Fool's Run

by Sidney Williams

  Then you remember when it’s time to leave that you’re headed in different directions, back toward different lives and that you’ve just been in the past for a while or a part of a timeline that turned out differently.

  For a moment I felt like I was on the job and taking her call, a call from her checking what I wanted her to leave me to warm up for dinner or if I needed the checkbook. Or to tell me something the baby had done.

  All things that had transpired in between were forgotten. It was like a moment from long ago. I knew better in a heartbeat. My brain reminded me and suctioned the pleasant feeling out of my gut.

  I searched, found words though they were very basic.

  “I wanted to know how you were doing,” I said. “How Juli is.”

  Just a couple of moments of silence followed, a hesitation, though brief. I interpreted it as a bit of emotion, regret. Then she said: “We’re fine. I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to see her right now.”

  “Just for a while? Are you in New Orleans?”

  “That’s not important.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Fine. I wanted to tell you….”

  “Sandy…I’m working on something. I’ll get a payout. I can put something together. I can help you both out of whatever you’re involved in.”

  “That’s not what Juli needs right now. Don’t bother on our account. Don’t….”

  Her voice tightened and she just stopped for another long silence.

  “Just leave us alone. Maybe down the road, but now….”

  “I’d like to see Juli. Years of her life are passing. I don’t know what she looks like now. How tall she is. She was barely talking when I went in. She doesn’t even know who I am.”

  “Some of that’s a blessing for her,” she said.

  “Is there…are you having any problems?”

  “I’m fine. I told you. Not your concern.”

  I thought about telling her what I knew about Finn Alders, his rap sheet, about his potential issues. I worried she’d think I was overstepping, prying into her life, stalking. Concern for Juli counterbalanced that worry for a second. Let Sandy be upset, at least she’d know, even if I revealed I’d been checking up. At least the warning would be on the table.

  I changed my mind again because I knew Sandy, and I knew if I tried attacking her boyfriend, it would push her closer to him, make her defensive.

  “Can I talk to Juli? Just for a minute? Put her on.”

  “Not right now. It’ll get hopes up. Cause confusion. Maybe down the road, like I said.”

  “Look, I haven’t been snooping, but the guy….”

  Damn caution.

  “I don’t want to hear it. Leave us alone.”

  I felt my jaw tighten, and I fought to control my voice.

  “What if he’s putting Juli in danger?”

  “He’s not the one who threw us into a world of confusion. Leave us alone. Will you? Stop trying to find me.”

  And the connection broke. You don’t get that dull buzz of a dial tone any more. I suppose some have never heard that result of a clipped connection. I think the absolute silence is worse, even more final and absolute. A void.

  I was definitely not in the past. I was sitting on my futon. Alone, in the void, worse than I’d been a few seconds before when at least there’d been a thread of connection and a few seconds before that when hope had lived and I’d been working toward a purpose.

  Was there a need to go on?

  Chapter 39

  Rose kept a crisp, pragmatic edge with an underpinning of impatience. Faced with the choice between finding a bottle or calling her, I’d chosen the latter then wondered if a bottle might have offered more comfort.

  “It’s one phone call,” she said. “Take it from a lawyer. Life’s a negotiation.”

  We’d agreed on a coffee bar. It sat in a corner on the ground floor of a building off Canal a short walk from my place. The menu featured a full line of fresh grinds with Vieux Carré appropriate names but no options to make one an Irish. Less temptation that way.

  “You haven’t even begun to wrangle,” she said, sipping something caramel-colored and cold. Remember, I’m not your lawyer on this, I’m not giving you legal advice, but you have negotiations in your future. An emphatic no isn’t really an option for her.”

  She waited for me to agree, and I did.

  “You get your act together,” she paused for a protracted emphasis on that point. “You get your act together, you get into family court, you’ve got a shot. It’s going to behoove you not to get caught in the middle of any illegal activity of course.”

  She paused again and gave that thought a second to submerge.

  “Not that I want to hear about what you’re up to on behalf of the Holsts to get my opinion.”

  We were back to that. The message was: “Whatever you’re up to, don’t get caught.”

  I re-focused on what I’d really wanted to ask and why I’d really called her.

  “How’s the search on your end going? For a location. For Finn?”

  “You don’t want to go stirring things up with him at this stage. Even if you could find him.”

  She gave me a hard stare, but I’d been a cop a long time, and I’d learned to tell when a lawyer was hiding something with aggression.

  “What do you know?”

  “We don’t have a definitive address or anything.”

  But there was something.

  I let the silence linger until she filled it.

  “Sniffing along a paper trail, there’s a possibility he’s been back in New Orleans.”

  “Court appearance?”

  “Something on a credit report, such that it is. You can imagine he doesn’t have a great FICO score. Let us keep up that search. You go on with what you’re doing. And again. I don’t want to know.”

  I didn’t want her to know that I’d spotted at least one tell.

  “It’s sealed away,” I said. “Chinese wall, isn’t that what you guys call it?”

  “Good. Finish what you’re doing, then think about arbitration. Giving up’s not going to do your daughter any good or get her to safety any faster.”

  It had been there all along. Save one daughter, save your own.

  Screwing up wasn’t going to do her any good either, and we weren’t that close to the goal.

  Chapter 40

  Two days later, I sat in Jackson Square watching artists create likenesses of tourists while mimes and street musicians annoyed or entertained. Mostly annoyed, I think.

  “We need to dangle something in front of Alexeeva,” I’d said a little earlier. “Even though anything we do from now on makes a shaky structure quiver a little more.”

  We were at Arch’s house sipping Keurig brews from Starbuck’s pods. Kenny, who had no coffee, had disassembled an assault rifle and sat cleaning the components. It might have been a set of Legos. Arch knew how to keep him occupied.

  “What if Moates had another suitor with laundry needs?”

  If Alexeeva really was courting someone with funds coming soon and the Eternal Fund looked like as good an option to him as it did to me, the last thing I’d want to hear was that someone else was interested.

  “Who’s at the door with a bouquet?” I asked.

  “Weapons traffickers?”

  It was almost literally staring me in the face, and I didn’t need to call someone in the ATF for a credible story.

  “Someone who’s been moving weapons across the border to Mexico,” Arch said.

  “You know somebody?”

  “Of somebody. That’s not quite our thing.”

  That kind of made me happy.

  “But maybe, say, a middle man who’s been moving guns from Eastern Europe and through the U.S. to Mexico to get around their gun laws,” Arch said. “Or just a guy doing straw purchases and sending guns across the border. You know, guy gets a guy to buy a gun for him. Guy gets another guy to buy a gun. Eventually guy has a bunc
h of guys making legal purchases. Adds up and there’s cash to deal with.”

  “And some asshole in Mexico has a new arsenal of assault rifles. I’ve heard of that. Never investigated anything like it. Kind of reverse multi-level marketing. Maybe a ring of people doing that? To really have laundry needs.”

  By the time Hollie agreed to meet me on a bench in the Quarter, I had a set of notes for her, and I was ready with one more round of threats. I was aware you could only keep this up so long before cracks appeared.

  “I know you want this to be over,” I said. I had to present this as a lifeline. “It almost is. It can be.”

  She gave me an impolite suggestion.

  “We’re going to give Alexeeva a nudge. We’re going to start a bidding war, hopefully encourage him to get serious about an inducement. Moats kind of liked the idea of a partner after your last conversation. Now he’s in a courtship with someone else.”

  “I never asked for this.”

  “I know.”

  “I was stupid. Ryan offered a little excitement.”

  “I know.”

  “This is….”

  “I know.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  I outlined a call for her to make to Alexeeva’s contact number. A guy running a scheme to route guns to Mexico from Southern sites using a network of seemingly legitimate buyers to supply him. Big payout with future repetition, money funneled through the Ponzi scheme. Big cash cuts for Moates.

  Whatever could Alexeeva offer that would tip the scale?

  “Moates likes the idea of a cash infusion now that it’s come up and sought him out after things reached a stalemate in talks with Alexeeva. He liked the idea Alexeeva planted, but you’re nervous about the guy. You’ve got to sell this to Alexeeva. You want to stabilize and disentangle yourself, and you think he’s the best option.”

  “Is this going to work?”

  I could see the strain around her eyes.

  I’d looked into her life enough to have an idea of who she was. She’d come from a modest middle-class family in North Louisiana, one where the women didn’t often earn degrees. She had and that had opened avenues that took her to places she hadn’t expected.

  She had married an average guy and grown bored, so she’d been playing games, a little glamour and the cash Moates could throw around afforded some escape, some excitement.

  She’d known Moates was up to something shady, but the excitement had superseded wisdom. She learned more, but by then she was wrapped in the benefits. Then it had turned into something she’d never anticipated. She’d turned into something she’d never anticipated. I could read that because I understood that.

  On the flip side, I’d sweated a lot of suspects on the periphery of crimes, leveraging and intimidating to gather facts, confessions or an angle on bigger fish. It had always been part of the territory and a means to an end, usually snaring someone violent and dangerous.

  I’d felt empathy for some of them just like I did for Hollie King, drawn into bad decisions by circumstances and lack of guidance and a moral compass lacking a pull to true north. I’d tried to do what I could for the ones who were caught in the snare of those above them.

  Hollie was like one of the scared kids in a way. She’d been poised to make better decisions, but there was just enough naiveté in the mix, the naiveté of those not usually involved in crime.

  “Is it really going to be over soon?”

  “I hope so,” I said. “If this one doesn’t do it, you walk away. I’ll lose the spreadsheets and try another way for the girl.” Wished to god I knew what that was.

  I wasn’t sure if I was lying about the spreadsheets. I had little pity for Moates, but she wouldn’t be of much further help after this gambit good or bad. She wasn’t much use to me as an emotional wreck either. Might as well dangle a carrot for her too.

  “So, I call….”

  “Tell him you’re worried Moates is making a bad call on the ringleader of a gun ring. There’s enough real activity of this sort, if he sniffs around at all, it’ll look like a sign.”

  She gave me a nod. She was schooled in persuasive talking on business deals. I looked into her eyes and gave her arm a squeeze.

  “You’re scared that it’s going to lead to something that falls apart and that he looks like the best of a bad situation. Can you sell that?”

  “I think so,” she said.

  I walked her through gun ring details a few times, stressing that she should parcel out information on the gun traffickers in small doses and that anything related to Dagney would generate caution with Alexeeva. He’d lost Dahlia and knew there must be someone looking for her sister, but he also knew he needed to make use of his second prize soon or not at all, and he didn’t strike me as someone who wanted to waste what he’d think of as an asset.

  After a few rehearsals, Holton tugged out a cell. We could have spent a day or more rehearsing, but it needed to be a bit desperate and confused anyway, peppered with fragments of information that would loosely sound real to Alexeeva and his people. He might even find a real trafficker like we were imagining if he looked hard enough.

  We agreed the sounds around her would add a sense of urgency and help mask false tones or mistakes on her part. She’d slipped out of the office after a meeting, desperate for an alternative and placed the called outside of Moates’s view.

  I waited for it to go to voice mail, but she got an answer and after a little bit of explaining, she was put through to Taras. That was almost best-case. He seemed to be the calmer and more pragmatic of the inner circle.

  “This is Holton King,” she said. “I’m glad I got you. I needed to talk to you. To see if we could…I’m sorry discussions broke off before.”

  Nice touch.

  “It’s good to hear from you, Mrs. King,” he said. Calm and stable. Promising.

  “Thanks. I called because I’m worried Ryan is about to make a bad decision. Your overtures got him interested in the secondary possibilities of his fund, and he’s talking to this fucking idiot with a….”

  “Business is not best discussed on the phone,” he said. “I will say if you have an offer he thinks is more lucrative….”

  “I realize I’m outdoors and it’s noisy. I stepped right out of a meeting….”

  She stared directly at me as she improvised, her eyes conveying the effort and desperation. I gave a nod and expression to suggestion she was doing fine, though my insides were in knots as tight as hers.

  “This is something that at best is short-lived. Not the scale of Mr. Alexeeva’s efforts and not the….”

  “Why don’t I send a car for you?”

  I shook my head and mouthed PUBLIC PLACE.

  She repeated that.

  “Where are you now?”

  “Walking. I can be at Jackson Square in a couple of minutes.”

  “No. It’s hot out isn’t it? Why don’t you head down to Harrah’s? It’s not far from there.”

  Noisy and probably crowded no matter what time of day. Not a bad choice.

  “How will you find me?”

  “Wait near the front on the entrance near the fountain. I’ll spot your lovely hair.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay. It’ll take me a few minutes to get there,” Holton said.

  She clicked off.

  “Do you want me to turn my phone on when he gets close, open a connection to you?”

  “We’re not going to try anything elaborate. It wouldn’t work anyway with all the slots and other toys. He knows that. You know what you have to sell him on.”

  “Will you be close? You still worried about them recognizing you?”

  “I’ve got my Trilby, and it’ll be dim and distracting in there, and I can’t do worse than Kenny. I don’t think Taras will spot me if I’m nearby even if Alexeeva has somebody inside with a view of the security cameras, and I don’t think that’s likely. I won’t be able to pick up any of the conversation. You have the scenario. You can d
o it. We’ll connect up somewhere away from the casino after you’ve had the talk and see where things are.”

  I talked her through the bullet points again, the irony of the term not lost on me. Then I put her in a cab.

  It was hot out.

  I grabbed a different cab near the Cathedral and had the driver drop me at a streetcar stop across from the casino. I found a set of covered benches at an angle from the entrance and sat down, adjusting so that I could look Hollie’s way.

  In spite of the orders to get comfortable inside, she had a seat on a concrete lip at the edge of the small array of fountains that stretched between Harrah’s signs outside the covered bus and limo drop-off area.

  I was definitely too far to hear anything, and I felt pretty useless. He wasn’t likely to try and harm her. I hoped she’d catch sight of me for moral support. Or maybe just to appreciate my jaunty chapeau. As minutes ticked past, I watched a few newer red streetcars rattle by. I’d grabbed a paper copy of the Picayune earlier, and I pretended to read it as tourists and locals alike filtered on and off the cars, some heading down toward the Riverwalk. No one really paid much attention to my not getting on.

  Twenty minutes were gone before Taras appeared, and I’d begun to periodically tug my collar and shake my shirt for a makeshift breeze. Taras had come alone. He walked along the cobblestone walk from down near a Hilton a couple of blocks away. Someone must have dropped him off. I didn’t spot any companions as he approached Holton’s seat.

  She stood and accepted his hand, and then he gently took her arm near the elbow, and they navigated across the entry drive to a set of doors.

  I waited a few seconds to make sure no one followed, but Taras really seemed to be alone. I gritted my teeth a while, waiting for a horde of Alexeeva minions to converge, but that never happened.

  A busload of seniors pulled up shortly after, so I hopped a low railing behind my bench and hoofed it for the gaggle so I could mingle with them as they entered.

  And amid giggling silver hairs, I stepped into the low-lighting of the artificial casino world: dinging slots, babbling voices, falling coins and the subdued, gold-tinged lighting that makes time ambiguous, especially under a tiled ceiling that affected a look of a starry sky.