You are very lucky that I happen to need money at the moment. If you will immediately send cash in the amount of (this would vary), I will send you the duplicate audiotapes of your phone conversation telling Uncle Desmond what you intend to do to this helpless little six-year-old. I’d better hear from you by next week.
Jules Temple would often go so far as to hire a street person to pick up envelopes from his post office box and carry them to his car parked a safe distance away. But finally, Jules decided that he needn’t have gone to such lengths. He was always overestimating people, and in this case he’d overestimated the authorities. About half a dozen pedophiles summoned up the nerve to go to the police and admit to being extortion victims, but the police and postal authorities had never got to a post office box that hadn’t already been closed.
In that one year, Jules made $123,000 (tax free, of course) before the pedophile publications began printing warnings about Uncle Desmond. Cynthia’s photos ended up in the files of several law enforcement agencies, but never were traced back to her or to her mother.
During that same year Jules Temple’s father died after his second stroke, having kept his word to leave his son a stipend only. Jules did not visit his comatose father in the hospital, claiming he was too busy expanding his capital base. Having acted upon a hot tip from a country club acquaintance, Jules had invested the money in a mismanaged waste hauling company, a business field that was opening up with unlimited possibilities for someone like himself. Jules called his company Green Earth Hauling and Disposal.
One of Jules’s first moves as a waste hauler was to form a corporation with a bogus president, in this case a former real estate agent of Mexican descent who’d worked for Jules in land development. Raul Medina drew a salary of $1,500 a month for doing nothing more than signing documents from time to time. Raul Medina never set foot in Green Earth Hauling and Disposal, spending most of his time at home nursing a chronic back problem.
Jules owned forty-nine percent of the stock in the Green Earth corporation and the other fifty-one percent was “owned” by Raul Medina. All of the trucks, equipment, and material assets were transferred to the company by Jules, who took back a note from Raul Medina for twice the assets’ value. Jules subleased the property to the company for twice what he paid to his landlord, and siphoned off all profits except for the $1,500 a month that Raul Medina received.
Because of Raul Medina’s Hispanic surname, Jules had been able to secure government contracts that non-minority haulers could not get. And Jules was often contracted to haul hazardous material from military bases, some of which came from military facilities halfway around the world.
The generator of hazardous waste would list in the Environmental Protection Agency’s “cradle to grave” numbered documents what the contents of the waste consisted of. The waste could then theoretically be easily traced from the generator of the waste, through the transporter, and finally to the disposal facility. Ultimately, the disposal facility was supposed to inform the EPA when the waste was incinerated or otherwise destroyed.
Four years later, after Jules found a promising buyer for his business, he and Raul Medina signed documents wherein the major stockholder paid off all notes and commissions to the minor stockholder, receiving nothing from the sale. But Raul Medina had no complaints. The $1,500 a month had been nice while it lasted, and Jules promised him that if his next commercial endeavor could benefit by minority preference, Jules and Raul Medina could make a similar arrangement.
Green Earth Hauling and Disposal had prospered because Jules Temple was a businessman who quickly discovered ways to cut corners in order to avoid the red tape inherent in this industry. Some of the ways in which he did that were exotic, some were quite simple, but Jules seldom tried to cut corners with military waste, not unless it could be ascertained that it could be safely mixed with other waste he was hauling. Safely for Jules only meant that it would be untraceable to him.
Sometimes, Jules just couldn’t resist saving time and money with the waste generated by civilian companies, such as one called Southbay Agricultural Supply. The owner of the company was an ex-farmer named Burl Ralston who was making a lot more money selling supplies than he’d ever made on his sorry hundred-acre farm in the Imperial Valley. Burl Ralston was not a man for unnecessary paperwork and he was not one to ask a lot of questions, not when Jules Temple was consistently able to undercut the competition with his hauling bids, thus saving money for Burl Ralston.
Southbay Agricultural Supply and Green Earth Hauling and Disposal had just struck a deal whereby Jules Temple’s employees would pick up a fifty-five-gallon drum full of something very toxic: Guthion. The pesticide had been consigned to a customer in Arizona, but had got mixed inadvertently with a small amount of weed oil, so it had to be disposed of ASAP. Jules Temple’s low bid was for $500 to haul the Guthion, but as frequently happened with Jules, he wanted cash from Burl, to be given in an envelope to the driver. Green Earth’s truckers were accustomed to receiving cash, and after successful transactions, Jules often would slip a $20 bill to the trucker as a “bonus” for good work.
From Jules’s point of view, he could not afford to haul extremely hazardous waste if he had to transport it to a Texas incinerator for legal disposal, so he decided that item #11 on the manifest should list the Guthion as “waste flammable liquid.” That way it could be hauled to a disposal site at a Los Angeles oil refinery when Jules had another load heading that way.
When the cash deal was struck, Jules said on the phone, “I’ll do the manifest for you, Burl, so you just have to sign off and pay my driver. What’s your EPA number?”
Thus, when truckers Abel Durazo and Shelby Pate showed up at Southbay Agricultural Supply in their twenty-four-foot bobtail van, Abel handed the completed and numbered seven-page manifest to the waste generator, Burl Ralston, who signed off without worrying about item #11 on the manifest. He could honestly say that “waste flammable liquid” was a legally correct description of a little oil and a lot of Guthion, if not morally correct. But Burl Ralston was confident that Jules would see that it got disposed of properly, with no harm done.
After the haulers left Southbay Agricultural Supply with the envelope containing $500, Burl Ralston put one manifest copy into an envelope to send by certified mail to Sacramento; then he filed his copy. The truckers had not asked Burl Ralston for a precise description of the material in the drum. In fact, no waste hauler had ever asked him. But Burl Ralston had informed Jules Temple that it was Guthion, hadn’t he? And the skull and bones placard was on the drum, wasn’t it? Burl Ralston went back into the warehouse to continue his inventory without giving that drum of poison another thought. It was Jules Temple’s problem now, and probably would be the last deal they ever did together in that Jules was selling his business.
Trucker Shelby Pate folded the manifest copies around the money envelope, and put the packet in the zippered pocket of his leather jacket.
CHAPTER 3
“Bad Dog” was not a respectable name for a young woman, her mother had said to her when she was home on leave.
“It’s just navy, Mom,” Bobbie had insisted. “Gimme a break!”
“Navy? I call it crude. That’s the kinda brutal attitude toward women that caused the Tailhook scandal where all those horny pilots mauled the women in that Las Vegas nightclub.”