announced that no such reservation existed.

“Any good room is fine.”

“I’m very sorry,
señor.
The hotel is full, well almost full.”

“What do you mean, almost?”

“The only room we have left is the
El Presidente
Suite, but it’s our most expensive suite. Would you like that one,
señor?”
The clerk’s smug smile confirmed that his squeeze play worked on Americans more often than not.

He was being hustled, but getting angry wouldn’t help, and he wasn’t in the mood to search for another hotel.

“That will be fine. You said you can’t find my reservation, but the company that booked it for me has it, so that’s the rate I’ll pay for the suite. Correct?”

The clerk’s smug look vanished, replaced by an obsequious smile. Without missing a beat, he said, “Of course, sir.”

A mosaic path of colored stones in an Aztec pattern led through an impeccable garden and alongside a swimming pool shaped like a dolphin. Midway down, the bellman swept open the door of the
El Presidente
Suite. On an oval table in the center of the room stood a bottle of Porfidio tequila with a ribbon around its neck: “Compliments from the Management. We are here to serve you.”

He’d had his fill of Juarez hospitality. Guzman, Montana, now this. What the hell was coming up tomorrow?

Chapter 20

July 2

8:00 a.m.

JACK STRODE INTO the Admin Building at Palmer Industries at eight a.m. As he neared Montana’s office, a strikingly beautiful woman called to him.

“Good morning. I am Ana-Maria Archuletta. May I take you to your . . . office?”

Her smile improved his state of mind considerably, but that lasted only until she showed him to a small cubicle where the sun blazed in through a propped-open window. Just outside, eighteen-wheelers rolled past through waves of exhaust. His nostrils burned.

“This is where
Señor
Montana said for me to take you,” Ana-Maria told him in clear, schoolbook English. “I reminded him the air-conditioning is broken but—I’m sorry. If I can help you, please ask.” She left, obviously embarrassed.

He could insist on a better workspace, even commandeer one, but that would put Ana-Maria in a bind. Montana had sent him a message. He’d find a way to return the favor.

She’d stacked the metal desk high with neatly-labeled folders full of files, graphs, schedules and receipts. Now it was up to him to evaluate their credibility. If Montana had laid down a smoke screen, he had to penetrate it.

Four hours later he leaned back from his laptop and rubbed his eyes. No smoking gun, nothing that proved Palmer Industries had dealt with hazardous waste illegally.

He stood and looked out the window, idly watching a truck marked Brown & Root Chemical leaving the yard.

The records Montana had sent to him in Mexico City were useless. The ones in front of him now were organized and seemingly comprehensive, but were they authentic? He’d come to Juarez to find a way to defend Palmer Industries. If these records were valid, they could help him keep the plant open. Even if there were minor violations, he’d convince Arthur it was in his best interests to clean them up.

But Roberto Alvarez had acted as though he were holding aces. So if these records were bogus, Alvarez probably had a trap ready to discredit the records and the lawyer who put them forward.

He looked at the situation in another way. The Palmer plant is a big business. To run it, Montana had to keep real books to monitor costs, pay bills, detect theft, whatever. If these records were fake, he had to have a real set, probably locked up somewhere. He’d hide them from his own lawyer because they’d convict him.

He’d taught his law students that a client who lies to his lawyer is like a hand grenade with the pin out. He thinks he can game the system, including his own lawyer. Once in a while he gets away with it. More often, the lie blows up the case and takes the lawyer with it. Now, here he was with a client who might be lying through his smile.

Next step? Find out if there was another set of records stashed away somewhere. If so, and they were incriminating, that would be a turning point. He wouldn’t walk away and pretend he’d seen nothing. Instead, he’d dump copies of the relevant parts in Sinclair’s lap so he could deal with his client.

He remembered Ana-Maria saying, “If I can help you, please ask.” If there were skeletons, Ana-Maria would know in which closet. But why would she reveal anything about Palmer if it could sink the company?

The stakes were so high that if he had to “use” her, that’s the way it would be. He needed to get her alone.

Chapter 21

July 2

1:00 p.m.

JACK TWISTED THE cork out of a bottle of white wine and filled two glasses. This was his chance to persuade Ana-Maria to reveal Montana’s secrets. “I wanted to take you to a nice restaurant.”

She sat in a folding chair next to the desk in his cubicle. After a moment she said, “In a restaurant, many eyes would see us together. Someone would tell someone. Anyway, look at this feast you brought from Café Carmella.” She gestured at the half dozen containers on the desk. “
Señor
Montana has never even offered me a beer.” She cocked her head. “May I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Some people say you are spy for the San Francisco home office, others say maybe for
Señor
Montana. Which is it,
Señor
Strider?

That hit home. He felt exactly like a spy. “I’m a lawyer from San Francisco, and I’m here to help solve a problem for Palmer Industries.”

She looked pensive. Maybe she believed him. Maybe not.

“Tell me about San Francisco.”

“It’s on a peninsula almost surrounded by water, the Pacific Ocean to the west, the Bay to the east.”

“Juarez is in a desert,” she said, “and the water in the Rio Grande would eat the soles off your shoes. Where I came from, the mountain streams are sweet and full.”

For a moment, her large dark eyes seemed focused on a distant place. Her shiny brown hair, cut short, showed off her graceful neck.

“Years ago, the Bay was so polluted the government started enforcing laws against dumping anything toxic into the water. Now the Bay is clean. I read somewhere that some
maquilas
dump chemicals and other toxic garbage into ponds or even on the ground.”

“Some of them don’t care what damage they do. My cousin works in a factory where they use much, much water to make blue jeans look worn out. The factory is so hot that one girl used the wash water to soak her headband so she could suck on it. She started throwing up. The floor manager took her away. My cousin never saw her again.”

“Didn’t the other workers complain?”

“Most workers are girls who left a husband and children in a village to come to the borderland to earn a living. If they say anything, they get fired. So they are silent.”

“I understand,” was all he could say. But what he thought about were the rich businessmen and power-hungry legislators that make rules that benefit themselves, indifferent to how they affect millions of ordinary people they will never see. He was disgusted.

“But you
don’t
understand,” she replied. “You see only what you see as you drive from your fancy hotel to this plant. You don’t see real life in Juarez. At your home, you’re surrounded by water. In Juarez, we sometimes don’t have enough water to cook our meals or wash our bodies, even to drink. It’s getting worse.”

“What’s the government doing about that?”

“The President in Mexico City pays no attention to us. In Chihuahua, the state governor says it would cost ten billion pesos to bring water from beyond the mountains, and they don’t even have enough money to fix the traffic lights. The Mayor claims the problem was made up by American consultants. Others say, ‘The water still comes out of the wells, more salty, but still coming.’ Everybody tells us ‘No problem, don’t worry about it.’”

“We should worry a lot more about it,” Jack told her. “The number of places around the world that are beginning to run out of water is growing so quickly that I taught my students about it.”

She nodded, but didn’t speak, so he said, “I’m sorry, but right now I need your help with something that’s happening in this plant. The records on this desk aren’t the real records for the company. I need you to tell me what’s really going on.”

He was pessimistic as he waited for her response. Montana signs her paycheck, so she’d probably report these questions to him. So what? He wasn’t going to win a popularity contest with Montana anyway.

She crossed her arms. Her face closed. “I have nothing to say,
Señor
Strider.” She looked at her wristwatch, then down at the table.

“Ana-Maria, if PROFEPA closes this plant, all of you will lose your jobs. If you know anything that can help prevent that, you should tell me. I want to help.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “Then why did
Señor
Montana tell me not to do anything for you except what he said?”

“Maybe because he’s doing something he doesn’t want me to know about. If he’s dumping hazardous waste illegally, he’s poisoning the water supply. You need to help me stop that.”

She looked at him as if trying to read his mind. “Why would you care what happens to people here? You don’t know us.”

This was his chance to get her on his side. “Then take me into the city. Show me what I should see. Help me understand.”

“I’m sorry,” she said softly, “but I don’t trust you.”

“I’ll give you one thousand pesos to drive around with me for a couple of hours. Just drive, nothing else.” It sounded crass, but he didn’t know what else to do. If she thought Montana was guilty of something, she might want to keep it concealed. Or she might want to help the
gringo
fix the problem. If she thought Montana was clean, she’d walk away.

She stood. “I’ll tell my best friend Juanita I’m going with you. At five o’clock, I’ll be walking somewhere past the first bus stop down the road to the right. Pick me up there.”

“I will.”

“
Señor
Strider. I promise nothing.”

Shortly after five, Ana-Maria settled into the Town Car without a word, so he kept driving, waiting for directions. After a couple of miles, she told him to turn off onto a two-lane road so full of craters it looked as if it had been bombed. When the road led through the city dump, he powered the windows up to reduce the odor and the din from heavy machinery compacting mountains of debris. They rounded a gravel bank, and straight ahead was a sprawling landscape of human habitation that almost looked like a continuation of the dump.

“Anapra,” Ana-Maria said as if it were a dirty word, gesturing toward makeshift homes scattered on harsh, barren soil. “Years ago, the city ended at the other side of the dump, so poor people coming from the country wound up here. Now forty thousand live in Anapra. The first ones built homes from wood pallets and cardboard boxes. They flattened soft drink and beer cans to make the roof. Where you see concrete blocks and tarpaper, those people have some money. In summer, it’s over one hundred degrees.”

“Is this where you live?” He immediately wished he hadn’t asked. Instead of showing that he empathized with anyone forced to live in these conditions, his question sounded judgmental.

“Yes. Many people in Anapra work in the
maquilas.
This is all they can afford on forty dollars a week.”

Forty dollars a week?
He pictured the Palmer brothers in expensive suits paid for by the sweat of these people.

“Now it is getting worse. A big drug cartel has moved in. They set up crack houses where they recruit kids to deliver drugs. Some people say Anapra is like a ‘border motel’ because so many drug smugglers hide here before they sneak across the border. No one here is safe, especially not women.

“They call Juarez the ‘Murder Capital of the Americas.’ Men stinking with tequila kill each other like animals. The
narcotraficantes—
the cartels, the police, and the army—they are at war with each other. Thousands murdered. If you get in the way, you die. In the past few years, more than three hundred women in Juarez have been murdered. Most of them raped and cut, mostly dumped by the river, some on the side of a road, thrown out of cars like garbage. Women disappear. One day they’re here, then no more.”

She was silent for a minute, then continued, “The fat police chief says, ‘This one went back to her village; that one went across the border.’ For a while, the police blamed the murders on local bus drivers, then on bad men from El Paso. But they don’t really want to know. They’re afraid they might catch someone from the cartels they don’t want to catch. So every case is ‘unsolved.’ You know those white crosses along the road from the Hotel Rialto? Some father or brother drove each cross into the ground to mark the place where a dead daughter or sister was found. You saw those crosses but you didn’t understand.

“In my village, I taught English and history in a small school, but I could barely live on what they paid. So I came here. By God’s will, I have no children. When mothers go to the border, children stay with relatives or wind up in places that are like orphanages. Some disappear. People say they are kidnapped or even sold.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I hate Juarez, but I have to stay.”

Jack had seen poverty in many cities around the world, cities filled with people who were desperate but not defeated, who endured. But the fact that Anapra was only a few hundred yards from the United States made it more shocking. But it was her words “kidnapped” and “sold” that cut deepest. In his gut, he suspected that some of those missing children had been taken from Salina Cruz aboard
Pacific Dawn.
In a flash it all came back: Peck’s brains splattered on the law books, Calder’s fury in the horse arena, the shame he felt.

To break out of the foul memories, he pointed at the maze of electric wires crossing over each other to connect the houses. He imagined a new arrival climbing on top of a truck after dark to hook his house into any wire he could reach. As they passed, one of the junctions sparked and popped.

She heard it too. “Sometimes a line breaks and burns a child. The city people say, ‘Nobody pays, so we don’t care.’”

We don’t care. Those words summed up so much.
He gripped the steering wheel tighter as he drove slowly down the main road that cut Anapra in half. No trees. Nothing green. Summer heat radiating from the tin roofs and barren hillsides.

“At least the city provides water, doesn’t it?”

“Water is supposed to come free from city trucks, but if you don’t pay
morditas,
bribes, the drivers won’t stop at your house. They’re supposed to come once a week but they don’t come that often. In summer, when we need water the most, they don’t come at all.”

“What do you do?”

“In Anapra, four families own everything, even the land under our houses. One of their businesses is selling water. Drivers who work for the four families charge much more to fill the
pileta.”

“Pileta?”

“See those old 55-gallon drums? They come from the dump, so they don’t have tops. That’s what we use to store water.”

“Aren’t there any wells here?”

“The old wells dried up, and there’s no money to drill new ones. Everyone has diarrhea. Some kids die from it. Father Alarcone at Santa Lucia Church prays, but that’s all he does. Look.” She pointed up the street. “Here comes one of the family’s water trucks.”

The truck pulled to the curb and the driver swung down from the cab, flipped the switch on a pump, and hauled a hose toward a shack covered in flaking yellow stucco. He wore greasy black trousers and no shirt. Sweat soaked his hairy shoulders. He shouted in the direction of the doorway covered with a length of faded green fabric.

“He won’t pump until he gets his money,” Ana-Maria told him.

A woman in her early twenties stepped out, one little girl on her hip, another at her side. Jack couldn’t hear what she said, but the driver shouted and shook his fist at her. She offered the man a handful of pesos. He stuffed them into his pants pocket, but instead of filling the drum he stomped back to the truck and started shoving the hose into its storage space. The woman ran to his side, crying and pointing to her children, obviously begging.

“What’s going on?”

“Her children are sick and must have water. He took the money she had but says it’s not enough. He’s going to keep her money and sell the water to someone else.”

Jack was out of the Town Car in a second. A few long strides took him to the truck driver.

“Fill it up.” He pointed to the metal drum. “I’ll pay the rest.” When he repeated that in Spanish, the driver began yelling and gave him the finger, pumping his right fist up and down.

Ana-Maria ran up. “We need to get out of here. Can’t you see he’s high?” She pulled hard at his arm.

He hadn’t recognized that the man was stoked on something, but there was no backing down. “I want that water delivered. Tell him I’ll pay.”

Frowning, Ana-Maria did as he asked.

The man wiped his hand across his forehead, whipped the sweat into Ana-Maria’s face, and swung a beefy roundhouse right that landed like a club on Jack’s shoulder. Jack stumbled sideways, got his feet tangled and fell heavily on his butt. He rolled to his right and up. The driver came at him with a bellow, paws widespread like a grizzly intending to wrestle him to the ground. Jack moved quickly to the side, grabbed a fistful of the man’s mat of hair and hurled him forward, driving him face first into the rough gravel. The burly man got to all fours, then slowly onto his feet, shaking his head side-to-side. He wiped blood and grit from his face and backed away, both hands raised, palms out. He was done.

Jack pointed to the drum. The driver snarled, but filled it. As the water level reached the top, Jack saw dead cockroaches floating.

Swallowing hard, he asked Ana-Maria, “How much?”

She told him. He was tempted to throw the money on the ground, but held it out instead. The driver snatched it, climbed into the cab of his truck and rolled away.

Jack had acted fast, without thought. No negotiations. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that.
Damn, that felt good.

Hands on her hips Ana-Maria said, “You’re a fool. That man could have killed you. Over what? And next week he’ll take it out on that woman. You don’t understand this place. You can’t fix everything.”

That was a tough message to accept. He was programmed to fix things.

“Listen, I have an idea. You mentioned Father Alarcone. Will you take me to meet him?”