by Dave Norem
“Augustin Guilbeau, he’s into import-export.”
John made a mental note of the name: someone to avoid from more than one perspective.
Kimmel took over with, “Importing drugs and exporting guns. He seems to believe everything she tells him, and we believe she’s privy to some key information in our investigation of him.”
Washington came back with, “Right now he seems to be using her as an information courier or messenger, and there are two other agents following her as we speak. We want to see who she meets and if either of them hands anything over to the other.”
“Who is she really?” John asked.
Kimmel stepped in again, “We’ve got some leverage on her but don’t really want to use it. Camille LeMieux is her real name, but she’s from Chalmette, Louisiana, and she is twenty-four, not twenty. She helped her daddy run a shrimp boat out of there from the time she was ten years old until she was nineteen. They were bringing booze, Mexicans, Cubans, and South Americans into the country on a small scale, along with the shrimp.
“Her daddy was doing a little business with Guilbeau too. It seems they were sort of casual friends from way back. Anyway, INS caught her daddy a few years ago. She jumped ship during the raid and swam away. Guilbeau financed her daddy’s defense and tried to acquire his boat, but INS wouldn’t relinquish it.
“Guilbeau’s attorneys finally got his sentence commuted based on some trivial technicality regarding jury selection. It was too late for daddy, though. He was shanked in prison by one of his former passengers and died from septic shock just before he was to be released.” Kimmel stopped.
Washington took up the narrative where he left off. “Anyway, about a year ago, she started showing up on Guilbeau’s arm at weekend social functions here and there. He’s a widower, by the way, and the wife’s death was legitimate—four years ago.
“It wasn’t long before he set Camille up in that apartment, but we believe he’s got her making some kind of restitution, or the apartment would be a lot classier. She’s a spirited girl though, and likes excitement. She started a fling with another young man about six months ago. Three weeks later most of his corpse was found floating in the Bay.”
Then it was back to Kimmel. “By the way, if your car had been parked over there one night later, you would have been caught. Guilbeau keeps a pretty close eye on his investments.”
John asked him, “If his men are that good, why weren’t you caught?”
“I wanted you to see me. We were hoping to scare you off before things got this far.”
John thought it over while they waited. He knew that if even half of it was true, he was out of his element and risking exposure by sticking around. They may have even saved him from a lot of grief, or worse. He shrugged, hands palm-up. “Well, you’ve scared me off now. I guess I’ll head back to Virginia.”
He stood up, wondering what they’d do. A look passed between them and Washington got to his feet. He and reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket and then handed John an embossed business card.
“Here kid, give us a call in two or three weeks and we’ll let you know how this is going; OK?” He stuck out his hand.
John shook it. “Deal,” He said.
He reflected later that it might have all been a put-on, to scare him away for a different reason. If so, it had been an elaborate ruse, one beyond likelihood. Later that night he had a friend in another state check on the phone number. It was a legitimate FBI field office.
He put five hundred miles behind him in the next twelve hours, and never looked back. Later he traded the Chevelle to Martin Levine for another model.
Over the next few weeks, he toured as far north as Hayward, Wisconsin. Later he traveled back down through Red Wing, Minnesota and visited acquaintances. He went camping with some of them and they fished in small rivers and pristine crystal-clear lakes. They caught brown trout, walleyes, pan fish, and a few huge muskellunge, which the others called muskies. It was a time of regeneration for him.
CHAPTER 12
John considered himself a responsible adult, and it was time to start planning for a more conventional future, and to curtail his wandering ways. He needed to establish a home of his own, so that he could store and stash without dependency, and have a retreat from whatever he decided to do with himself.
There were also places he wanted to see farther west, even though he had no history there. He had been thinking about it off-and-on while living his itinerant lifestyle. It had been over two years since he had left Suffolk.
He decided to return to Indiana and make a home there. At first, he wasn’t sure which city he’d settle in or near, but then decided that he liked the river areas and educational opportunities around Lafayette, even though he had no immediate plans for college.
He took a job as a rural delivery driver for a propane gas company, as a legitimate source of income, and bought a small duplex on the outskirts of the city. It took a while, but he found someone he trusted to rent one unit, while he lived in the other.
The man was a disabled Vietnam veteran named Allen Wells. Allen would watch over John’s half of the duplex while he was traveling. Wells was married to a nice, but not too bright, woman named Debra, and neither wanted children. Wells was a double-amputee, but he could get around surprising well on a cut-down mechanics creeper and could do some home repair and maintenance.
Allen and John hit it off well and played pool, checkers, card games, and board games, while swapping Army stories. They discussed a variety of topics including politics, philosophies, religion, and psychic phenomena. Allen’s plump little wife had her family nearby, and her own hobbies and circle of friends.
After settling in for several months, John left the low-paying job, but kept the duplex and resumed his wanderings, staying within a closer radius.
He was living near Valparaiso under the pretext of considering college there, while his real interest was in looking for an opportunity from some type of business or shady enterprise with a large cash flow. At first, he had been looking for something quick and easy, as college towns usually had many smaller businesses with a fast cash turnover.
He found the major steel mills, US Steel and Bethlehem Steel, and then Ford Motor Company to the northwest of him. They had huge payrolls and he recognized that he was in a good spot for something bigger. Gary, East Chicago and Hammond, Indiana had more. Harvey or Oak Lawn in Illinois would also be good.
While making his forays, he was staying in a rooming house and working as a maintenance man at a grain elevator outside of town. There were a number of grain elevators scattered along US-30, The Lincoln Highway, as it sliced through farm country across the state and beyond, to both coasts. Most of the elevators had menial jobs available, so he was surprised that they hired him at a higher-level position in maintenance. When he met Julie, she was a waitress in a restaurant he had been eating in for several days.
Julie was petite but not slender. She had fresh-faced, bland features and a nice smile that accented her blonde hair and pretty blue eyes. She was shy though, and usually only talked to her customers enough to answer direct questions. The smile and something in her eyes were what caught John’s attention. It took several days before she relaxed around him enough to engage in personal conversation.
She told him that she was the youngest of three daughters, and that the next older sibling was nine years older. Her insurance-agent father had died not long before, leaving her and her career-oriented mother as the last two at home.
Julie did not have the business drive that her parents and sisters had. She was entering her junior year of college at Valparaiso University, and wanted to be a schoolteacher for younger children. The distance of sixty miles each way from her hometown was too far for a young woman to drive alone each day, so she was boarding. She was returning to her family home in Goshen on weekends.
Her mothe
r had an active social life and did not pay as much attention to a late-in-life daughter as she had the two older siblings. Julie’s sisters, now gone from home, had played a greater role as parents.
John had grown into an average looking man with no outstanding features. His dark hair and suntan contrasting her hair and complexion. At five-foot ten he didn’t stand out and people usually couldn’t describe him later unless they had looked closely into his eyes. From his polite soft-spoken manner, most people would never have believed that he was capable of a booming voice of authority, one he used when taking control of a potentially volatile situation.
His first dates with Julie were daylight meetings in public places for lunch, and visits to the public and campus libraries. This was fine with John as it gave him an excuse to learn more about the area and gain access to places where he might have been out of place alone. He hadn’t planned on being smitten by her quiet charm. The way she filled out the angora sweaters she wore above her just-below-the-knee skirts helped to draw him in.
It was not long before he gave up all thoughts of committing any crimes in the Valparaiso area. He decided to take advantage of her weekends away to look elsewhere for lucrative opportunities. Then she decided to start spending more of her weekends there.
At first when he left for the weekend, she thought he had another girlfriend. The thought crossed her mind that he might be married and living a double life. She imagined a house and children to go with the other life.
Julie’s experience with men was limited to only one serious boyfriend. While with him, she had found out almost too late that he was having sex with one of her classmates. She had overheard the girl talking about it with someone else in the ladies’ room. Julie didn’t know the girl except by sight, but she did know the boyfriend well enough to know that what she heard was true.
John’s vague references to different schools or work did not seem reasonable to her. His dilemma was that he could not tell her what he was really doing.
After one of their long talks, John told her that he didn’t want to have any children and that he’d had himself fixed while in the Army.
Since he had not attempted to have sex with her, she believed him. She thought it was odd but didn’t mind since she would have many children as a teacher.
Because of the circumstances and her feelings for him, she decided it was time for her to join the rest of the adult world. They had been dating for over a month, but John was still surprised when he caught on that things could get intimate.
Two weeks later, they were living together and had rented a cottage in a park that was changing from motor lodge to trailer-court. Both quickly fell into their domestic roles with almost total compatibility. From their first encounters on, she was always with him in heart and soul. There was no interest in him for others.
He still would not tell her about the weekends away and begged her not to ask, assuring her that he was not married or seeing someone else. She knew that he had some type of secret life, but finally believed that it wasn’t another woman. Other than this, she was happier and felt more in control of her life than she ever had. She was happier yet when he insisted on staying in Valparaiso until she got her degree.
He was ranging farther afield in search of the kind of money and excitement he craved, forcing him to give up the maintenance job at the elevator. His excuses to her were difficult to fabricate and harder to put across.
He couldn’t help thinking what a hoot it would be to knock over the grain elevator. There was a bank, branch office in the elevator office complex, but robbing it was out of the question. He decided to keep it in mind for a different location, or to use as a trade with some of his contacts after they were long-gone from the area. He found what he was looking for in Chicago, through a contact.
The job in Chicago was a family restaurant with bar. It was in Cicero and the contact was his long-time friend, Frank Cramer. The target was in a small business and residential area of mixed European nationalities, primarily Lithuanian, Jewish and Italian. Cramer had knowledge of the restaurant’s after-hours gambling. The business Location was at a five-way, heavily traveled intersection, prime reasons for selecting it as a target.
John and Cramer easily swept through the card game with no resistance and duct-taped all five of the middle-aged players into immobility. They had found the back door unlocked, and no one paid any attention as they entered. “Police must be paid off,” John thought to himself.
He held the men at gunpoint while Cramer did the taping. Afterwards Cramer took the money from their wallets and John scooped up the table money. While they were taping the men, only one of them said anything. A big, burly black-haired man with hard looks spoke up.
“You don’t know who you’re messing with. You don’t know who this place belongs to.”
“Oh yes we do Georgie-Boy Rollo,” Cramer said with a big grin.
The man’s face turned purple: “Nobody calls me Georgie-Boy and lives.”
“I just did, Georgie-Boy.” Cramer laughed, while slapping the tape over his mouth. He was still chuckling halfway up the hall.
After leaving the players, they went to the manager’s office where there was a safe and two employees counting money. They gave them the same treatment and went right on up to the front, where the cash register was by the door. A portly bald-headed man, with a skinny woman, a head taller than him, was just handing over two twenties.
“I’ll take that,” John said as he pulled the money from the man’s right hand with his own left. He rested the butt of his revolver on the edge of the open cash register and pointed it directly at the matronly cashier’s belly.
Cramer reached around her from the other side and raised the cash drawer. With the same hand that had lifted the drawer, he pulled the bills from under it too. There was a startled “Huh!” from the man and a sigh from the cashier. No one else spoke. Cramer walked past John and on out the front door.
John glanced around at the diners, none of whom seemed aware of what was going on. As he walked past the couple at the cash register, the skinny woman swung around her partner toward him.
Before he fully realized what her intentions were, she grabbed a steak knife from a table directly across from the register and stabbed him in the left arm. Only a sudden twist to his right kept it from hitting him in the chest.
He grunted in pain and jabbed the barrel of the revolver hard into her face, hitting bone just below her left eye. He thumbed the hammer back and was tempted to shoot, but a black eye would do.
She yelped and staggered back with her hands in front of her as if to ward off the bullet. The knife dropped to the floor.
John turned and walked on out to where Cramer and Rogers, the driver, were waiting in the idling getaway car.
The entire job had taken seventeen minutes and the scene at the cash register less than one. The pain had him gasping before they had gone two miles.
“Was the knife clean?” Cramer asked, while twisting John’s coat sleeve tightly around the wound with his clenched fist.
“The table she got it from was set up for new business,” John replied through clenched teeth.
Within thirty minutes, Cramer had taped his bicep and fed him antibiotics and painkillers from supplies that he had stashed in his hotel room just off the Loop.
Two hours later, they dropped John off at a bus station in Gary, Indiana. He had Cramer dial the number and asked him to wait until Julie answered, before leaving. She picked him up an hour later.
He was wearing a medium-heavy lined wool jacket when the woman stabbed him, but the knife had penetrated both jacket and shirtsleeve. All of the bleeding was contained on the inside of the jacket and was not noticeable. When Julie picked him up she knew only that he was injured, not how or where.
The puncture was into the bicep from an angle and did not appear to have hit the bone. That night, af
ter she had looked at his wound and changed his bandage, he took the risk and told her everything, except for Cramer’s name. He included his compulsion for adventure and excitement, and for fast money.
They held each other all night, without sleeping, and she cried through half of it. They were wholly in love and committed to their destiny. The following night he dreamed.
She is so angry___ words cannot describe it. I knew that it would be this way when I told her that I was leaving her and the children again, maybe for good. Even with such a look on her face as she rushes toward me, she is so beautiful. If looks can kill, she is an instrument of death. I must stand and take whatever she will deliver, deserving no better. Now, I see that she has a meat skewer in her hand and is driving straight toward my chest with it saying, “Damn You___ Damn You!”
At the last possible moment, I turn to the side: more for her sake than for mine. I would accept the death that I deserve, were it not for the guilt and grief she would have from it afterwards.
The skewer pierces my sweater and sleeve, and my left bicep. There is no pain, only remorse. I grab her and hold her to my breast while she is still trying to yank her implement from my arm for another thrust. We struggle, without speaking, until she releases it and sags trembling in my embrace.
Now the pain begins for both of us. It is emotion and grief for her, and physical pain for me. I fear that hers is the worst of it. It would be better to have the both of them for myself, than to have harmed her. My grief has been endless and will endure for eternity. She cannot know of or understand this, and I cannot be near her when I am in my darkest hour. I must leave.
John awoke with a groan. It had all been so real. He was again the man from the recurring nightmare, but in a new and different setting. This time there was another person, one close to him, included in the dream. It was the woman whose face was so beautiful but still indistinct. Her dress was gray with white piping, and it had lace at both sleeve and collar. It was full and to the floor, possibly a fashion of a past century, or from at least decades past.