The Caesar Clue (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  I slept until ten and woke up feeling like I’d left my best years in the street the night before. I had beignets and coffee at the Cafe du Monde and tried to pick up any talk of trouble in the Quarter last night, but there wasn’t any; people were more interested in the depression that had turned into a tropical storm and was nudging its way into the gulf. Afterward, as I neared my place I found Mancuso’s car at the curb. I opened the door on the driver’s side and got in.

  “I hear there was some excitement down here last night,” the policeman said. “Right after a false alarm. Funny thing: The firemen found some pretty sophisticated electronic equipment in one of the vacant buildings.”

  “The Quarter’s going to hell,” I said.

  “Ain’t it?” he pulled away from the curb. He waited until we were out of the Vieux Carre before he spoke again.

  “So’s how’s she doing? Any word?”

  “Too early,” I said, as much for my benefit as his. “She’ll need two, maybe three days minimum. And she may strike out completely, but I thought it was worth a try. I can’t think of any other way to get close to the girl.”

  “I’d like to know who’s paying the bills,” Mancuso said. “Doc Laurent doesn’t do anything for free. That’s an expensive place. But without a court order, I can’t find out who’s picking up the tab.”

  “I’ve wondered, too,” I admitted. “Julia seems to have made good money at what she did, but if she called her father to help get her sister out, it doesn’t seem like she was the one footing the expenses.”

  “Yeah,” Mancuso said. “And Jenny’s main asset was the first half of the aforementioned word, apparently.”

  We fell into silence and I stared out of the window as the old neighborhood went past. We were on Esplanade, headed for Carrollton, a route I often jogged, but somehow today it seemed as if we had been on it forever. It was the photograph, of course: It seemed to swim in and out of focus, and the only thing I could see clearly was the curve of her lips in the ironic little smile. Somehow, to me, the case was not about a congressman almost being assassinated, but about a woman who had asked for my help, help I’d never had a chance to give.

  “There has to be a way to find out more about Julia,” I said. “If I could know what the hell was going on inside her head right before the crash …”

  “That would be kind of hard,” he said. “I don’t think science has got us quite that far.”

  “No,” I said, watching more houses go past. We were in a black neighborhood now, with kids playing on porches and in front yards. Then I turned to face him. “But we could do the next best thing. How about some of the johns she dealt with?”

  Mancuso gave me a wary, sideways glance. “Don’t go overboard on this thing. The girl’s dead.”

  “But now that you have her prints, you could search the files for police reports, see if she was ever arrested and if any customer was named.”

  The detective sighed. “Well, I guess I owe you something. Once we IDed her yesterday, I made the rounds of banks with her name, description, and social security number. We turned up a bank box at Hibernia.”

  I faced him, my hand gripping the dash. “You’ve opened her deposit box?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. I talked Judge Broussard into signing a court order, even though we don’t have an official death certificate. I called her father. He’s coming down to be there when we open it at one o’clock. Maybe you want to be there, too.”

  “Thanks, Sal.”

  “No problem. But next time call me before you get the fire department, okay?”

  He let me off downtown and I walked over to O’Rourke’s office. His leggy secretary, Abbie, greeted me with a smile and sent me into her boss’s office without a knock. I told him about my meeting with the congressman.

  “I hear they’re moving his wife to a hospital,” he said, playing with a pencil on his desk. “So is there any word of this Rivas?”

  “He’s in town,” I said. “I was wrong and Cox was right.” I described what had happened last night.

  “Jesus,” O’Rourke swore. “And you haven’t told all this to Mancuso?”

  “Maybe I ought to,” I admitted. “But then he’d have to go to his superiors with it, there’d be meetings between commissioners and U.S. attorneys, and he’d probably end up being kicked off the case again.”

  “I see what you mean. So where to now?”

  “Well, I’d like to call the Captain for starters. I don’t trust my phone and I hope they haven’t bugged yours.”

  He pushed the phone over to me. “I hope not, too. Otherwise, they’re going to hear some pretty lurid things about a divorce case.”

  I dialed the captain’s number and waited. This time it answered on the first ring and his voice was breathless.

  “Hello? Son, is that you?”

  “It’s me. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. But I’ve been worried to death about you. And, damn it, I don’t like to worry. Is your phone safe?”

  “None of them are safe these days,” I told him, “but this is probably as good as any. Have you got any information?”

  His voice dropped to a whisper, as if he thought someone might be in the room with him.

  “Well, it wasn’t easy. I’d rather take a battlewagon into a mine field than try to get anything out of these security types. And now I’ve got to go deep-sea fishing with Percy Fennelly, for Christ sake. And I’ve never liked the man.”

  “Who’s Percy Fennelly?”

  “An ONI type, retired now. But not before he got his flag. His own flag, if you can believe it! And I remember when he ran an LST aground in fifty-nine! So he ass-kisses all the brass, and pretends he’s still active. Joined some goddamn policy group that calls itself the Committee for Six Hundred. You know, the six-hundred-ship navy—which means carriers and other targets, not tin cans—but they think it gives ‘em a right to mouth off about everything else. They give money to the right candidates, and sponsor speeches, the whole business. I had to ask him over for drinks last night. Pompous little bastard, hasn’t changed since the academy. We hazed the hell out of him, you know. Anyway, his wife isn’t much better. A twit.”

  “Had he heard of this group?”

  “Not per se, but he’d heard of Cox. Thought he was a hell of a guy. West Point, sixty-two; captain in Nam, Silver Star, retired with the rank of major, in seventy-eight.”

  There was a silence as he waited for my reaction.

  “Okay, Dad. You made your point, so I’ll ask: Why does a man who’s West Point and has beaucoup medals leave the service as only a major?”

  “Right,” he said, pleased I had caught it. “Just what I asked. But Percy only acted aggravated, said he didn’t know, that he heard there were lots of offers he had and he could take his pick. But you and I both know a man doesn’t just step out for no reason. So I called Frank Gilbert’s son. You remember Frank? He had the Manion when I was skipper of the Gordon Faust. His son, Lee, is working for the NSC these days, detached from the CNO’s staff. Hadn’t seen the boy since he was a midshipman, but I called him anyway. He was very helpful.”

  I knew I couldn’t speed him; he’d tell me in his own time.

  “He did a quick check, made a call, and got back to me just half an hour ago. Turns out this Cox didn’t just change jobs; he resigned his commission under some very dubious circumstances.”

  Somehow it wasn’t a surprise.

  “What kind of circumstances?” I asked.

  “Nobody seems to know. The records were purged. He was just in one day, out the next. But you remember, that was during the Carter administration. There was a general cleanup then, and all the spook services took their licks. Lee felt it probably had something to do with some screw-up in the field.”

  “So he isn’t what he claims,” I said. “And poor Solly only thinks he’s back to active duty.”

  “Not necessarily,” the cap
tain corrected. “Just remember, in eighty everything changed again. People that were out came back in. Spook types got a new lease. The Reagan administration promised to build a six-hundred-ship navy. A smart man like Cox could find a new niche, end up in the driver’s seat of some outfit buried so deep in the Pentagon nobody in Congress ever heard of it.”

  “Except,” I said, “the members of the Armed Services Committee.”

  “Yeah, maybe them.” He coughed. “Well, steer into the wind, son. And watch out for that storm in the gulf.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Next I called Katherine at Tulane’s anthropology department and assured myself that she was all right.

  “So now what?” O’Rourke asked.

  “I guess,” I told him, “that I find out what Julia Morvant was saving in her safe-deposit box.”

  Mancuso was already waiting at the bank. It was the Carrollton Branch, on the shady old boulevard that had once been the main street of the town of that name. Carrollton had been annexed by New Orleans in 1874 and its once-thriving market had become a small plaza on a back street, with a brass plaque. Now, the boulevard was the site of old houses, shopping centers, and the north-south extension of the streetcar line. I got out in the parking lot and recognized Mancuso’s unmarked car.

  He met me just inside the door. Will Folsom stood beside him, in his blue jeans and a baseball cap. I started to offer my hand and then decided against it. It wasn’t a social occasion.

  At that moment a woman in sedate silk blouse and tie came out from one of the offices with a paper in her hand. She might have been pretty, I thought, except that her severe clothing suppressed her femininity. But then, I was comparing her with Katherine, whose sensuality no clothes could hide, and that was hardly fair.

  “This seems to be in order,” she said crisply, handing him back the court order. “We sent for a special master key, since you were unable to furnish us with the client’s. I have to tell you, this is the first time that’s happened since I’ve been manager of this branch. Anyway, we’ll open the box, and we’ll take it into my office. You can remove objects and look at them, and then, when you’re finished, we’ll ask you to put them all back in the box and we’ll replace it. One of my people will stand by as an observer, on behalf of the bank.”

  “One thing,” I asked. “When was the last time she went into the box?”

  The manager gave me a surprised look, as if I hadn’t really been there until I’d spoken. She issued a crisp order to a clerk, taking out her annoyance on him, and a second later he came back and whispered in her ear.

  “It was exactly one week ago,” she replied. “Now …”

  Mancuso nodded and we followed her into the rear.

  She spoke to a young man who nodded and led us into the vault. He climbed onto a stool and unlocked the box. Then he removed it and, holding it like a baby in his arms, descended slowly to the floor.

  With ourselves as an escort, he went behind the officers’ desks to one of the rooms in the rear, where he deposited the box on the desk.

  We crowded around as the young man lifted the hasp and opened the top.

  The box, at first glance, seemed to be full of envelopes. The young man took out the first, a brown mailing envelope with the bank’s return address, and held it for us to see that it was not sealed. He removed the contents and there was a collective gasp as he placed a handful of certificates of deposit on the table. Each was for ten thousand dollars and he thumbed through them quickly.

  “One hundred thousand dollars purchase value,” he said, and, replacing them in the envelope, went on to the next.

  This envelope contained cash, mostly hundred dollar bills.

  “Twenty-five thousand,” he said, putting them in their envelope. He removed the third envelope and took out two small objects that I recognized as passbooks. He showed each to us in turn. One, I saw, issued by the National Bank of Commerce, showed a balance of five thousand dollars. The other, at a Texas bank, indicated a balance of thirteen thousand and change. The last deposit had been made the month before, for five hundred dollars.

  I sneaked a look at her father, but his face seemed carved from stone. I wondered if he realized that he stood to inherit everything now before us.

  A fourth envelope cast a new light on things. It held a birth certificate issued to one Julia May Morvant and a social security card in the same name. The latter may have been genuine, but the birth certificate had to be a forgery. Mancuso and I exchanged glances but the others seemed not to have caught it.

  I knew what Mancuso was thinking, of course; that the birth certificate and social-security card could have been used to get other documents, like a passport and a driver’s license, and they, in turn, could have been used to take out another safe-deposit box. Mancuso wrote down the number on the card and the data on the birth certificate. We looked back at the box. All that was left was a small, spiral notebook with a brown cover and a gold necklace with an imitation sapphire.

  The officer removed them both, as if handling the bones of a dead person, and carefully set them beside the other items.

  It was the notebook that interested me, of course. And when he’d opened it I saw that it was what I had been looking for: A list of first names, all men’s, followed by a final initial, for the surname, and a telephone number. Mancuso reached out, took the book, and flipped through the pages to the middle. Here, each page bore a set of initials at the top, and under each was a series of dates, indicated by numbers and slashes, and a place, sometimes the name of a hotel, and at other times a reference such as “apt.” or “his.” Beside the latter was always an address. And beneath that, the particular services she had performed, the price, and any comments. For Ron V. G., 7/12/87, for example, she had written, His—1210 Chamberlain, near Topaz. French. $250. Tlk abt wife, Elsa, kids. Stocks.

  We went through the other entries and I got out my note pad and set it on the desk.

  The bank officer looked uneasy but he said nothing as I copied some of the entries. When I finished he whisked the notebook away and started to gather the envelopes.

  I was wondering what Will Folsom must have been feeling, but then I caught a glance from Sal Mancuso and looked over at the old man. He was holding up the gold necklace, oblivious to the rest of us, and his lips were moving silently.

  “Mr. Folsom,” Mancuso said softly. “Mr. Folsom, it’s time to go.”

  He shook his head, handing the necklace to the bank officer.

  “I gave her that on her thirteenth birthday. Her thirteenth birthday. I thought she lost it a long time ago. I had no idea …”

  I realized then that he hadn’t noticed the book with the names and I was glad.

  14

  The shop smelled of dust and I stifled the urge to cough. Books overflowed the shelves and in the center of the room a big table was piled high with volumes that were long out of print.

  “Hello, anybody here?” I asked, threading my way through the narrow aisle toward a long counter at the rear. The counter was stacked with more books, and its display glass showed a haphazard collection of old coins and archaic military medals.

  I heard movement and a minute later a woman came through the open door behind the counter and stopped when she saw me. She was tall and thin, with her gray hair done up in a bun, and a pair of bifocals had slid down her aquiline nose, making her tilt her head backward slightly to see me.

  “May I help you?” she asked, coming through the swinging gate to face me. “I have an excellent first edition of Thomas Hardy. I happen to know that it will be gone within two more days.”

  “Sorry,” I said, “I stick to comic books.”

  She gave me a pitying look.

  “Well, you have that military air,” she said. “A little on the stiff side. Maybe you’d like a copy of Charlemagne’s memoirs.”

  “How about a Gutenberg Bible,” I asked. “I’ll wait for you to finish printing it.”

  She smiled first and then we
both broke into laughter and she threw her arms around my neck.

  “Micah, you old reprobate. I was wondering what had happened to you. You must have found yourself a new girl.”

  “You’d like her, Samantha. But she’d be difficult: She’s into Mayan codices.”

  “My God, that is a hard one,” she said, pursing her lips. “But it can be done. There was a man once, a doctor from New York, who wanted a genuine Mixtec codex, so …”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” I said, holding up my hand.

  She pouted. “You won’t even allow me to brag? And I get so little opportunity these days. I can’t do it with my bridge club.”

  “No,” I agreed, “I guess not.” Samantha de Villier was a member of old New Orleans society. She had graduated from Newcomb in the late forties, married a rich engineer who had taken her around the world four or five times, and then had died, leaving her with leisure and twice as much money as before. He had been her one true love, it seemed, because after that she’d married two or three more times, but none of them had lasted more than a couple of years, so that now she was by herself and loving it. After hours she hobnobbed with the elite, and during the day she ran a small, eccentric used-book store on Tchoupitoulas, a stone’s throw from the river. The books brought her only a small income, but it hardly mattered, because the shop itself allowed her to have a working address, where she could take full advantage of her art degree.

  “But I can’t believe you came here just to invite me to lunch at Commander’s,” she complained. “You have that look in your eyes. You’re going to exploit me, I can tell.”

  “Now, Sam …”

  “And whenever you call me that, it’s a certainty.”

  “What can I say, except that I saw something earlier today that made me think of you and I just had to come over.”

  “Made you think of me?” She frowned. “What do you mean? Not some of my work?”

  “It was so good it had to be.”