by Greg Herren
Frank can turn on the charm when he wants to—probably partly why he’d been such a great field agent for the feds—and he gave her his most winning smile. But when he spoke his voice was cold and professionally polite. “We’re not so concerned about Veronica, frankly, Mrs. Porterie, and I don’t want to waste any more of your time than we need to. It’s Hope we’re primarily concerned with.”
Her face visibly softened at the mention of her granddaughter. “Why didn’t you say so?” She leaned forward in her chair. “It’s ridiculous that the police think she had anything to do with stealing that tiger! She would never do such a thing.” She turned back to me. “You were the one who found Mike, weren’t you?” She peered at me over the tops of her glasses. “Yes, you look a little the worse for sun exposure…you probably don’t remember me, but I remember when you were a little boy.” She relaxed back into her seat and recrossed her legs at the ankles. “The great irony was we always thought your mother was the one who’d turn out to be a lawbreaker.”
Given Mom’s arrest record, she wasn’t that far off the mark. “You raised Hope, right? You won custody of her when she was a little girl?”
She nodded. “Hope was only three when that security guard was killed. We’d never seen her…we never even knew that Veronica had been involved with someone and had a child until she was arrested, and once we knew about the child, obviously there was nothing else to do. We took her in—even though Veronica didn’t want us to, my daughter would have preferred the child become a ward of the state, can you imagine such a thing? She didn’t even fight us for custody after the trial…she tossed that child away like she was a pair of worn-out shoes. What kind of woman does that to her child?”
I resisted the urge to point out how she’d turned her back on her own daughter.
She wiped at her eyes. “Hope is a good girl, she’s never been a bit of trouble, not a bit. She’s been a joy to raise—top of her class at Sacred Heart, straight A’s at LSU—and you know you have to be a top-notch student to be selected to take care of Mike. She loves animals…for a while I worried she might become a fanatic like her mother, but no, she’s a sensible girl.”
“Did you know that Veronica had been in touch with Hope?”
Her eyes hardened. “That’s absurd.”
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, Mrs. Porterie,” Frank’s voice was very gentle, “but Hope herself told us she’d been in touch with her mother.”
She didn’t say anything. The only sound in the room was the loud ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner.
Frank cleared his throat. “Mrs. Porterie, do you know anything about a family connection the Porteries might have to Huey Long’s deduct box?”
She stared at him, her mouth open, and after a moment started laughing raucously. “Don’t tell me someone’s told you that silly old story?” She shook her head. “Yes, my husband’s grandfather was a close associate of Huey’s. My husband, Woody”—she glanced over at the enormous portrait over the fireplace—“never believed that ridiculous story about Huey giving his grandfather custody of the box. Anyone who knows anything about Huey Long knows that man never let that box out of his own custody and didn’t trust anyone. That ridiculous Fleming man came around so many times, trying to get into the family papers and prove his story.” She made a dismissive noise, pursing her lips. “When Woody was alive, he gave that idiot a piece of his mind but good. But after Woody died last year, he started sniffing around here again.” She raised her chin. “I may have only married into this family, but I won’t have my granddaughter’s legacy tarnished by such idiocy.”
“The Porterie family—it’s pretty big, isn’t it?”
She peered at him through her glasses. “Woody had a lot of aunts and uncles—old Gene Porterie and his wife Frances had eight or nine children. Woody also had three sisters. Why do you ask?”
“We were just wondering who else might know the family legends.”
She snorted. “Anyone who believes that story…” She got up and walked over to a painting of an older man and stared up at it for a moment. She turned back to us. “Woody didn’t believe it for a minute, he thought it was just a silly story his father used to tell him when he was a little boy, you know, to impress him on how important the family was.” She barked out a laugh. “Woody thought—and so did I—that the box was destroyed or lost right around the time Long was assassinated.”
“Well, we thank you for your time,” Frank said, standing up and offering her his hand. She shook it, smiling up at him. “We can show ourselves out.”
Once we were sitting in the car again, Frank looked at me. “She doesn’t believe the story. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t true.”
“This is so damned complicated.” I shook my head. “Frank—this was a colossal waste of time and hasn’t helped us at all.”
He patted my leg. “We’ll find him, Scotty, don’t you worry about that. Nothing’s going to happen to Dad.”
I wished I shared his belief.
He started the car and I leaned my forehead against the passenger window and closed my eyes. “Frank—”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing, was just a feeling I had.” I rubbed my eyes.
Just a feeling that Mrs. Porterie might have shot her own daughter—there was certainly no love lost there.
Chapter Thirteen
The World, Reversed
Success yet to be won
We hadn’t gotten far when my cell phone started ringing. I looked at the screen: Unknown Caller. I usually don’t answer those kinds of calls, but given my father had been kidnapped, I figured it was a good time to make an exception. “Hello?” I said cautiously.
“You’re not an easy fella to track down,” a voice drawled in a thick Texas accent.
Rev Harper.
I signaled to Frank to pull over again, and he gave me an odd look as he pulled the car back over to the curb. “Hello, Rev. I heard you were back in town,” I replied, keeping my voice even as Frank’s eyes bugged out. “In fact, there are some people who think you may have been the one to kidnap my father.”
“Now, Scotty, you know me better than that.” He chuckled. “What would it gain me to kidnap your daddy? That’s not how I operate.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“I don’t suppose there’s any reason why you should,” he went on, still chuckling in that deep-throated way I remembered so vividly. “And I don’t suppose my word is worth two shits to you, either. Why don’t you and your boyfriend stop by and chew the fat for a while with me? I think we’re both trying to find the same thing, and if we pool our resources, we might just get somewhere.”
“Okay, where are you?”
He gave me an address on Harmony Street. “I’ll expect the two of you soon.” He hung up.
“Was that really Rev Harper?” Frank breathed the words out. “Does he have Dad?”
“He says he doesn’t, but he wants to talk to us.” I closed my eyes. “I don’t think he would kidnap Dad—it’s really not his style, Frank.”
His lips tightened. “He kidnapped and drugged you, if I recall correctly. So why wouldn’t he do the same to Dad?”
“He didn’t seem too surprised to hear that someone had taken Dad,” I mused. “But like I said, Frank, it’s really not his style. Sure, he might take Dad and drug him, see what he knew—but he wouldn’t try to keep him, you know, try to get us to find stuff for him. I mean, yeah, he’s a son of a bitch, but I don’t think he’s that son of a bitch.” I gave him the address. “Let’s go.”
Frank pulled back out onto Napoleon Avenue, heading toward the river, but made a U-turn at the first turnabout he came to. He took the U-turn a little too fast, slamming me into the side door, but I didn’t say anything. He had a very grim look on his face, one that I knew all too well. Frank was slow to anger, but when he snapped, the best thing to do was just get the hell out of the way until it passed. The scar on his cheek even looked an
grier than it usually did.
Honestly, though, I was glad Harper had called me—we needed to talk to him, and tracking him down wasn’t going to be that easy. It was rather nice that he’d gotten in touch with us, and if it made sense to pool our resources and work together, I was all for it. I wasn’t sure how Frank would feel about it, but I was fairly confident I could convince him it was for the best if it came to that. I put my left hand on his right leg and was a little reassured when he put his hand on top of mine and squeezed. When we stopped at the light at Prytania, he looked over at me. “Don’t worry,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I won’t do anything to put Dad in danger.”
I took a breath and smiled back at him. “I wasn’t too worried,” I replied. “It’s just so weird that they haven’t called again.”
“Amateurs,” Frank said, turning onto Prytania Street when the light changed. “That’s why I’m worried, Scotty. We deal with kidnappers a lot at the Bureau, and it’s not like there’s such a thing as professional kidnappers. Usually, it’s amateur criminals that are desperate—and desperate, scared people who’ve already broken the law…” His voice trailed off, which was just as well.
I couldn’t imagine what else he could have said to scare me any more than I already was.
The address Rev Harper had given me was between Camp and Coliseum Streets on Harmony. Harmony was one of those streets of indeterminate neighborhood; some people considered it to be Garden District, others said it was Uptown. But it was a nice, quiet street full of nice-sized houses with rather nice cars parked in their driveways or on the street in front. The address itself was an enormous Victorian-style three-story house on a large lot behind a tall black wrought iron fence with sharp-looking stakes at the top of each post. The lawn was in need of mowing, and a forest of bamboo ran along the riverside edge of the property, completely blocking the neighbors on that side from seeing anything in the yard. Weeds choked out the flower beds directly in front of the porch, and the house itself was in need of painting. All the shutters were closed, which made the house seem closed off and insular.
Frank parked in front—there were some black town cars parked in the driveway behind a closed gate. “Stay calm,” I cautioned him as we closed the front gate and walked up to the porch. “He can be a bit smug and infuriating, but we need to know what he knows, okay?”
He gave me a look. “Scotty, I was trained on how to keep my cool with suspects when you were in diapers,” he hissed at me as went up the front steps.
I resisted the urge to give him the finger and instead pressed the doorbell. I could hear it booming inside—it was a loud fucking bell. We heard footsteps approaching, and then the door swung open and I gasped out loud.
The man who opened the door was enormous, but none of it was fat. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man so huge and solid in my life. He was several inches taller than Frank and was wearing a very tight black turtleneck that hugged his torso so tightly it would probably have to be peeled off. His stomach was completely flat, and his pecs looked bigger than my head. His arms and shoulders were also thick and hard, and his tight black slacks left very little to the imagination. He was wearing dark sunglasses, his hair was cut short in a military style, and he was dark-skinned. He had an earpiece with a coiled wire hanging down from it that went down past his shoulder and down the back. He looked like he could have been a Hall of Fame NFL linebacker. “Bradley and Sobieski?” he asked in a voice that was so deep my ears almost didn’t register what he was saying. When we nodded, he gestured with a massive hand for us to follow him.
He led us through the darkened house into a room filled with bookcases. Seriously, everywhere I looked there were books. The walls were lined with bookshelves, going from the floor to eighteen-foot-high ceilings. There were some easy chairs, and a desk in the center of the room. Seated at the desk was an all-too-familiar face, frowning down at a book he had opened wide on the desktop. When the enormous man cleared his throat, the seated man looked up and beamed. He shoved the chair back and jumped to his feet, crossing the room to where we were standing just inside the door in no time flat, his hand outstretched.
“Scotty!” He grabbed my hand and wrung it up and down so vigorously I was worried it might snap off at the shoulder. “And you must be Frank!” He turned to Frank, the big grin never wavering, and gave him the same vigorous handshake. “A pleasure to meet you at last! I’ve heard a lot about you!” He then turned to his enormous employee. “Bring us a bottle of my best Scotch.” The big man bowed his head and walked out, shutting the door behind us. Rev gestured at two chairs in front of his desk. “Sit, my good men, sit!”
He jaunted back around his desk as we sat down. Rev wasn’t a big man, maybe an inch or two taller than I was, but he had one of those weird bodies with an enormous torso straining the mother-of-pearl buttons on his western-style shirt over narrow hips and skinny legs. He was wearing tight Wrangler jeans over snakeskin cowboy boots and had an enormous gold Rolex on his left wrist. The ubiquitous cowboy hat was perched on a corner of the desk. He leaned back in his chair and spread his hands wide, a big smile on his leathery face. He had a flat nose that looked like he’d broken it a few times and it finally gave up. His eyes were brown and small, and his eyebrows were thick and long and graying. His lips were thin, his teeth were yellowed by nicotine. His big strong hands were manicured, and the fingertips also were nicotine stained.
The big man brought in an large bottle of Scotch and three cut-glass tumblers. He poured a couple of fingers of amber liquid into each glass and then silently disappeared, shutting the door behind him.
Rev picked up a glass and took a sip. “Drink up, boys, there’re people who’d sell their mothers into white slavery to taste this hooch.” When neither one of us made a move to pick up our glasses, he shook his head. “Now, I’m trying to be friendly here, boys. I think it’s in our best interests to work together on this little matter.”
“What exactly did you have in mind, Rev?” I asked, reaching for my glass and sniffing the Scotch. I wasn’t much of a connoisseur of Scotch—it’s an acquired taste, and I haven’t acquired it yet—but my Papa Diderot was, and I could tell this was indeed a very good brand. I took a little sip, and it burned a bit but was also very smooth.
“I know about your dad, Scotty,” Rev replied soberly. “I didn’t have nothing to do with that, you know, and I don’t know who took him—I mean, I do know where he is, and I’ve got a man on the inside, but I don’t know who’s behind it. But I do know why.” He leaned forward. “And I know you boys know about the deduct box.”
“Where is my dad?” I demanded, feeling an adrenaline surge as I leaned forward and put the glass of whiskey back down on the desk.
“He’s safe.” He held up his hands in a gesture of submission. “Like I said, I got a man on the inside who’s been keeping me posted on what’s going on with your dad. He’s fine. They haven’t hurt him, they haven’t done anything to him, and they’re not going to.” He smirked. “And I’ve got plenty of other men stationed in place. All I have to do is make one phone call and my men will move in and get your dad out of there.” He folded his hands on his chest and leaned back in his chair again.
“How do we know you don’t have him yourself?” Frank’s voice was very calm, but I wasn’t fooled by it. He was barely controlling himself. Every muscle in his body was coiled into a knot, ready to spring across the desk and start beating the truth out of Rev.
Rev’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t kidnap people, Frank.”
“You kidnapped Scotty, almost killed him, in fact.” Frank’s voice shook with controlled rage. “Forced him off the road—your thugs didn’t know he wouldn’t be killed when they wrecked his car. And then you drugged him and—”
“Those men fucked up,” Rev replied evenly. “They weren’t supposed to hurt anyone, and believe you me, they regretted causing that accident. Believe. You. Me.” His voice was cold, and I felt a chill go up my spine at the look
in his eyes when he said the words. “All I wanted was to have a little chat with Scotty. My men misunderstood my instructions. It won’t happen again.” There was silence for a few moments, and then his face warmed up again. “Scotty’s dad didn’t have any information I needed, so why would I take him? No reason at all for me to get involved in that. But someone pretty damned powerful here in Louisiana is the one who did take your daddy, Scotty. I don’t know who he is, but he’s got some pull in this state.”
“But you said you have a man on the inside?” I shook my head. “Then you have to know who he is.”
He shook his own head. “My guy’s been doing his damnedest to find out, but this organization is pretty damned secretive.”
This wasn’t going anywhere. “So why do you want the deduct box, Rev? What’s in it for you?”
He grinned at me. “You know me, Scotty. I’m interested in history, and I’m a collector. I just want it for my collection. I don’t give a shit what’s inside of it.” He picked up the book on his desk and waved it at us. “This is supposed to tell me where it is, you know, but it don’t. Old Eugene Porterie was a pretty tricky bastard.”
Frank and I exchanged a look. “Is that—is that Eugene Porterie’s diary?” I asked, stunned.
He nodded. “Yes, and I know you want to know where I got it from.” He beamed at me. “I bought it from Veronica Porterie almost twenty years ago.” He put it back down on the desktop again. “She came to me, you know, with this story about how the diary was the key to finding the deduct box. She wanted money to start her organization, some legal advice, all of that. I was more than happy to set her up.” His face darkened. “Of course, I didn’t know what she wanted was to start an animal rights terrorist group. Stupid bitch. Everybody knows animals were put on this earth by the good Lord to serve man, not for us to serve the animals.” He clicked his tongue against his front teeth. “Still would have given her the money, though, even if I had known.” He laughed. “I’ve been looking for that goddamned deduct box ever since.” He closed his eyes and leaned back, putting his booted feet up on the edge of the desk. He put his hands behind his head and winked at me. “But you’re a smart one, Scotty, you found that goddamned Napoleon death mask when people had been looking for it for decades, and you found it only a couple of days after you started looking for it. So I figured, maybe it was time to bring you in, see what you could find.”