Deep Kill (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  Melville took a step away from his father. “What?”

  “So you raked all that up, did you?” Calvin asked, his tone a mixture of hurt and anger. “You had to go poking into things forty years old.”

  “It’s my job,” I said.

  “Your job is to get me off the hook, ’cause I’m innocent. That’s your job.”

  “Answer the question,” I said.

  I heard him breathing hard. For a second I thought he might rush me, and I tensed, but instead he just exhaled heavily.

  “Okay, I’ll answer. But I want you to know what I think about you. I counted you my friend, and I trusted you. The way I see it, a friend don’t go suspecting another friend. But I see now how it is. You ain’t my friend. You think I did it. That’s why you’re here.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “But I need to know everything.”

  “Everything,” he snorted. “You and this boy of mine are about the same, the way I see it. Ain’t neither of you worth a shit.”

  “Pop,” Melville started, but I cut him off.

  “I want the answer,” I said.

  He nodded. “All right. You’ll get your goddamn answer.” He spat on the ground and kicked the earth. “Where I grew up it wasn’t like the goddamn city,” he said. “Out there people said what they had a mind to say. People wasn’t kind to you when they talked. They told it the way it was. If a kid was different, he got told so, right out. I remember this little fat kid in our class. He had a name, Everett P. Kittridge. But he was just called Fatty. That’s how it was. You didn’t get no chance to like it or not.…” His voice trailed off.

  “It ain’t easy to be told when you’re twelve years old you’re gonna be different the rest of your life,” he began again after a long silence “But I didn’t have no choice. It was the accident, see.”

  “The accident?” Melville said. “I never heard of no accident.”

  “ ’Cause I didn’t tell you,” Calvin said. “I didn’t tell nobody, except your mother. And that hurt enough.”

  “What kind of accident, Calvin?” I asked him.

  “Fell on a pitchfork. Ripped me right here.” He clutched his groin. “Doctor said wasn’t no good to try to save it, a man had two of ’em, only needed one. Sewed me back up. But there was a scar. And you don’t keep things quiet in a little place like that.” He squinted over at me. “How would you like to be called names?” He coughed. “Oh, there was a lot of jokes. I was growing up then. I couldn’t stand the things they said.”

  “What did they say?” I asked.

  “All kinds of crap. You name it. I ought to join the priesthood, I should stick to farm animals. I ought to try boys cause I wouldn’t never satisfy no real woman. I—”

  He halted, suddenly conscious of what he’d said.

  “But I didn’t, damn it. It didn’t make no difference. You coulda asked Marie. She was satisfied with me. While we was together, we was happy. She said I was a real man, as much a man as anybody she ever met.”

  “You said you argued,” his son said.

  “But not about that, damn it.”

  “Then why did she leave?” Melville persisted.

  “Goddamn it, I don’t know why she left. She didn’t say. She just said she was leaving. A one-line note, it was. Hell, maybe I didn’t make enough money for her. Your mother had rich blood, boy. She didn’t think too much of me running a damn garage. She always talked about California. So I reckon she finally just up and went there. People …” He spat again. “You just never know what’s in their minds. No matter how well you think you know ’em.”

  I stood there, feeling the morning cold creep into my bones, unsure whether to laugh or cry. It was a good story, but something still bothered me, something I’d seen in Melville’s house. I was trying to summon up the image when we all heard it at the same time: a noise from outside.

  Cal was at the door in half a second, gun in hand.

  “What was it?” Melville asked.

  It came again, only this time from behind us, in the kitchen area. I went for my flashlight, but before I reached it the room exploded into burning daylight.

  Running footsteps pounded the hard earth outside, and I heard somebody yell for everybody to freeze. Cal uttered an oath, and in the split second before he fired, my eyes met his and I flinched at their accusation.

  A volley of shots answered Cal’s challenge, and I saw him fly backward against the doorframe. I started toward him but something slammed me to the dank earth floor.

  I tried to rise, but a foot pressed me back down, and somebody yanked my good hand behind me and I felt the cold bite of handcuffs. I tried to pick out Cal’s voice, to convince myself that what I’d seen had been distortion, that they’d really missed, but all I heard was Melville pleading, yelling for them not to shoot, and cop voices telling everybody to stay where they were and somebody else saying to get an ambulance and somebody else saying not to worry about the ambulance, to call the coroner.

  Fox’s voice.

  Nineteen

  The weight lifted from my back, and I managed to get to my knees. Fox was staring down at Cal Autry’s crumpled body, a grim smile on his face. The cop next to me yanked the handcuff to keep me back, and I let out a curse.

  Fox looked over in my direction, his eyes half hooded like those of a predator after a meal. “Let him go,” he said, his voice suddenly silky. “He did what we needed him to. We need him again, we can always send the street cleaners.”

  Grinding my teeth, I looked over at Melville. He was cowering in a corner under a cop’s shotgun.

  “What about this one?” one of the cops said. “Harboring?”

  Fox shook his head. “Nah. I got what I want.” He gave Cal’s body a nudge, and that was when the man on the ground groaned.

  Fox drew back his foot as if it had been bitten and several of the men uttered oaths.

  “Damn you,” I yelled, “he’s alive.” I started toward him, but hands reached out and held me. A detective stooped down and turned Cal over.

  “We better call the meat wagon, Lou.”

  Fox bit his lip, chagrin showing all too plainly on his face. “Yeah, okay.” He turned around and walked back through the empty doorway into the mist.

  “Let me go to him,” I begged, and the cops holding me released their grip. I went over to Cal and knelt down beside him. “Cal, can you hear me?”

  His eyelids fluttered and his eyes wandered over to focus on me.

  “Cal, we’ll get help. I promise.”

  His eyes narrowed slightly and his lips struggled to form a word. I leaned close and waited, and after what seemed an eternity it came out, barely audible, but with all the force of a Magnum bullet: “Sellout.”

  The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later, and I watched them huddle over him and then strap him to a stretcher and slide him inside. The ambulance roared away, its lights blurred by the fog, its siren wailing like the cry of some prehistoric creature. Men came with cameras and took pictures, and the original detectives pushed us aside, and only after what seemed an interminable period did somebody come forward to take our statements, one at a time.

  The detective hadn’t been present when the shooting had happened, and I guessed he was part of the shooting team that would ultimately make a recommendation about whether the force used had been necessary or excessive. I told him the truth, too tired to worry by this time. I’d like to have stuck it to Fox, but the truth was that Calvin had pulled his gun, and there was no way to get around the fact that the cops had shot an armed fugitive. I couldn’t hang Fox for his smile or the look on his face when he’d found Cal was still alive; the best thing I could do was lamely complain that no attempt had been made to ascertain his condition until at least a minute after the shooting, and I knew that was small potatoes.

  Then the detective threw in the spanner: “What about the cocaine?”

  Melville was standing ten feet away, looking miserable, and I tried to read his featur
es, but there was nothing in them I could make sense of.

  “What cocaine?” I asked.

  “The search team found a bag of crack cocaine in the back of the house.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.” I thought for a minute. “Maybe somebody who was here before left it. Maybe the house was a stash place for drug deals.”

  The cop grunted and told me I’d be expected downtown to sign my statement. I told him I was dead on my feet; that I’d been shoved face down into the dirt and I felt like vomiting. He was unimpressed. So I followed them downtown in the rental car with the gray sky now giving way to burned orange behind us in the east, and the fog congealing into wisps.

  The cocaine didn’t make any sense. But I was tired, too tired to think, and there were a lot of things that didn’t make any sense, things like Eddie Gulch’s killer walking across the lobby under the eye of a watching cop and not being seen. But now I remembered what I had seen in Melville’s house that had troubled me: it was the whiskey bottle that had been on his coffee table. My mind told me that made sense, but right now I was too far gone to understand where it fit in.

  It took another hour at the detective bureau, and then they told me to go home and warned me not to leave their jurisdiction. I got into the rental car and drove back to my place.

  It was just after seven in the morning when I got home. I looked back over my shoulder at the car as I went inside; after I’d gotten some sleep I’d go over it inch by inch for coke or anything else Fox might have planted to get me off the case. But I guessed there was nothing, or they’d have pulled a search earlier.

  Cal had been set up, though why was beyond me. I stumbled into the front room and dialed Katherine’s number. She answered, as I’d known she would, before the end of the first ring.

  “It’s me,” I said wearily. “Everything’s okay. No news. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  “Micah, what happened? Where did you go?”

  “I’ll explain tomorrow,” I said, realizing dully that it was already tomorrow. “Promise.”

  I hung up and went into the bedroom, where I fell onto the bed without taking off my clothes.

  They must have had Melville’s house staked out, I thought as I drifted toward unconsciousness. Ordinarily he would have driven around, shaken them, before going to where his father was. But I’d scared him too badly, and he’d led me straight there. Cal thought I’d set him up. It hurt like an open wound, knowing that there was no way to explain, to tell him I hadn’t. Because in a real sense I had: by demanding that his son take me there in the middle of the night I’d thrown caution to the wind, and I hadn’t paused to think about what Cal’s response would be because I was too worried about Scott. Thanks to me, an innocent man had been shot.

  Well, you can’t have everything, a little voice said inside me.

  Yeah, said its companion, but you’ve been screwing up by the numbers. First Condon, and now Cal. What’ll you do next?

  I don’t know, I told myself.

  Yes, you do, said one of the voices. You know where to look. Only don’t fire all barrels this time. Cunning. That’s what you need.

  Cunning, the other voice said. Take a lesson from Condon.

  Condon?

  I awoke at eleven, feeling drugged. A mishmash of dreams sorted themselves out and I tried to make sense of them. Mouth dry, I got up and went to the refrigerator for some milk.

  I hadn’t any liquor and yet I felt drunk. Almost as if I’d had the bottle instead of Melville.

  The bottle. Of course.

  The label had been a house brand. But not a common one, like K&B, which was sold at all the Katz and Besthof drugstores in New Orleans, or Schwegmann’s, which was sold by the supermarket chain. It was one I’d only seen once, several days ago, while walking among the racks in a converted house on Magazine, not interested in alcohol, my mind anywhere but on the rows of bottles in front of my eyes.

  The bottle on Melville’s table had come from the wineshop owned by the Spiderwoman.

  A wave of nausea swept through me. I reached for the milk carton and downed half of it.

  Katherine would be half crazy by now, and I wasn’t helping her. I hoped she knew that the only good I could do was by following things on my own. But she also knew it was my profession and my having lapsed by talking over my case in a social situation that had brought matters to this pass.

  Maybe, days from now, when things were resolved … But I didn’t dare think about it. The future was never, and all that mattered was now.

  My phone rang. I stared at it and lifted the receiver slowly, afraid of what I might hear.

  “Yes?”

  “Micah?” It was Katherine’s voice, and a shiver passed over me.

  “What is it? Has something happened?”

  “It’s Scott,” she breathed, in a voice almost too low for me to hear. “He just called.”

  “Called? You mean he’s all right?”

  “Yes—no. I mean, they’re holding him. That’s what he said. ‘Mom, they’ve got me. Tell Micah he was right.’ And then it sounded like another voice and a scuffle of some sort and the line went dead. Micah, for God’s sake—”

  “I know,” I told her. “But at least he’s still alive. If they haven’t killed him by now, they probably won’t.” There was no basis in fact for that, but she needed to hear it.

  “But what can we do?”

  “I’ll take it from here,” I said. For a few seconds I debated calling Mancuso and asking for a warrant on the wineshop and on the Spiderwoman’s home. But I didn’t know where she lived, and Scott hadn’t implicated her directly. If she had pull, a friendly judge might delay signing long enough for her to dump Scott. If she lived out of the parish, she might be able to call on local authorities for help: Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes were about as famous for good government as New Orleans.

  No, there were too many ifs in dealing with the legal bureaucracy. This would have to be extralegal.

  I hunted up my telephone directory and found the number I wanted. When a voice answered, I asked for the Reverend Condon and gave my name.

  The voice didn’t respond, just left me in silence for five minutes. Finally I heard a shuffle of footsteps, and Condon’s voice came on the line.

  “Mr. Dunn. You’re the last person I expected to hear from. You aren’t going to threaten me, are you?”

  “Not this time. I called for your help.”

  Half a heartbeat. “Are you serious?”

  “Why not? You wanted me out of the way because you have interests to protect. I have interests to protect too. I think the same person’s threatening us.”

  “I’m listening.”

  I told him about Taylor Augustine. “I’ve got to know if you have him stashed somewhere,” I said.

  “Just a minute,” he said. I heard muffled noise, and I imagined he had his hand over the mouthpiece. A minute passed, then two. Finally he spoke again.

  “I asked my people, to see if anybody got too enthusiastic on their own. And the answer is no.”

  “Then somebody’s grabbed him,” I said. “The same person that shot at me, and the same person that killed the boy.”

  “Your main man: Calvin Autry,” he said.

  “Calvin would have had to have been everywhere,” I said. “All with the cops a step behind him.” I told him about where I’d found Cal early this morning, and what had happened. “And now somebody else is missing,” I said.

  He listened while I explained about the wineshop and its proprietress.

  “I’ve got a feeling Taylor Augustine knows something about all this and that’s why he’s been gotten out of the way. But I have to find him: if he does know something, it may be the only way to get Scott back, if they’re holding him.”

  “Sounds like your white boy got himself in a peck of trouble,” the minister said.

  “That’s right. But he may not be the only one.”

  Silence. Then, “You want me
to find Taylor Augustine,” he said.

  “If you can. I know I can’t, and maybe you can’t either. But maybe his sister saw something, or he told her something, who knows?”

  “All right. You got it. Is that all?”

  “Actually, no.” I told him I needed a couple of his men.

  “A robbery?” he asked, when I’d finished explaining. “Okay, man, you got it,” he said again. The phone went dead.

  I stared down at the desktop. The Spiderwoman. Francine LeJeune. That was all that made sense. Scott must have blundered into her operation, and she had snatched him.

  I’d gone after Cal to see if he knew her, and a bottle of whiskey had told the story: if Cal didn’t know her, his son did. That left only the LeJeune woman herself now. It was too late to get anything out of Cal, and I didn’t have any more time to fool with Melville. I’d have to approach her cold, which is what I should have done to begin with. Would have done, if I’d been thinking clearly, had been less angry, less certain Cal would cave in when he saw me and tell me about her operation.

  My Polk’s directories for New Orleans and the New Orleans suburbs listed no Francine LeJeune for the city or the suburbs, but there were plenty of LeJeunes. I put the books away and tried to decide which way to go. It was Sunday, and the government offices were closed, which meant no access to property books. That only left one way.

  I washed my face, combed my hair, and then went down the outside steps to my car, parked beside the rental machine. I wasn’t worried about being followed now; I’d pretty well botched that part of the operation. Fox was happy, he had his man, and he’d be too busy trying to hang Gulch’s murder on Cal to be thinking about me. I took Esplanade to Claiborne and Claiborne to Napoleon. From there it was a straight shot south to Magazine and only a few blocks to the wineshop.

  I drove slowly past, checking the single car in the driveway. It was a red Caprice with a New Orleans plate. Not, I judged, the kind of car Francine LeJeune would drive.

  I made the block, trying to blink away the sand under my eyelids. My mind kept fading whenever I tried to focus. Finally I gave up. There was no other way. I had to do it.