The Caesar Clue (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  “Which was all negative, or you wouldn’t be drawing this out.”

  “That was day before yesterday, right? It was getting kind of late. I was wondering how I was gonna wrap this up when I remembered something Lakeesha—that’s the maid—told me. She said Wednesday was her day to work four hours at the house. So I went back to Lakeesha and asked her how she’d like to make thirty dollars for not working four hours instead of fifteen for working.” She tittered. “Wasn’t no contest.”

  “So I guess you were her cousin,” I said.

  “You got it. Cousin Lula, taking over for her sick relation. Micah-man, you shoulda seen me with that feather duster. I was hell on wheels.”

  “But no kid.”

  “How did you guess? I did some snooping in desks and such and as far as I can tell the kid hasn’t been there for a month. I found a checkbook with a stub for the last support payment, too.”

  I remembered my misgivings about the woman who’d hired me.

  “So he wasn’t in Mississippi,” I said.

  “No. I came back yesterday afternoon and followed our dear client all morning. I followed her to Maison-Blanche to buy clothes, and then to lunch with some sleeze bag who kept trying to put a hand on her thigh under the table, and finally to a house in Westwego that I find out just happens to be owned by a woman who bears her a striking resemblance. And lo! When she parks in front and the front door of the house opens, who do you think comes running out?”

  “The boy,” I said.

  “Call you Sherlock Holmes. She had him stashed with her sister. She was willing to pay a detective just to stir things up against her husband.”

  “Christ,” I muttered. “How did you leave things?”

  “Alone, of course. I figured you could call it from here. Naturally, I got some photos of her with the kid and with her sister.”

  “We’ll let it run a little longer,” I said. “The boy’s safe, so there’s no hurry, and I want to be sure our bill is steep enough. Just make sure the pictures come out. They’re our ace.”

  “Amen. Anything on the other case?”

  “Actually, that’s what I was calling you about,” I said. “You did such a good job as a domestic, I thought you might want another starring part.”

  “What kind of starring part?” she asked, suddenly wary.

  “Well,” I said, “I was kind of hoping you could go crazy.”

  12

  It was that night, just after ten-thirty, when the station wagon stopped at the guard shack in front of the Riverside Clinic. There was little I could see from my place across the street, but I knew what was happening: A call had been made from a black member of the city council and a name had been placed on a list. The guard who was looking into the car now had verified that the name on the list belonged to the disturbed young woman lying in the back. Even as I watched he stepped back and the car passed through the gate and down the drive. It stopped in front of the building and I saw shadows pass back and forth in the headlights. Attendants would be coming out now to open the tailgate and assist the patient out. The driver and the elderly woman who claimed to be the patient’s mother were going inside now to sign the papers. The papers would guarantee payment and would describe the medical history of the patient. The medical history was false. Payment would come from the black politician, and afterward the favor he owed Sandy would be wiped off the books.

  Ten minutes later the man and woman came out and got back into the car. Twenty years ago they would never have gotten past the gate. Today the city was in its second black administration, and the money of middle-class black families was as welcome as anyone else’s.

  The car came back out and disappeared down the River Road.

  I gave the clinic a last look and started my engine.

  Sandy was a resourceful, determined woman, tough as diamonds and twice as sharp. Still, I couldn’t help but have some misgivings about my idea.

  Solly was waiting when I got back to my office. This time, though, the bluff demeanor had vanished, replaced by weariness.

  “Jesus, Micah, what’s going on with you?” he asked, rising from his chair. He’d picked the lock, of course, and gotten himself a beer, but I didn’t mind. “I thought we were going to hear from you,” he said.

  “I’ve had a lot on my plate,” I evaded.

  “You?” he snorted. “Look, buddy, I put my ass in a sling for you. I told ‘em there was one man that could do this and it was you. Then I told ‘em you wouldn’t touch it unless they treated you right afterward. Hell, I thought you’d jump at the chance, like I did. I mean, old days all over again, just like Saigon. We’d be working as a team again, you and me, in country.”

  “It’ll never be just like it was, Solly,” I told him. “We’re both older and we’re different people.”

  His face reddened. “You don’t have to tell me that, goddamn it. I’m not five years old. Maybe the war’s changed, but the rules are the same and there’s still work to do. If you don’t want to be part of it, that’s okay. I’ll just tell ‘em I made a mistake—” He lurched to his feet and I realized he’d had more than the beer he was holding in his hand.

  “Sit down, Solly,” I soothed. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t work with you. As a matter of fact, I’ve been working on it ever since I left you people. I just have my own way of doing things, you know that.”

  His face relaxed and he smiled sheepishly. “I should of known, Micah. You always were an insubordinate bastard.” He chuckled. “You remember that time you disappeared for three days? You were already listed as AWOL when you came back with our man, the one you pulled right out of that V.C. village. You’d have gotten another Silver Star if they hadn’t been so pissed about how you did it.”

  “I remember,” I said, thinking about it for the first time in a couple of years.

  I went over to the window and lifted a blind to look out onto the dark street.

  “Well, I’ll tell Cox, to cut you some slack,” Solly declared, rising to elbow me fondly. “He’ll do like I say. But Micah, when this is over”—his face was inches from mine now as we stood looking out into the night—”I hope you’ll want to come aboard.”

  It was a window in the building on the corner, fifty feet away. Maybe it was just my imagination, but I didn’t think so.

  I let the blind fall and turned back to Solly.

  “There’s something I have to ask you,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  I headed into the kitchen for the refrigerator, took out a beer, but, instead of going back into the front room, went out through the back door to the balcony. The fountain made a rushing sound, but I knew that could be filtered out. Still, where we were standing was the safest place I could think of without going out onto the street.

  “Are your people wiring my office?” I asked.

  I wondered if the question would make him angry, but it didn’t. There was a long silence and then he leaned forward, his hands on the iron rail.

  “I don’t think so,” he said finally. He turned to me and the bluff heartiness was gone from his face. “But you’ve got to understand, Micah, they don’t tell me everything they do. Cox is a bastard. Sometimes I think he’s too smooth. Hell.” He shrugged. “Twenty years ago I’d of told him to get his prep-school ass out of my line of fire. But, like you just told me, things change. Now his kind are the ones in control. If I want to work, I got to do what they say. Ain’t ideal, but it beats being a civilian.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and patted his shoulder.

  He left via the outside stairway. I followed him into the patio and let him out the pedestrian door beside the vehicle gate. Then, when I was sure he was gone, I went back up and stood beside the window. It took five minutes but once more I caught what seemed to be a brief flash in the window on the corner. Maybe my imagination, but maybe not.

  I went to my desk, took out the .38, and slipped it into my pocket, along with a small flashlight and two pieces of wire. Then I went down the
way Solly had left. A minute later I found myself in Barracks Street. If someone was watching the side entrance, they were well hidden. I walked away, toward Chartres, and then turned right, toward Esplanade. So far today I hadn’t picked up any obvious tails and I didn’t think they’d sent Solly to nail down my location. So maybe they were just playing a waiting game from across the street with an infrared beam, content to listen in on what happened in my office. If so, they were less competent than I expected, because there was little reason to expect me to transact all my business there. And why did it matter what I did? Were they expecting somebody to call me again?

  I didn’t like it and the only thing I could think of was to go to the source. Because if it wasn’t Solly’s people, then that left only Rivas, though why was unclear. Then the thought came to me as I reached Esplanade, the boulevard that forms the northern boundary of the Vieux Carre: Suppose there was something I knew that Rivas didn’t? Something that endangered him or the people he worked for?

  It was an attractive hypothesis, but I could think of nothing that fulfilled the condition. Unless he was using me to get to somebody else.

  Even Esplanade was quiet, the only car a cruising police patrol, a white ghost in the darkness. I crossed Decatur, walking in front of the old Mint, my eyes alert to changes in the texture of shadows. But there was nothing.

  I reached North Peters and turned back toward Canal, roughly paralleling Decatur. Their observation post was between me and my window now; I planned to approach it from the south, coming around the French Market and up Nicholls, then right onto Decatur until I was beside their own building and across Barracks Street from my own. It would be tricky, and if they had a lookout I would probably fail. But in that case, it would probably be Cox’s people. Rivas worked alone and I doubted he would take someone else into his confidence.

  When I came to the corner of Governor Nicholls and Decatur I stopped in a doorway and waited. So far, so good. I crossed the street quickly and slid through the shadows toward the next corner. The building had been unoccupied for six months and there was a realtor’s sign on the brick wall. I put my hand on the door handle and pushed gently but it was locked. I’d expected as much.

  Years ago, when I was in the navy hospital, they’d told me a man with one arm could do a lot more things than I thought. I hadn’t believed them, but a year later, at a VA Rehab Unit, I’d run into a man with no hands at all. His name was Charlie Mix, and he had an escape act, a la Houdini. He showed me some things I hadn’t realized a two armed person could do and he got me to forget my own problem.

  One of his tricks involved his bare feet and a couple of pieces of wire. It was easier for me, though; all I needed was to put one of the pieces of wire between my teeth, to hold the pins down while my hand held the other wire that jiggered the tumblers.

  It took me forty-five seconds and I was in.

  I stood in the darkness for a while, listening. The old structure creaked and invisible rodent bodies scampered through the darkness. But from somewhere upstairs came a telltale sound. It was a floorboard taking weight and then releasing it.

  For a moment I considered my options. If I could hear him, then if I started up the stairs he would be able to hear me, and if he was good there was no telling what booby traps he might have rigged.

  It would be better to get him down, into the street.

  I closed the door behind me and left as quietly as I’d come. I used the pay phone in a bar on Esplanada. Then I hurried back to my apartment and waited.

  Five minutes later I heard the sirens, and then flashing blue and red lights strobed the street outside. Through my night glasses the scene was bathed in an eerie green. Ghostly figures fled in and out of my vision as firemen hammered at the downstairs door of the abandoned building and then broke it down. I counted three of them heading inside, followed by a cop. Maybe I was wrong, I thought. Maybe I hadn’t seen anything at all. Maybe the flashes in the window were from passing traffic. Maybe the soft red glow was nothing at all. And maybe the sounds I’d heard had been the expansion and contraction of old timbers.

  Except that as I watched, another man came out quickly, shouting something at the waiting firemen. They seemed momentarily confused, which was understandable, since he wasn’t one of the men who had gone in.

  He was counting on the confusion to get away, of course. I raced down the stairs and out onto Decatur. He was fifty yards ahead of me, going toward Jackson Square. I wanted to run, but held myself to a fast walk. Someone called out something behind me but I ignored it.

  His form was only a flicker of shadow now and I hurried to keep up. One man. Rivas. It had to be Rivas.

  He reached St. Philip, a streetlamp catching his body for the merest instant. I couldn’t let him get to Jackson Square. Even at one in the morning there would be people around, bodies to confuse, alleys to lose himself in.

  My mind sped ahead, trying to plot out the possibilities. So far he didn’t seem to know I was behind him. There was just a chance he wouldn’t change direction when he got to the square.

  It was the thinking ahead, losing track of the here and now, that was my mistake. Normally, I would have been aware of footsteps behind me, but my mind was with the quarry, and I never stopped to realize that I might have been the quarry myself.

  When I turned it was too late. He was only ten feet away, on the opposite curb, half in and half out of shadow. Instinctively, I reached under my shirt for the gun in my waistband, but I knew it was too late. He stepped off the curb, a machine pistol in his hand and a smile on his face.

  Even though I had seen him only on videotape, there was no mistaking the face: The man who would be my murderer was Adolfo Rivas.

  13

  A string of shots buzzed past my ear and I threw myself onto the sidewalk, landing clumsily on my right side and trying to slap the pavement judo fashion, to break my fall, without dropping the pistol. The pain of the fall throbbed through my arm, ruining my aim. He wouldn’t miss again and yet, incredibly, he didn’t even try. Instead, he was crouching, looking at something off to his left, by the levee, and I realized, dimly, that someone else was firing. I got off a pair of quick shots, but the ache in my forearm made me miss, and the bullets ricocheted off a brick building behind him.

  Still, the crossfire did the job and, after a quick spray from the machine pistol, Rivas ducked into the shadows and I heard his footsteps slapping the pavement as he ran. I raised myself, prepared to follow, and then the sound of a moan from the direction of the levee caught my ear. The man I was after was disappearing, damn it, but the man who’d saved my life needed help.

  There was nothing to do but let Rivas go.

  I made my way to the other side of the street and stopped, amazed.

  Solly Cranich was smiling at me from where he sat on the sidewalk, a silly expression on his face.

  “Lucky shot,” he lamented, holding his shoulder and letting me help him to his feet. “As for this thing”—he gave a contemptuous glance at the Beretta in his right hand—“if I’d of had my 1911A1”—he thrust the offending weapon into his waistband. “Well, we can talk about that later. Christ, Micah, get me outa here. Lights are starting to go on. I don’t want to spend the rest of the night answering questions in the cop house.”

  An hour later I watched one of Cox’s anonymous agents finish bandaging Solly’s arm. We were in a safe house off West End Boulevard and Cox sat on the arm of a ratty sofa, his cigarillo smoked down to the filter.

  “I wish you’d clued us in,” he said. “Calling a false alarm wasn’t the coolest thing I’ve heard of.”

  “No?” I shot back. “Then why were your people spying on me? Why the hell didn’t you play straight with me, instead of putting a goon in a window with a laser beam?”

  The “goon,” who straddled a chair on the other side of the room, half rose, but Cox motioned him back down.

  “No need to be all pissed off,” he said. “It was for your own good. We were trying to
protect you. We knew once Rivas figured you were after him he’d try to neutralize the danger.” He shrugged. “We were right, too, weren’t we? He must have picked you up outside the congressman’s place when you left, and followed you. A little research would show you were a PI and after that he could add things up. I figure we saved your life.”

  “Like hell,” I said. “It isn’t that simple. I don’t think I was followed and even if I was, why assume I was after him? I think there was a leak. I think you need to check your own people and see which one of them’s selling you out.”

  This time all three of the agents rose, their eyes killing me. Only Solly and Cox remained in their places, and for a while, as Cox smoked thoughtfully, I thought he was going to let them have me. But he finally extinguished his cigarette in a Coke bottle and sighed.

  “My people are all vouched for, Dunn. There’s not one who hasn’t been cleared to the top-secret cosmic level. And rechecked. They’ve all passed lie-detector tests and a psychological battery. It’s a tough program. The CIA designed it and I improved on it. Most people can’t get past the first cutoff. How do you think you’d do?”

  “That’s your problem, not mine,” I said.

  “It’s both our problem, if you come to work for me,” he said. “We like independent people, people who can think on their feet, make quick decisions. So long as their decisions are the right ones.” His brows rose slightly. “But mavericks who fight the system can be a pain in the ass.”

  “Your ass is my last worry,” I said. “Right now I’m more worried about Solly almost getting killed because you didn’t tell him what was going on. Not to mention myself.”

  “Oh, hell,” Solly said, putting on a fresh shirt. “I’m okay. I’m just glad I decided to come back to get my lighter and saw you coming down the steps.”

  “Look,” Cox said, getting up. “It’s after two in the damn morning. We aren’t going to get anywhere arguing. We’re all tired and you need some sleep. We all do.” He moved to the door. “Hays here will give you a ride back. Get some sleep and cool off. Then get back in touch with me, okay? The offer still stands.”