A Perfect Cover

by Maureen Tan

  I looked at Beauprix, who was pouring a warm-up into both of our cups, and wondered what he was thinking. Certainly if Uncle Tinh was connected to organized crime, Beauprix would know or suspect it. Perhaps that was the reason he’d come to Uncle Tinh. Perhaps he, too, was corrupt. But, although I hardly knew the man, I realized that it was difficult for me to imagine that Beauprix was anything but honest.

  Beauprix felt my eyes, turned his head and flashed me a smile.

  “It could have been just a random act of violence,” I said.

  Beauprix shrugged, then handed me my cup.

  “Happens. A couple of guys come here from out of town, figure that there are no rules here in the Big Easy, mix booze and boredom with a disposition to violence…”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding. “It could have been that.”

  “Yeah,” he said, not looking entirely convinced. “Maybe. Might also have been someone trying to scare you off.”

  “Only three people knew I was coming here. You. Uncle Tinh. Senator Duran Reed.”

  He grinned.

  “That’d make me the most likely suspect and, I swear, I didn’t do it.”

  I laughed, which I suspected was his intention.

  “What about extortion?” he said more seriously. “Maybe someone wants money from one of your uncles.”

  As I considered the possibility, my carefully cultivated detachment failed me. Suddenly I was recalling the glittering eyes that stared down at me from a pair of feathered masks, recalling how helpless I had been. My stomach twisted and I shuddered.

  “That would only make sense if they’d kidnapped me,” I said. “Which would have been easy.”

  “But they didn’t,” Beauprix said firmly. “You’re safe now, Lacie.”

  I felt better for the reminder, but I wasn’t sure that I was comfortable with his quick perceptions.

  I took a sip of coffee, watching as he spooned a little extra sugar into his own cup, and again asked myself about his relationship with Uncle Tinh.

  “Would you like some food?” Beauprix asked. “I can call down to room service.”

  “No. No need.”

  I leaned forward slightly, thinking that I’d snag myself another cookie, and felt the muscles catch in my back and shoulders before I lifted my arm. So I hid my grimace with a smile, abandoned the task and settled back onto the pillows.

  “Since you’ve already been through my suitcase, I don’t suppose you’d mind rummaging through it again? There’s some extra-strength ibuprofen in one of the pockets. Could you get me a couple?”

  He did just that, then stood beside the bed, watching as I swallowed them with a sip of coffee.

  Shifting back into overprotective male mode, I thought, noticing his expression. I raised my hand, palm out, to stop any anxious words.

  “I’m not going to die of internal injuries. Promise. And I don’t have a concussion. My headache is already gone. It’s just that my back and neck are getting stiff. Not a big deal. Really.”

  Briefly, Beauprix continued to look down at me and I could read indecision on his handsome face. Whatever his thoughts, he apparently made up his mind.

  “Turn over,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “If you didn’t trust me, you wouldn’t have called me tonight. So, Ms. Reed, if you’ll roll on over, I’ll rub your sore shoulders.”

  I didn’t bother replying. Instead, I snuggled down under the blanket until it covered me to the waist and rolled over onto my stomach.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, leaned in and put his hands on my shoulders. At first, he tried to massage my back through the bulk of my sweatshirt. After a minute, he made a noise in his throat that sounded like a growl.

  “This doesn’t work,” he said.

  He slid his hands under my sweatshirt and lifted it to my shoulders, exposing my back. At first, his touch was tentative, then more confident. His hands were warm and only slightly calloused, and he obviously knew what he was doing.

  “The attack… Those two men… My God, Lacie, it was brutal. And, though I think you’re putting a good face on it, terrifying. There’s no doubt in my mind that you handled the situation then—and you’re handling how you feel now—as well as anyone, man or woman, could.”

  As he spoke Beauprix’s fingers moved along the muscles of my neck and shoulders, working outward from the spine, identifying knots and skillfully working them out. Silence stretched out into minutes and I tried not to think of anything but my muscles relaxing beneath his hands. No rough, brutal hands. No threatening feet. No carrion birds staring down at their prey.

  “If I ever decide to quit the department,” he said finally, “I think that I could make a damned good living as a masseuse.”

  “Mmm,” I said, sighing in agreement.

  “My daddy,” he said by way of explanation, “had a stroke earlier this year. Left him partially paralyzed. That’s why I moved back home. To make sure he has someone there… Not that I do all that much, mind you. He’s got a fellow who comes in almost every day to help him out and a physical therapist visits once a week. The therapist—a black gal with a smart mouth and muscles that would make a pro wrestler jealous—keeps him doing his exercises right. She does massage therapy, too. Really seems to help him. So I learned enough to pitch-hit between appointments.”

  Beneath his touch, the ache through my neck and shoulders diminished. Efficient, caring and compassionate, I thought, considering some of Anthony Beauprix’s more positive attributes. And it didn’t hurt that he was easy on the eyes.

  Underneath his probing hands, I lay relaxed, warm and unresisting. I’d had lovers in college and, less frequently, in the years I’d worked for Uncle Duran. Though Beauprix sat on the other side of the sheets and his hands strayed no farther than the space between my shoulder blades, I doubted that I’d ever been with a man whose foreplay was more potent.

  “Do you do this sort of thing often?” Beauprix asked.

  I started, wondering for a moment if his question had anything to do with a fantasy about a virtual stranger smoothing his oh-so-gentle hands over sensitive areas of my body. Then I turned my head, took a quick look at his face and realized that the question was professional interest.

  Just as well.

  “If, by ‘this sort of thing,’” I said in the direction of the pillow, “you mean getting beaten up and dropped in a gutter, the answer is no.”

  As I spoke, Beauprix’s hands had stopped moving. They lay passive against my body, heavy, warm and much too tempting. I stretched, shifting slightly from beneath his touch. Immediately, his hands fell away from me and he tugged my sweatshirt back into place. Then he moved back into his chair and poured himself another cup of coffee.

  After I crawled up from the blankets and sat up against the pillows again, I rolled my shoulders and turned my head experimentally.

  “Nice,” I said, pleased by the results.

  He touched two fingers to his forehead, moved them outward in an informal salute. Then his face grew more serious.

  “From what Tinh said… This sort of thing…” Beauprix stopped speaking, reorganized his thoughts, tried again. “What I mean is, being attacked like this isn’t business as usual for you, is it?”

  At the suggestion, I pressed my lips shut, rolled my eyes.

  “Uncle Tinh is proud of me, so he tends to overdramatize. I’m good at what I do, but I’m no Hollywood-style secret agent. My job is more a matter of keeping my eyes open and my mouth shut than getting my butt kicked.”

  He looked vaguely disappointed and, perhaps, a little relieved. Counterproductive, I thought, if he began underestimating me. Perhaps a little drama wasn’t all bad.

  “Though, I will admit,” I said slowly, “there have been a few uncomfortable moments. Last month, I was in the desert, trapped in an abandoned trailer with several dozen illegals. I had my doubts, but we all lived.”

  Rosa, her infant daughter, and her husband were now living legall
y in New York City. A bonus from Uncle Duran for a job I’d done well. At my insistence, he’d pulled a few strings with the INS.

  “And, a couple of years ago,” I continued, “I leaped from a fire escape while trying to evade a couple of Chicago’s finest, and I broke my arm.”

  Beauprix’s eyes widened.

  “Yup. Breaking and entering. There had been rumors of child labor in this sweatshop on Chicago’s north side. Turns out they were using kids as young as nine to clean used transformers. Little fingers, it seems, do the best work. Under the best of conditions, it’s an unpleasant job. But this place…”

  I shook my head, remembering air that was thick with smoke and fumes, and nasty burns from soldering irons that went untreated.

  “Anyway, I posed as a child, wore a hidden camera to work every day, made sketches of the men I couldn’t get clear photos of, and built a solid case. But I wanted more. There was this woman who never saw those kids. Old family, old money, expensive lifestyle. She wasn’t the type to get her hands dirty, ever. But she knew about the kids and profited by their labor. Didn’t seem right. So I made a late-night visit to her office. I was on my way out, up on a flat rooftop, when the cops spotted me. I hid the camera and took off. Figured if I jumped across to the next building, I could use its fire escape to get to the ground. Unfortunately the fire escape wasn’t in very good repair. I fell hard, they scraped me off the pavement and I spent a couple of days in Cook County’s police infirmary before Uncle Duran fixed things.”

  Then I grinned at Beauprix, thinking the story would make him laugh. Instead, for the second time that day, he looked at me as if I were something alien. And it hurt.

  Chapter 8

  The Seventh District squad room reeked of stale coffee, rancid food and dirty sweat socks. The result, I diagnosed, of chronically long hours, mediocre housekeeping and too many male bodies occupying a small space. That morning, the malodorous background was diluted by the buttery scent of bakery-fresh beignets and someone’s recent, heavy-handed application of aftershave. I was responsible for the beignets. I suspected that the heavy-set man with a toupee at the far end of the room was responsible for the Old Spice.

  The area was furnished with a disorganized arrangement of battered metal desks, mismatched chairs, multiline desk phones and surprisingly new computer monitors and hard drives. Umbilical cords of coaxial cable, anchored mostly by strips of duct tape, ran from hard drive to monitor and then snaked upward and unsupported to the framework for the drop ceiling. From there, the wires disappeared beneath stained acoustical panels.

  On every desk, adjacent to every computer, was some kind of stacked metal tray, shallow cardboard box or rectangular wire basket. Each held well-filled and obviously recycled file folders. The paperless society in action, I thought, recalling the better matched but similarly functional setup in my own office. Then I corrected myself. Like the setup in my former office.

  Seven men occupied the space in the squad room. Four, including the guy with the toupee, were white. Three were black. In appearance, the detectives ran the gamut from fit to flabby, from early thirties to fifty-something, and from handsome to dissipated. The styles of their plainclothing ranged from the pages of GQ magazine to the resale bins at the Salvation Army.

  All but one of the men were staring at me and pretending not to.

  Anthony Beauprix was staring at his computer screen.

  I couldn’t imagine what the others found so fascinating. In deference to my aching body and a sunny, fifty-degree forecast for the New Orleans metro area, I had dressed for comfort. There was nothing remarkable about the worn blue jeans, raspberry-striped white cotton sweater and thick-soled black Skechers that I wore. And I doubted that lips colored with a bit of pale gloss, brown eyes touched with just a smudge of gold shadow and dark hair swept up into a thick twist had transformed me into an irresistible object of desire.

  Beauprix’s introduction had been casual.

  “Y’all, this is Lacie.”

  He’d expanded on that by waving a couple of fingers in the direction of each desk and giving me a name. That prompted an assortment of waves, nods and “heys.” No explanation of my presence was offered or requested, which, I suppose, left them to speculate about whether I was Beauprix’s lover. In the males-only atmosphere of the Seventh District squad room, I couldn’t imagine them thinking I was anything else.

  I ignored the looks, sat beside Beauprix’s desk in a chair that was upholstered in cracked leatherette, and watched the screen as his fingers pecked rapidly at the keyboard. We spoke quietly, our voices mixing with the ringing phones and the drone of other conversations in the squad room.

  “Ah, this is what I wanted you to see,” he said, pointing at a line. “Look here. Assaults.” Another tap on the keyboard changed the screen image. “And here, under armed robbery.” He pointed again, then scrolled down. “And here. Crimes against property.”

  Individually, the numbers were unremarkable. Taken together, they went beyond statistical probability. And now I understood what Beauprix had meant the day before when he’d described the crime rate in the area of the murders as odd.

  “Technology in action,” he continued, tapping the screen of his monitor for emphasis. “Crime is mapped by type and area, with stats updated weekly. The public can get the numbers through the city’s Web site. Cops have access to better breakdowns, more details. If you crunch the numbers and graph the stats…”

  Beauprix paused as, once again, his fingers flew over the keyboard and pulled up a graph. It was enough to pick out a dramatic plunge in reported crimes in early spring.

  “Little Vietnam is maybe two miles square. And for months, except for spontaneous stuff like domestic violence, vandalism, a few minor drug busts, and some prostitution, there’s been no crime. A hundred-plus businesses. Maybe nine thousand residents. And no crime.”

  “No reported crime,” I murmured.

  He nodded.

  “Right. Which only makes sense if—as Tinh maintains—a gang has recently moved in and is putting the screws to the community.”

  As we were speaking, the guy in the toupee had made his way across the squad room to the water cooler. On his return trip, he lingered near Beauprix’s desk, looking at the monitor. Apparently disagreeing with my unspoken reaction, the detective went from surreptitious listening to actively participating in our conversation. He took a few steps over to stand behind Beauprix’s chair, bringing with him the strong smell of aftershave and the accents of backwater Louisiana.

  “Anthony telling you about his theory? Our district commander, he thinks your friend here is… What was his exact word, Anthony? Oh, yeah. Obsessed. ‘We ain’t got enough crime in N’Orleans,’ he say to Anthony. ‘You ain’t got enough work on your desk? Now you worrying about crime not happening?’ You look like a smart girl, eh, Lacie? And you’re one of them. Anthony don’t believe Remy, but maybe he listen to you. I been telling him for weeks that your people don’t make no trouble for cops.”

  No, no trouble at all, I thought sarcastically. At least, not for the past six months in Little Vietnam. And I wondered if Remy had ever heard of the Born To Kill gang. That group of Vietnamese thugs that had ripped through America’s underworld in the 1990s, giving even established organized crime like the Chinese tongs and the Italian mafia something to fear.

  But before I could say anything, Beauprix leaned back in his chair and flashed his colleague a smile that was all teeth and no humor.

  “Don’t you have something important to do? Somewhere else?”

  Remy took the hint and sulked back to the other end of the squad room.

  “There’s no one better than Remy for grabbing onto an idea and chewing at it until he gets results,” Beauprix said to me. Then he shrugged. “His blessing. Our curse.”

  I smiled, understanding.

  “I worked with someone just like him a few years back. Different city, different accent, similar attitude.” Then I asked him a question tha
t, thanks to Uncle Tinh, I already knew the answer to. “Do you have someone inside the Little Vietnam neighborhood? A snitch? Someone undercover?”

  He shook his head.

  “If I’d had, it wouldn’t have taken Tinh Vu to tell me about a new gang in town. Turns out the department’s gang unit hasn’t heard a whisper about them, either. Not surprising, I suppose. In places like Little Vietnam, if you’re not on the inside, you don’t get in. And if you are on the inside, you keep your mouth shut. And I’m not even talking criminals. I mean the majority, all those folks who are honest and hardworking and simply don’t like cops. Not that they have a corner on that market. Hell, if they didn’t want anything to do with cops before they immigrated, dealing with rednecks like Remy wouldn’t do much to change their minds. So, bottom line is, even if someone in the department was willing to assign the personnel—and no one is—we don’t have anyone who can go into Little Vietnam without raising all sorts of suspicions.

  “You think the murders are tied to gang activity,” I said, my tone making it a statement.

  “It makes sense, doesn’t it?” he said as he nodded. “That kind of brutality could silence an entire community, especially if they’re not predisposed to working with the police.”

  “But the only way you’re going to find out for sure is to have someone on the inside who’s willing to talk.”

  “That’s what I told Tinh over dinner at City Vu the night I asked him for advice. I don’t think he’s an insider, but he’s well respected by the Vietnamese. I was hoping he might know someone, maybe make the right phone call, twist the right arms…. That’s when he told me about you and I made that expensive—and damned stupid—bet.”

  It was then that I flashed Beauprix the same predatory smile he’d shown Remy.

  “Then I’d better make sure you get your money’s worth,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything in return.