by Jude Hardin
The man shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “You want something to eat?”
Wahlman looked up at the menu mounted on the wall behind the counter. It was possible that Drake was running late too, possible that he might show up in a few minutes.
“How fresh are your oysters?” Wahlman asked.
“Pulled out of the Gulf yesterday. Best in New Orleans.”
“Let me have an oyster po’boy and a side of fries.”
“Anything to drink?”
“I’ll try the Abita,” Wahlman said.
The man behind the counter reached into a glass-fronted refrigerator, grabbed a bottle of Abita Amber lager and opened it and rang up the order. Wahlman paid him and carried the beer to a table by the window. The middle-aged couple and the college students must have exited the restaurant while Wahlman was placing his order. Now he had the entire dining area to himself.
It was a nice autumn day, and there were quite a few people out on the street. You could spot the tourists by the way they walked along casually and looked around and pointed at things. Some of them were wearing lanyards with nametags attached to them. Probably attending a conference at one of the big hotels, Wahlman thought. Some of them were carrying plastic cups filled with frozen drinks, and some of them were carrying shopping bags filled with who-knows-what. Some of them were eating hot dogs from street vendors. Everyone seemed to be having a swell time and Wahlman was enjoying his beer and the aroma of the oysters frying and he was wondering what had happened to Drake when four shots rang out and four fat holes suddenly appeared in the big plate glass window.
Wahlman hit the deck and started crawling toward the service counter. People outside were screaming. Panicking. Undoubtedly scurrying in every direction, trying to make it to safety as more bullets whizzed through the sandwich shop and more glass rained down on the floor.
Wahlman made it to the area behind the counter. The hairy man was back there on the floor nervously fiddling with a cell phone.
“Do you have a gun back here?” Wahlman asked.
“Why would I have a gun?”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“This is a good area,” the man said. “We don’t have no trouble around here.”
And yet there was trouble, Wahlman thought. Big trouble. Those first four shots had come within inches of his face. He’d heard the bullets whistle by. It seemed highly unlikely that this was a random attack. It seemed that whoever was doing the shooting had chosen a target, and it seemed that the target was Rock Wahlman.
The hairy man was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, explaining what had happened. When he finished, he told Wahlman that there were plenty of knives in the kitchen, and that maybe it would be a good idea to arm themselves in case the bad guys decided to come inside.
“Knives won’t do us any good,” Wahlman said. “Is there a back door?”
“Yes. On the other side of the kitchen.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
“I need to wait for the police.”
The shooting had stopped. Wahlman figured the assassin was long gone by now. You don’t shoot up a restaurant and then hang around outside and wait for the police to arrive. And if you’re going to come inside to finish the job, you do it quickly. So the bad guy had probably driven off in a hurry. Then again, some very peculiar things had happened over the past twelve hours, so it probably wasn’t wise to rule anything out. It was possible that the shooter was out there reloading, that he or she would stroll in any second and blow Wahlman’s and the hairy man’s brains out.
“We need to leave,” Wahlman said.
“Why? It seems that it would be safer to stay inside.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“But the police are coming. They’ll want to talk to me. And they’ll want to talk to you too.”
“We can talk to them later. Let’s go.”
“I’m staying.”
“I would advise against it.”
“I’m staying.”
“Okay.”
Wahlman crawled toward the beer cooler and then through the swinging door that led to the kitchen. He found the service door, peeked out first and then walked outside to the alley. It took him a few seconds to get his bearings. He noticed another service door on the other side of the alley. Some kind of pizza place. There was a plastic trash can beside the door and a security camera over it and a fat padlock dangling from its metal frame. Canal Street was to Wahlman’s right, and Common Street was to his left. A crowd had gathered along Canal Street for another parade. The band was marching by, along with dozens of other people, some of them waving bandanas and others dancing along with colorful little paper umbrellas. There was the steady thump of the bass drum, like the one Wahlman had heard earlier, along with trumpets and trombones and a tuba and a snare drum. The spectators and the people marching in the parade obviously hadn’t heard the gunshots. They were smiling and swaying to the beat and having a good time. Wahlman started toward Common Street, thinking he would try to walk around the block and enter the hotel from the side, but he hadn’t gotten very far when he heard an echoing series of blasts from inside the sandwich shop.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Four shots, two from one pistol and two from another. One of the guns was probably a .45 or a nine millimeter, the other something smaller. Wahlman could tell by the sound of the reports. Two different weapons, which meant that there were probably two different shooters.
Wahlman turned around and took off running for Canal Street. Best to try to disappear into the crowd at this point, he thought. He was a head taller than most of the other people, so he bent his knees and his neck and tried to keep a low profile as he made his way over to St. Charles Avenue. He took a right at the intersection and jaywalked across the streetcar tracks and pushed his way through the heavy glass doors at the front entrance of the hotel. The doorman said good afternoon sir or something like that and Wahlman nodded and made a beeline for the elevators. When he got to the fourth floor, he started thinking about everything that had happened and how close he’d come to dying—twice—and how you might be able to accept that one of those instances was an outlandish coincidence but not both of them. He started thinking that it might not be such a good idea to go to his own room.
So he didn’t.
Instead, he trotted down the hallway past the ice machine and the vending machines and the laundry facilities and knocked on the door to room 427.
7
Allison answered the door.
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you let me borrow your room for a while,” Wahlman said.
“Excuse me?”
“Some very bad people are after me. I need a place to hide.”
“I’m sorry, but—”
Wahlman moved forward, sidestepped his way past the threshold and closed the door behind him.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “They’re trying to kill me.”
“Are you out of your mind? You can’t just barge into my room like this.”
“I’ll make it up to you. I promise. I just need your help for a little while.”
Allison’s purse was on the bed. She walked over there and unsnapped the front flap and pulled out a cell phone.
“I’m calling the police,” she said.
“Good idea. Ask for Detective Collins.”
“What are you talking about?”
Wahlman gave her a condensed version of the events that had transpired over the course of the day, starting with the out-of-control diesel rig early that morning and ending with the shooting at the sandwich shop just a few minutes ago.
“So you can see why I didn’t want to go to my own room,” he said.
“Unbelievable,” Allison said.
“I know,” Wahlman said.
“No, I mean it’s unbelievable that you would slink into my room like you own the place and then try to bullshit me with such a—”
“Call Detective Collins,”
Wahlman said, stepping toward the window and parting the drapes enough to peek outside. “He’s at the Seventh District Police Station. Or maybe he’s home by now, but they’ll know how to reach him. Collins will verify that everything I’ve told you is absolutely true.”
“What are you looking at?” Allison asked.
“The sandwich shop. It’s a crime scene now. Hear the sirens? That’s the police and the other emergency vehicles coming. There was only one person working over there when I walked in, one guy ringing up the orders and doing the cooking, one guy taking care of everything while it was slow, between the lunch shift and the dinner shift. I’m guessing he was the owner. And I’m guessing he’s dead now.”
“If that’s true, how do I know you’re not the one who killed him?”
Wahlman stood there and stared down at the ruined plate glass window.
“You don’t,” he said.
And neither would the police, he thought. At least four witnesses—the middle-aged couple and the two college women—had seen him walk through the front door of the sandwich shop, and nobody had seen him walk out of the front door, because he hadn’t walked out of the front door. He’d walked out of the back door. He’d walked out and stared straight into the security camera across the alley, and then he’d started running toward Canal Street. Running away like some kind of criminal, like someone who might have just shot the owner of a sandwich shop. He would be a suspect, for sure. And there were no dry boots to get him off the hook this time.
“I think you better leave my room now,” Allison said. “My husband should be back any minute, and—”
“You don’t have a husband,” Wahlman said. “Or maybe you do, but if so he’s not staying here at the hotel with you.”
“What makes you so sure about that?”
“I saw you loading your laundry into the washing machine. It was all women’s stuff. And there’s only one suitcase and one carryon bag over there in the corner. You’re here by yourself. Like me.”
“You’re pretty perceptive,” Allison said. “But I really do need you to leave now. I’m going to give you five more seconds, and then I’m calling nine-one-one.”
“You don’t have a husband here with you, and you’re not going to call the police,” Wahlman said. “If you were going to call the police, you would have done it by now. My guess is that you have something to hide. I wouldn’t want to speculate about what it is, but I’m pretty sure you don’t want to talk to the police right now—any more than I do.”
Allison sat down on the bed.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I just want to stay here for a while. I’m pretty sure whoever shot up the sandwich shop was aiming for me. It probably won’t take them long to find out my room number. I need to not be there when they come for me.”
“Why is someone trying to kill you?”
“That’s what I need to find out.”
Wahlman was still standing by the window. Two NOPD cruisers were parked in front of the sandwich shop now, blue lights flashing. Allison got up and walked over to the window and peeked out.
“Maybe we should start from the beginning,” she said. “Why did you come to New Orleans in the first place?”
“A man named Clifford Terrence Drake contacted me several weeks ago. He wanted me to meet him down there in the sandwich shop at four o’clock this afternoon.”
“Why?”
“He’s a lawyer. He knew I grew up in an orphanage. Apparently my maternal grandfather passed away recently, and apparently he left me a great deal of money. Drake was in charge of dispersing the funds from the estate.”
“You grew up in an orphanage?”
“Yes. My parents died in a car accident.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Why the sandwich shop?” Allison asked. “Why didn’t Mr. Drake want you to meet him in his office?”
“He said it was being renovated.”
“Are you sure he’s really a lawyer?”
“I looked him up. He’s legit.”
“How much money are we talking about?” Allison asked.
“A hundred thousand, according to Drake.”
Allison took a deep breath, let it out slowly.
“That’s a lot of money,” she said.
“It’s not exactly life-changing, but it’s better than the big fat zero I was expecting.”
“But Drake didn’t show up for the meeting?”
“He might have. I was running late. He might have given up on me.”
Allison walked back over to the bed and sat down. She crossed her legs, laced her hands together, stared down at the gray carpet.
“Maybe Drake was the one who tried to kill you,” she said.
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. Drake’s going to get his percentage no matter how many beneficiaries there are. He wouldn’t have had a motive to kill me.”
“So it must have been one of your family members,” Allison said. “Someone who stood to inherit more money if you were out of the picture.”
“That would be the logical conclusion,” Wahlman said. “If it was just the incident at the sandwich shop. But it wasn’t. Like I told you, a semi almost ran over me this morning. A truck with a driver who looked just like me, a driver who had been stabbed multiple times.”
“That’s the part that makes absolutely no sense.”
“None whatsoever.”
“Do you have a phone number for Mr. Drake?”
“I had his cell phone number. It was written on the back of a business card in my wallet. The ink bled when it got wet.”
Allison picked up her phone and started tapping and swiping.
“Clifford T. Drake and Associates,” she said. “You can use my room phone to make the call.”
She told Wahlman the number to Drake’s office.
“It’s being renovated,” Wahlman said. “I doubt if anyone who works in the law office is there. And it’s Sunday. So the people doing the renovating probably aren’t there either.”
“I think most lawyers use an answering service for afterhours and weekends. You could call and leave a message.”
“I guess I could. Drake might check his messages from home, or from wherever he is.”
“I would think so,” Allison said.
Wahlman walked over to the nightstand, picked up the phone and punched in the number, and a recorded voice immediately announced that it was no longer in service.
Drake had told Wahlman that his office was under renovation, but it didn’t make sense that his phone had been disconnected. Forwarded to a third-party answering service, perhaps, as Allison had suggested, but not completely disconnected. Most lawyers keep the same office number from the day they hang out a shingle until the day they die. Wahlman had read that in a book one time.
“Let me make sure I dialed the right number,” he said.
Allison told him the number again. He punched it in again. Got the recording again.
“Wait a minute,” Allison said, staring down at her cell phone. “I think I just found out why Drake’s phone was disconnected.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s dead. I just found his obituary.”
“Maybe I talked to his son. Clifford T. Drake Junior.”
“He was survived by two daughters,” Allison said. “No mention of a son.”
She handed her cell phone to Wahlman. He read the first paragraph of the article, and then he noticed the date on it.
“This can’t be right,” he said. “I talked to Drake two days ago. It says here that he died almost two years ago.”
“Maybe he faked his own death,” Allison said, her voice taking on a sudden tone of sarcasm. “Sure, that’s it. He faked his own death and then he called you out of the blue with promises of great riches. Can’t you see that this whole thing was some kind of scam? Clifford T. Drake didn’t call you. It was someone pretending to be him, someone hoping to scam you o
ut of some money.”
“Maybe,” Wahlman said. “But the person who contacted me two days ago knew things about me that an ordinary run-of-the-mill con artist just couldn’t have known. He knew that I grew up in an orphanage. He knew what kind of car my parents and I were in when we had the accident. He knew what my first name was before I changed it.”
“All that means is that he did his research,” Allison said. “Some of those operations are incredibly sophisticated these days.”
Wahlman walked back over to the window, peeked through the drapes again. Several more police cars had arrived, along with an ambulance and a fire truck. A couple of the NOPD patrolmen were stretching some yellow crime scene tape around the area in front of the restaurant.
“It wasn’t a scam,” Wahlman said. “Not the kind where someone expects to make some money, anyway. It was a setup. The person pretending to be Drake just wanted to get me inside that sandwich shop at that time of day. It was a hit, pure and simple.”
“Shouldn’t you be telling the police all this stuff?”
“No. Not until I can prove that I wasn’t the one who did the shooting. And the only way to do that is to find the person who did do the shooting.”
“But if you explain—”
“If I go to the police right now, they’ll arrest me. They won’t have any choice. Maybe eventually I’ll be exonerated. Maybe not. You never know with a case like this.”
“So how do you plan on finding the killer?”
Wahlman thought about that for a few seconds.
“Do you have a car?” he asked.
“Yes, but—”
“I’m going to need your help.”
Allison shook her head. “No way,” she said. “I have my own problems. I can’t just drop what I’m doing and—”
“What kind of problems?” Wahlman asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Maybe we can help each other.”
Allison stared down at the floor again. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not unless you really are going to inherit that money.”
“How much do you need?” Wahlman asked.
“Ten thousand. But it might as well be ten million. I have no way of—”
“Consider it done,” Wahlman said. “You help me out for a few days, and I’ll give you the money. No questions asked.”