by John Farrow
“Not exactly? You suffer from strange accounting practices, do you?”
“Sometimes we move bad money, confiscated money, normally drug money, inside the Bureau to serve special purposes. Funds to pay off kidnappers, for instance. Funds to pay informants. Special situations. We now have reason to suspect that Dreher became a master of moving that kind of money around. But to pitch it around, it still has to exist. We think, now, in light of everything, that he knew how to bring money in from his own illicit activities to make it look like the FBI was funding this or that operation—this also made him look good, you understand, look effective—and he was able to redistribute that cash back into the field again. That’s what I suspect happened with your funds.”
“He was using the FBI to launder his own dirty money?”
“That’s a way of looking at it,” Hartopp admitted. “I’m waiting on an official verdict on that one. We’re trying to track his ways and means.”
“Do you have any idea how much pleasure this gives him in his grave?”
“Ah … An inkling, I suppose.”
“I’m keeping it,” Cinq-Mars let him know. “The cash.”
Hartopp remained undisturbed. “I see no reason for you to do otherwise.” He was left, he knew, with a problem that went straight to the financial center of his universe, one that might take a lifetime to unravel. Cinq-Mars could see a dilemma unfold behind his eyes. The man cared. And he was worried.
All three indulged in the coffee briefly and enjoyed a few bites of the biscuits. They were store-bought, as Sandra, who loved to bake, was outside her routines of late. The phone rang, and they heard her picking up behind the kitchen door. She spoke in bright yet murmured tones before hanging up again.
Having given them a few matters to think about, Cinq-Mars was not shy to ask his own questions and to expect answers. “Here’s one for you, Agent Pettibone. Why Danziger Bridge? It’s not a landmark without significance in New Orleans, particularly with respect to police business. So what was that about? Why release my wife on that bridge?”
A slight rocking of his head indicated that the query was legitimate. “Code,” he acknowledged. “We didn’t know who we were dealing with. We wanted to find out. Was it the NOPD? Always a possibility. But we thought we might be circling forces within the Bureau, so we wanted to put the fear of God into anyone and everyone. Since we didn’t know the culprits, and we didn’t even know if there were any culprits, we were chasing ghosts, really, ghosts and shadows. If they did exist we wanted to communicate with them, to let them know that our involvement was precipitated by an interest in what police were doing. We chose Danziger Bridge as an example of what perpetrators might face, to remind them of what happens to cops who do bad things. We didn’t care if you, the Montreal visitor, understood or not, obviously the bridge didn’t carry much weight with you, but officers in New Orleans who were walking on the dark side might get it. Someone like Rand Dreher, if it was him, or anyone in his group, might get it.”
More questions followed, and answers and speculations, ground plowed before. Yet going at it face-to-face this time, rather than through the filter of written reports, had value. Cinq-Mars was weary of it all, but as a cop he’d been a lifer, so he appreciated repetition and honored repeated surveys of the same terrain. When they finally let up and were about to give him what they’d agreed to give him, he said, “You guys revealed yourselves, you know.”
“How so?” Hartopp asked.
“Agent Pettibone mentioned, and I quote, ‘circling forces within the Bureau.’ That tells me something. The use of the word forces. You know this isn’t scant.”
That admission was not going to be made, but these men were not going to deny it either. “Now, Sergeant-Detective, we have an agreement. We have vowed to answer your questions. You’re right, it’s not the normal way we conduct our business, we find ourselves adrift. And we owe you. The least we can do as recompense, is to tell you what you want to know.”
Cinq-Mars tugged on an earlobe. “I’m going to ask Sandra back into the room. Two reasons for that. One, she wanted to be part of this from the outset. And two, I want you to explain things to her knowing that she had an FBI agent’s brains on her face and in her hair. For more than a moment she thought they were my brain bits. She had to leave it all there, too, let forensics do their thing. So anytime you want to renege on our agreement, or curtail the truth or dress it up a little, look at her, know what she has gone through, and for the sake of her recovery from this trauma, for the love of Mike, speak the truth. We’ve agreed to this over the phone, but face-to-face, I’ll ask you again. Are we in agreement?”
“Certainly,” Pettibone informed him.
Hartopp tacked on, “Absolutely.”
Sandra returned to the room and curled up comfortably on the sofa, a pillow in her lap as though for protection, to hear what the men had learned. Hartopp began. “The man’s name is Orritt. Alexander Orritt. He goes by Alley, and he told us that he was known as Alley O for a time but that naturally evolved to Alley Oop. Whether he’s named after the old cartoon character or the basketball move, even he’s not sure, probably neither. But he’s Alley Oop.”
“Sorry,” Sandra said. “Who?”
“This is the man,” Émile said quietly, “who killed Agent Sivak in Alabama. Dreher told him to cut her finger off before she died, to make it look like he wanted it to be a carbon copy murder, but not really. He is also the man who the FBI arrested near here, who Dreher intended to kill, to then claim that he had solved our murders and Agent Sivak’s.”
“Okay. Him. Alley Oop.”
“Has he been cooperative?” Cinq-Mars inquired.
Pettibone separated his hands then brought them together again. Hartopp was deferring to him in this aspect, so clearly he was the one with firsthand knowledge. “That depends, sir, on your definition of cooperative. He has not been inclined to be friendly. But with dead agents involved, we are not accepting reluctance from anybody, especially given Agent Sivak’s luster within the Bureau and given the gravity of the overall situation. Besides, we’re on foreign soil. We’re willing to take advantage of different rules.”
“What different rules?” Sandra asked.
“There are none,” Pettibone told her.
She nodded, accepting that.
“What we’ve learned is that he killed Agent Sivak in Alabama, the man that she was with that evening, and also a former New Orleans police officer.”
“Jefferson Grant?” Cinq-Mars piped up.
“The same,” Pettibone let him know.
“So what happened,” Sandra wanted to know, “in New Orleans?”
“Your husband, ma’am, asked Detective Dupree of the NOPD to investigate police records, to see what payments may have been made to informants or to outsiders to conduct investigations. What surfaced showed that two Latino men were imported from Miami, ostensibly to give information to help convict a criminal, and they did that, but normally if a detective has a chance to slip out to another city to gather testimony, he’ll go on his own if only for the time away, the fun, he won’t ask the witness to come to him. Especially when there are two witnesses who need to travel. Perhaps your husband has figured out why.”
Cinq-Mars was willing. “Jefferson Grant was an ex-cop with shadowy ties, now a lowlife so-called private eye. Dreher hired him. Not merely to follow us around in New Orleans, but primarily to slip to certain bad officers inside the NOPD that an outside cop was coming down from Montreal, a former officer with a reputation for cleaning up police departments.”
Hartopp and Pettibone took turns in outlining the sequence of events.
“Cops with something to worry about got themselves riled up about it.”
“They wondered what was going on. When a good cop, Pascal Dupree, heard that your husband wanted to speak specifically to him, he was also riled up.”
“Policemen, good or bad, don’t want outsiders investigating them. Outsiders are never likely to unde
rstand the environment.”
“Basically,” Pettibone explained, “Dreher wanted your husband’s life in New Orleans to be difficult and chaotic.”
“He achieved that,” Sandra mentioned.
“But then Dreher had a problem,” Pettibone went on. “One that he most likely perceived ahead of time. Jefferson Grant had done what he wanted, and he was useful as a very visible tracking dog. Dreher guessed that your husband would notice him, due to your husband’s experience and the identifying pale pigment patches on Grant’s skin—he’d be easy to spot.”
“According to Ally Oop, Dreher now needed Jefferson Grant out of the picture. Probably his thinking was that Grant was unreliable, that sooner or later he’d let slip what he’d been hired to do. That would shine a light back on Dreher.”
“But you were the guys,” Cinq-Mars pointed out to the Agents, “who told us, through your call to Captain Borde of the SQ, to check my old room.”
“Because we had that room wired,” Hartopp said. “You were on the town with Dupree. Your wife wasn’t there, we’d picked her up. But something happened in that room when it was supposed to be empty. Not knowing what went down, we checked the room and found Jefferson Grant. I admit, we used the murder to our advantage and smeared blood from the scene onto a wall in your new room. Even through we didn’t know who we were after, we were sending confusion back through the pipeline. To Dreher, as it turned out. We had to. We needed to add to the confusion, to help gain some leverage in all the developments.”
“The pickpockets?” Sandra asked. She was thinking that if these men wired their room, they had listened to their lovemaking. She didn’t want them here any longer.
“They were working for detectives in the NOPD. The bad ones. They wanted to know what Sergeant-Detective Cinq-Mars was up to. Like the NOPD, we also wanted to know what was going on. We found out about the pickpockets, but who was conducting that operation? We wanted a word with your husband.” Hartopp looked sheepish a moment, then forged on. “Sergeant-Detective Cinq-Mars had gone off with Dupree. We found out about Jefferson Grant before that, that he was tracking you, just like we were. That worried us. Then he’s murdered. We thought to take your husband out of the picture by having a word with you.”
“I was kidnapped. I wasn’t invited out for a cup of coffee. For a word.”
Both agents let their heads drop, mulling that over. They glanced at one another before responding. “I apologize for the euphemism. We justified that action by telling ourselves that we would treat you very well. We just felt that your husband was involved with the wrong person or persons. Yes, we were investigating Dreher’s group, and whatever it was he had up his sleeve. We didn’t know it was him, didn’t think it was him either, but whoever that guy on the dark side was, we wanted to eliminate the activity. We didn’t grasp that we were being played.”
“So Alley Oop kills Jefferson Grant—”
“Which instigates chaos on every side. It puts Dreher back in charge, pulling our strings. I can’t say what a certain segment of the NOPD was feeling—I don’t mean Pascal Dupree, but his foes in the department—but I can only imagine they found themselves in brackish waters. I know we did. We were swimming among the alligators. But we had to play our hand.”
“At the very least,” Hartopp said, “we needed to get the two of you to leave town. Everything was getting out of hand fast.”
“Meanwhile,” Cinq-Mars summed up, “Dreher is enjoying himself. Having a laugh a minute. Loving what he’s put in motion. Reveling in the incompetence of every other cop in Christendom but him.”
Hartopp deliberately, gravely nodded, “Pretty much the size of it.”
Pettibone added, “Dreher had his Achilles’ heel though. He involved other people at various points in his enterprises, be they weed or murder, but then he couldn’t allow those confederates to live for long. He feared betrayal more than anything. So he always had to plan his next execution. Killing Agent Sivak, who was not a confederate of his in crime, definitely not a suspect, prevented her from asking questions around the Alabama tornado murders, which would have verified the existence of an adjustor. Not his identity, but his method. Dreher could not permit that. She got too close. So he went after her first. And now Alley Oop was also too involved. He’d killed Grant and Sivak for him. He was brought up to Canada for one more job, but really that job was supposed to be his own death. He gets that now. That still doesn’t make him fully cooperative, but his overall disposition is improving day by day.”
A quiet pervaded the room for several minutes.
Cinq-Mars said, “I don’t disagree with you, but I’m struck by your confidence in Agent Sivak.”
That remark was met by an intriguing disquiet between the two agents.
Interpreting their mood, Émile said, “I see.” When Sandra exhibited a questioning expression, he explained, “She was working with these two.”
Hartopp conceded with a shrug. “We needed someone in that group, on that team. This goes way back, even before the murders. We flaunted Agent Sivak’s credentials, knowing that Dreher could never resist lassoing the latest brainiac to join the Bureau. So she was charged with the duties that Dreher brought to her, but also to be our person inside his group. And, I have to say, once we made contact with you, her job was to make sure she kept your confidence going forward. So we could figure out your role in all this. Which wasn’t so strange to us, you understand. That was Dreher’s thing. Find the brightest and bring them onto his team. But, I guess, he had other intentions with respect to you.”
Émile let that sink in. “Might that be why he killed her then? Not the matter of her investigation in Alabama, but he got wind of her involvement with you? Remember, gentlemen, that we know he was in a defensive mode. This whole Quebec escapade was part of that. He may have found out, or deduced, that Vira was working with you.”
Perhaps that had not occurred to the men previously, but in any case they chose not to respond to the possibility.
Émile reached across and touched Sandra’s knee, and she looked up at him. If she had any more questions of her own, now was the time to ask them.
“Why,” Sandra wondered, “did Dreher bring Émile into this in the first place? Not just because he’s smart, surely. It turned out to be Dreher’s biggest mistake. Why didn’t he leave well enough alone, for his own sake?”
Her query seemed to arise from the center of her being, as if this one mystery so vexed her that no piece of the puzzle could settle onto the board without this locking mechanism being in place. Émile noticed that the two agents were studying him with equal intent, indicating they’d rather hear his take on the matter than postulate one of their own.
“I hate to be the one to say this,” Cinq-Mars admitted, “but partly—only partly—it’s accidental. As these two men indicated, Sandra, Dreher needed his hired killer, his adjustor, which is to say his evil twin, to descend upon FBI business, which had to be business not connected to him. He probably had very few options. He would’ve wanted access to everybody in witness protection, to make an informed choice, but he’d take whatever he could find.”
Sandra nodded, absorbing that. She said, “So he found out about Morris and Adele Lumen by accident?”
“I’m guessing yes. Probably through a personal contact with a loose tongue, he got an address somehow and went with it. In a way it turned out to be perfect for him. Not only out of sight and out of mind, totally unconnected to him, but also out of the country. That was a bonus. After killing them, he wouldn’t have to say it himself or point it out to anyone. It would just be so obvious that neither he nor his team were connected. He’d know that others would think that any relation between the storm murders and Rand Dreher was coincidental now, because it obviously extended well out of his reach and even beyond the American border, which is to say, way beyond his working territory.”
The men were nodding in agreement, and Sandra did as well.
“Was he sent here officially?
” Cinq-Mars asked the agents.
“He was never sent here. But Dreher had scope,” Hartopp explained. “He could latch onto things if he gave himself, and the Bureau, a good reason.”
“As for bringing me onto the case,” Cinq-Mars speculated, “he essentially could not trust local investigators. I told him that at the start, even though I didn’t understand the ramifications then. Local authorities would not include him in what they were learning, if anything. He couldn’t have that. He couldn’t speak the language. He needed someone on the ground to keep him informed. So I was duped. When that errand took me on to New Orleans, he was probably surprised by that, but he wasn’t in any position to fight against it. So he took advantage of it instead. He could make life difficult for me, and he did. So that’s how it came about, except for one thing. This is where I’m in slight disagreement, Sandra, with our new friends in the FBI. As to what constitutes his Achilles’ heel. Yes, he feared betrayal. But his undoing, gentlemen, which we find in every crime he committed, has to do with his disdain for the police, and his conviction that he was smarter than any of us. He may have been smarter, but that character flaw, that need to be in the attic when the cops investigated, that need to phone in this crime while he was in the attic and couldn’t get out because of the snow, that need to publicly humiliate investigating detectives, and the need to choose me—I have a reputation, I’m ethical, I’ve been a success—all that derives from his compulsion to prove the universe wrong. In his own head, he was the most cunning, the one and only wicked witch of the Midwest, so he had to take on the wicked witch of the North to prove his own greatness. That’s why he chose me even before he killed the Lumens. So he could better a foe some might consider worthy then brag about it before putting a bullet through my head.”