The Caesar Clue (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  “You called her,” I said, helping him along.

  His head bobbed once.

  “You won’t believe how long it took me to dial that number. Or how many times I got all the way to the last number and then hung up.” A car went by on the boulevard behind us, sending up geysers of water. “Maybe I should have the last time, too.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  He shook his head mournfully. “No. I think if I’d gotten her answering machine, though, I’d have let it go. I mean, I couldn’t have left my name and number for a stranger, could I?”

  “It’s been done.”

  “Yes.” He reached up to loosen his tie. His trembling had stopped and he seemed to be settling in. “Anyway, I got her. You don’t know how scared I was. I mean, I didn’t plan on anything; I just wanted to introduce myself, tell her I’d enjoyed meeting her. I thought, since she’d been friendly at the party, well, maybe a drink or something, you know?”

  I waited.

  “Oh, hell,” he said suddenly. “I guess that’s not true. I wanted her, I just didn’t want to admit it. I kept telling myself I could stop halfway, there was no harm just talking.”

  “Go on.”

  “She was friendly. She remembered me. I asked if she wanted to have a drink or something and she said sure and named a bar.”

  “Then you found out she wasn’t just a nice girl at loose ends.”

  “Well, not immediately. I mean, we had drinks, talked, and she really acted interested in me and in what I did. She seemed to know something about the market, asked a lot of intelligent questions. She seemed to get a kick out of seeing how surprised I was. Of course, I just figured she’d picked up a lot from Jack, but I have to tell you, in a lot of ways she seemed to know even more than he did.”

  I had a picture of her in the cozy booth, dazzling the slightly awkward broker with her enthusiasm for his field. Had it all been a put on, I wondered, or had the enthusiasm been real, a craving to learn what she hadn’t been able to on the farm?

  “After a while,” he said, “she got up and asked if I wanted to see her home. Not take her home. See her home, like I was an old-fashioned date or something. I realized then that she didn’t have a car, at least not with her, so I drove her home. It was an apartment over on Causeway, a big building …”

  “I know it.”

  “Oh. Anyway, I went up with her and she invited me in and all the while I was thinking, What the hell am I doing here? But it seemed so natural, so right. I felt so comfortable with her. She told me she shared the place with another girl, but the other girl wasn’t around. We had another couple of drinks and she asked me about myself, where I came from. I told her from Reserve and she seemed to know all about it; it was amazing, it was like she grew up there or something. She came and sat next to me, and she started to unloosen my tie. Well, after that …”

  “Right.”

  “She didn’t ask me to pay her. I didn’t even know she was, well, professional. She just asked if I had any good tips and whether I’d set up a small account for her.”

  “Which you did.”

  “Sure. Why not? Every week or so she’d call and ask how it was doing. I never charged a commission. And sometimes I’d set up a date with her. If she was busy she’d tell me and we’d reschedule. But she always made it seem like she’d rather be with me, like I was somebody special.”

  “You must’ve figured out she was a pro.”

  “Yeah, it didn’t take long. I remember, at first I was disillusioned, and she realized it, but she told me I was different, not like the others. Maybe she told them all that, but at least I could pretend.”

  The flashing lights on the causeway had been joined now by others. Multiple injuries, I thought, maybe even deaths.

  “Did she ever tell you anything about her life outside your relationship?” I asked. “Her friends, for instance?”

  “She had this roommate, Linda. I met her a few times. She was nice, but not too smart, you know? It was obvious Julia led her around, and Linda kind of depended on her. I invested some money for Linda once, right before the stock split two-for-one, and she made about a fifty percent profit. But she didn’t seem to understand. I got the impression she thought she was supposed to make more money than that. I tried to explain about the market but she wasn’t interested. Between the two of us, I think without Julia to help her along she’d have been on the street. She didn’t have Julia’s taste, either. She tended to be tacky in the way she dressed. Julia got on her about it once, told her not to wear a certain blouse. It made Linda mad, but she did what Julia wanted.” He gave a lopsided smile. “Come to think of it, I have the feeling a lot of people did what Julia wanted.”

  “She didn’t say anything about any of her other clients?”

  “Never. And I didn’t ask.”

  “Family?”

  He exhaled and a cloud formed on the inside of the windshield opposite him. “Well, she said once that she came from a rich family. Said they had a home in the Garden District, servants, butlers, a limo. Her father was a surgeon and they used to go to Europe every year. But I never knew whether to believe that or not.” He looked over at me. “Do you think it’s true?”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,” I said, thinking of the grizzled old farmer.

  “Once, she told me about her husband and baby. I didn’t know whether to believe that, either.”

  “Her what?”

  He gave a nervous little laugh. “I didn’t expect it, either. We were … that is, we’d just, we were lying there, you know, and she asked me about my children, about how they’d been when they were little, and getting up in the middle of the night, taking them to the doctor, and all. She seemed really interested, asked me all kinds of things, little details, and then she sprung it on me.”

  “What did she say?” I asked, my throat dry.

  “‘I had a baby once,’ she said. ‘But it died. So did my husband.’ It caught me by surprise. I mean, there we were one minute, you know, and all of a sudden she’s telling me this. I asked her how it happened. She said they were in a car crash. That their car went head-on off the road, into a bridge abutment. She said her husband and her baby burned up.”

  Even secondhand, the words sent a shudder through me.

  “Where did this happen?” I asked.

  “She wasn’t specific, just in another state. She said after that she couldn’t have a normal life.”

  “Interesting,” was all I could think to say.

  “No,” he contradicted. “The interesting thing was what she said next.”

  The rain was slackening now, as the squall passed over.

  “She said,” he went on, “that the accident was the fault of the car manufacturer; that they’d done a lousy job of inspection. But when she went to them, they stonewalled, refused to admit any fault, wouldn’t even discuss it.”

  “Then what?” I asked, knowing there was a punch line and afraid of what it would be.

  “Well, she said there was nothing else to do, that the lawyers were all crooked or too expensive, so it was up to her.”

  He put his glasses back on. Glare from outside reflected in them, hiding his eyes.

  “So?”

  “So she said she took care of it on her own.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “She said it was an eye for an eye. They ruined her life so she ruined theirs. She said she got a detective to find some dirt on their company. She found out it was stored in the main computer and she got it out by agreeing to sleep with a programmer. She told me she ruined them, had them begging when it was over. She said after that, nothing mattered for a long time and it didn’t seem so bad to sleep with other men for money. To tell the truth, I figured it was a crock of bullshit, some kind of melodrama she cooked up to excuse how she got into the business, and yet by the time she got to her baby and her husband she was crying, like it really happened. But it couldn’t have, could it?”

  I thought of Will Folsom and
the cardboard box of books. Was it her father she had destroyed in her fantasy? Was it a scenario she had dreamed up as the fulfillment of a wish?

  “Who knows,” I said. “Look, does the name Rivas mean anything to you? Short, stocky guy, Latin?”

  He shook his head, befuddled. “No. Can’t say it does. Was he one of her … one of the others?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a name that surfaced. Did she say anything to you about leaving the country, say on vacation?”

  “I didn’t know until I couldn’t get her to return my call. Then”—he cleared his throat—“you called and said she was dead. It’s so hard to believe.”

  “Right.” I pulled out my final question: “Did she ever tell you about a sister?”

  “A sister? Her sister? I didn’t know she had one.”

  He sounded like he was telling the truth.

  “When was the last time you saw her roommate, Linda?”

  “Linda? I don’t know, a month or so. We were never close.”

  “You don’t read the paper?” I asked.

  “Sure, usually. Why?”

  “They dragged her out of Bayou St. John the other day. Somebody killed her.”

  A look of horror contorted his face. “Oh, my God, you don’t think I…?”

  “It’s just across City Park from your house.”

  It was really a couple of miles, but I thought it was worthwhile to see his reaction. It was a good one. If he was guilty, he was a damned good actor.

  “As God is my witness, I had nothing to do with that.”

  I nodded. “Calm down, Mr. Gautreau. I believe you, at least for now. Go home, enjoy your family. I’ll call you if there’s anything else.”

  The relief fought with the awful possibility that he might hear from me again.

  “Please. Not at home.”

  “It probably won’t be anywhere,” I said.

  “Thank you.” He reached for my hand with both of his and shook it fervently. “Thank you so much. You have to understand. She was the only woman besides my wife who ever found me attractive. I was always so self-conscious. I felt so different, and she made me feel normal, like it didn’t matter.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He frowned and tapped his right foot and for the first time I saw the built-up shoe.

  “My foot,” he said. “You can’t know how it is to be different, and to meet somebody that makes you feel whole.”

  He opened the door and I sat stunned as he limped back to his car.

  16

  The halls smelled of death, death and moisture from the mud that sucked at the old building’s foundations and kept trying to drag it down like everything was eventually dragged down here.

  “You’ll go,” Katherine had said last night, as we lay quietly in bed upstairs. “You won’t be satisfied if you don’t.”

  She was right. My talk with Gautreau had left me in a melancholy mood, the worst I’d experienced since just after my divorce. The picture of Julia Morvant had altered. Behind the self-sure smile I saw the frightened Mary Juliette, living her fantasies. Then the image shifted once more and I saw a woman with unusual compassion. Another fantasy, I told myself: Mother incarnate, giver of comfort. And finally I saw her on the airplane, frightened, but confident, playing the biggest role of her life, and never knowing that for the ones she had crossed it was no game, and they would have the last word.

  There was no way to hide my mood from Katherine. At first she asked if I wanted to talk, but I couldn’t shake the images. At first I pretended interest in what she was saying, but I kept losing her words in midsentence. And that night, when she’d bathed and put on an especially sexy negligee, and applied a perfume she’d saved for the occasion, I realized it was no use.

  “It’s not rational,” she said, turning in the bed to face me. “But it never is. The way I felt about Gregory Thorpe all those years wasn’t rational, but that didn’t make it less real. What I needed was a strong dose of reality. Maybe that’s what you need, too.”

  I reached over and touched her face. How had I ever been lucky enough to find her?

  That was when she said I ought to go.

  At first I protested. I’d seen enough bodies in Nam, and I’d been in a few morgues since then. It was never a pleasant experience.

  “And there probably won’t be any way to tell,” I said.

  “Probably not,” she said. “But just going there may help. The knowing that one of the people there …”

  “I can do without it,” I said, but she knew she had me.

  And she was right. That night I dreamed of a plane falling from the sky, a brilliant pinwheel of smoke and light, like the space shuttle exploding. Only somehow I was on the craft, a lone survivor standing hip deep in the swamp, with nothing but desolation around me. I tried to raise my arms to grab a cushion and that was when I realized my left arm had been yanked from its socket. Strange, I thought, that it’s only numb. Then I saw the bodies floating around me.

  When I awoke she was shaking me and telling me it was all right. A few minutes later I drifted back into a dreamless sleep and when I awoke this time it was daylight. At eight-thirty I called Mancuso and asked him to make arrangements at Charity’s morgue.

  “I still don’t know what you expect to find,” he groused as we stood in the hallway, waiting for the pathologist, Dr. Schwartz. “By the way, any word from Sandy?”

  “None so far,” I said, trying to sound unconcerned. It had only been a day. I’d allowed three.

  A nervous little man in a white coat came through a set of swinging doors, shook hands with Mancuso, and then regarded me balefully.

  “Is he a relative?” he asked my friend.

  “A close friend of one of the victims,” I said quickly. “She doesn’t have any relatives.”

  The doctor shook his head skeptically. “Well, there isn’t much to see, unless one’s morbid.” His look implied I might fall into that category. “And in a disaster of this magnitude, we have to use a number of different hospitals. Most of the victims have already been identified. Fortunately, most were still strapped in their seats.”

  He led us through the doors and I saw a series of tables, each with a sheet-covered form. I produced the photograph Mancuso had handed me on the way over.

  “Have you seen this woman?” I asked, my throat catching.

  The pathologist gave it a quick glance and shook his head.

  “It’s impossible to say. I may have. But then again …”

  I looked around at the white forms. The walls wanted to close in and I felt perspiration on my arms and back.

  “Are all the bodies accounted for?” I asked.

  “Well”—the little man shrugged—“there are always some it’s impossible to identify, and a few we never find. Some probably still in the swamp. And the sheer trauma confuses things.” He made a sour face and I noticed he had a twitch. “There are stray arms and legs, torsos. Not pleasant at all. Some of it’s guesswork. There’s room for mistakes. Suppose you get the wrong arm with a torso?”

  We murmured appreciation of his difficulty.

  “That’s right.” He warmed to the subject. “No easy answers. Oh, we do blood tests and the like, take fingerprints, but there’s always the chance of a screw-up. You may’ve read last month about the woman the funeral parlor took out of the rest home. They got her on the slab and found out she wasn’t dead. It was her roommate they were supposed to take. Incredible, you say, but these things happen more often than you’d think. And in this case it’s worse. Any explosion that rips up bodies makes a mess. Not enough body parts, too many body parts. You name it. We have that problem here. We …”

  “In other words,” I interrupted. “There’s no way to really know she’s dead.”

  “Technically? Not at this point. Maybe before too long, but we’re still sorting them out. Where there’s fire, of course, it sometimes becomes almost impossible for even a dentist. Now if this friend of yours h
ad a dentist you could put us in touch with …”

  “I’ve already checked that,” Mancuso said quietly. “So far we’ve struck out.”

  “Well, then,” the doctor said primly, “it’ll take longer. But we’ll find out eventually. The odds are overwhelming. Look”—he moved toward one of the lockers that lined the wall—“we found a hand, a man’s left hand. Waterlogged. That makes it hard to get the fingerprints.” He started to pull out the locker, then thought better of it and reached for another, underneath. “Or even worse, how about a foot? Not much to work with. The disaster crew almost didn’t even recognize it, floating on the surface. But with photographs, blood types, I’ll bet you fifty to one we place it.”

  “That’s okay,” Mancuso said, putting a hand on the other’s arm before he could open the locker. “We’ll take your word for it.”

  “Whatever. But you see the point I’m making: Something like an ear or an arm, even a head, the real problem is finding it. After that, we can generally place it, if there isn’t complete incineration.” He smiled lopsidedly. “But if there was incineration, then nobody would’ve found it, would they?”

  We couldn’t argue with that.

  “So do you want to look at some of the remains?” he asked, completely enthusiastic now. “If you don’t find the lady here, she might be at one of the other hospitals. But I’d better warn you: If that hurricane hits, it’s going to slow us down considerably. Not”—he shrugged—“that we’d ever have another disaster like Galveston, at the turn of the century. But even thirty or forty extra bodies …”

  “Right,” I said, turning away. “Well, if you turn up anything unusual, I’d appreciate a call.” I handed him my card and he thrust it into a pocket of his lab coat without looking at it.

  “Sure,” he said, walking back out with us, through the swinging doors. “I know what you’re feeling. Everybody wants to think their loved one isn’t here. But if she got on that plane, she’s here.” He twitched again. “We’ll find her sooner or later.”