Cool in Tucson (12 page)

Aside from the impossibility of arguing with his grandfather at such a time, Rudy was glad enough to drop out of tenth grade.  Like most of the men in his family he could read and write adequately, and add and subtract rapidly in his head, and considered all other formal education a mysterious nuisance.  He hated the thought of working for his overbearing grandfather, but promised himself it would not be for long.

Raymundo was astounded by how good Rudy turned out to be at the job.  Rudy wasn’t surprised at all; he had always known he was a born entrepreneur, quick to learn, tireless and shrewd in the pursuit of profit.  His sisters and classmates were not surprised either.  Rudy had always grabbed the extra dish of flan and hogged the ball. 

By the end of the year, standing beside his grandfather at his father’s funeral, Rudy had already figured out how to make a fortune in the tire business.

The first move was the hardest because Raymundo was a cautious man, and even Rudy’s mother, whose resentment of the old man matched his contempt for her, would not listen to her son’s plan to stage an open revolt. 

“Your father loved him and made me promise to look after him,” she said, “I would go to Hell.”  She crossed herself and added thoughtfully, “But talk to the old bastard again, flatter him if you have to.  It’s a good idea.”

His grandfather did not dispute his suggestion that an auto repair shop would help the tire store and vice versa.  But it was still too risky, he said, Rudy was too young.  His attitude changed when Rudy said, of the man whose shop he wanted to buy, “Cisneros says if you’re not up to working full time any more maybe he’ll buy you out and make me a partner, would you like that?”  That was a lie; Cisneros had a bad heart and was only hanging on till he could sell, but Raymundo didn’t find that out until later.  When he did, he began to watch his grandson more carefully, pleased that his acquisitiveness had been passed along but wary of the extra edge of ruthlessness Rudy had shown him.  He told his wife, “Who would ever have expected Alberto to nurture a viper?” 

Raymundo had great credit at the bank, so Rudy made the deal easily for less than the asking price.  He might have haggled it lower but the purchase price, he knew, was almost irrelevant, because as soon as he was out from under his grandfather’s eye in a separate store he began to set up the part of the deal he never told his mother about.

He started with small orders of marijuana that he could receive and dispense himself to a growing circle of friends.  At first he sold only to people he knew well, but as soon as he saw the potential he began accepting referrals.  He ran all the cash through the till, ringing it up as brake linings, motor tune-ups, lube jobs.  That made it all taxable but he compensated with some very creative paid-outs, so that most of the extra cash ended up being just that, extra.  By the time his grandfather was ready to retire, Rudy had paid off the second shop and was able to arrange a nice pension for the old man. 

“
Mire
,” Raymundo said when they concluded the deal, “for the record I am not such a fool as you think, I know you have not made all this money fixing old cars.  You had better watch your back from now on, Señor Smart Pants, I will not be here to turn away questions.”  They regarded each other coldly for a moment before Rudy nodded.  Raymundo walked out of the store where he had spent his whole working life and never came near it again.

With access to both cash registers Rudy could handle more dope, so he hired a pusher named Brody, an outcast and bully from just outside the barrio who also helped fend off would-be competitors.  Later the same year he hired Emilio Sanchez, an unassuming distant cousin who was happy to sell tires in the afternoon and dope in the evening.  Emilio enjoyed both trades because they fed his real vocation, which was gossip.  Gradually he sold less and less as he became, in effect, the company spy.  Rudy loved getting these little extras from the two of them, but he tired of the constant arguments their odd working arrangements generated, so from then on he set up his drug traffickers as franchisees, who bought from him and sold on their own.   

By the time his fourth child was born, Rudy was looking around for another business.  And it had to be something bigger, because he was getting into the cocaine trade.  He had hesitated a long time because it felt like roller-skating at the edge of a cliff; cocaine suppliers were stony-eyed killers who would cut off your head if they got angry.  Some of them would do it for fun on the days they’d been using the product themselves. But weed was becoming so common that the price was coming down, there was less money in it every year.  Profits in the cocaine business, on the other hand, were extraordinary; the prices people would pay for this crazy white powder were freaking unbelievable compared to what they’d give for something they really needed like a wheel alignment.  As soon as he started dealing coke he saw that the biggest problem was going to be hiding the money.

He bought a restaurant and bar where he could launder a large volume of cash, and thought hard about the problems of dealing with cocaine suppliers.  An important component of his success had always been his ability to accept the truth about himself, like the fact that although he was ruthless enough about manipulating people and cheating the government, he knew next to nothing about killing and was probably too old to learn.  That was a problem because the men he was dealing with now were like jungle cats, they would pounce if they sensed any weakness. 

He made inquiries and hired Tilly Stubbs, who had been in and out of the prison systems of several states since the age of fourteen.  He was new to Tucson; Sanchez found him by following a rumor about a monstrous-looking thug who threw two men out of a bar on East Speedway.  “Two at once into the middle of the street during heavy traffic,” Sanchez told Rudy.  “One of them with a broken jaw.”

“I don’t need no crazy guys,” Rudy said.

“He ain’t crazy.  He was gone by the time the cops got there.”

“What was he fighting about?”

“They were making fun of his looks.”

“Oh?  What about his looks?”

“Somebody beat him up a lot when he was a kid, I guess.  His head’s kinda funny-looking.” 

Rudy met him in front of the Sears Store in the Tucson Mall.  They walked through the aisles of jeans and bras, talking softly.  For the job Rudy had in mind, Tilly’s looks were perfect: a deeply dented forehead, a cauliflower ear and a nose that angled noticeably to the left.  He had hands like anvils, too, and slabs of muscle across his chest and shoulders.  He was ugly and thuggish but not stupid.  Rudy offered a thousand a month more than he had intended, gave him cash in advance and a cell phone. 

He was very glad to have Tilly along the day, a month later, when two hard-eyed couriers tried to take Rudy’s money and skip the delivery.  When he saw that Tilly had arranged to have the other two enforcers in port-a-potties near the park table where the delivery took place, he congratulated himself on hiring a planner.  Brody knew a spot in the desert where a couple of bodies could be quickly buried, and Tilly brought back the heads of the hard-eyed men as Rudy had asked.  

Rudy stuffed the correct payment in their open mouths, wrapped them in plastic so they wouldn’t leak and Fed-Exed them to their employer with a note saying, “Next time send the honest ones.”  The note was in bad Spanish because Rudy couldn’t ask his elders for help, but the dealer in Hermosillo got the message and Rudy had no more trouble with his shipments. 

The day after he mailed the heads, Tilly asked for a sizeable raise in pay.  Usually Rudy haggled tirelessly over raises, inserting so many new demands on the employee that he ended up almost even or sometimes a little ahead.  But he was so pleased with Tilly’s skill sets that he gave him his raise without argument. 

Sanchez and Brody gained status from that day’s work, too; Rudy began to treat them less like gofers and more like the full-fledged goons they were turning into.  Each of the four had knowledge, now, that was worth a death sentence for the others, from either the government or the drug trade, depending.  Bound together in a new, edgy equilibrium, they watched each other carefully, and before long Sanchez and Brody got raises, too.         

But in spite of the added expenses, the money kept piling up; Rudy spent most of his time now moving cash around.  Outwardly he remained a small dealer in car parts and food, but over the next couple of years he bought silent partnerships in another bar, two fast-food restaurants and a liquor store. 

He made occasional mistakes, like buying a shop called Fancy Wheels, which he off-loaded again quickly when he found out it really did gross as much as the previous owner had claimed.  The male youth of Tucson, it turned out, would scrimp on new clothes and even beer and weed in order to put useless flashy extras on their rides.  Rudy couldn’t insert much drug money into the remarkable cash flow at Fancy Wheels, nor at Candy, the lap-dancing bar downtown that was his other mistake. 

Cash flow wasn’t all he underestimated at Candy.  Having been absorbed in the pursuit of money since puberty, he had no idea, until they were right under his nose, what an impact all those bare backsides would have on his libido.  

“Might as well have some today,” his new partner said, seeing him looking, “you ain’t gonna be no younger tomorrow.” 

Soon he had a girlfriend named Steffi and more expenses, but even so he was running out of places to hide the money till he found Pappy Grimes.  

Actually Sanchez found him, following Rudy’s precise instructions.  “I need me a big-time Anglo,” Rudy told him, “somebody from downtown that’s got a problem.  I ain’t too fussy what problem, except gambling or pussy’d be better than drugs or liquor. That way he’s got his brain working when it ain’t on that one stupid habit, you see what I’m saying?”

Sanchez passed a happy week sitting around bars downtown, trading obscene jokes and sordid conjecture with a parade of envious louts who had bar gossip instead of a life.  He came back with the name of Sean “Pappy” Grimes, an auto dealer with two big, glossy dealerships, one new and one used, on Auto Mall Road.  An entrepreneur with plenty of public persona, who featured himself in his constant advertising, he was also a showy philanthropist whose name appeared often attached to innovative charities like dogs for blind kids and dream trips for terminal cancer patients. 

What the advertising and self-promotion didn’t say was that he had gambled his way to the brink of bankruptcy.  He bet on all pro sports worldwide, played high-stakes poker locally at the Indian casinos and flew to Vegas once a month for long weekends.  Shrewd in business, he was in deep denial about his lack of skill as a gambler, and the word on the street, frequently doubted but still persistent among barflies, was that his losses were threatening to destroy his prosperous and comfortable lifestyle. 

“Beautiful,” Rudy said, when Sanchez came back with the story.  He slid a couple of large bills into Sanchez’ shirt pocket.  “Take the day off and get drunk, you did good.”   

Grimes was such a perfect fit that Rudy suspected he must be a trap.  He hired a private detective, who confirmed Sanchez’s report that Pappy was mortgaged to the hilt and living on the float from his huge cash flow.  “But he’s in trouble now,” the detective said, “because electronic money transfers are making float go away.” 

Rudy didn’t want to talk in Pappy’s office, so he made an appointment to discuss the purchase of a fleet of used cars for his crew and three of his nephews.  He told Pappy’s secretary, “Tell your boss Mr. Ortiz will only deal with the owner.” 

Grimes had the usual cluster of short-term loans coming due.  He had spent the last two days reviewing inventory on his used lot, marking cars that hadn’t moved in sixty days, getting ready to send them to the auction block.  But he was afraid the money wouldn’t arrive soon enough to keep the banks off his back.

Grimes rarely did his own selling any more, but Rudy had made the deal sound fairly large, and Pappy’s cash crunch was approaching the point of pain.  So he chuckled and said, “Well, criminy, I guess if the fella wants a little extra attention—what the hay, we can do that.”  That was his style, folksy.  He ran with high rollers but he had made a fortune by staying, as he often said, just as plain as an old shoe.  

He peeked out into his waiting room when his secretary said Mr. Ortiz was here, and saw Rudy out there in his black cowboy hat and dark glasses, black pants tucked into his gaudy boots.  Grimes thought he was kind of a hoot, and that this transaction would make a good story for the golf course later.  He came out of his office with his arms spread wide and his smile at full gleam, saying, “Well, hey there, neighbor, how are things in South Tucson, by golly?”