The Caesar Clue (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  He stood aside and nodded at the door.

  I went to the door, opened it, and went in. The room was filled with acrid cigarette smoke and at first it seemed empty, but I knew better.

  “You can come out now, Cox,” I said.

  There was movement to my left and a form disengaged itself from the shadows.

  “Very good, Dunn. How did you know?”

  “I’m used to being bait,” I said. “But tell me one thing, Cox: Who do you really work for?”

  “Justice,” he said. “But we’re not FBI. We’re a special task force, just as I told you before.”

  “Naturally, there’s no way for me to verify that, because the secretary will deny all knowledge.”

  He gave me a thin smile. “The attorney general. Same principle, though.”

  “But why in a hurricane?” I asked. “That doesn’t make much sense. You don’t really expect Rivas to pull up in a boat.”

  He shrugged. “What the hell? We can’t control the weather.”

  It wasn’t convincing, but I needed some time to sort out the possibilities before I called him on it.

  “Where’s Solly?” I asked.

  He sighed theatrically. “Flown. You were sharp. Dunn: You told me there was a leak but I didn’t want to believe you. I thought my people were the best. They’d all been vetted, and vetted again. But sometimes you pick a rotten one.”

  “Solly?” I asked, shocked.

  “Afraid so. If it helps, I was as surprised as you were.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I protested. “We were together in Nam. We were …”

  “Yeah, tell me. He’s done some sensitive jobs for us, too. I had him all wrong.” Cox came out into the center of the room and drew on his cigarillo. He was in his shirt sleeves, and the nickel plated PPK gleamed in the lamplight. “But you know, Dunn, sometimes there’s something inside, a flaw.” He removed his pistol from his shoulder rig and jacked back the slide, chambering a round. “I had this revolver once, a .357, one of the prettiest jobs of workmanship you’ve ever seen. I could take the pip out of an ace at a hundred feet, during rapid fire. I loved that weapon. Saved my life more than once in-country. Then, one day, I had it out on the range, at Quantico, of all places. Load five and fire at will, you know the drill.” He brought the automatic up and sighted along the barrel, aiming for an imaginary point on the curtains that shrouded the windows. “First shot, bull’s-eye. Second shot, overlapped the first. Third and fourth, all touching.” His finger touched the trigger and I tensed. “Fifth shot …” He made as if to fire, jerked the pistol up, and then laughed, lowering it. “Fifth shot the son of a bitch blew to pieces.” He lowered the hammer and then removed the magazine. “I checked the ammo. It was regulation, range loaded, nothing wrong with any of it. All I could figure was a flaw in the metal. I never forgot that experience.” He jacked the slide back, ejecting the chambered round, and caught it neatly in the air.

  “You have proof about Solly,” I said.

  He shrugged, reloading the magazine and shoving it back into the handle of the gun. “Proof? He broke. That’s proof enough.”

  “Broke? How so?”

  “Last night, at the clinic. He had a chance to take you and he didn’t. At that point, we were unsure about you. You caught us by surprise. His orders were to stop you and he failed. And threatened the other members of the team. That was the tip-off he was under too much pressure to handle. So I spent the next few hours checking out times and places, and what it came down to was he was always gone at strange times. You know the kind of guy he was. He wasn’t good at deception. It was like bending a piece of metal backward and forward. After a while it was too much. So I pretended I was being called back to Washington and had him listen in on the tap when Miss Benedict out there”—he made a derisive limp-wristed gesture—“called you to come. I figured that would flush him. It did. He vanished. AWOL. Gone.”

  “If that’s true, why did he save me from Rivas the other night?”

  “I’m telling you,” Cox explained patiently, “he’s a man trying to be two things. It was fine to feed Rivas intelligence about the congressman and about our investigation, but he didn’t want you killed. You’re his friend. Or were. But when you busted those folks out of the place, that tore it for him. You hadn’t kept him informed. It was a sign you didn’t trust him. And since he’d recommended you for this gig, he was the one knew he’d get a new asshole torn out.” Cox jammed the pistol back into the shoulder holster. “His letting you get away was his good-bye present. His statement, according to his own muddled code of honor. But a code all the same.”

  I looked down at the rug. I hated to admit it, but it all made a kind of crazy sense, everything except how he could have been betraying his employers in the first place.

  “You know,” Cox said softly, taking a final puff and stubbing the butt out in an ashtray. “Solly Cranich wasn’t the smartest guy ever lived. He wasn’t made for spook shows. I figure he got set up sometime after he came aboard. Maybe a woman, hell, you know the routine: I’ve got an uncle in Malaga, will you take him a present? And the uncle has to send something back, of course, only it turns out to be some white powder, and a favor to a girl friend all of a sudden is smuggling.”

  I nodded. It was the sort of thing simple, good-hearted Solly could let himself get mousetrapped into.

  There was a thumping behind the curtains and I walked over and parted them. The sound I’d heard was the heavy storm shutters, trembling in the wind.

  “What about the girl? What was she doing in Laurent’s clinic?”

  “That’s a long story,” Cox sighed. “But she and her sister were mules for the drug cartel. This girl, Jenny, was a little unstable already. I don’t know what she’s said to you, if anything, but she’s in outer space. And the drugs she was into made it worse. She knows a hell of a lot about the organization. We were protecting her. And trying to straighten out her head enough so we could get her testimony.”

  Outside, the usually tranquil grounds would be a lake by now and I thought of my traveling bag, with my gun inside, bobbing away on the current.

  “How many men did you keep here?” I asked.

  “One other,” Cox said easily. “Why? Do you think Rivas has fins?”

  I remembered the strange image I’d seen the moment the branch had hit me, of a form seated in the gazebo. It had been an illusion of the storm, I knew, but it still made me uneasy.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “But it might help if we did. This is lowland, with a bayou just behind the house. It can’t take too much more flooding. And even the levee won’t hold forever.”

  He laughed soundlessly. “Hurricanes don’t bother me,” he said. “And I didn’t know they bothered you.”

  “I grew up in Charleston,” I said. “Where did you grow up?”

  “Touché, Dunn.”

  I started out.

  “Oh, Dunn.”

  I stopped.

  “What?”

  “The offer’s still open.”

  I shut the door behind me.

  In the kitchen Benedict and the servant were assembling an array of hurricane lamps and batteries.

  “How high has it ever flooded here?” I asked.

  The old black man stopped, a candle in his hand. “In twenty-seven it was eight feet, they say. ’Course, that was before my time.”

  “But this house is on brick pilings,” Benedict ventured. “That should help, shouldn’t it?”

  The servant and I exchanged looks.

  “Pilings three-foot tall, Mr. Benedict. Water outside already almost a foot in some places.”

  “Is the phone still working?” I asked.

  Benedict nodded. “Last time I checked.”

  “Then we should call and ask for help in evacuation. The Coast Guard station’s just at the end of River Road. They ought to be able to send a boat.”

  “No!” It was Benedict’s voice, shrill in its denial. “No, we can’t do that.
We’ll be all right.” He saw my surprise and licked his lips. “Don’t you see? It’s the congressman’s house. He left it to me, as a trust, to guard. I just couldn’t go away and leave it to be destroyed.”

  “Houses can be rebuilt,” I said.

  “Not Godsend. This is the family home. We couldn’t leave, could we, Elias?”

  Elias turned away to reach for another candle. “I reckon not, Mr. Benedict. But this gentleman got a right to leave.”

  Benedict picked up his glass and tossed down another swallow of whiskey. “That’s for him to decide.”

  I took the glass out of Benedict’s hand and set it down on the table. “How do you think the congressman’s going to feel about your helping to lure me down here?”

  Benedict’s eyes bugged and he wiped a hand across his mouth. “I did what had to be done,” he cried, shrinking back. “I was trying to save Godsend, to …”

  Elias looked over at me. “Mr. Benedict gets upset sometimes,” he said. I nodded and walked out into the foyer and picked up the phone.

  The line was dead. I was just replacing the receiver when there was an explosion outside and the lights went out.

  22

  For a long moment I sat motionless in the darkness, listening to the wind’s scream outside, while the sheets of rain pounded the walls and windows. Then a light flickered and Elias advanced into the foyer with a candle in his hand.

  “Must be a tree across the power line,” he said, handing me a candle stub in a brass holder. “We’ll have the house lit again in a minute.” He gave a little laugh. “We got plenty of hurricane lamps.”

  “We may have to go upstairs,” I said.

  He nodded. “In twenty-seven they took my folks off the roof of a house. They were lucky.”

  “Help will come here before that,” I said. “When it’s light a boat will get through.”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  I went over to the study door and tried it, but Cox had locked it behind me. I had a vision of him with the curtains drawn back, hands on his hips, daring the storm to do its worst. I’d seen a lot of men like him in Nam. They won medals for bravery, but they weren’t brave. Mostly they got killed, and because they tended to work alone, they mercifully died alone, too. But a few survived.

  Most of what he said made sense, but I still didn’t believe him. Solly wasn’t a traitor. And as for my being called here …

  My thoughts were shattered by a crash from the back of the house and I whirled around. I was already halfway through the door when a shout sounded from the kitchen. In the lamplight I saw Elias holding a lamp up to the window over the sink. The storm shutters had torn loose and were swinging back and forth in the blasts of wind.

  “I don’t see nothing, Mr. Benedict.”

  “But my God, didn’t you see?” gibbered the other man, his face convulsed. “He went right past the window.”

  “Mr. Benedict, it was the branches moving outside.” Elias regarded me with deep-set eyes to see if I would accept the idea. “Big limb off the oak tree, should of been cut three months ago. Calm down now. I’ll go up and put something over the window.”

  But Benedict was not convinced. Instead, he rose on shaky legs and grabbed my collar.

  “I saw what I saw. He was out there!”

  “Mr. Benedict, this window’s nine foot off the ground, with the brick pilings. Man passed under the window you couldn’t see.”

  “He didn’t pass under the window,” Benedict shrieked. “He was over near the tree line, near the swimming pool.”

  I wondered if Solly could be out there someplace.

  “It’s easy enough to prove,” I said. “Who has some galoshes?”

  Elias approached me. “Mr. Dunn, you don’t have to go. It was just the limb.”

  “Then proving it’ll make him feel better,” I said.

  I slipped into some gum boots and threw my poncho over my head. Maybe it was crazy and Benedict had seen nothing, but in Nam I’d learned to trust my guts, and right now my guts were telling me that things were wrong. I told myself it was only the storm, that the prospect of being flooded out would give anybody butterflies, but I’d been in danger from inanimate forces before, and this feeling was different.

  Elias unbolted the rear door and handed me a flashlight.

  “Be careful of the steps,” he said.

  He pulled the door open and I ducked my head and rushed down the concrete steps. My boots sank into water almost to the knees and I steadied myself on the side of the house for support. In front of me were the surreal skeletons of the iron-filigree lawn chairs around the swimming pool, and behind them the outline of the pump house. I started forward, careful to walk around the watery pit that was the swimming pool. Leaves and twigs sailed past my head and I held up my hand to fend them off, the flashlight tracing crazy strips against the rain.

  Could it be Solly? I halted, clutching the low fence around the swimming pool for support. A terrible thought grabbed me: What if Cox was right? Suppose Solly had been turned, had followed me out here and was waiting? Twenty years can change people, and how well do we ever really know anyone else?

  I pulled myself along the fence, fighting the blast, and stopped in the lee of the pump house.

  It had been a bar in Saigon, during R&R. A VC on a motor scooter had tossed in a bomb. I’d watched it bounce through the door and into the middle of the floor. But Solly hadn’t watched—he’d jumped for it, picked it up, stiff-armed a couple of patrons between himself and the rear door, and thrown it into an alley.

  Reflex. It didn’t mean he’d done it for me. It had been as much for himself. That’s what I told myself.

  But, by God, he’d done it.

  I came around the edge of the little structure and halted to look back over my shoulder at the big house. From where I stood I shot my beam at the kitchen window, where the storm shutter flapped back and forth like a broken wing, and I saw the limb of the live oak Elias had mentioned, hovering just a few feet away. Of course he had been right: It had been one of the branches.

  And the man in the storm had been Nelson Benedict’s imagination.

  I felt my way along to the back gate and then along the other side of the fence to the door of the outhouse.

  Below the house the land sloped downward, to the bayou. The bayou had already risen over its banks and water slopped against my knees. Something brushed past my leg and I recoiled instinctively. I’d heard of the swamp creatures coming out in hurricanes, being driven to high ground. But it was only a clump of swamp grass, torn loose by the storm, and as I looked I saw others, uprooted by the rising waters.

  I reached out for the door of the pump house and pulled.

  The wind battered against it, and for a while I thought it was hopeless. Then the wind fell for an instant; I yanked and the door came open.

  I slipped inside and the wind slammed the door shut, closing me into the structure. I turned around and shined my light. It was, of course, the last place for anyone to hide in a storm and I knew already that it would be empty. The first probings of the light confirmed my suspicion. I saw a squeegee, a net, a bag of chlorine, and some old clothes floating in a corner.

  My flashlight went over to the pump, and then back to the clothes, and I realized with a start that they were more than clothes.

  I bent down to examine them, aware of the wind trying to lift off the corrugated roof. When I was finished I stood up again and sloshed to the doorway, leaned my body against it, budging it open just far enough so that I could squeeze out again.

  Even in the teeth of a hurricane I felt relief after the claustrophobic little shack.

  He’d been shot in the chest with a heavy caliber weapon and it had come out the back, leaving a hole big enough to put a fist through.

  Judging from the freshness of the blood and the fact that the body was still warm, it had happened only minutes ago. I’d fished in the water for his weapon but had come up empty. Whoever killed him had been a pro, c
atching him at close range, putting a single round through the chest, and then collecting the victim’s weapon before stowing him in the shack, knowing that the sound of the storm would drown out the gunshot.

  The only question was whether the man Benedict saw had been the dead man or his killer. Not that it mattered: there was still somebody out here, now with two guns instead of one.

  Reaching across my chest, I pulled the tape that held the little .22 to my left arm.

  I started back along the fence, the wind at my back, trying to blow me forward. Three feet from the gate it knocked me to my knees and I almost lost the flashlight.

  As I was rising to my feet the man appeared on the other side of the gate, pistol in hand.

  For a moment we looked at each other and then I did all I could think of: I threw the flashlight in his direction.

  It caught him by surprise and he ducked out of the way, firing off balance so that his bullets passed harmlessly overhead into the trees. I yanked the little pistol loose from under my arm, thumbed back the hammer, and when he rose from the water to take aim, I fired slowly, four times.

  He looked surprised, staggering forward, then dropped his own pistol as his muscles quit working. He went onto his knees in the water and then toppled forward into the swimming pool, his slicker billowing out around him like wings.

  Shaking now, gun emptied, I reached the back door and slammed on it with the flat of my hand. The door swung open and I staggered in.

  Cox had joined the others in the kitchen and in the soft glow of the oil lamps I detected mild surprise on his features.

  “Nice night out, is it, Dunn?”

  I took off the slicker and slipped out of the gum boots. “Not my idea of fun,” I said, walking past the table where Benedict sat. “By the way,” I said. “You were right. There was a man out there.”

  The aide started, his fist clutching his whiskey glass.

  “Nothing to worry about,” I said. “He’s dead.”

  The lack of sleep was catching up with me. I took a lamp and made my way to the front of the house, to the study, with Cox following.

  “Water getting high, is it?” Elias called out from behind us. “Got to watch for snakes. When the water gets high the snakes come out. During Camille people got bit by moccasins.”