Virgil did. “What does Carl Knox have to do with this?”
“I don’t know, and I’m afraid to ask.”
“Tell me.”
“It started with a bunch of bulldozers in Vietnam…”
CARL KNOX, and more lately, his eldest daughter, Shirley, were the Twin Cities’ answer to the Mafia-a kinder, gentler organized crime, providing financing for loan sharks and retail drug dealers. They neither sharked nor dealt, but simply financed, and earned a simple two hundred percent on capital.
Knox, now in his middle sixties, also ran the largest used-heavy-equipment dealership in the area, buying, selling, and trading mostly Caterpillar machines. He also-law-enforcement people knew about it only through rumor-bought and sold large amounts of stolen Caterpillar equipment, and moved it in Canada north of the Fifty-fifth Parallel.
“Half the stuff up in the oil fields came through Knox, one way or another,” Bunton said. “I was right there at the beginning.” His voice trailed off. “Jesus Christ, this is awful.”
“Is he the guy you’re afraid of?” Virgil asked.
“Damn right I am. He’s the fuckin’ Mafia, man,” Bunton said. “He needs to get rid of us. He’s got some shooters from fuckin’ Chicago on our ass.”
“You know this for sure?”
“Well-no. But who the fuck else is it gonna be?” Bunton asked. “Who else has the shooters?”
“Tell me about it,” Virgil said.
“I DON’T KNOW all of it,” Bunton said. “Back at the end of March 1975… I’d been in Vietnam in ’69 and ’70, I’d been out for five years. Anyway, this guy calls me. John Wigge. Wasn’t on the cops yet-he’s just out of the service, Vietnam. I got no job, he’s got no job-but he says he’s got a guy who’ll pay us twenty grand in cash for two weeks’ work back in Vietnam. Two weeks at the most, but it might be a little hairy. Shit, we were young guys, we didn’t give a fuck about hairy.
“The story was this guy, Utecht, the one that got killed-his father was this crazy guy who operated all over the Pacific, selling heavy equipment. He sold a lot of shit to the South Vietnamese. Anyway, this guy is in Vietnam, and the place is falling apart. The North Vietnamese were coming down, everybody was trying to get out.”
“I’ve seen the embassy pictures, the evacuation,” Virgil offered.
“Yeah, that was like a month later. Anyway, Utecht, the old man, is in Vietnam, and he finds this whole field of heavy equipment, mostly Caterpillars, D6s up to D9s, is gonna be abandoned there. Good stuff. Some of it is almost new. And everybody’s bailing out.
“So he cuts some kind of crooked deal with the South Viets, and brings in a ship, and calls up his kid, and tells him to get some heavy-equipment guys together and get his ass over there. We’re gonna take this shit out of the country.”
“Steal it?”
“Well-save it from the North Vietnamese. The enemy.” Bunton grinned at Virgil, showing the nicotine teeth.
“All right,” Virgil said.
“So Utecht knows Wigge, and Wigge knows everybody else, and he starts calling people,” Bunton said. “I could drive a truck, I could figure out a Cat if I had to. Twenty grand. That was a shitload of money at the time. Two years’ pay. So six of us, young guys, Sanderson was one… we all flew out to Hong Kong and then right into Da Nang. Not all together, whenever we could get on a plane, but all within a couple of days.”
“I’ve heard of Da Nang, but I don’t know about it,” Virgil said.
“ Da Nang? Big base in Vietnam. Port city. So we flew in, and Utecht, the old man, picked me up at the airport, and what I did was, I drove a lowboy. There were thirty fuckin’ D9 Cats sitting there and all kinds of other shit… You know what a D9 is?”
“No.”
“Biggest fuckin’ Cat there was, at the time,” Bunton said. He dropped his cigarette on the street, stepped on it, shook another out of the pack. “Maybe still are. They used them to clear out forest. Go through a bunch of fuckin’ trees like grease through a goose. Anyway, there was thirty of them at Da Nang, and they were just sitting there, waiting for the NVA. So here we are, with this lowboy and a bunch of heavy equipment guys to get the tractors going and to run them-that was the other guys. I’d haul them out to the harbor, and they’d lift them onto the ship with this big fuckin’ crane. One of the guys told me that they were headed for Indonesia, they had some oil fields going there… I mean, some of these dozers were like fuckin’ new.”
“All the guys who’ve been killed were on this trip?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah. Anyway, what happened was, I dropped off the last load at the port, wasn’t just these Cats, it was all kinds of shit. Everything they could get moving. After I brought in the last load, they even picked up the fuckin’ lowboy and took that on board. Then Chester -”
“Utecht. Chester Utecht, the old guy.”
“Yeah, that one,” Bunton said.
“Okay…”
“He’s dead now. Died about a year ago, in Hong Kong, is what Wigge told me,” Bunton said. He had to think a minute, to get back to the thread of the story. “Anyway, Chester pulls up in this old fucked-up Microbus, and as soon as the lowboy was off the ground, going on the ship, we took off to get the other guys. This was about forty-five minutes each way, from the port to the equipment yard. Chester had airline tickets to get us out of there, spread over a couple of days, and two of the guys were going with the ship.
“So we got back to the yard, and what do we find? I’ll tell you-these dumb fucks were all about nine-tenths loaded and they’d set this house on fire… And they were fuckin’ arguing with each other… I mean like, they were freakin’ out about this house, and screaming at each other, and they had these M16s. Chester said, ‘Fuck it, we’re going,’ and we went. Me and another guy, who I think was Utecht, the younger one, the kid, but this is so fuckin’ long ago…”
“Okay…”
“Me ’n’ Utecht, we flew out of there, to Hong Kong, and then back to Minneapolis, through Alaska. Wigge went with the ship, I think, because I didn’t see him again, and somebody else went with him. Sanderson, I saw a year or so later. I asked him what happened with the house, and he said some chick got killed-that somebody started yelling at them from the house, I don’t why, and one of the guys got pissed. He was already drunk, and somebody started shooting, and one of these guys went into the house with an M16 and shot the place all up and maybe some chick got shot and I guess some old man got shot. Maybe some other people.”
Virgil said, “Ray-you’re telling me some people got murdered?”
“Yeah… maybe,” Bunton said. He shrugged. “Who knows? The fuckin’ place was going up in smoke. Thousands of people got killed. Maybe… hell, maybe it was self-defense.”
“So why is this gonna get you killed?” Virgil asked. “What does Carl Knox have to do with it?”
“One of the guys was Carl Knox,” Bunton said. “When Utecht got killed, Sanderson called me up. He was freakin’ out. He said Utecht had got Jesus, and called him a couple of times, after Chester died, and said Utecht was talking about confessing the whole thing.”
“Ah, man,” Virgil said.
“So I’m thinking, Carl Knox-he’s not exactly the Mafia, but he knows some leg-breakers for sure. If he was the one who killed the chick, and he heard about Utecht, and if he needed a hit man, I bet he could find one. Get one out of Chicago. If he needed to kill someone in prison, he could get that done, too. If he did the shooting. I mean, if there was a bunch of guys who said he did murder… You see what I’m saying? He kills Utecht to shut him up, but then he starts thinking, these other guys will know why…”
“There’s this thing-the victims have lemons in their mouths,” Virgil said. “Even Wigge… but not his bodyguard.”