Joe Dillard: Reasonable Fear Part 10

I got out of the car, and he recognized me immediately. His face seemed to relax as he walked past the dog. I felt something unusual under my feet and looked down. The driveway near the trailer was covered with flattened, aluminum cans.

"Poor man's asphalt," Zack said, approaching the car. "I ain't seen you in a c.o.o.n's age, Joe Dillard. What brings you out here?"

I introduced Bates. "We need to talk to you about something," I said. "It's important."

"That d.a.m.ned gravy eater," he said.

"Beg your pardon?"

"Turtle. I oughta know better than to open my mouth around him. Might as well write it on a billboard."

"Mind if we come in out of the rain?"

"There's barely enough room in there for me. How about I sit in the back of this fine automobile the sheriff's driving? As long as you promise not to arrest me."

"Promise," I said. "Hop in."

As soon as Zack was settled in the back seat, I turned around.

"No point in beating around the bush, Zack. Turtle says you saw something on the lake Sat.u.r.day night."

"I didn't want no part of it," he said, "but it's been eating at me. In my sleep, you know? I keep seeing it in my sleep. That's probably the reason I told the gravy eater. I knew he wouldn't be able to keep it to himself, and I figured y'all would be coming around sooner or later."

"What did you see?"

"I saw a man dropping a body into the lake off the back of a big house boat."

"Tell me about it."

"I dropped me a few catfish jugs near the bank in this little cove not far from my place around midnight. There were still some crazies out on the lake, but it had thinned out quite a bit. Right around five in the morning, I headed back out to check on them. The house boat was anch.o.r.ed in the cove, but I didn't think nothing about it. I picked up the first jug, and then I heard some b.u.mping and banging on the boat, so I looked over, and I saw a man dragging something. Couldn't much tell what it was at first, but then he hoisted it overboard and it splashed into the water. It was a body. A woman's body. She was naked."

"How close were you?"

"Maybe ten feet. I was in my canoe. I just sat there and stared. I didn't really know what to do. The man didn't notice me. He went back inside, and then somebody fired up the engine and the boat pulled out of the cove. I paddled over to where the girl went in, poked around a little with my paddle, and found her a foot or so below the surface. I pulled her up, but she was already dead. There wasn't nothing I could do for her, so I just let her slide back into the water. When I started to paddle out of there, something b.u.mped my boat. It was another girl. She was dead, too."

"Why didn't you report it?" Bates asked.

"I don't exactly have fond memories of dealing with the law," he said. "And if I'd reported finding those bodies in the lake at five in the morning, who would've been your first suspect?"

Bates nodded, but didn't answer.

"Did you get a good look at the man?" I said.

"It was dark, but the moon was shining off the water and the running lights were on. I could see him."

"Would you recognize him again?"

"I reckon I would."

"What did he look like?"

"Gravy eater like turtle, only this one eats his gravy by the bucket. Lard a.s.s. Dark-haired."

I looked over at Bates. "Show them to him."

"Let me ask you a question," Bates said. "You ever heard of John Lips...o...b.."

"Don't reckon I have."

"Nelson Lips...o...b.."

"Not that I can say."

"Andres Pinzon?"

"Nope. Why?"

I'd called Bates as soon as I heard from Turtle, and he'd had his investigators put together three separate photo lineups: one that included John Lips...o...b.. one that included Nelson Lips...o...b.. and one that included Andres Pinzon. Bates pulled a manila envelope from the glove compartment and handed the line-up that included Nelson over the seat to Zack.

"Recognize anybody?" Bates said.

Zack pored over the photos for a couple of minutes.

"Never seen any of them," he said, handing the lineup back to Bates.

Bates repeated the process with the line up that included Andres Pinzon. Nothing. Finally, he pa.s.sed the line up that included a photo of John Lips...o...b..to Zack. It took less than ten seconds.

"That's him," Zack said, tapping the sheet with a thick, calloused finger. "That's the gravy eater I saw."

I felt my heart accelerate. "Let me see, Zack."

His finger was resting on the photo of John Lips...o...b.. I looked at Bates, who appeared to be more worried than excited.

"Are you absolutely sure?" I asked. "No doubt in your mind?"

"Not a bit. That's him."

Bates handed him a pen. "Circle the photo and put your initials on it," he said.

"Would you be willing to get up on a witness stand and repeat this in front of a jury?" I said.

Zack hesitated. "You think it'll come to that?"

"It might."

He took a long breath. "Well sir, that's the man I saw. If I have to, I'd swear an oath on it."

A few minutes later, after Zack had gotten out of the car, we were driving back down the muddy driveway. Bates broke the silence.

"What do we do now, Mr. District Attorney?"

The decision I was about to make was by far the most important of my brief career as district attorney general. While it was true that we now had an eyewitness who said he saw John Lips...o...b..dumping a body into the lake, it had been my experience that eyewitness testimony was often unreliable and easily a.s.sailable at trial on cross-examination. And even if Zack had seen Lips...o...b..dumping a body, we had no idea which body. Was it Lisa, who died of an overdose? If it was, then Lips...o...b..was guilty only of illegally disposing of a corpse, a misdemeanor, unless we could prove that he'd provided the drugs that killed her. It was certainly easy enough to a.s.sume that the act of dumping a body and the act of murder were connected, but we still had no way of proving it.

I asked myself what seemed to be a simple question: what was the right thing to do? When I was younger, I tended to view the world in terms of right and wrong, black and white. The distinction between the two came naturally to me then, or at least I thought it did. But as I grew older, witnessed more, experienced more, the line between right and wrong, at least in terms of morality, began to dissolve and the two concepts began to bleed over into each other until a river of gray separated them, a seemingly unfathomable river with swirling tides that pulled me in different directions.

We could keep investigating, hope to find the boat, hope that another witness would come forward, hope that Nelson Lips...o...b..would crack under the pressure of the drug charge and turn on his brother, but I believed there was little chance of any of those things happening. We could attempt to make a deal with Nelson, offer him a walk on the drug and weapons charges in exchange for information regarding the murders. But the truth was that we really didn't have much leverage with Nelson. He'd been arrested in the past, but he'd never been convicted. Given the standing of his family in the community and the very real possibility that powerful people would make influential calls and/or visits to the judge on Nelson's behalf, the worst punishment Nelson was likely to receive was probation. Finally, I could set up a meeting with Pinzon, John Lips...o...b..s lawyer, and tell him that we had a new witness, someone who actually saw Lips...o...b..dumping one of the bodies, and attempt to negotiate some kind of deal with him. But that would be like showing your hole cards before the flop in a game of Texas hold 'em. The defense would know what we had much too early, and they could adjust their strategy accordingly.

When I was practicing criminal defense, I'd been highly critical of prosecutors who indicted people prematurely, before their case was locked up, in an attempt to play one defendant against the other. The old "first one to the prosecutor's office gets the deal" strategy almost invariably resulted in a perversion of the truth, and I'd told myself that I would never use it.

I went back over the facts as I knew them: three dead young women. Erlene's identification of the bodies and her story about "Mr. Smith" hiring the girls every year. Erlene's identification of Nelson Lips...o...b..as Mr. Smith. The bouncer's testimony that he saw the girls get into a white limo. Turtle's testimony that he saw Nelson get out of a white limo with three blond girls at the marina, get onto the Laura Mae, and drive away. The limo driver's statement that he dropped Nelson and the girls off at the marina. The caretaker's testimony that he saw John Lips...o...b..and Andres Pinzon get onto the same boat a short time later and then leave unexpectedly early in the morning. The fact that the boat belonged to John Lips...o...b..s corporation and was nowhere to be found. And now Zack's testimony that he had seen John Lips...o...b..dump the body of a young woman over the side of the boat that morning.

There were no other suspects. The only reasonable conclusion I could draw based upon the evidence we'd gathered was that someone aboard the Laura Mae that night strangled two of the girls and dumped three bodies, and it seemed the only way to find out what really happened was to take a risk. If I was wrong, I knew I would be humiliated far beyond anything I'd ever experienced and that my legal career would most likely be over. Even if I was right, there were no guarantees we would ever convict anyone for the murders.

I rolled the window down as we crossed the DeVault Bridge near Winged Deer Park. The rain had stopped, but the wind had freshened and the clouds were becoming even darker. It had been five minutes or more since Bates asked me the question. Then I heard a voice inside my head: "I was banging your wife. Didn't she mention it?"

"We go to the grand jury," I said without looking at Bates. "We indict all three of them for second-degree murder, and we let the chips fall where they may."

Chapter Twenty.

It didn't take long for the young Andres Pinzon to come around to John Lips...o...b..s way of thinking. I can't say I was surprised, especially after I heard how much money they made.

A week after Lips...o...b..made the suggestion that Pinzon "do the math," Pinzon got in contact with his uncle Eduardo back in Envigado, Colombia. The conversation was awkward at first Eduardo and Andres's father had been estranged for years but it quickly became cordial. Four days later, Pinzon and Lips...o...b..flew in the used Cessna 421 Lips...o...b..had been given as a graduation gift to a three-thousand-acre ranch twenty miles southeast of Miami, a ranch owned by a sh.e.l.l corporation controlled by Eduardo, who flew up from Colombia to meet the boys. He treated them like royalty, intrigued by his nephew's suggestion during the phone call and anxious to expand his burgeoning cocaine business in the United States.

Lips...o...b..and Pinzon took their maiden drug-smuggling voyage to Colombia in June, a month after they graduated from Demeter Prep and nine days after they met with Eduardo Pinzon in Florida. They flew from Elizabethton, Tennessee, to the airstrip on Eduardo's Florida ranch, refueled, and set out for another small airstrip in the jungle near Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, where they refueled again and rested for a couple of hours. From there, they took off for yet another remote airstrip thirty miles southeast of Cartegena in northern Colombia. Eduardo met them again, but this time he had five kilograms of cocaine with him. The price was seventy-five hundred dollars a kilo. Eduardo had agreed to "front" the drugs to his nephew, but just before Andres boarded the plane to return to Tennessee, Eduardo put his arm around him and pulled him off to the side of the runway.

"If you don't come back here and pay me in a month," he said, "you'll get a visit from my sicarios. Business is business."

The sicarios were paid a.s.sa.s.sins, a different kind of debt collector. Ten years later, in the early nineties, Pablo Escobar's sicarios terrorized Colombia's government. They killed dozens of politicians, judges, lawyers and police officers. They wiped out entire families, once even planting a bomb aboard an airplane that killed over a hundred innocent pa.s.sengers. The target in the bombing, a politician who supported policies detrimental to Escobar's drug smuggling interests, decided at the last minute not to board the plane, but it didn't matter. The sicarios shot him to death in his car two days later.

Pinzon knew that if his uncle sent sicarios to the United States, both he and Lips...o...b..would be dead, even if they handed over the money. They'd kill him just for the inconvenience of having to travel, and to send a message to anyone else who might think about paying his drug bill late.

But there were no late payments. Initially, Lips...o...b..and Pinzon's biggest problems were keeping up with the insatiable demand of their customers and what to do with all the cash they were making. They sold their product, uncut, for two thousand dollars an ounce to their prep school friends from Demeter, who would dilute the cocaine with baby laxative by as much as a third and sell it by the gram. Lips...o...b..and Pinzon had customers at prestigious universities all over the country Yale, Brown, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, USC, UCLA, Duke, universities where the students had means. Their only shipping expense was the postage charged by the U.S. Postal Service, and they didn't ship the product until they'd received their money, cash only. After expenses, Lips...o...b..and Pinzon made just over three hundred and thirty thousand dollars on the first five kilos. Three weeks after their first trip to Colombia, they flew back, paid Eduardo Pinzon in cash, and picked up ten more kilos.

When the cash started to pour in, the two of them traveled to Boston at the suggestion of Uncle Eduardo and consulted with a lawyer. They presented themselves to the lawyer as two business students who wanted to start their own investment firm. The lawyer was dubious about their prospects for success, but he agreed, for a fee of seven hundred dollars, to a.s.sist them in setting up a corporation. As soon as the paperwork was approved by the state of Ma.s.sachusetts, they set up corporate accounts at five different banks in Boston and began making large cash deposits. By the time the summer was over, Equicorp had over a million-and-a-half dollars in cash.

There were a couple of things that impressed me as I learned of Lips...o...b..and Pinzon's early ventures. They showed remarkable maturity, discipline and ingenuity for nineteen-year-old boys. They didn't run out and buy fancy cars. They didn't hang out in bars. They didn't host big parties and chase women. Pinzon didn't use cocaine at all and Lips...o...b..used it only occasionally, at least early in the venture. They kept to themselves and they kept their mouths shut.

The only money they spent was for business purposes. They rented stash houses in quiet neighborhoods where they stored, separated, and packaged their product, and they never used the house more than once. If a banker happened to question where all the cash was coming from, they made it worth his while to keep quiet. Lips...o...b..used pay phones near the apartment to conduct all of their business. But probably the most impressive thing they did was resist the urge and the pressure to expand their operation. They kept it small and manageable, and it paid off in spades.

Lips...o...b..and Pinzon made another run to Colombia during the Thanksgiving break that first year. By then, their customers were literally begging them for more product, so they bought fifteen kilos. All of it was gone in less than two weeks. They went back the week before Christmas and picked up fifteen more. On January fifth, John Lips...o...b..deposited the cash that made each of the unlikely pair of nineteen-year-olds from Tennessee millionaires. He arrived back at their apartment with two bottles of Dom Perignon and three-and-a-half grams of pure Colombian cocaine that he'd been saving for the occasion.

"Let's party," Lips...o...b..said to Pinzon when he walked through the door, holding up the bottles in one hand and dangling the baggie of c.o.ke in the other.

"You know I don't use that stuff," Pinzon said, "and I thought we agreed that you'd stay out of it, too."

"Ah, c'mon, amigo. We deserve this. We've been busting our b.u.t.ts. We've made over two million bucks. It's all good. Why don't you loosen up a little?"

"Because loosening up could get us caught."

"Look. I know this girl named Mallory. She's cool. She loves to party, and she won't say a word. I'll call her up, ask her over, and we'll take turns getting laid. How 'bout it, buddy?"

"No thanks."

"Okay, suit yourself," Lips...o...b..said. He put the bottles on the counter and picked up the phone. "But you seriously need to get laid, dude. I'm beginning to wonder if you're going gay on me."

Mallory arrived an hour later. Lips...o...b..introduced her as Mallory Vines. She was pretty, blonde-haired with a creamy complexion and huge b.r.e.a.s.t.s, just the kind of girl that attracted Lips...o...b.. Pinzon said h.e.l.lo and then disappeared into his bedroom, where he spent the remainder of the evening listening to music and reading Pablo Coelho's "The Alchemist." He turned off the music and light at eleven and heard the sound of Lips...o...b..s headboard banging against the other side of the wall.

At two-thirty, Pinzon was awakened by a frantic Lips...o...b..

"Get up," Lips...o...b..said. "I need your help."

Pinzon could tell by looking at Lips...o...b..that he'd been using. His eyes were wide, his pupils dilated, and beads of sweat had formed across his flushed forehead.

"I told you I'm not interested," Pinzon snapped.

Lips...o...b..grabbed him by the arm.

"Get up, man! I think she's dead."

"Dead? You're joking, right?"

"C'mon!"

Lips...o...b..walked out, and Pinzon got up and followed. Mallory was lying naked on her back on Lips...o...b..s bed, her blue eyes staring at the ceiling. Pinzon felt her wrist for a pulse, then her neck. He put the back of his hand near her lips to see if he could feel any sign of breathing. There was nothing.

"What did you do to her?"

"She did a lot of c.o.ke, man. She started talking crazy. Then she started jerking and spazzing and then her eyes rolled back in her head and she just went quiet. I tried mouth to mouth and CPR, but it didn't do any good."

"Did you call 9-1-1?"

"Are you crazy?"

"We can't just leave her here like this, John. We have to call someone."

Lips...o...b..approached to within a few inches of Pinzon's face. There was anger and desperation in his eyes. His upper lip was drawn back tightly like a snarling dog. He poked Pinzon in the chest with his finger.

"We're not calling anybody," he said. "If we call an ambulance, they'll bring the police with them. Even if I flush the c.o.ke down the toilet, they'll do tests on her and they'll find out what killed her. Then they'll start nosing around in our lives. Do you want that, huh? Do you want them nosing around in our lives?"

Pinzon's eyes dropped to the floor.

"What are we going to do with her?"