“How many telephone conversations did you have with these people?”
“I don’t know. How the hell am I supposed to remember something like that?”
“You can be sure the DEA or the FBI will know the answer,” I tell him. “If they’re investigating you, they may already have your telephone records. They’ll know how many times you talked to the brothers in Mexico and how long each conversation lasted. They may know about this man Espinoza. They’ll have that at a minimum, unless of course the Mexican authorities tapped into the brother’s phone lines down there, in which case they’re likely to know a great deal more.”
I can tell that this is a sobering thought.
“Did you send them anything in writing, any letters?” All I have before me are letters from the one brother to Metz, nothing going the other way.
“I, ah. I don’t think so.”
“You do keep copies of your business correspondence?”
“Yeah. But you know how things are. Sometimes they get away from you.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s everything I could find.”
“You mean you may have written letters to these people, but you can’t find them?”
“It’s possible. I can’t remember.”
This is not looking good.
“What if the prosecutor subpoenas them?”
“I’ll give them what I can find. What the hell else am I supposed to do? If I can’t find ’em, I can’t find ’em. Right?”
“You said one of the witnesses was a former secretary to your company. How many office employees do you have?”
“One. Sometimes I don’t have any. People quit, come and go. Stuff gets lost. I told my gal in the office to get whatever was in the files, like you asked. That’s what she got.” He points to the few letters on my desk.
“And what if your secretary is called to testify. What will she say?”
He gives me a steely-eyed look. “That she gave me everything she could find,” he says.
“And that this is it?”
“Yeah. Sure. I’m not trying to be difficult,” he says. “It’s just that I can’t give ’em what I don’t have.”
“Of course.”
“That’s all I can tell you.”
“Tell me, did you sign a contract on this business in Mexico?”
“We never got that far.”
“Did they pay you anything, compensation?”
“Like I said, they paid for my trip down there. Traveling expenses and the like.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know, maybe four thousand, forty-five hundred dollars. And there were some consulting fees.”
“Consulting for what?”
“The location, difficulty of getting heavy equipment in and out of the job site.”
“How much did they pay you for this?”
“I can’t remember exactly.”
“An estimate?”
“I don’t know.”
“More than a thousand dollars?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“More than five thousand?”
“Uh-huh.”
My eyes are off my notepad now, looking at Metz. “How much?”
“Somewhere in the neighborhood of two million,” he says.
“Dollars?”
He nods.
I sit there staring at him, the gaze of an animal in front of a speeding locomotive at night.
“For consulting fees?”
“Well, no, no, it was… actually, it was a security deposit.”
“Security for what?”
“My equipment. Hell, you don’t think I’m gonna take heavy equipment across the border without some security up front. This is expensive stuff. A front-end loader, a big one, the kind that articulates, can set you back a quarter of a million dollars. What if it disappears? I mean, this is not Nevada we’re talking about. If they greased somebody’s palm for permits and the sky falls in, a fuckin’ swamp without a permit to drain it ain’t worth shit,” he says. “The first thing the Mexican government does is grab my equipment.”
“So what was the understanding as to this money, this security deposit?”
“I’d hold their money until the job was done. Then I’d get my equipment back and get paid. They’d get their deposit back.”
“But you never signed a contract and you never sent any equipment across the border?”
“No.”
“And they gave you two million dollars on a handshake?”
“That’s right.”
“So what happened when the deal went bust?”
“They got their money back.”
“All of it?”
He makes a face. Scrunches up his mouth a little. “Everything except the ten percent,” he says.
I look at him.
“For my time.”
“What time?”
“You know, puttin’ the thing together. Talking. Goin’ down there?”
“But you said they paid for your trip?”
“Yeah. But my time’s worth something, ain’t it? Like I say, consulting fees.”
“But you had no contract or written arrangement for these fees before you went down there?”
“No.”
“A week of your time in Mexico, not considering traveling expenses, which they paid, is worth two hundred thousand dollars?”
“I could have been doin’ other work,” he says.
“You lost a big job because of this week in Mexico, did you?”
“I might have. I mean I could have. I don’t know.”
By now I am scribbling furiously, trying to get Metz’s story down on paper before the ludicrous logic of it disappears like a vapor.
“And what did you do with the two million deposit money? Did you put it in a bank in this country?”
“Not right away,” he says.
I stop writing and look up again. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I brought my money up here after the deal fell through…”
“Your money?”
“The two hundred K. Over a period of time,” he says.
“Stop. Did you maintain a foreign bank account?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
“Belize,” he says.
“Why Belize?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you report this account on your taxes for that year?”
