by John Farrow
“So your lack of understanding, Émile, and mine, match up.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Cinq-Mars remarked.
“Let’s do so.”
Cinq-Mars raised his glass to the Irish bartender for another round of bourbon, and this time added the beer chaser for himself. Dupree was still working on his in a contemplative fashion.
“So what do you know,” Dupree asked him, “about what y’all don’t know?”
Cinq-Mars moved the glass in his hand around the table, then drank. He didn’t like the bourbon as much as his favored Scotch, a mite harsh on the throat, but it possessed its own guile that he could appreciate. “You investigated the deaths of Dorsey and Gifford Lanos. The cold case you mentioned. An unsolved crime.”
“I did. Who is it who cares?”
“The FBI, for starters.”
“You’re working for the FBI now?” He laughed that bright laugh again and resolved the tempest with the widest grin.
“Apparently I am.”
The grin vanished. “What, they’re hiring out private now?”
“One of many puzzles.”
When Dupree drank again it seemed it was less to slake a thirst or to savor his drink than to settle his nerves. “Okay,” he said. “You got me. Where do we stand? What’s going on?”
Cinq-Mars took a breath, and started in. “A similar killing occurred in my backyard, except that two cops on the scene were also gunned down. Several similar murders have occurred around the U.S., always in the aftermath of a natural disaster. I know what you’re nervous about. You investigated the murders of Dorsey and Gifford Lanos when the killer was hanging out over your head. In the attic. I’m not down here to burn a detective for not looking in the attic. But those murders, how they all add up, including what doesn’t add up, paint a picture. And it’s that whole picture that gets interesting. Why me? The FBI will tell you they need someone on the ground in Canada who speaks French and is a Canadian. I don’t buy it entirely, but for now I’m on the case. My being here is purely a background investigation, to see what your case, and others like it, tell me about mine.”
Dupree waggled his head a little as he processed the news. “I was getting myself worked up. Shadows jump out at me these days, you know? I fingered y’all to be a man behind a shadow, you know?”
“I understand. Well, to a point, I do.”
“He was in the attic all right. But we only learned that later. It’s true I thought y’all might be here to rub my nose in it somehow. So, you said … let’s take it back a step. Y’all were talking about what adds up, but also saying that this is about what doesn’t add up. So tell me, what doesn’t add up for you?”
The alcohol was buzzing in his veins now, and he could feel his body relaxing. Cinq-Mars sat back a little. “Why the victims?” he asked. “Why them in particular? Arriving in the aftermath of a storm, I can see that. The authorities are preoccupied. But how did he choose his people? Maybe some of his personal psychological headspace accounts for picking couples, but why those couples? Do they relate to one another in any way, and will that help us? That’s one thing I’m after.”
“My people, Dorsey and Giff, seemed pretty ordinary types.”
“My dead couple, too. So there’s that. But how does ordinariness help us?”
“Go figure. Do you want to go up there tomorrow, Émile?”
“Scene of the crime? I do.”
“It’s a date.”
A man was moving closer to them, swaying, barely staying upright and now holding to a chair back. He had his eyes on Dupree, apparently with some intent, though he didn’t get within ten yards before he toppled forward, caught himself, then fell backward. The Irishman came out from behind the bar in a shot. Rather than drag him out to the street he heaved him off in the opposite direction.
“What’s back there?” Cinq-Mars asked.
Dupree smiled, then laughed at his own joke before he told it. “Triage, a recovery room, emergency. Whatever you want to call it. A patch of concrete next to the garbage cans. A place to puke, piss your pants. When the guy wakes up, he’ll be no worse for wear. Probably he’ll be left alone back there. Trouble-free for a night. No bust. Tomorrow evening, in the warm air, he’ll find his way through the front door again. All in the name of peace and quiet, Émile.”
“Dupree,” Cinq-Mars said.
“Yes, Émile?”
“A man was following me—me and Sandra—outside tonight. A black man, brown-skinned with pale pigment patches on his cheeks. A good-sized middle- aged man who just naturally kept his eyes down. Was he one of yours?”
“You’re figuring him for a cop? Not one of the bad guys coming out of the woodwork to check on you?”
“I figure him for one of yours. You had motive.”
“Well, okay. Tell me about this patch on his skin. Looks like a continent? Darkest Africa with a splash of sunlight, let’s say, with some islands lying off the coast to the south, down his neck some?”
“More or less. So he’s yours?”
Dupree shook his head slowly. No smiles this time.
“A dick-for-hire. Ex-cop. But you were with your wife, so I don’t know who’d hire him to tail you. Do you?”
“No clue,” Cinq-Mars admitted. “That’s all I’ve got no matter which way I look. No clue.”
Dupree ran a hand under his chin and across his neck to dispatch the perspiration there.
“One more thing,” Cinq-Mars broached.
“Go ahead.”
“The two guys who tried picking my pocket and Sandra’s purse. I find it very strange that they also broke into my room. So I’m wondering, do they ring any bells?”
Dupree nodded, to confirm that the question was a good one for this hour. “I know the pushers and pimps, the loan sharks and kneecap specialists, the backstreet hustlers, the dips and stalls, the gamblers and lenders. They all faithfully adhere to my parish, Émile. Others, too. So it’s a strange tale you’re telling me. They sound new, and since they sound pro, that makes them sound out-of-town. Maybe you brought them down with you? But you say they were of the Spanish persuasion, so maybe not. I’ll check into them, but I’m saying at this point that they interest me for the same reasons they interest y’all and one more—their action and their description comes across as foreign to my town.”
At first he declined, but under Dupree’s steady heckling Cinq-Mars agreed to have another, and the two men talked about the weather in their respective centers, one stunned by the heat and humidity, the other by the cold. Then they discussed police pension funds before Cinq-Mars announced that he was packing it in.
He insisted on picking up the bill. Dupree agreed only after he was assured that all his expenses that week would be passed along to the FBI. After that, their goodbyes were cordial and brief, and they set a time to meet up the next day.
The walk home informed Émile Cinq-Mars that he had probably had more to drink over the full course of the evening and night, first with Sandra, then with Detective Dupree, than he had intended, or had consumed for quite some time. He was walking straight enough but repeatedly lost his concentration, and once, captivated by the coloring of a series of old buildings, his direction. Tipsy, but upright, he knew that he’d feel rough come morning.
Scudding clouds cleared out, unveiling a few faint stars whenever he hit upon a dim stretch. They would never be so brilliant here as they appeared from the darkness of his farm, yet they bequeathed a sense of companionship this far south in this other land. Constant travelers. All part of his inebriated bloodstream, he surmised. Nonetheless, he welcomed their relative vicinity.
He was heading straight for the elevators when he arrived back at the Hilton, bypassing the front desk, and almost punched a button to take him up when he realized that he could not do that. He didn’t know where to go. He returned to the front desk, explained his predicament, and soon exchanged his old keycard for a new one, this one passed to him in a sealed envelope.
“Wh
ich floor?” he asked.
“That information is in the envelope, sir. It’s not in our system.”
Security had intensified.
The eleventh floor this time. The elevator seemed swift, silent, and steady, yet Cinq-Mars detected himself wobbling. Excess Scotch usually spared him the morning headache, but he was less confident that the harsh bourbon would treat him as kindly. The cabin eased to the gentlest of stops and Émile exited.
He had to read the directions indicating which rooms were which way three times before he gathered that he must turn left. Left he turned, found his door, and skimmed the keycard through the gizmo. A green light blinked. In he entered.
Cinq-Mars undressed in the dark and performed his ablutions in the washroom with the door closed to protect his sleeping wife from the noise and light. Everything had been laid out as if he had never changed rooms. Blindly, he fished an undershirt from his bag and put it on to neutralize the air-conditioning, and a favorite pair of oversized Jockey’s served as his traveling pyjamas. He felt his way back through the dark and slipped in under the covers. His side of the bed was always the same, a stringent rule of his wife’s.
She didn’t stir, which pleased him.
Especially with so much drink in his system, he started out sleeping on his back, his head raised. As the liquids were processed, he could strike out upon his side, his preferred position. He attempted that position early, and yet he was in bed for as long as four minutes before he realized that he was alone.
He flicked on the light switch, anxious now, and confirmed that he was in the room by himself. Perhaps she stepped out for air? Went hunting for ice? He poked his head out to the corridor. She was certainly nowhere in view. Coming back into the room he saw a blood splotch on the wall and the door jamb and felt his heart smash through his ribcage. He ran to his pants and almost ripped the pockets open to get at his wallet. He snatched up Dupree’s card and called the man’s cell on the hotel phone.
The New Orleans detective answered. “Hello?”
“My wife,” Cinq-Mars barked. He gasped as the reality caught up to him. “Dupree. She’s been abducted.”
TWELVE
A swath of powder-blue uniforms flooded the eleventh floor. Émile Cinq-Mars received them in a daze. Shaky, desperate, he drew some solace seeing that Sergeant Pascal Dupree had pull. He had called out the city’s finest in force.
“Okay, Émile, so, you come back to the room and Sandra’s not here.”
“I kept the lights off. I didn’t want to wake her. I was in bed for a bit—three, four minutes—before I realized she was gone.”
“You called me right away?”
“I did when I saw the blood.”
“Maybe she injured herself, Émile. Took herself to the hospital.”
“She’d call. Somebody downstairs would know.”
“You can’t be sure. Sometimes there’s a logical explanation.”
This was called grasping at straws and both men knew it.
Dupree told him what was being done. “We’re interviewing everybody who’s been downstairs or outside. If somebody saw her leave, on her own volition or not, we’ll find that person. Doormen, cab drivers, bellhops. Patrons in the bar. We’re asking the cab companies to list what drivers were here while you were gone. We’ll talk to them. My guy, and he’s pretty good, guesstimates that the blood smear is about an hour old, so the injury took place not so long after we left your room.”
“No one could expect that I’d be leaving with you,” Cinq-Mars pointed out to him, “or that she’d be staying behind. Us going out was spontaneous. Nobody could’ve counted on her being here alone or planned it that way.”
“So maybe they planned to take you and took her instead. We don’t know.”
“This is insane.”
Cinq-Mars stared out the window a moment. An officer whispered to Dupree, who nodded irritably before dismissing him with a backhand motion of his hand.
“Who’s the man with splotches on his face?” Cinq-Mars demanded.
“I put out an order to pick him up.”
“Who is he, Dupree?”
“I told you.”
“Tell me more.”
In rushing back here from his drive home and hurrying up to the room, Dupree had left his jacket in his vehicle. His shirt was short-sleeved, a pale yellow with faint sweat stains showing around his armpits and across his stomach. The two top buttons were undone, the tie slackened. Over the girth of his stomach he wore his beltline high, so that his service revolver hung above his hip. His shield had been left behind in the jacket, but in this environment everybody knew him anyway.
Dupree released a long breath. “He wasn’t a good cop. Okay? He was a bad cop. Bad enough to get himself canned, and in this town, at that time, that’s saying something. But we have our own peculiar ways down here, so he was still able to get his PI license. Mostly he sniffs the tails of rancid husbands, but it’s my understanding that off and on he’s a political hire. Come election time, there’s people who shovel shit around here. He’s one who can tolerate the stink, no problem, so he offers his services.”
“You don’t like him.”
“I do not.”
“Nor do you hire him.”
“I do not. What are you trying to say? Just say it.”
“You’re the one who took me out of this room.”
“But it wasn’t this room, was it? And I only invited you out for a drink. I didn’t drag you into the streets to intentionally put your wife in danger.”
“Look, I’m—”
“Forget it,” Dupree said, and waved both hands in front of him. “Y’all don’t have your bearings down here. This is your wife we’re talking about. I get that. This far into things I’m like you—equally suspicious of everybody. I only know one person for sure who’s not involved and that’s me. You’re in the same boat, except you can only substitute yourself for me, perhaps.”
“Perhaps?” Cinq-Mars drilled him with a look. “I know it wasn’t me.”
“I know it wasn’t you personally,” Dupree said and he gave him a good hard look as well and yet smiled, slightly, at the same moment, “because weren’t we hanging out together? But just like y’all hold to the possibility that I might be involved, so will I hold to the possibility that you could be involved. As much as I like y’all, Émile, I know nothing about you. The sad truth of the matter is, y’all would not be the first husband to get rid of his wife on a vacation in another country.”
Cinq-Mars continued to gaze back at him, without returning the smile. He understood what Dupree was implying and objected to none of it, but that phrase—rid himself of—overwhelmed him momentarily. Sensing that, Dupree gently placed a hand on his shoulder. “Keep a good thought, all right?”
Cinq-Mars nodded. Quietly, he demanded, “No stone unturned. So where’s hotel security in all this?”
“They’re around.”
“I haven’t seen Everardo Flores. Have you?”
Dupree yanked out a handkerchief and mopped droplets of perspiration from his brow. “I’m told he went home after helping your wife change rooms. End of shift.”
“Then bring him back here.”
“His staff is being helpful, Émile.” He put the handkerchief away.
“Which means they’re doing bugger all.”
“They’re staying out of my way. That counts right now.”
“Dupree, come on. Who else knew that Sandra and me switched rooms and to which room? Him. Not many others.”
Dupree ceded ground. “I’ll notify Flores to get back here on the double. Meantime, why don’t you take a seat? I’ll get a uniform to fetch a glass of water. A lot of weird shit’s walking upright today. Just sit here. Think about anything y’all might have missed.”
“The guys in the lobby. The pickpockets. I gave you their descriptions.”
“We’re looking for them.”
Cinq-Mars sat down. He even accepted water brought to him by an offic
er with forearms bigger than Popeye’s. As Dupree departed to confer with his people, a considerable buzz occurred around him. Detectives and uniforms alike desired a consult, then lit out in various directions. Cinq-Mars hated that he had to trust someone he didn’t know, but … that was all there was to it, he had to trust someone he didn’t know, and this guy appeared to be more than competent. He was just getting up to address Dupree again—damn it, he had thought of something he should have realized earlier—when the man returned to check in with him.
“What do you got?” the detective asked. Something in Émile’s eyes.
“Your killer in the attic. And mine.”
“Is this about that?”
“What else could it be about? I have no other connection down here.”
“Okay. I’ll buy that. What does it give us?”
“He’s in the attic.”
Dupree understood the reference.
Cinq-Mars explained his thinking. “Nobody saw anyone take my wife—walking upright or wrapped in a carpet. Not out the front door, not down to the garage. Cameras in the lobby or the garage picked up nothing like that, right?”
“Sorry, we don’t have cameras in the lobby or in the garage. On the front desk, but that’s it.”
That was a disappointment, but still, Dupree was getting this. He didn’t have to explain himself.
“So let’s stop thinking that my wife and her abductor or abductors left the building. Maybe they did—but remember the attics.”
Dupree scratched the back of his neck with both hands, squeezing his eyes tight a moment to release a building pressure, then he let his arms relax. “We’ll start by searching every empty room. And the rooftop. Everett!” he shouted.
A slight Caucasian who seemed to be behaving more like a secretary than a cop, who was sheltering Dupree from anyone who wanted a word, allowing only a privileged few through to him and giving pointed direction to others, came over. Dark-haired with sloping shoulders and a weak chin, he sported a ring in an earlobe, which surprised Cinq-Mars. He wondered if the man didn’t pull undercover duty regularly to warrant the embellishment.