“Would you like a drink?”
Her glass of white wine sat on the bar showing beads of condensation.
“I’m fine.”
“Nothing at all?”
If she was going to twist my arm: “Bourbon. Little ice.”
Perhaps ironically, the bartender poured Four Roses, and we settled onto barstools. I looked over at the mirror in the dim light.
I wore the charcoal suit bought for the most recent round of hearings. On the street earlier, I’d tugged my tie away from my throat as the humidity gnawed at me but I looked okay. I’d had a haircut before I’d left N-5 Special Management Unit where I’d done my time alongside other convicted law enforcement officers and child molesters. The rooms there hadn’t been air conditioned so I’d spent enough time outside to avoid the pallor that often comes with incarceration.
“Who gave you my number?”
“Not who you think. Don’t spend too much time analyzing that.”
“Jerry really seemed to feel sorry for me.”
“Wasn’t him. Would you be willing to have a conversation with some people?”
“Do I have to appear at gun shows or any political rallies?”
“I don’t think it would be that public.”
Something started to tingle. Maybe this wasn’t quite the offer I’d first assumed.
“You’re not up on the details?”
“I’m not really into the minutia,” she said.
She turned on her stool and I eyed the soft, smooth flesh of her throat as I took in more of her smell. I pushed away thoughts of what would’ve been said by Richard Jasso, the con who’d come close to being a friend in N-5. Let’s just say it would have been crude.
She didn’t deserve crude. She wasn’t suggesting anything with the turn, just trying for a better view of my expression, but I felt a deep burn. Her tan was better than mine, glistening with just a hint of the humidity. I tried to hide the effect she was having, to keep it noncommittal, but she could tell I was at least intrigued.
“You’ll get a meal in a nice place. Hear some people out. You decide to walk away, it never happened.”
I looked into her eyes, at her full lips and took another whiff of her, and fought to keep my head clear. Wasn’t easy. I’d been inside a long time and my wife had been gone longer than that.
“What the hell?” I said.
Chapter 2
“I think we may be a little crowded tonight.”
The maître d’ scanned a sheet on his podium.
Rose had deposited me at the corner near a pastel orange building with black ironwork a few blocks off Bourbon. Inside, lighting was low, supplemented by a few aquariums set into the walls, glowing with brightly colored fish and coral. It all looked a little nicer and featured a better atmosphere than the communal dining I’d grown used to.
“Would you mind sharing a table? We have a spot in one of our private rooms.” If he was putting on a show, it was a good performance.
When I said that was not a problem, he ushered me back to a little area with just a few candlelit tables off the main dining room. Only one was occupied: a couple in their early forties, sitting, stiff and not quite shoulder to shoulder. A suit and a black dress. The man had well-tended, greying curls and looked lean with long arms. The woman: blonde, slender and angular but possessing rounded cheeks. The brown eyes harbored a soft innocence though it lingered beneath a hazy, haunted veil.
“So nice to have company,” she said, as I settled into a chair.
“Can I start you off with a glass of wine?” the waiter asked.
“Bourbon. Whatever brand’s open. A little ice.”
The man extended his hand. “Adam,” he said. “My wife, Grace.”
I shook the man’s hand. The woman gave mine a quick squeeze.
“I guess you know who I am, or else the guy up front really is expecting a bus.”
“We know, Mr. Reardon.” The wife smiled a faint smile. Grace, it was easy to think of her by that name.
A heavy crystal glass with a splash of amber-gold in it landed in front of me, and I picked it up for a sip and a burn.
“I guess you can solve the mystery I’ve been living with for the last few hours.”
I’d had time for only a little checking on Rose Cantor. Her shingle really did say special counsel, and it hung from a prestigious firm. They’d reached some sort of arrangement that was mutually beneficial.
Grace smiled again. That seemed to be the affirmative. Then she reached for a clutch purse that hung on the back of her chair, producing a small black folder. It looked like something that would hold the invite for an elegant cocktail party. She drew out a heavy paper photo card with other pictures tucked inside it.
I flipped it open to find a family portrait, a vertical of the couple across from me, younger by a few years and looking a bit warmer in general. In front of them, blond children smiled for the camera. More pictures were loose in the folder, the girls aged slightly if you flipped through them.
In one, the older of the two had been caught at play on a sunny day, a huge bubble with traces of rainbow forming behind her from the tennis racket-sized wand she held. Her smile was wide, her face aglow.
“Dahlia,” the woman said.
The younger smiled with an effervescent glow from a studio shot, wearing overalls, sitting on a bale of hay with appropriate props scattered around her including a wash tub and a cowboy hat discarded to avoid hiding her wavy tresses.
“And Dagney.”
“They’re beautiful children.” It was the kind of thing you were supposed to say. It was true, and of course they reminded me of Juliana. Was that by design?
“They’re gone,” the woman said.
The solemn finality made it clear they weren’t visiting a grandmother in Seattle.
“What happened?”
“They were murdered.”
I tossed back a swallow of the bourbon and looked at the photos on the table again. A chill gripped me. It was one of the fears that stalks the imagination of every parent.
“How?”
“It was part of a lesson,” Adam said. “For me.”
Tears came to Grace’s eyes.
“What were you involved in?”
“I was involved with a man,” he said. “In business. I didn’t realize quite what he was tangled with. Or had been”
“Which was?”
“Previously the Vory. Do you know what that is?”
“I know what the justice department says it is or used to. It’s a matter of some debate, but’s it’s supposed to be an affiliation of criminal organizations in the Russian vicinity.”
“There’s no doubt about his activities in Southeast Europe. Name the crime. Even when he rose, he liked to do some of his own dirty work. He worked to establish himself with a little more legitimacy in the U.S. after a couple of Europol operations broke things up for him back home.”
They didn’t look like people who’d even know what Europol was. I barely did. It wasn’t the kind of crime you encountered in day-to-day police work.
“His activities being…?”
“The usual early on. They call it transitional crime when it crosses borders. Blackmail. Extortion. Human trafficking. He’s cleaned up his act a little, but his hands are dirty.”
“Bloody,” Grace Holst said. “Even though he’s gained even more respectability in the last few years, polished himself a little more.”
Adam looked at her then nodded affirmation.
“You wanted to work with Keyser Söze anyway?”
Grace shot a hard look at her husband with that question, and any lingering innocence was replaced with a black, stone-cold hatred that made apparent why they were still shoulder to shoulder.
“A lot’s become clearer in the interim,” he said. “He seemed a little rough around the edges, but I didn’t know all of that then. Like I said, he wanted some legitimacy. I was trying to help him get some city contracts for mutual benefi
t. Not my best decision, but he’d ditched the gold chains by then, and he didn’t have a lot of tattoos and everything like the bad guys do in movies.”
“Contracts didn’t work out?”
“Palms were greased. Promises were made. This is New Orleans. You know how things go.”
“Somebody else had more grease?”
“I didn’t have people on tight enough leashes. He was unhappy.”
“The girls disappeared from our house one night, and we got a call,” Grace said. “A call that couldn’t be verified as to its source, of course.”
She had to grab for a napkin and dab her eyes before makeup was affected.
“Nothing could be proved,” she said.
“Cops?”
“They made an effort. You got a sense they were being careful, but they tried. We had private investigators. They tried too. There was nothing that would stick to him. No proof we’d talked to the girls on a phone call, no proof he’d been near them.”
“I don’t see what I might turn up that the authorities missed. I’m sure they took this seriously, and I wasn’t Sherlock Holmes when I was on the job. It’s not like the movies.”
“We didn’t come to you for more investigation,” Adam said. “If we ever had any illusions, they’re long gone.”
“I know there’s a lot of pain,” I said. “I can imagine anyway. I have a child.”
“The best imagination couldn’t capture it,” Grace said.
“I’ll stipulate to that.”
“You’d probably acknowledge too there’s nothing we could do to bring the girls back. We know that. We know anything you accomplish wouldn’t bring closure, but it would be something. It would keep it from happening to someone else.”
“It would do that. I’m just not the man to handle that.”
She leaned forward, resting her arms on the table as she looked at me.
“The other day, I read about an abduction that was stopped in Gretna. A man tried to snatch a girl away from her mother in broad daylight. While they walked along in their neighborhood. The mother fought the man, but he dragged the girl into a car anyway and almost got away. Some neighbors were near and helped stop him and save the girl. When the police arrested the man and ran a check on who he was, they found there’d been a similar incident. A girl who wasn’t so lucky.”
I closed my eyes and bowed my head. You didn’t have to look far for bad things.
“There’d been an attempt to prosecute him. For that case, for what he did. The previous victim stopped cooperating. I keep asking myself, what if something had been done in that case. What if something could be done with ours? Who might it help? Some other child, some other family wouldn’t have to have their world shattered.”
The tears began then. I had to presume they were real and not calculated. She had every reason for them to be real.
I didn’t move. These were haunted people connected by a single purpose with all else behind them lost, including any love that had once been there. They were clutching at something, hoping.
“What is it you want me to do?” I asked.
“We have a proposition,” Grace said, dabbing at her eyes so that the little black square of a napkin caused minimal irritation. She put the napkin aside and stared across the table at me with more fervor.
“We want you to kill the devil, Mr. Reardon.”
Chapter 3
Of course, I said no.
Hell No.
Fuck No.
Before there could be further discussion.
Before there could be debate.
Before they brought the demitasse cups.
The meeting had been set up well. Happenstance in a public place. If anyone could even be found to recall a guy in a suit passing through the dining room. If any security footage was found. If a crime were actually committed and an effort at establishing a criminal conspiracy came somewhere down the road.
I’d worked a case once where we believed a businessman had had his business partner killed for the payout on an insurance policy. The defense attorney had made his meeting with the trigger man an asset. “Jake Gremillion is a prominent businessman. Would he be stupid enough to go to a meeting in the middle of town at the murderer’s place of employment?”
The triggerman had not been the most competent of professional killers, a sociopath who managed a retail establishment. He’d seemed innocuous enough until you looked at the record he lied about to get that job and knew he had no connection with the victim except through the partner.
This meeting would be even more easily dismissed. No explaining why I’d been at a private residence, no real connection. Just “the restaurant was crowded and we got thrown together.” It wouldn’t seem out of the question a guy not long out of lockup had wanted a good meal.
But I still beat it the hell out of there. I couldn’t be connected with the fumes of anything illegal. I wasn’t technically a convict at the moment, but a second offense wouldn’t look good on my record. I didn’t pass Go and didn’t wait on the curb for Rose to turn up again.
I hoofed it up to Bourbon and insinuated myself into the stream of tourists and gawkers, a thick, interwoven mass of humanity that marched past barkers and promises.
“We’ve got the prettiest boys in the city….”
“Men for the women, women for the men. Come right in. Come right in.”
“The show is just beginning….”
It’d still be just beginning at 1 a.m.
Bourbon’s a surreal carnival any time, and that night I felt more lost in the middle of it than ever, jostled by tourists, caroming. I let the odor of beer and drinks in red plastic Solo cups fill my nostrils, dodged drunk guys dancing, gaggles of tourists four abreast giggling, let the noise and the insanity envelop me and let myself believe nothing was real.
Then I was in a bar around a corner from one of the strip clubs. I had a glass in front of me with something else amber on ice. I sipped and I watched a girl of about 22 in a white blouse and black slacks hurrying a new rack of glasses out for the bartender.
She wasn’t Sandra, of course. The odds would’ve been incredible of just stumbling on her, but for a second, she became my ex-wife until I shook my head and sipped another swallow.
She was younger than Sandra, but Sandra’s skills included bartending and, when she needed the work badly, the more laborious bar-backing, everything from washing glasses to lugging fresh cases of liquor from the stock room. It could be shitty work, but it meant she could be almost anywhere, under most of the radars that blipped when resumes and references were checked.
I’d heard mention of Florida from a friend who’d noticed something on social media. That seemed possible. It put a good bit of distance between her and Louisiana while offering a world not too alien the way a northern city might. A search, with the restrictions of a prisoner had made confirmation seem like a search for a raindrop in river rapids. Even these days.
Whether it was true or not, I often pictured Juliana walking in the surf, sea wind tousling her hair, her tiny feet leaving faint impressions in damp sand. I wanted to be with her there, running with her, splashing in incoming waves. Instead I stared at cinder block walls or at a sky framed by the correctional center’s surrounding fences.
“There are ways to find your ex,” my friend Jasso had said during a session of catch, his greying mane tousled by wind at his back. “Some calls, friends of friends. She’s on planet Earth, she can’t hide.”
“I’m not interested in having her intimidated.”
“Nobody said anything about intimidated. Found.” It still sounded menacing.
“Not right now. It starts looking like I really might get out, that search could do some good. I’ll get back to you.”
“Suit yourself.” Words dragged across his tongue in a laconic drawl that seemed to add vowels.
I stared now into glistening glasses dangling from overhead racks and rows of whiskey, rum, and vodka bottles. Sandra’s job would ha
ve been washing and polishing those glasses, placing them carefully, among other tasks. She’d hated the hours and the dish washing, called it soul destroying when I’d met her while canvassing for possible witnesses, trying to find a guy who’d mugged an old man.
She had despised the hours, the toll on her back and her hands. She’d been happier when she got an office gig once we were married and had toyed with courses as a radiology technician, but bar work would do to take her far away from me.
I’d lost a lot for a stupid, off-the-books effort with my partner. I didn’t need to make more mistakes. I ordered another drink. Speaking of mistakes, I’d left my bottle stashed in Rose Cantor’s car.
Chapter 4
The thought that I should check into Rose Cantor further crossed my mind, but I had other priorities the next morning. I woke looking up at the canopy of the antique bed in my little guest house room. It was better than waking on my prison bunk, and I just didn’t feel that inspired to call people who might have given her my name. They’d just rejected me anyway.
Someone must have meant well.
I had one more old friend to try for work in my field before I went to job listings on Craig’s List where I’d been told the opportunities in New Orleans might be interesting.
I checked my reflection in an antique mirror with a dark wooden frame. I looked slightly younger than the oak, but my sandy hair was only a little neater than Trotsky’s. Dark circles formed chasms under my eyes, and my upper lids were puffy. I didn’t need to apply for any male modeling gigs.
As I stepped back, I wondered what Julianna’s face would look like today since children’s faces change so quickly, and I hadn’t seen her in a year and a half.
Sounds of her as an infant, the soft little gurgle from the crib came back to me. She’d gone from there to walking while I’d been kept busy by the job. Her little coos and babbles had turned into talking for her mother first as well.
A lot of other milestones had passed now. I had no idea what markers, but as I imagined a taller and clear-eyed version, I found myself willing to beg for a security guard’s checkpoint tracker, or whatever they used in these high-tech days, and willing to put on any cap and uniform polyester shirt.
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