The Caesar Clue (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  He rapped twice on the door, and, without waiting for an answer, opened it.

  The room was dark, so dark I at first had trouble seeing the figure propped up in the chair beside the bed. The air smelled faintly of mint and I realized it must have been a medicine used in preparing dressings.

  Benedict started to close the door behind him.

  “Thank you, Nelson,” said a voice. “You can leave us alone now.”

  The aide started to protest, then realized he wouldn’t be heard and looked from one of us to the other.

  “It’s all right,” the congressman said. “I don’t think we have anything to fear from Mr. Dunn.”

  I thought I detected a hurt cluck, but the door closed, and the congressman and I were alone.

  “Excuse the darkness, Mr. Dunn. The explosion almost blinded me as well as left me without my hearing. The doctor told me to take it easy on my eyes for a few days. And I may talk a little loud.”

  My own eyes had started to adjust, and as I came forward to shake his hand I saw that he was swathed in bandages that covered the sides of his face and the top of his head, like an old-time nun’s habit. But there was no mistaking the features; I’d seen them enough on the news.

  I started to mumble sympathy and he nodded at the movement of my lips.

  “Thank you. But I don’t intend to let it get me down, any more than you let your own problem get the best of you. There’s too damned much to do. Right now, though, I’m a hell of a lot more worried about her.” He nodded toward the bed, and for the first time I realized there was someone in it.

  I turned to look down at her. She was sleeping, the sheet drawn up almost to her neck, her face peaceful. Gauze patches were taped across her eyes, which had suffered from the blast.

  “H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L?” I mouthed.

  “She’s only resting. It was a shock. But she’ll be all right. I only wanted to keep her company.”

  I looked down at her again, this time critically. She was a beautiful woman, with pale gold hair and refined features. I tried to remember if they had any children but I couldn’t recall hearing of any.

  “Cox sent you,” the politician said. “So we don’t have to beat around the bush.”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “He said you’d be working for him. He recommended you highly. John O’Rourke’s call was just icing on the cake.”

  Cox seemed ahead of me all the way and I resented it.

  I pulled a chair near to where he sat, sat down myself, and then pulled my notepad from my shirt pocket. With it resting on my knee, I used the attached pen to scribble out an answer:

  I HAVEN’T MADE UP MY MIND.

  He squinted over at it as I held it up and then nodded. “I understand. Don’t let him push you into anything. Don’t let anybody push you into anything. This thing happened, but I’m convinced it’s over with, at least so far as our being targets. This man, whatever his name is, is long gone.”

  I shrugged, hoping he’d get my meaning.

  “Yes, I agree. He did hurt a lot of people.” The congressman’s voice caught. “That’s the terrible part. But, you know, maybe he’s one of these people that really can’t help themselves. A man with a compulsion.”

  PSYCHO? I wrote.

  He nodded. “Basically. What can you do in a case like that? It’s a fact of life.”

  My expression must have been telling, because he nodded again.

  “I know.” He tried to shake his head but it was an effort. “I’m publicly for the death penalty, but if I were in that little room at the penitentiary, with my hand on the switch to end a man’s life … I just don’t know.”

  CAN YOU TELL ME EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED? I wrote.

  He stared past me in the gloom. “We’d just gotten in from the beach. We were going to have a little informal dinner for a few of the local members of the party. We were changing clothes in the bedroom when we heard a crash, like glass breaking. Aline opened the door into the parlor and I heard her gasp. I went toward her. I saw it on the floor and shoved her behind me. That was when it went off. I don’t remember anything except waking up outside. They said I dragged her out.”

  It was useless to ask for details; I was beginning to think I’d already overstayed my time, but there were one or two more things I needed to ask him before I left:

  HAVE YOU RECEIVED THREATS?

  It was his turn to shrug. “All the time. You can ask Benedict about that. I never pay them any attention. At least, until now.”

  WAS IT A GRENADE?

  He nodded the affirmative.

  HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF JULIA MORVANT?

  He squinted at the page for a second, then shook his head. He moved his hand up to rub his eyes.

  I understood and mouthed thanks.

  “Thank you, Mr. Dunn. I hope—”

  His sentence was interrupted by a moan from the woman on the bed. Stokley saw my head move and followed my eyes. He was on his feet in an instant, bending down over her.

  “Aline. Aline, are you all right?”

  The door opened then and Benedict rushed in, all efficiency. “It’s okay, Congressman, she’s all right.” He looped an arm over his boss’s shoulder and eased him back into his chair. The woman in the bed moaned again and turned on her side. Nelson Benedict readjusted her sheet, nodded reassurance to Stokley, and walked with me to the door.

  “It’s time for her medicine,” Benedict explained. “We wanted her in the hospital but the congressman wouldn’t hear of it. We have a nurse, of course, but he wanted to spend some time with her, alone.”

  I followed him down, pausing at the bottom to look at a small framed photograph on a credenza. It showed a man and woman on their wedding day, and though the faces were younger, I recognized the man and woman upstairs.

  Trauma had strange effects, I reminded myself, as I shook hands with the aide and went back out to my car. I had seen men recover from terrible physical injuries and others, who had suffered no obvious wounds, retreat into a shell-shocked daze. There was no predicting the strengths and weaknesses of human beings.

  When I got back home my message light was on and my heart missed a few beats when I played the message. Then I went cold all over.

  It was Katherine, calling from Yucatan, giving her flight number, and asking me to pick her up at the airport.

  9

  I was an hour-and-a-half early, pacing the long hallway in front of the ticket counters, and asking every five minutes or so if the plane was on time. She was flying out of Mérida, which meant a transfer in Houston, and it would be late afternoon before her flight got in. The counter personnel were very patient; after the disaster of a few days ago they were getting a lot of anxious questions, especially with a depression in the Caribbean and the possibility that a hurricane would develop within hours.

  For my part, I could tell myself that what had happened to Transcaribbean 420 had no relation to the Delta that was still on the ground in Houston. But I could not blot out Julia Morvant’s voice, asking me to meet her.

  Solly had the tape, and all I had now was my memory. And the hell of it was that in my memory it kept sounding like Katherine’s voice, which sent shivers through me.

  I headed for the bar, for a drink, then stopped myself, an inner sense telling me to stay alert.

  We had missed Rivas. That was the logical conclusion. He’d killed Julia presumably because she had defected with information about the drug cartel. He’d killed Linda because she knew something, or plausibly, because he was afraid she might know something, being Julia’s best friend. He’d attempted to kill the congressman, and therein had been his only failure. But he’d been successful in stopping Stokley’s tour and giving a graphic lesson in what happened when the cartel was crossed, so had his mission really been a failure?

  Still, he seemed to have no problems with travel: He’d put a bomb aboard a plane in Kingston, Jamaica, then flown in to New Orleans and killed Linda. Only hours afterward he’d flown back to t
he Caribbean, this time to St. Croix, where he’d bombed Stokley’s cabana. There must have been airport surveillance, but the cartel could bribe officials. Hell, they could even provide a plane for a man who loved his work that much. And that was exactly what bothered me: A rational man would have gone on to other things, but Rivas seemed obsessed with his work.

  And an obsessed man would refuse to accept unfinished business. If he had missed Stokley once, that could only mean he would try again. I knew that was Cox’s analysis and I couldn’t fault it.

  The plane was five minutes early and I watched through the big glass window in the lobby as it rolled toward the gate. I moved to the gate area and waited as the passengers debouched with their parcels and luggage.

  Surely she’d made it. She would have called if there’d been a problem. …

  Then I saw her, the thirty-first person out, a slim tanned figure in her slacks and huipil blouse. A floppy straw hat shaded her face, but when she saw me there was no mistaking the smile.

  We ran the last ten feet and I breathed a prayer of relief.

  “God, I missed you,” she said aloud and I smiled at the thought of the prim, efficient secretary I’d first met a year ago in the staid halls of Tulane University.

  “I missed you, too,” I said, looking around. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I have to collect my luggage,” she laughed. “Then we can go anyplace you want. Anyplace, that is, where I can call Scott and let him know I’m back.”

  Scott was her son, now a Tulane junior.

  “I’m scared to see the house after two months.”

  “Scott and I had lunch just last week,” I said. “He’s a fine boy. Everything’s okay, you’ll see.”

  I hustled her down the escalator to the baggage claim, my eyes searching every face. But there was no one who resembled Rivas.

  She was telling me about the new temple group they’d discovered, and how it combined elements of Puuc style with the earlier classic architecture. I nodded, alert now as more bodies crowded into the confined baggage-claim space.

  She looked up at me sharply. “You haven’t heard a thing I was saying. What’s wrong? You aren’t mixed up in some other big case again?”

  “Nothing much,” I put her off. “I’m just tired.”

  She gave me an appraising look, but said nothing.

  We were already on the expressway, when she mentioned the crash.

  “We heard about it in Yucatán,” she said. “It makes you wonder about flying.”

  I didn’t say anything, just whipped us through the clots of traffic.

  “… seemed to be a multicomponent structure,” she was saying, and I nodded. She stopped suddenly and looked out the window. I wanted to listen, to make myself understand what she was telling me, but I still couldn’t wrench myself away from the last few days.

  Twenty minutes later we were unloading in front of her house on Prytania. It was a two-story Victorian structure, with a tiny front yard and a patio out back with banana trees for shade. She stopped on the walkway and looked up at the old house.

  “It’s so weird, coming back from another world,” she said.

  She picked up a valise in either hand and I followed with the last bag, suddenly conscious of my infirmity. She opened the door and waited for me to come in.

  I remembered the first time I had been in this house, a year ago, and with a pang I thought of the first time we had made love, in the bedroom at the top of the stairs.

  Her laughter took me away from my thoughts.

  “My wonderful son,” she said, holding up a sheet of paper.

  I read the words and smiled: DEAR MOM: I CLEANED A LITTLE BIT. FOOD IN THE FRIDGE. CHAMPAGNE COLD. KIND OF BUSY. SEE YOU TOMORROW.

  “You called him from Mexico?” I asked.

  “Of course. You don’t think I wanted a delicate situation, did you?” She smiled and put her arms around me. “And as charming as it is, I feel a little cramped in your place. If a beautiful woman came in with a medieval falcon, I might have to brain her with it.”

  She turned her face up to me and I leaned down, tasting her lips. All at once her mouth was against mine and she was pulling my head down, pressing against me, making urgent little sounds. I held her with my right arm, drawing comfort from knowing she was back, while at the same time worrying about the complication it introduced.

  First things first, though, I told myself, as we started up the stairs, hand in hand: I would have time afterward to worry about the complications.

  The first shadows were beginning to fall when she uncurled herself from the crook of my arm and raised on one elbow.

  “All right, so what is it?” she asked, once more the determined lady I’d first known. “I’ve waited for this for eight weeks with all my fantasies working overtime and when it happens, I find my man is in another galaxy.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s nothing you did.”

  “I’m sure of that,” she said. “I mean, it’s not like I didn’t skimp on the food down there, so I wouldn’t gain a pound, and you know how much I love cochinita pibil. Why is it I have the feeling you’re up to your eyeballs in something you don’t want to talk about?”

  I sighed and rolled out of bed. Standing by the window, I was aware of the light falling on my left side, highlighting the crisscross of scars on my arm, and I shifted to get that part of my body back into darkness.

  Remembering her love of puzzles, which was part of what had brought us together, I realized it would be futile to try to hold back. Besides, it concerned her. If I took Cox up on his offer, it would mean some decisions for us both.

  “It has to do with a woman named Julia Morvant,” I told her at last, and let the story pour out. She listened intently, deliciously oblivious to her nakedness, and try as I might I could not keep my eyes from her breasts, twin globes in the room’s twilight.

  “And you’re scared for me,” she said finally. “Scared I’ll be caught in the crossfire.”

  I nodded. “If this Rivas finds out I’m after him, he may go after whatever—whoever—is closest to me, to draw me out. I can’t have that happen.”

  “Rivas doesn’t bother me,” she said quietly. “He’s only a man.”

  I knew what she was saying. It was the possibility of my leaving New Orleans and what we had.

  “I want you to be happy,” she said. “You know that.”

  “I want us both to be happy,” I told her.

  “Come sit next to me,” she said, and I went back to the bed. She reached up and traced a line along my shoulder with a finger. “You loved the marines, I can understand your wanting to go back. When somebody finds something they love that much, they have to go after it.”

  Slowly, I turned toward her, aware as never before of her attraction. I loved her; I’d told her that many times. I had a life here with her. Why was there always the word but?

  I wanted her then as never before and put my hand on her breast, feeling her erect nipple. She closed her eyes and moaned.

  “Oh, God, Micah, let’s not talk anymore.”

  We got up again at nine and had an intimate dinner of filet mignon and wine. We said no more of what was on both our minds, pretending, instead, that nothing at all had changed. I listened to her description of their field season and the unexpected cache of ceramics they had found below a living floor. We could almost, for a little while, believe that there was no one else in the world but us. We went to sleep in each other’s arms, secure, and slept until almost eight.

  Then, like a fool, I called for my phone messages and heard Mancuso’s voice.

  “Micah, the pathologist just gave us a readout on the Marconi woman: She was probably thrown from a car, but her death was from drowning.”

  Before I could react he went on to the punch line.

  “But what I was really calling about was the pics you gave me. They really did the trick. Call me if you want to know the identity of Julia Morvant.”

  10
r />   This time Mancuso came out to meet me and escorted me into Homicide like I was royalty.

  “I really owe you, Micah,” he said under his breath, as we walked to his desk. “Two of the pictures turned up fingerprints that matched some in our files. For once I’m glad you screwed around with evidence.”

  I knew a few of the other men in the room, but none as well as I did Mancuso, and for the most part they ignored me. Mancuso bent over his desk and thumped a folder.

  “This is it,” he said, handing it to me.

  I laid it back down on the desk and flipped it open.

  Julia Morvant stared out at me.

  The picture was a mug shot, and her hair was lighter, but there was no mistaking the dark brows, the almost whimsical expression of the mouth, as if she knew this was a game and when it was over she would take her things and go home. Which was almost certainly what had happened.

  “Her name is Mary Juliette Folsom,” Mancuso explained, pointing to the charge card. “She’s from Bogalusa. The chief of police there knows her father, gave me his address. I’m supposed to meet him at ten-thirty. You wanna ride up with me?”

  I looked back down at the face of the dead woman, the woman who had cited Shakespeare just before her death, the woman who now was only one of a host of mangled body parts in the morgue.

  “Thanks, Sal,” I told him. “I think I’d like that.”

  We took the long bridge across Lake Pontchartrain, heading out of the city smog for the pine woods of the north shore. Once there, we arrowed northeast onto the two lane and then due north, running a few miles west of the Mississippi border. We reached Bogalusa just after ten and turned west, off the highway, onto a shady street that led toward the center of town.

  A thriving sawmill town in the first years of the century, its glory days were long over. There were some historic buildings and a park with a couple of museums that were seldom open. The National Guard armory sat on a hill where there was once an Indian mound. There was a bar on the main street, with a machine that makes frozen cocktails and a pool table, if you were a beer drinker.

  We found the police chief at the local hot-dog stand. A friendly, heavy-set man of fifty, he wore a blue uniform with his rank on his lapel and a small American flag on his right shoulder. We introduced ourselves and he shook our hands and then threw his cup in the trash barrel at the edge of the parking lot.