“That involved a corrupt cop,” she said. She blew five more perfect rings in Meyers’s direction. “I’ll go the extra mile when I’m putting together a case against a corrupt cop.”
“Jessica,” Meyers said, “it was you who instructed the U.S. attorney to cooperate. The holier-than-thou doesn’t wash.”
Ardell, the lawyer whom Meyers had hired for the courtroom scene, tilted a small flask of bourbon to his lips and wiped his mouth with his hand. “She may be right,” he said. “A judge would call it entrapment. I can’t see how you’ll get a conviction, Inspector.”
Ardell spoke with a slur. Mitchell was repelled by him. He felt Meyers should have been able to put the courtroom business together without having to bring in an outsider, but Meyers had claimed Ardell could be trusted. With a big alcohol monkey on his back, he needed the money.
“Mr. Ardell,” Mitchell said, “you may be interested to know that in Canada there is no doctrine of entrapment. It is one of your strange American legal conceits.”
“No, sir, I didn’t know that,” Ardell drawled.
“We have advice from our staff lawyers,” Mitchell said. “There’s a precedent: an operation on the West Coast a few years ago. Some smugglers bound for Canada ran out of fuel, and we arranged for DEA undercover people to pull their boat into San Diego Bay, refuel it, and send it on its way north. It was a controlled delivery, like this. The courts okayed it.”
“Controlled delivery.” Ardell spoke with the smiling cynicism of an old alcoholic. “That’s what you call it, huh? Don’t worry, Inspector, I’m a lawyer. I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
Among the four others in the room was Theophile O’Doull, who looked as if he were trying to hide in a corner, his eyes shifting nervously from speaker to speaker.
“Well, Theo,” Mitchell said, “the whole point of this interesting little diversion to Miami is the Sat-Track transmitter. I want to know if it’s functioning. If it’s not, we’ve wasted a lot of my time, Meyers’s undercover ingenuity, and we’ve lost the services of Colonel Escarlata.”
“Escarlata is a coward,” Meyers said. “He seems also to suffer a tendency to lose himself in the pleasures of the flesh. I intend to get rid of him.”
“I want to know if the Sat-Track is functioning,” Mitchell repeated.
“I’ll call Goddard,” O’Doull said. “They’ll have word by now.” He dialed direct to the number in Maryland.
“Kerrivan won’t find it?” Mitchell said.
“Not behind the jungle of hardware that’s in there now,” said Meyers. He turned to Flaherty. “That was an impressive performance, today, Jessica. It shows your stage experience.”
“If you mean the part where I asked if you wash your sheets in the morning, yeah, I managed the role pretty well.”
O’Doull waved them quiet and spoke into the phone. “Repeat, please. Latitude north twenty-five degrees, forty-six minutes, thirty-seven seconds. Longitude west eighty degrees, eleven, and thirty-two.” He hung up. “I think those are Miami’s coordinates.”
Meyers nodded, and everyone — except Flaherty — seemed to relax.
Operation Potship was no longer running the risk of human frailty, Mitchell thought. It was equipped with an informer that couldn’t be bought off — a faithful electronic fink that would keep in touch with Operation Potship every one hundred and seven minutes.
“Congratulations, Sergeant O’Doull,” Meyers said.
O’Doull smiled a faint and nervous smile.
Later, taking Mitchell and O’Doull back to their motel, Meyers said, “I don’t want Agent Flaherty involved in this any more if it can be avoided. She can be very annoying. A very mouthy dame.”
O’Doull found it curious how the man’s lips did not seem to move when he talked.
Johnny Nighthawk
A late start. A golden moon hangs over the city and paints the ripples in the wash.
Another swing bridge opens, and we move through, and the jaws of the bridge shut behind us.
To starboard is the U.S. Customs Building. A lone sentinel light glows in the yard. My heart pounds as we pass by. But there is no one.
A last bridge. We slow. We wait. Finally it opens. Its arms rise in an invocation to the moon.
The river casts the Alta Mar upon the sea.
PART THREE
The Gypsy’s Witch
Chapter Twenty-Four
Theophile O’Doull lay under a single sheet in a Biscayne Bay motel room, bathed by the wash of the air conditioner. The moon’s white eye glared through the window and painted a silver rectangle on the wall beside him.
In O’Doull’s hand was a tumbler of Barbados rum, half-full. He searched for patterns in the darkness then closed his eyes to dream. . . .
His flight had been late, and he had slipped past the brass that had gathered to meet him. O’Doull had always preferred to work alone, without orders. A Citroën taxi shouldered rudely past the others in the line and the rear door opened for him. He got in.
“I am Maria von Koenig,” the woman said. Her hair was blonde, her eyes green. “I am your contact here. We will go first to my hotel room.”
O’Doull knew she was from the other side. But she was beautiful, and he would play along. . . .
***
Jessica Flaherty, chain-smoking, stood at the window, cursing the moon, listening on recording equipment to the sounds of rut that ascended with a shriek. “Dios!” Then voices moaned in release.
That bastard, Flaherty thought. Alfredo J., who was to have come tonight, had come indeed — but not to her. She looked at her watch. She would wait. This was critical.
This was the night.
***
The electric glitter of the flashy, glassy bars of Mayfair Center brought Kevin Kelly no joy, and he became frightened of the lonely people in them, plastic and brittle. He hungered for the warmth and love of his woman and his babies.
Escarlata had offered him a couch until the morning when Kelly’s plane was due to leave. The night would be long.
He rolled up a fat dooby of Senator Paez’s flowertops, shared it with some freaks sitting in a park under the moon, and strolled back to the Mangrove Arms Hotel.
***
J.R. Peabody, the night clerk at that hotel, was trying to hustle Cherrie, a natural blonde who believed that gentlemen preferred redheads. Peabody expected free rides from the quality whores who used the hotel. He figured his job got him more free ass than a movie star.
Cherrie would come across if her john failed to show. He knew that.
The phone rang. A woman spoke urgently: “Please send someone to the penthouse! Quick! Please!” She rang off.
Peabody wondered if it was the full moon that made people strange. He went to the elevator.
***
Detective Braithwaite took the call from the Mangrove Arms Hotel. He wished he hadn’t. “Shit,” he said to himself. It would be another long night. He desperately wanted to transfer out of the Miami police force and move to somewhere sane. He strapped on his gun harness and went outside.
***
The air in the room was cool and dank with the sweat of death.
Feet shuffled softly and voices murmured. An air conditioner puttered. A bulb flashed, and in the harsh white light of its split second of time, there appeared a frozen tableau, etched sharply in the eyes of Detective Braithwaite. The tableau showed a dead man wedged behind the door clutching the empty air with curling fingers. It showed the homicide team moving through the room like dark specters — dusting for prints, rummaging in drawers, scraping blood into vials. Complaining.
J. R. Peabody stood by the door, biting at a fingernail. Men from the morgue waited nearby.
Braithwaite, a black man, and senior investigator with the Criminal Investigation Section, Homicide Detail, was speaking in a sonorous monot
one. “No other signs of disorder. Nothing broken, nothing overturned. From the condition of the face, I would say blunt instrument. No weapon so far. Initial ID from Jessica Flaherty, Drug Enforcement.” He pushed the stop button of his cassette recorder. “Give me that again,” he said.
“Escarlata, Augustin.” She spelled it out.
He repeated it into his machine. “Apparently Cuban national, came over on the Ariel boatlift. No next of kin here. Lives here, at place of death.”
He turned again to Flaherty. “This is pretty expensive digs, Miss Flaherty. What did he do for a living?”
“Worked for Rudy Meyers.”
“That explains it. Part of Rudy’s goddamn army, I suppose.”
“Meyers had him playing double agent. Working for the RCMP.”
“That why he got offed?”
“I don’t know.”
Braithwaite leaned down over the body, and continued dictating: “Can’t see any injuries other than to face, but the face is a job for a good mortician. Appears to be caved in towards the middle.”
Flaherty couldn’t look. Even Braithwaite turned his head away with a sour expression.
“Looks like he got hit on the nose with a swinging nine-pound hammer,” he said.
Flaherty wasn’t used to this. She was feeling sick, holding her stomach down.
“Okay, the other man,” he dictated. “There is no pulse here, either, but it ain’t cold yet. They’ll have to do anal temps. Can’t figure this one out at all. No exterior injury. Something internal, maybe. We wait for the medical examiner on this one. Okay, who’s he, Miss Flaherty?”
She was staring out the sliding glass doors, to the roof, to the moving lights on the water, watching the moon over Key Biscayne.
“Miss Flaherty?”
“Detective, I think we should have a talk in private.”
“You’ve got some operation going with Meyers and the RCMP. You don’t want it compromised.”
“You’ve got it,” she said, then paused for a breath or two. “And there’s more.”
“Well, I got a murder here, Miss Flaherty. It’s priority over drugs.”
“Let’s have a coffee when you’re through here.”
“Okay. Let’s get this guy’s vital statistics.”
“Kevin Kelly,” she said. “Citizen of Canada. Newfoundland someplace. Smuggler by occupation. . . .”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Theophile O’Doull was acting out a fantasy when he became a cop. He joined the force at twenty-five — overripe for a rookie Mountie. But he had been in school, taking a Ph.D. in electronic engineering.
The fantasy that most possessed him had to do with being a police detective, a solver of crimes. It was this fantasy that held him infatuated six years ago when two puzzled recruiting officers sat him down for his interview. They knew industry would offer him four times what he could get being a cop.
The RCMP were happy to grab him. They stuck him in the central crime laboratory and made him chief electronic technician. He suffered there, sought transfers to the field and was continually rejected.
Denied his dream, he began to see in his disillusionment that there had lurked behind the dream a real and personal reason for becoming a Mountie: the need to make reparation for the sins of a beloved father. The father had made corporal, a rank that allowed him to command one-man detachments here and there in Newfoundland. Corporal O’Doull and his wife raised three daughters, eager only to marry, and the son, a brainy dreamer. His father invested heavily in his education in distant and costly schools.
At the age of fifty-five, on the eve of his retirement, a scandal destroyed Corporal O’Doull. There had been allegations of bribe taking — small payments in cash and in kind from the rum and brandy smugglers who did a hectic trade from the French island of St. Pierre.
Innuendo and rumor were followed by a quiet internal inquiry, a hearing at which O’Doull’s father had no lawyer. Soon after came a recommendation of retirement six months before his due date.
Then, unexpectedly, a rehash loud and undignified before a public commission of inquiry. Another sudden burst of headlines when the commission released its report. The report assumed the guilt of the policeman and excoriated his seniors for covering up his misdeeds.
Theophile O’Doull remembered the time: the family gathered in a tight, wretched knot in their waterfront home, his mother despairing, his father seeking oblivion in whiskey. O’Doull, sunk in gloom, began to wonder if the charges of graft were true. His education had been expensive. Shortly after, O’Doull joined the RCMP. As if this would give his father back his pride, redeem his name.
It wasn’t medicine enough. O’Doull watched his father die slowly of the scandal and the pain — and the alcohol that calmed the pain. Cancer had got into his liver, had spread, and he had refused to fight it.
A year ago, O’Doull had flown back to Newfoundland for the funeral, then returned to Ottawa: moody, contemplative, immersed even more deeply in his dreams. Again he asked for a transfer to the Criminal Investigation Division and again was refused.
His fellow workers considered him a character. Eccentric. Vague. Forgetful. Lately, there was a new quality. With his father’s death had come a toughness, a cynicism, a dry bite to his quiet humor.
They called him “Newf.” He hated that. His given name was worse. There had been an Uncle Theophile, and in remembering Uncle Theophile in the name of their only son, his parents had been the cause of later suffering. The name led to an apparently comical appellation: Thewf the Newf. Or — often worse, Thewfie the Newfie — one of the seemingly endless drawbacks to being a Newfoundlander.
O’Doull worked at the fringes of criminal investigation and learned the processes, but came no nearer to a real criminal than in the courtroom, where often he would be sent to testify — trying to assemble the answer to a lawyer’s fumbling question in easily understandable words while peering at the nervous prisoner in the box. The real stuff of cid work was denied him: the assembling of a case, the questioning of suspects, the joining together of the jigsaw.
His daydreams, however, counted hundreds of successful cases, brilliantly resolved. Often, at the end, a woman who had earlier been wrongfully accused would throw herself into his arms. She was dark, alluring, her eyes filled with mystery. If he was alone, at night, his mind would conjure bed and passion.
But the call to action had finally come, late one afternoon as O’Doull was lost in the routines of the laboratory.
“Good news,” said the lab superintendent. “You’re finally going to the front lines. Kerrivan and Kelly — those dope dealers you went to school with. Inspector Mitchell wants you on the case. Voice identification.”
O’Doull thought for a few seconds. Then he said, “No.”
But he wasn’t given a choice. He was flown the same day to St. John’s, and was introduced to the strange world of Operation Potship, where surveillance teams brought back more rumors than fact, where the inspector in charge seemed to operate from a messianic sense of mission.
To O’Doull’s disgust, he found himself prying into the private lives of old friends — like Kevin Kelly and his wife, Merrie, whom O’Doull had dated in their high-school days. Ultimately, O’Doull reached a truce with himself. Kelly’s conversations, after all, were the kind that all the world could hear: breezy, easy, and direct, as if he were shouting to a friend across a crowded room. Merrie was the same as ever — unaffected, without malice. O’Doull began to feel like a silent hidden member of the family. He worried when one of the babies was ill; he triumphed quietly when Kelly announced he had gotten work on the inland freighters.
Hidden in a hotel on the edge of the city, O’Doull had been ordered not to see old friends and not to be seen by the targets. He staved off boredom by working late and poking through the files. Meyers’s photographs from Colombia were professi
onal: clean and sharp, and some of them showed Marianne Larochelle’s sea-green eyes. In one picture, which O’Doull filched (he had it with him now, in his Miami motel room), she seemed to stare at the lens, as if aware it was there. She seemed to be smiling at him. . . .
***
The terrorist, armed with a stolen Colt AR15, came at him, firing wildly in all directions. O’Doull, squinting, snapped a shot that sent the man spinning off the wall. There was the sound of semiautomatics burping fire in the embassy drawing room. O’Doull gambled — he flung the door open and dived low, catching the ambassador’s daughter around the legs and carrying her, with the momentum, behind a settee. Her skirt had risen, and his hand slid up her thigh to her hips. His immediate sense was of a gentle, teasing perfume. But there was no time. He lobbed two gas canisters in the direction of the Arab commandos. . . .
O’Doull was battling an unbidden morning erection through all of this. He was disgusted with himself. He turned off the movie in his mind and got himself to the shower. He felt dragged out. He realized that last night he had drunk a half a bottle of rum.
Thirty minutes later, he was downstairs in the restaurant, looking for Mitchell and Meyers. He saw the inspector at a corner table, by himself. When their eyes met, O’Doull suddenly felt enshrouded in a pall of gloom.
“Did the ship get out?” he asked.
“It’s about eighty miles at sea,” Mitchell said. “Kelly isn’t on it.”
Good, O’Doull thought.
“He’s in the county morgue.”
O’Doull blinked. His mouth went dry.
Mitchell sketched the details Flaherty had given him. “They think Kelly killed the Cuban, but they’re not sure what killed Kelly. Heart attack, probably. They’re opening his body up now.”
O’Doull felt light-headed. He ordered a cup of coffee, then waved the waiter away. “My God,” he whispered, “we have to call his wife.”
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