by Chuck Logan
“He’ll tell me a lot,” he said slowly. “But I’ll tell him more and then he’ll tell LaPorte…”
Nina shook her head in a quandary of pain and anger. Broker clamped a hand on her shivering shoulder. “You’re not alone anymore, okay?”
She set her lips to keep them from quivering. “We’re going to take LaPorte down,” she said.
Broker narrowed his eyes. “We’ll see. I’m on my way to lay the opening move on Fret.”
Nina collapsed into his arms in a tremendous release of anxiety and laughed. Quickly she sobered. “Where do you keep a pick and shovel?” she asked, squaring her shoulders. “You can’t dig with that hand and your dad can’t and I sure as hell won’t let Irene do it.”
Broker knelt and patted the stiffening fur. “Wait for Mike. He’ll want to pick the spot.”
19
THE NORTH SHORE DAWN ROLLED THE FOG IN OFF the big water and glossed the black granite boulders with glacier sweat and it was the first day of June. Broker stood on the waterfront across from the police station and sipped coffee and waited for Tom Jeffords. Lyle was inside the cop shop running Fret on the computer.
Jeffords showed up in sweats, running shoes, and a light windbreaker. Unshaven, he nodded as he eased from his Chevy pickup. He reached out his hand for Broker’s coffee cup and took a sip. “Lyle says we got big city bullshit before breakfast?”
“Fucker killed Mike’s dog.”
“Lyle told me. Why, Phil?”
“Remember that kid who stayed with Kim and I? Nina Pryce.”
“Sure. Your army brat surrogate kid sister, the celebrity.”
“She grew up,” Broker said laconically. “This guy says he’s a cop followed her up here from New Orleans. Played real rough with her.”
“Lyle’s got him for burglarizing your house and assault. The dog will be impossible to prove. He could claim self-defense. You want to press the breaking and entering?”
“Not yet. Want to talk to him first.”
“This headed in the direction of me doing you a favor?”
“I’d appreciate it.”
Jeffords turned Broker’s injured hand in his fingers, winced and said mildly, “You started smoking again.”
They went into the station and Lyle handed them a sheet of fax paper. “He’s dirty. Administrative leave from NOPD, implicated in narcotics and two homicides. Case dropped. Circumstantial. No witnesses. Sound familiar?” Lyle handed over a plastic card. “He also had this in his wallet. Registered PI with New Orleans.”
“Big deal,” said Jeffords, “you can send away to a magazine and get one of those.”
Lyle held up the map. “All this trouble over a piece of paper.”
Jeffords unrolled the map. “Hmmm. This is the coast of…Vietnam.” He took out a sheet of paper that had been rolled inside the map. The murky graphic could have been a close-up of a rock formation in a lunar crater. “What’s this?”
Broker had avoided taking a good look at the contents of Nina’s briefcase up until now. He shrugged, but he felt his stomach tighten and the part of his mind that was an intricate museum of facts drew a connection to a picture he’d seen in a National Geographic article. Sidescan sonar. A shape emerged in the wavy gray lines. The unmistakable rotor masts of a Chinook cargo helicopter. Not on the moon, on the ocean bottom. He looked at Tom and shrugged. “I don’t know. Yet.” Then he said, “Is there a Xerox in town big enough to copy the map and this thing, good copy?”
“Maybe at the hospital,” said Jeffords.
“Could Lyle run copies on the QT while we talk to this guy?”
“I can do that,” said Lyle. “One other thing. I had Gloria at the motel pull his phone bill. He made two calls to New Orleans and received one back. All the same number. Listed to a Cyrus LaPorte.”
Broker instinctively disliked former New Orleans detective sergeant Bevode Fret. Not just because he wore a men’s cologne that had little girls in its ads. Or because he oozed casual superhero violence out of a Nietzschean comic book. When Broker walked into the detention room where they were holding Fret, the southern cop nodded and smiled at him in sinister welcome.
Like he was proud of the brawny backwoods mojo that enabled him to lure a big dangerous animal into killing range. Like he was in control.
The Louisianan sat at a small table under bright electric lights. His lanky frame was relaxed on a folding chair as, tentatively, he sipped from a Styrofoam cup of coffee. He had a bandage on his big jaw and a puffy bruise down his left cheek. He had meticulously combed his duck-butt hair. The charcoal gray, athletic-cut tropical suit he wore must have cost eight hundred bucks. With a twinge of disgust, Broker noticed the prominent day-old suck mark on his neck under his left ear. Vain Elvis boy has a hickey.
“You gonna charge me?” he asked as Broker and Jeffords entered the interrogation room.
“How’s B&E and felony assault sound?” said Jeffords.
“Where’s the felony? She had the shotgun, bro, not me. I ain’t carrying. Got no permit up here.”
Broker did not mention the marks on Nina’s throat or the dog. That would be a personal discussion he’d have later. He said, “You came through my door at four A.M. You didn’t knock.”
“Door was open.”
“Door was locked,” said Broker.
Fret shrugged. “Opened for me. I just walked in. Was going to collect some things that didn’t belong to her and quietly be on my way. She jumped me.”
Jeffords folded his arms and leaned against the wall. Broker sat down in the other chair, facing Fret.
Fret grinned. “Give me my rights and my phone call. I ain’t saying do-do.”
Broker and Jeffords stared at him. His muddy hazel eyes did not waver. His grin broadened. “Didn’t think so. This ain’t the kind of situation we want getting more complicated than it already is for you guys or my client.”
“Tom, could Sergeant Fret and I could talk privately?” asked Broker.
“Sure, just keep the door open.”
Fret grinned again, showing alligator rows of teeth. “You the local badass? Going to trip me down some stairs?”
“Talk,” repeated Broker. Jeffords nodded and left them alone. “I’m a cop,” said Broker.
“Yeah, so I gathered when I saw the army bust into your house in Stillwater. Checked you out…” A little honey humor ran with the mud in Fret’s eyes and he let Broker fill in the blanks. Fret knew he had history with LaPorte and Nina and they were talking between the lines. “You’re the kind of cop who don’t wear a uniform. So if you’re a cop why you been driving that cunt around?”
“Her name’s Nina Pryce,” said Broker.
“Yeah, the nasty little cunt who wormed her way into my client’s social circle and then robbed some items.”
“What’re you getting at?” asked Broker.
“She took some stuff. I take it back. Everything’s copacetic. Oh yeah,” Fret loosened his features and like some lightbulb coming on in the dungeon of his mind, he recollected, “my client has a soft spot for the…girl. That’s why he didn’t charge her down home. Yet.”
“We checked your phone calls. You work for Cyrus LaPorte.”
“General Cyrus LaPorte.”
“And he has a soft spot for Miss Pryce?”
Fret smiled and shifted into a lazy intimate tone of voice, a personal touch that southerners seemed to own as a birthright and that Broker resented because it was absent in himself. “It’s like this,” said Fret reasonably. “Mr. LaPorte and the girl’s daddy were in the army together. Some fuckin’ thing way back. She blames General LaPorte for her daddy’s shortcomings, you could say. She’s messed up her life behind this shit and the general don’t necessarily want to lean on her. He’d be willing to let it go if he gets his stuff back and some kind of understanding she leaves him alone.” Fret knit his thick blond eyebrows in a convincing display of concern.
“What’s the big deal about this map?” asked Broker.
“Not real
sure on that, bro,” said Fret, smiling broadly and winking. “Not my area of expertise. Something to do with illegal oil drilling General LaPorte detected over in Asia. General LaPorte has these do-good projects, sorta like Jimmy Carter, you understand. Some deal with the Vietnamese government. If it gets in the wrong hands, it could create a problem. But it ain’t the paper. It’s her intent. General LaPorte is a prominent member of the community. Don’t need extra hassle from a nutcase.”
“So you’re up here on a goodwill mission?”
“Yeah,” said Fret. “Just my nature, I guess.” He paused and massaged his hands together and a lazy, bullying contempt surfaced in his swampy eyes. “You could say all my life big dogs been lickin’ my hand.”
The ugly challenge hung like smoke between them. The barest of smiles drew down Broker’s lips. This new ogre was intentionally goading him.
Fret, enjoying himself, asked, “You her boyfriend, huh?”
“Friend of the family,” Broker said.
“Oh yeah?” said Fret. They were playing a game. Broker didn’t mind games.
“Yeah,” said Broker. “She’s been…upset. Since her mother died. She doesn’t need any more crap in her life.”
Fret became absorbed in dusting at a dirt smudge on his trousers with his big hands. And Broker chastised himself for being so cavalier about security last night. Fret had contempt for them, and he was vain. Mind the threads. He had worn a suit. He didn’t expect to get dirty. He had planned to get caught. I’m letting you do this, you understand. Just a sadistic sonofabitch who couldn’t resist killing something. Casually, Fret looked up. “She don’t count, bro. Turns out now it’s you the general wants to talk to.”
Broker stood up. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Do that,” said Fret. As Broker left the room he sang out, “Hey, sun’s coming up. Can a guy get some breakfast?”
Jeffords pushed off the wall when Broker came into the hall. “How long can you hold him?” Broker asked.
“Thirty-six-hour rule,” said Jeffords. “Which doesn’t include weekends. So it’s Saturday. So I can run him up to county and lock him up and the clock will start as of midnight on Sunday. We don’t have to charge him till noon on Tuesday. That give you enough time?”
“That’ll do just fine.”
“What are we doing here?” said Jeffords.
Broker nodded at the door. They took their coffee to the waterfront. Sunlight steamed the dew on the boulders.
“I was eavesdropping in the hall,” said Jeffords. “So, is she really a nutcase?”
“I suppose she is, the way Joan of Arc was a nutcase.”
“What? She hears voices?”
“She has a fixed idea that drives her life. Maybe Fret has a point. LaPorte was her dad’s commanding officer in the army. He pressed charges against her dad for stealing. She’s really twisted about it. Maybe it’s time she faced up to the truth.” Broker spoke easily, playing into the scenario that Fret had sketched. Dissembling, something he’d watched Trin do effortlessly to Americans in Vietnam, that he had perfected when he first started working undercover with J.T. Merryweather: Let ’em see the black man and they can’t see the person. Gives me extra room to maneuver on their ass. Stillwater prison was full of people who suspected everybody in the state, except Phil Broker, of turning them. They saw a limited, dangerous blue-collar mensch who worked with his hands when they looked at Broker, and he flowed naturally into their expectations. Talking to Fret he did it innately. Now he was doing it with a friend.
Tom exhaled. “So now what?”
“I’ll have a heart to heart with her and then I’ll talk to this LaPorte. Arrange to get him his stuff back. If he’ll drop charges on her, then we let the redneck go. A trade.”
“Tuesday noon. And I keep the Tazer.”
“Let Fret know I’m trying to work something out. Then let him use the phone.”
“What about Mike’s dog?”
“That’ll be between him and me when he gets out. You all right with that?”
“You want to get your butt sued, fine. Just don’t get my butt sued,” said Tom Jeffords.
Walking heavily, Broker was on his way to find his folks and tell them about Tank when he spotted Fatty Naslund wheel his tomato-red, perfectly restored ’55 Thunderbird up to the bank. Broker stepped off the street into a space between two stores until the banker was out of his car and inside. He didn’t want to see Fatty now. He’d see him later.
Because Broker had decided he was going to New Orleans to see a man whom he had idolized in his youth. To see for himself if that man was who Nina Pryce said he was.
20
THE NORTHEASTERN SKY WAS A PILE OF CUMULONIMBUS, the color of spoiled mushrooms. Superior coiled flat and green in eerie anticipation. The air hung in sticky olive sheets.
After telling his folks about their dog, Broker followed Mike’s station wagon home.
Okay. It was personal now and it was starting to look very tricky. LaPorte wanted to see him? These folks sure had a strange way of sending an invitation.
It was always a good idea to follow the money. In this case, ten tons of gold. Jimmy Tuna was the only living person who had been near that gold. Maybe everybody wanted to locate old Jimmy. Because maybe Jimmy was the only person who knew exactly where it was.
A lot of maybes. But there was the pure adolescent thrill…
Arrgh. What might yer name be, matey?
Why, Jim Hawkins, sir.
A sunken treasure. Yesterday the voice had been tiny inside him. Today it had grown to small. Small like Mighty Mouse. I’m gonna do this.
More soberly, he caught a spark from Nina’s long, patient fury.
They killed my dad.
After meeting Fret, Broker no longer ruled that out. And if that was true, then they’d used him to do it.
His folks turned off and drove toward the main house and a tarp that made a blue lump over Tank on the lawn by the porch. Mike and Irene got out of the car and stood by the tarp.
Nina waited on Broker’s porch, sipping coffee. They went inside and Broker slapped the Xeroxed copies of the map and the sonar picture on the table. She poured a cup of coffee and handed it to him. Then she sat down and smoothed out the map. She’d put on sweat pants and a fresh T-shirt. The shirt didn’t hide the scarlet and purple bruises that raked her bare forearms. A red bandanna around her neck hid the bruising there. If she hurt, she didn’t show it.
The bruises were a reminder. Fret could have killed her if he’d wanted to. Broker paced with his coffee cup and reconsidered Nina Pryce.
His method was to start reading a person with their body, to observe how they occupied their space. Some people were barely connected, flophouse tenants in their own flesh; some were entombed or asleep. Others were conflicted.
Nina wore herself like a veteran, not an ounce more than was necessary. She’d shaken off the attack of this morning and now she sat alert, crackling with energy, keyed on him.
Maybe seeing her as obsessed in a crazy way had been his easy way out. And it had been easy to see her over-achiever performance in academics, athletics, and the military as a warped proof that she could outrun her father’s shame.
People had said, Broker had said: Something is wrong with her.
Broker took a deep breath and considered the possibility that it was the other way around: Something is wrong with people who choose to live with a criminal lie.
He was still pondering his mea culpas when Nina asked, “What did Fret say?”
“He said LaPorte wants to see me.”
“Oh.”
“Fret gave me the scenario. I work out a deal; we drop charges on him if LaPorte doesn’t charge you in Louisiana. I guarantee that you leave LaPorte alone.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’ll go to New Orleans and personally return the map. Except what I give LaPorte will be a copy. We’ll keep the original to mess with his mind.”
“And?”
�
��I’ll find out what’s going on.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet.” He paused and said, “I never gave you a fair shake. It was easier to see you as a kind of victim.”
“There’s a lot of that going around,” said Nina. “Back during the army flap, this chichi feminist reporter had trouble seeing me as a soldier. She felt obligated to ask me if my father ever abused me. I told her I thought abuse was a sexual option you had when you were alone.”
They both laughed a little. Like a good officer, she told an off-color joke to ease the tension of a new relationship. Nina tapped the sonar graphic on the table and raised her eyebrows.
“It’s a sonar image of a Chinook,” said Broker.
“Laying in one hundred feet of water off the coast of central Vietnam.”
“We have to be sure.”
“The guy LaPorte hired to take the picture told me.”
“No bullshit?”
“No bullshit,” she said evenly.
She was Ray Pryce’s kid. She had that offhand charisma: How about you and me go out today and see if we can get ourselves killed in a good cause.
Nina Pryce grinned. It was the most dangerous kind of grin; it had youth and moral courage and principle and affection in it, and revenge and a crisp-honed edge of duty. But Broker saw a cold flicker of something else there. Something really scary. Ambition.
“I need all the background,” said Broker. “Facts, not theories.”
She nodded. “I’m out of the army, back at the U of M. You know how I did a search on Tuna and found out he was in Milan. And he wouldn’t see me. There was a state highway patrolman in one of my classes, Danny Larkins, and we went out a few times. I mentioned this prisoner in Milan I wanted to talk to and how he wouldn’t return my letters or calls. This cop made an inquiry and came up with this interesting fact.
“In July 1980 Tuna got in a brawl in the visitor’s room with Gen. Cyrus LaPorte—”
Broker cocked his head. “That police report you have—”
“Right,” said Nina. “What was LaPorte doing in some medium-security federal prison in Michigan in 1980? He was working in the Pentagon in Washington, trying to resurrect his career with the Reagan crowd. LaPorte tried to get the beef put on Tuna, but the guards witnessed it and they all agreed. The guy from Washington in the Armani suit attacked the convict. Not just attacked him but totally lost his cool, raving and throwing things. It was investigated by the FBI. LaPorte wound up paying a fine for misdemeanor assault.”