“It may not be rational,” she told me that evening. “But people aren’t rational. I’m a mother and his father’s dead. Scott’s all I have left of Tom. I can’t explain it. I just couldn’t go through losing the same person twice.”
Tom had been a navy pilot; he’d been shot down in ’Nam.
“There are always risks,” I said. “What if there’s another war and Scott has to go? Will you try to keep him back?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want there to be any more wars. They don’t make sense. I know that’s not an answer.”
After that things had started to go downhill. Long silences, exaggerated politeness, moods. We’d made up right before she went into the field to work on an excavation in Yucatán, but I think we both knew it was the end.
When she came home to visit a month ago, and pick up a new tourist card, she’d told me:
“I just don’t think it’s tenable any more.”
I like that word. Tenable.
It sounded like she’d come from a damn board meeting, and I told her so.
When she left again I brooded and then I sent her a letter. The one I’d gotten yesterday was the answer.
And no, nothing had changed. She would always love me. We could be friends.
Sure.
I let myself dwell on it awhile, feeling too depleted to be up and move around.
Then I heard steps outside on the balcony.
Not many people came up that way, because it meant either getting through the wooden vehicle gate on Barracks Street, or going through somebody else’s apartment. And Sandy was only one of a few persons I’d given the code number to the Barracks Street entrance, though all the other tenants had it.
I stood and went through my little kitchen, toward the back door.
Of course, it might be one of the neighbors, rearranging the deck chairs.
But no, the shadow had stopped at my door, a dark outline against the glass. It was too big to be Mr. Mamet the caretaker. Too big to be anybody I knew.
I stepped back into my office and took the Colt Agent out of my desk drawer and tiptoed back into the kitchen just as the first knock sounded. Sticking the gun in my belt, I raised the window curtain.
I didn’t know the man outside, and if he was big now he’d been a giant in his youth. Now, though, his hair was white and he had two chins.
When he saw me through the glass, though, his blue eyes didn’t flinch, even behind the bifocals.
I unfastened the latch.
“Yes?”
“Are you Dunn?” he growled.
“That’s me.”
“I’m Deputy Chief Jake Kelso, New Orleans Police Department. Should I stand out here or can I come in and talk?”
CHAPTER 6
“I been thinking about this Max Chantry business,” the old man said, coming down heavily in one of my two visitors’ chairs. “I thought maybe I could help you with it.”
I tried to remember what Mancuso had told me about him: “His daughter comes and gets him on Fridays and takes him to their camp for the weekend.” Today was Wednesday. He was probably restless, with an empty couple of days on his hands.…
“That’s nice of you, Chief. Look, I was about to get out a beer. You want one?”
“Why not? Anything to piss off my doctor.”
I got two Shaefers out of the refrigerator, holding one in my hand and the other close against my body until I could hand the first one over to him.
“Jesus, son, were they having a sale?” he asked, his nose wrinkling.
“Sorry. I’ve developed a taste for it.”
“Yeah. In the old days a lotta folks liked to drink Jax. I never could stand the shit. Now look at ’em: Their factory’s a damn tourist spot and some other outfit’s making it again.”
“A lot’s changed, I guess.”
“That’s for damn sure. Christ, when I started on the force in ’fifty, they gave you a badge and a gun and told you to go kick ass. Seemed natural, ’cause I’d just finished kicking Jap ass five years before. ’Cept those little bastards were pretty good at kicking back.” He reached into his pocket and brought out a yellowed photo.
“Look. This is me with the marines at Guadalcanal.”
I looked down at the young rifleman holding up a Japanese rifle.
“I was in the marines,” I said.
The old man’s face lit. “You were? I’ll be damned.”
I nodded at the picture on the wall and the NVA banner. He got up to look at them up close and gave a roar of approval.
“Good for you, boy. Even if you were an officer.” He came back to his chair. “Your arm: Is that something you got over there?”
“Land mine,” I said.
“Shit.”
“I was luckier than the guy who stepped on it.”
“Maybe so.” He sighed. “Or maybe he was the luckiest of us all. What could be better than going in your prime, before your body’s had a chance to give out on you and everybody you know has died?”
I thought about my father, the Captain, who lived in Charleston on his naval pension and was always making the same complaint. With him, I tolerated it as a ritual litany, but now, facing the man across the desk from me, I saw that there was suffering behind it.
“Look,” Kelso said in a voice so low he caught me by surprise: “I’m seventy-three years old and I don’t have a hell of a lot to do these days. When I go to the department they pretend they’re glad to see me, but every day there’s more new faces I don’t recognize and the old-timers have less and less time for me. Hell, they don’t even call me for poker games anymore. You know, when you first retire, you think when you go back everybody’ll be glad to see you, but it’s only the first time. After that you’re a nuisance. My daughter comes by on Fridays and takes me to the camp. I never hear from her the rest of the week. And all weekend I have to listen to her worry about how can I live by myself, how I oughta not waste my money on Lotto, how I oughta go to one of them retirement villages, or whatever, where they’ve got people to wait on you hand and foot and wipe your ass when you get so you can’t even do that anymore. She keeps telling me maybe I’ll meet a nice widow.” He shook his head. “She never can get it straight that I don’t want to settle down. I don’t want to go sit under the fucking tree and watch the other old-timers play shuffleboard. I didn’t even like it when the department pushed me upstairs into administration. My life was the streets. The whores and the junkies and the gamblers and pimps. I knew ’em all. They knew me, too. And they respected me. I kicked ass, sure, but I also kept my word. When Jake Kelso said something it stuck. Nobody ever claimed I never read ’em their damn rights. Back then, when you were caught, you were caught.”
I sipped my beer, waiting for the punch line.
“Now I’m just another old retired cop. I can go play security guard at a bank, or put a gun in my mouth. Or just sit around. Or I can try to make myself useful.”
He leaned forward now and I caught a whiff of his after-shave.
“Lemme help you with this Chantry thing. I got contacts. They’ll cough up what they know just to get rid of me. I knew about Max Chantry. Never met him, but it was all the talk back then. I could be your legs or whatever you need.”
I forced a smile.
“I appreciate the offer, Chief. But I don’t know that there is any Chantry thing. Right now I’m kind of involved in something else.” It wasn’t really a lie, I told myself: There was no formal evidence to link the Chantry and Gourrier cases.
“Yeah? Mind telling me what?”
I didn’t know what it could hurt so I told him.
“So you see, Max Chantry’s murder has to take second place to finding this guy with the scarred face.”
“Sounds like acid burns to me,” Kelso opined. “Can’t be too many of them around.”
“That’s my feeling. But technically the cops are working on it. I’m just chasing a few loose ends.”
He sat back in his chair and nodded
. “I get what you’re saying.” He reached out a paw and drained the can, then heaved himself to his feet. “Well, thanks for the beer.”
He lumbered toward the kitchen.
“You can go out the front,” I said.
“Don’t matter. I’ll go out the way I came.”
I was feeling guilty now. “Look, can I drop you at your place?”
“I got my car. Elaine’d raise hell if she knew I was driving, but I’m free, white, and twenty-one. That’s the trouble with kids: Once they get old enough to be shut of you, they know everything. Even tried to take my license. Cataracts. Hell, I can see better than ninety percent of the bastards out there.”
He went out the back door and down the steps. I stood on the porch and watched him head across the patio and past the fountain, where Mr. Mamet was playing with the water spigot. They exchanged a few words and Mr. Mamet pointed to the big green vehicle gate. Kelso nodded and went over to it, passing through the smaller pedestrian gate cut in one side.
I went down to where Mamet stood with his box of tools and rags.
“He come in through your place?” I asked. The caretaker’s ground-floor apartment on the other side of the yard gave directly onto the street.
“Showed me a badge,” Mamet said. “Said he was looking for your place. I thought he was kinda old to be a cop, but I don’t argue with those bastards.” He squinted at me. “Are you in trouble again?”
“No.”
Upstairs I called Geofind but there was still no answer. At this point I had only two leads to follow. One was Julius Chantry and the other was Betty Ray Martello, who’d been listed by the dead woman as a personal reference. Two threads leading to what might be two completely unconnected cases.
Julius was an attorney, the kind of man who belonged to the Boston or Pickwick Club and the Krewe of Rex, and didn’t take to being questioned. And if the two cases were unconnected it would be a waste of time, anyway. The Martello girl, if she was in the trade, was a better bet for some information. I called the phone number on the form and waited. Three rings later a woman’s voice said, “Hello?”
I hung up. At least she was at home, unless the number had been changed and given out to somebody else. I decided to head uptown to her place.
It was just after four and the streets were already starting to clog with people leaving work. It was hot, at least ninety degrees, and I was glad for the air-conditioning. My father, the Captain, who’d skippered destroyers in the big war, disdained it and said it made you soft. They always said street crime was worse in the hottest part of the year, and I sometimes fantasized what might happen if they built a big dome over the city and flooded it with chill air. The street crime would go down, but crime in the boardrooms and the banks and down at City Hall would keep right on, full steam ahead, as it always had.
As I parked on the street, in front of the old two-storied homes that had been renovated and converted into condos, I wondered if she’d heard about the Gourrier murder. News travels fast in some circles. But there was a good chance she hadn’t.
I went up the flagstone walk, which was part of the renovation process. The house itself was sixty or seventy years old and I wondered what the new paint could have done about the dry rot and the roach infestations. Typical New Orleans, I thought: a half-assed job not pretending to be anything else.
The righthand mailbox of the fourplex said Martello. I knocked.
It took her five minutes to get to the door and even then she just looked out through the chain. She was dressed in jeans and a white shirt and I could hear soft rock in the background. A smell of turpentine hit me in the face.
“Yeah?”
“My name is Dunmore.” I handed in the Creditnet card. “I wonder if I could talk to you about a friend of yours.”
“What friend?”
“Madeline Gourrier.”
Now was the time for her to react, if she had heard. The door shut, but then it opened again, without the chain.
The woman I was looking at was in her mid-twenties, with chestnut hair under a kerchief, and green eyes. For a fleeting second I was reminded of a youthful Katherine; then I forced the idea away.
“Come in,” she said. “You’ve got to excuse me. I’m painting.”
I looked at the walls. She had a stepladder and a bucket and there was some vinyl spread on the floor as a drop cloth. “Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
“Is Maddie in some kind of trouble?” she asked.
My stomach went queasy. She didn’t know her friend was dead and I had to decide whether to break it to her or leave it to the cops who would eventually come around.
“You know her well?” I asked, trying to feel out the territory.
“We roomed together when we were at UNO. That was five years ago. She dropped out in her sophomore year. Why?”
“She has your name on a credit application,” I said. “Have you kept up with her over the years?”
Betty Ray Martello frowned and rubbed her hands on her jeans.
“Look, I don’t want to get her in any trouble. I don’t know anything really up-to-date on her. You can’t want information that’s three years old.”
“We always like background data,” I said, and it wasn’t entirely a lie. “If she had some rough spots a few years back it’ll look good if she’s pulled herself out in the meantime. Character. If she’s having some problems now, a good credit history may show she’s still essentially a good risk. It’s the total picture. I’m sure she would have meant for you to be frank and open with us or she wouldn’t have used your name.”
“I guess.” Betty turned around and picked up a Diet Coke from one of the covered bookcases.
“Look,” she said, swinging back around to face me, “I like Maddie. I always have. We know each other real well. In fact, she says I know her better than anybody else. But she’s had some tough times. She’s bright as hell but her family life sucked, if you know what I mean; her father beat her and the other kids a lot. She came to college to get away from it but she never felt very good about herself. She got into some things that didn’t do her any good and she dropped out.”
“Drugs, maybe?” I asked.
“I’d rather not say. We had a bad falling-out. I had to ask her to leave. She owed me some money, okay? I was going to go to small claims court to collect it, but I decided it was a waste of time. About a year ago I ran into her again. She said she’d changed. She was looking for a place to stay. I invited her over. She asked if she could spend a couple of nights until she found a place. I said sure. It turned into six months. After that, she moved out and I haven’t seen her much since.”
“She have any steady boyfriends?” I asked, to see what her reaction would be.
“She had too many boyfriends. Look, I really don’t want to talk about it anymore. I can’t be doing her any good.”
“You’re not hurting her,” I said, realizing the only thing that would work now was the truth: “She’s dead.”
Betty Ray Martello blinked.
“What?”
“She was killed around noon, at a place she was renting on Nashville.”
Her hand went to her mouth and she backed over to a chair and sat down, oblivious to the drop cloth covering it.
“Oh, my God.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But you … Are you from the police?”
“No. I was at her house a few minutes before it happened. I had to ask her some of the same questions I was asking you. A man ran out and I went in and found her body.”
“I don’t understand. Why are you asking these questions if she’s dead?”
“Because I’m not making a credit check. I’m a private investigator. One of my cases led to her and when she got killed it raised a lot of questions. I used the credit-check explanation because it makes more sense to a lot of people than saying I’m a a private investigator.”
“You lied to me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’d like for you to leave.”
“All right.”
I put my hand on the door but her voice stopped me:
“Wait. Is there anything I can do? Do her parents know?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure the police will send somebody over to them.”
“Oh, Christ.” She rubbed a hand across her eyes. “I don’t know what to say. I kept telling her it would come to this. All the late-nighters, with the dope and the guys. She was killing herself little by little. I thought she’d pulled out of it when I saw her in January, but she slipped right back in.”
“She was a call girl, wasn’t she?”
The Martello woman nodded. “Yes. And when I found out she was using my apartment for that I made her leave. I told her this would happen.”
“You ever heard of the Class Act Modeling Agency?”
“No. She worked for different outfits, about one a week.”
“How about a Joe Hunt?”
“No.”
I shot my last ball: “Ever hear of a Max Chantry?”
She shook her head.
“Do you remember the names of any of the people she hung around with?”
“No. They were just guys. I couldn’t keep them all straight.”
“Well, thank you for your time. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “Life is shitty.”
“Yeah,” I said, and left her with her head in her hands.
That night I dreamed about the man in the sand. This time I was alone on the beach and the boat had left. The terns were strutting through the grass in front of me and as I approached they soared up in a big cloud. I was looking for Katherine, because even if the boat was gone and we were stranded out here thirty miles from the mainland it didn’t matter: We had each other, and we could build a fire on the beach and sleep under the stars.
I saw her ahead of me, the sunset light blurring the outline of her figure, and I called out, but she only danced away. I started to run, buffeted by the wind that tried to push me back.
Ahead was the marsh; I smelled the heavy organic odor of rotting vegetation. I topped a dune and stood looking out over the tufts of grass. She was gone, yet there was no place to go, just the bog.
The Last Man to Die (The Micah Dunn Mysteries) Page 5