by Carl Schmidt
“Do you want me to work this weekend?”
“No. Don’t bother. It looks as though the roads are going to be slick for a while. Take the weekend off. I’ll probably be home late Monday afternoon. If the interstate is icy, I’ll drive back before dark.”
“See you then,” he replied.
I hung up. Angele and I stared out the window at the falling snow.
“It’s really coming down hard now, Jesse,” Angele said. “You might have to stay here the rest of the month.”
“If we get snowed in that long, what are we going to eat?” I asked.
“We’ll survive on love,” she replied with a wink.
“Sounds like a lot of dessert,” I suggested.
“Well, we’re finished with supper,” she said, “so it’s a perfect time for it.”
With that, she unbuttoned her blouse, unzipped her skirt, took them both off and tossed them across the room. The blouse ended up draped over the television.
“That’s enough of Walter White for now,” I said, and I clicked the power button on the remote.
When the last of our clothing hit the floor, she said, “Stay where you are.”
“It’s your house, boss; you make the rules,” I replied obediently.
I was sitting on the couch. Angele straddled my thighs. A yellow afghan kept the chill off her back. The rest of her was hot as a potato pancake.
19
Xavier LaGrange
The weekend had its ups and downs. It kept snowing till noon on Sunday, the Broncos beat the Patriots in a playoff game, and Angele glowed like a Madonna for forty-eight hours. By Monday morning, I was so tired that I was looking forward to the rest you get from a day at the office.
I arrived to find the two regulars at work. Holly was typing sixty words a minute at the keyboard; Ranger was chewing even faster on a piece of beef jerky.
“Good morning, Holly. How was your weekend?” I asked.
“Wonderful. I spent the entire time with my daughter, Mary, and her family. We built a giant snowman in their backyard. Bobby, the four-year-old, played outside with Ranger for hours. On Sunday afternoon, they cleared the pond at Deering Oaks Park, and we all went skating.”
“How about you?” she added.
“A little of this, a little of that,” I said. “The Patriots lost.”
“I heard,” she replied. “Mary’s husband, Pete, tried to watch the game on his smart phone and skate with Bobby at the same time. When Tom Brady threw that interception late in the fourth quarter, he tripped, and they both went down.
“Men!” she added in a derisive tone, as if that weren’t already obvious.
“Can’t live with em; can’t shoot em,” I offered.
“Something like that,” she concurred.
“Women can make a mess of things as well,” I suggested. “Take Nicole Levesque and Tina Woodbury for example. I believe it was Jerry Seinfeld who best summed up the human condition when he said, ‘People—they’re the worst.’” I tried to sound like a New Yorker.
“During the 90’s, every Friday morning at the precinct, we’d get our fill of coffee, donuts and Kramer impersonations,” Holly said, “unless, of course, we had a fresh homicide to deal with.”
“Death has a way of putting a damper on comedy routines,” I concluded, doing my best impersonation of Aristotle.
Holly rolled her eyes as if to say the scales comparing gender stupidity were far from balanced. If truth be told, I agreed with her, but I wasn’t going to concede that publicly on Monday morning.
I decided to change the subject with, “What are you typing?”
“I’ve started the background checks for the job applicants at Allied Shipping. These won’t be quite as difficult as I had imagined. There’s plenty of resource material online for all three of the names they submitted. The only thing we need to decide is how extensive to make the reports.”
“Let’s give them three levels to choose from, rather than two,” I suggested. “We’ll make a list of any criminal and civil actions relating to each person. That will be the simplest and cheapest summary. We can offer two standards for their personal histories. One will be a two or three-page document covering their professional backgrounds. The more comprehensive version will include a Skype interview. We’ll record each conversation on video and provide a personal summary of our impressions. I’ll have Billy make the technical arrangements.”
“Sounds good,” Holly said. “Would you like to conduct the interviews yourself?”
“No. Why don’t you do them? Your experience as a detective on the police force will play well. You provide a perfect blend of politeness and no nonsense.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll forward the names and phone numbers to Billy right now, and we can begin to schedule the interviews.”
Angele joined us in the office.
“I think I should get studded snow tires, Jesse,” she said. “I was slipping all over the road on my way here.”
“I’m all for that,” I replied.
“Should I buy two and put them on the front?” she asked.
“Sorry, but you have to get four,” I said. “It’s the law in Maine; you can’t drive on just two. I’ll make an appointment today. We’ll get a complete set of wheels, as well. That way, we can change them ourselves whenever we want, like, for instance, if we decide to drive to Florida in March to celebrate my birthday.”
“No way, Jose! We’ll be in Italy on your birthday.”
“Oh, right. I almost forgot.”
Just then the phone rang.
“Angele, can you get that?” I asked.
While Angele was talking at the back desk, I walked behind Holly to have a look at her progress on the Allied Shipping account. I was partway through the first page of the first applicant, when Angele hung up the phone and called to us.
“You’ll never guess who that was,” she exclaimed.
“I’m sure you’re right,” I replied.
“Xavier LaGrange.”
“Who?” I repeated in owl-like fashion.
“Xavier LaGrange, the actor,” Angele said in an excited tone. “I’m sure you know him. He’s been in several movies. Most of them are comedies, but he had a supporting role in one of the Bond films; I can’t remember the title. It came out quite a while ago. For years he was a regular on the daytime soap, Nightdance.”
“Nightdance was a daytime soap?” I asked somewhat rhetorically.
“Is, Jesse,” she corrected me. “It’s still on every day at eleven in the morning. It’s been a hit for ten years.”
“No wonder I never heard of it…or him,” I replied.
“You’re going to hear about him now,” Angele predicted. “He’ll be in our office in twenty minutes. He wants to hire us.”
“What’s it about?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t say. He was very concerned about confidentiality. Quite frankly, he sounded upset.”
“Probably he was acting, Angele,” I replied.
She gave me that look.
“I wonder what a daytime star is doing in Maine in the middle of winter,” I thought out loud.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” she said. “Maybe I should run out and get some Starbucks and croissants.”
“That would be appropriate,” I replied. “Stars expect catered brunches.”
Angele was noticeably excited. She ignored my sarcasm, grabbed twenty bucks from the petty cash drawer and flew out of the office like a schoolgirl on her first date. “Xavier LaGrange,” I thought to myself. “Maybe I better get on the Google.”
Which is exactly what I did. I was surprised to discover that I did recognize him. I had seen a couple of his movies. He had small parts, to be sure, but I’d also seen his face on tabloids from time to time. He looked like window dressing—someone to stir up prurient interest among twenty-something ladies. I began bracing myself for the encounter.
Angele returned in ten minutes with some gourmet coffee and
an assortment of fancy pastries and muffins.
“Was twenty dollars enough?” I asked.
“No. I put it on the business credit card. It came to forty-two dollars,” she said as she returned the twenty to the cash drawer.
“I hope he stays long enough for us to cover our expenses,” I said. “Did you get any bear claws?”
“Too plebian,” she replied.
“I guess we’re moving up,” I said. “I wonder if I can handle the higher elevation.”
“Take a deep breath, Jesse, and try not to pass out,” Angele said.
Holly took a backseat to the banter. She was smart enough to stay out of the fray. She maintained her focus on the Allied Shipping account. “Somebody has to carry the load,” I thought.
• • •
Enter Xavier LaGrange, stage left.
Any other day, that was the door to our office. Today was different. Little did I know at the time just how different it would become.
I sized the actor up in one compound sentence. “He was a lot more handsome than I was, and he was a lot richer.” Which made it a good time to raise our rates.
I wanted to greet him with, “Xavier LaGrange, I presume,” but Ranger beat me to it. He barked. Angele was star-struck. Even Holly eyed him with enthusiasm. Xavier, on the other hand, wasn’t happy to see anyone.
“Jesse Thorpe, I presume,” he said, extending a hand and a serious face.
“How ever did you surmise that?” I thought, but I didn’t say it. What I said was, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. LaGrange. Would you like to sit on the couch and have some coffee?”
“No, I’m fine,” he replied.
“Would you care for some phyllo?” Angele offered.
Secretly, I was hoping he’d reply, “I’d prefer a bear claw,” but he didn’t. He just said, “No thank you.”
He followed that up with, “Is there somewhere we can talk privately, Mr. Thorpe?”
“Mr. LaGrange, this is Angele Boucher and Holly Winters,” I said, pointing to each of them respectively. “They are part of my team. Anything you say here will be taken in complete confidence. Please, have a seat with me at the desk in the back.”
He looked a bit hesitant but walked over and sat down anyway.
Xavier LaGrange appeared to be in his mid-thirties. He was about six-foot two with short blond hair, moussed up very carefully to look completely out of control. It resembled my own everyday do, before I actually did anything to it. I wondered, “What’s the point of having a comb?”
“What brings you to Portland, Mr. LaGrange?” I asked.
“You can call me, ‘Xavier,’” he said.
“You can call me, ‘Jesse,’” I replied.
“Jesse, something horrible has happened. I’m in a real mess.”
I waited for him to continue; he looked very distressed. I regretted having thought about him in such an unkind way.
“Before we start, I’d appreciate it if you could explain to me exactly what you meant when you said, ‘complete confidence.’ Is that like attorney-client privilege?”
“For private investigators, it is called ‘work-product privilege.’ We cannot repeat anything you tell us to anyone outside our firm, without your permission. You are protected against legal discovery, except in rare instances. We could only go to an authority with the information you provide us, if in our estimation you were about to commit a serious crime.”
“That would never happen,” he replied. “But what do you mean by ‘legal discovery’?”
“If you were involved in litigation, and an opposing attorney demanded that we repeat something you had told us, we would not be required to speak, with one exception. If the court determined there was no other party capable of revealing that specific information, we could be obliged to disclose it.
“Is that clear enough?” I added.
“Yes, thank you,” he replied.
He furrowed his brow again and drew in his breath.
“A woman was murdered in Portland Saturday evening,” he said. “Her body was discovered Sunday morning.”
“I did hear something about that,” I replied. “A young woman was strangled in the Rutland Arms Hotel. The police haven’t released her name yet.”
“Her name is Stephanie Goulet. I was with her late Saturday afternoon at that hotel.”
Suddenly the room got deathly quiet. Angele put down her coffee; Holly stopped typing; Ranger woke up.
“Go on,” I said.
“I met Stephanie three years ago doing summer stock theatre on Cape Cod. We slept together a couple of times during the month I was there, but we stopped seeing each other after I left in September to resume my work for Nightdance. The next time I heard from her was the following July. She had just given birth to a baby girl. She claimed I was the father.”
“There’s a lot of that going around,” I thought. But I didn’t say a word. I placed my left hand under my chin and let my head ease down onto the perch, forcing my mouth to stay closed.
“Naturally, I was skeptical,” he went on. “We took precautions. There should have been no child. But she said there was.”
“Have you seen the little girl?” I asked.
“Saturday was the first time,” he replied grimly.
“The mother and daughter were together with you Saturday afternoon, and the mother was strangled a short time later?” I asked incredulously. “The news story didn’t mention a child.”
“Exactly,” he said. “It’s all very strange.”
“Yes it is,” I replied. “Are you certain you are the father?”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m hiring you,” he said. “I want you to determine that for sure.”
“Where should we begin?” I asked.
“With these,” he replied.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out two small zip-lock bags, each holding a few strands of blonde hair. He handed me the bags, and I examined them closely. One was labeled, “Diana.” The other was marked, “X.”
“That one came from Diana,” he said, pointing to the first one. “That’s the little girl’s name. The other one, of course, is mine.”
“How did you collect Diana’s sample?” I asked.
“I cut it from her head with a pair of scissors,” he replied.
“That’s what it looks like,” I said. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Diana’s sample will probably not be very useful. If the laboratory is lucky, it may be able to determine who the mother is, but there is no chance of identifying the father.”
Xavier frowned and asked, “Why is that?”
“A hair that’s been cut off, without the root, contains only mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on from mother to child. It contains no nuclear DNA, which is inherited from both parents. Nuclear DNA can be found in a follicle of the hair but not in the shaft.”
“Oh,” he said, slightly bewildered.
“I don’t know if this will help you or not,” I added, “but we could have the hair tested to see if Stephanie is the mother. Of course, we would need a viable DNA sample from her to make the comparison, and even so, there is no guarantee that mitochondrial DNA can be extracted from your sample.”
Xavier tanked for a minute and then said, “Stephanie showed me a DNA report for the child two-and-a-half years ago. I had myself tested in California to verify paternity. The results proved I was the father.”
“Did you send her any money?” I asked.
“Plenty,” he replied.
“I see,” I said, probably more clearly than Xavier LaGrange imagined.
“How much did you pay her?” I asked.
“Forty thousand the first year, and seventy thousand on Saturday.”
“Wow. That’s a lot of money for a child you’d never seen.”
“Well, yes, I guess it is. Actually, that’s why I came to Portland…to have a test done to determine if I am the father. It really wasn’t about the money. I just wanted to be sure I wasn�
�t being taken for a ride by some doe-eyed grifter. Also, if Diana was my daughter, I wanted to see her. I may live in Hollywood, Mr. Thorpe, but I’m a human being. I don’t have any other children.”
“How were the payments made?” I asked.
“Both times I paid her cash. The first time I overnighted it to a UPS drop box. On Saturday, I handed it to her when I saw the child.”
“Cash?” I exclaimed. “And you agreed to that?”
“I know it sounds strange, Jesse, but I didn’t want the story to end up in the Enquirer. They make up enough stuff about me already.”
“Whose idea was it that you would pay in cash?”
“Originally it was hers, but I was all right with it. She probably didn’t pay the taxes on it, but I don’t think she has a lot of money anyway.”
Holly rolled her eyes, but Xavier didn’t notice. I pressed on.
“All right,” I said. “So, tell me about Saturday. What happened?”
“About a month ago, I called Stephanie and said I’d be in New York for the holidays. I told her I wouldn’t provide any more support payments unless I could see Diana. She told me she’d consider it.”
“So, you have her phone number,” I interjected. “May I have that, please?”
He opened his cell, scrolled to her name and turned the phone so I could read it. I wrote it down.
“She got back with me on Christmas Day and agreed to let me see her, if I’d come to Portland. She wanted me to be here last week, but I couldn’t make it. We settled on Saturday. I arrived on Friday afternoon just before the storm hit.”
“Did you stay at the Rutland Arms?” I asked.
“No. I didn’t want to be seen there ahead of time. Sometimes I draw a crowd. I wanted to meet my child without any fanfare. I stayed at the Hilton.”
“Who arranged for her room at the hotel?” I asked.
“I assume she did. I met her briefly in the lobby, and we went directly upstairs to room number 401. She told me that my daughter was there by herself in a portable playpen. She didn’t want any bystanders snapping pictures of the three of us. Neither did I.”
“And was your daughter there?” I asked.
“Yes. Just like Stephanie said.”