Detective

had one more day in Miami. So I hunted up a locksmith and told him I’d lost the key to my suitcase.”
    “Did he believe you?”
    “I don’t know. I think he did at first, but then when he got the lock open I didn’t want to open the suitcase while he was still in the room, and when he saw I wasn’t going to open the suitcase, he charged me a bigger fee than he’d quoted me originally.”
    “Great. Then what?”
    “Well, after I got rid of him I opened the suitcase and guess what was in it?”
    “Ten kilos of cocaine?”
    “Twenty.”
    “You knew it was coke?”
    “I figured it was. To tell the truth, I do a little coke now and then. You know, it’s helpful with the ladies.”
    I tried to envision Albrect as a sly dog entertaining the ladies. I couldn’t do it. “Go on.”
    “Well, I tried a little, and sure enough, it was coke. And good shit, too.”
    “So what did you do?”
    “Well, I figured this was my chance. As I said, I know a little bit about coke, so I knew what to do. The stuff was about a fifty-fifty mixture of rocks and powder, so I knew I could cut it. So I got a lot of milk sugar and I cut myself some coke.”
    “How much?”
    “I took four ounces out of each kilo.”
    “Jesus Christ!”
    “Yeah. So there I was with five pounds of really dynamite coke. I locked up the suitcase and made my delivery as usual to what’s-his-face, to Bambi. I was scared to death. I waited to see if they’d find out, if anybody would notice that anything was wrong. But they didn’t. I went to the casino, same as always. I saw the guys there, and no one acted like anything was wrong. In fact, Bambi asked me when was the next time I was scheduled to go to Miami.”
    “He didn’t notice you were stoned out of your mind?”
    “What? Oh, yeah, I did a little coke, but he wouldn’t notice that. I always did a little coke when I gambled. In fact what’s-his-name, Dumbo, used to supply it for me.”
    “So what went wrong?”
    “Well, I had to move the stuff. I mean, where the hell are you going to get rid of five pounds of coke? I sure couldn’t approach anyone remotely connected with any of these guys. So I started looking for a buyer. Now, there was a friend of mine, not from the office, that did a little coke, so I talked to him, sold him a few grams. Told him I had a new connection, asked him how he liked the stuff. I sold it to him real cheap, made him happy, got him talking about his connection and how much he usually paid, and the long and the short of it was that I found out who his connection was, and I went to him and showed him a sample of the stuff.”
    “The guy like it?”
    “He liked it fine, and he liked the price I quoted to him. The only problem was he wasn’t big time. I mean, he couldn’t handle any real quantity. He was just a guy who sold a few grams to a few friends.”
    “So what did you do?”
    “Well, I sounded him out and made him a proposition. Tried to see if he would be willing to turn his business around, and instead of buying, start selling to his connection, undercutting whoever was selling to him.”
    “Did that work?”
    “No, because he said he thought his connection wasn’t really big time either, just another guy who moved a little coke because he liked to have some around to snort. So I made him another proposition.”
    “What was that?”
    “I gave him an ounce of coke to introduce me to his connection.”
    “And he did it?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And he didn’t get paranoid that maybe you were a narc?”
    “If he did, he didn’t let on. I mean, you gotta understand the psychology of the coke-head. It’s pretty hard to turn down a free ounce of really high-grade shit.”
    On the yellow pad I had written “coke friend,” and “C. Friend’s Connection.” I now added, “C.F. Connection’s Connection.”
    “So what happened when you met the next guy?”
    “That was different. This guy was dealing ounces, which meant he was buying pounds, which meant the guy he was buying from was dealing pounds. Which meant we had a market. This guy and I agreed to try to sell pounds back to his source. It wasn’t that hard to set up a deal, because this guy was paying a fair amount for his pounds, and all I had to do was undercut that enough to assure that the guy made a grand or two on his sale, and that the price would fall under his connection’s buying price. I could do that, no problem, since I hadn’t paid anything for the coke and I didn’t have