The New Orleans Airport once was called Moisant, and the FAA three-letter identifier remains MSY, for Moisant Stock Yards.
John Moisant did not protest; he died in a plane crash on his farm in 1910, where the airport that once bore his name was built during World War II. Maybe someone in City Hall decided, fifty years later, that naming the city’s airport for someone who died in a plane crash wasn’t such a hot idea.
In the Albatros, Birmingham to New Orleans, six hours by car, takes forty minutes.
I did not file a flight plan.
At the FBO in Birmingham, I walked through the outside gate, threw a bag into the front locker, unchocked the wheels, did a quick preflight, and had the wheels turning fifteen minutes after I parked the rental car.
I called ground clearance while I taxied across the ramp.
Recon missions, whether for practice or hot missions over enemy ground, are flown low and fast, no more than five hundred feet above ground level. I’d flown the VR and IR routes over the Southeast so many times I knew every transmission antenna and every hill from Little Rock to Jacksonville and from New Orleans to the Outer Banks.
Takeoff on runway two four shot me out dead straight toward New Orleans via Tuscaloosa and Meridian.
I’m not paranoid, but the FBI, not to mention whoever hired Mr. Room Service, appeared to enjoy an active interest in my whereabouts, and I intended to remain literally under the radar as much as possible. As a general practice, I kept “location services” turned off on the iPhone. Maybe government spooks could track it through the GPS receiver anyway, but I doubted that I was quite that interesting.
The ceiling was three thousand feet overcast, and there was a chance of rain. I leveled off at five hundred feet AGL with the throttle on the stop. The turbofan behind me screamed its approval. Jets don’t like slow drivers.
Wake up, groundlings.
The approach to runway one eight right at New Orleans Lakefront takes the pilot in over Lake Pontchartrain. The sight is magnificent, but the approach does not forgive the pilot who arrives too low to a runway with a displaced threshold suspended a few yards above the oily water of the lake.
I landed and taxied to the Landmark FBO. After shutdown I climbed out and pulled the soft duffel containing my suit and street shoes out of the rear seat, locked up the cabin and carried the duffel into the restroom in the pilot’s lounge to change.
Maybe one of these days I’d sell the plane and start flying Southwest to save myself the trouble of changing clothes on both ends of the flight.
But then I’d have to deal with TSA. And ship my gun in the cargo hold. And let the airline and the government know I had it.
On second thought, maybe I’d just keep on with the Clark Kent meets Top Gun act.
At the FBO counter, I picked up the keys to another rental car. What would Avis do without me?
Heading southwest on I-10 toward downtown at ten, I pulled the iPhone out of my jacket pocket and called Michael Godchaux. Phoning while driving? Try communicating with air traffic control while turning to a heading and descending. I really can multitask, state legislators, thank you very much.
Godchaux asked me to meet him in thirty minutes for brunch at Begue’s in the Royal Sonesta Hotel on Bourbon Street.
I started to say no, because I didn’t want to drive into the Quarter, but he had already disconnected.
As I approached downtown, my phone buzzed, and I picked it up. Godchaux had texted me: Change of plan. Same time, Le Pavilion bar. Striped blue shirt.
Better for me. I hated driving in the French Quarter. Always felt like I was about to hit a pedestrian or get arrested or kissed or flashed. Or all of the above.
I parked in the deserted post office parking lot on Girod and walked the four blocks to the corner of Poydras and Carroll Street.
Downtown New Orleans was damp, cool, and disconcertingly clean. For the moment there was no rain. The few pedestrians might have been on their way to church, maybe to St. Patrick’s on Camp Street. Tourists in this part of downtown were scarce. The partiers were still sleeping off the Saturday night festivities.
Le Pavillon’s facade always made me think of a wedding cake lying on its side. The portico led into a lobby that might have pleased the Bourbon kings of France, or even their wives. I walked past marble columns and turned left into Le Gallery, the lobby bar.
The bar was empty except for a white-jacketed bartender who perched on a stool reading the Times-Picayune.
It was around ten-thirty in the morning, too early for the bar lunches, too late for the tourists’ Bloody Marys. The bartender looked up reluctantly from his paper. “Something for you, sir?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “A little information.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Why didn’t they spell Gallery the French way when they named the bar?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“The name of the bar. Le Gallery. Were they trying to make some transcontinental statement? It should be The Gallery or Le Galerie, one or the other, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir. I moved down here from Chicago for this job, and I don’t speak French. Would you like a drink, sir?”
“Actually, yes, a large chicory coffee. And I’d like to sit at the table in the corner on the right. I’m waiting for someone, a guy in a blue-striped shirt. I’d like to see him before he sees me.”
I placed a ten-dollar bill on the bar, walked over to the table I’d chosen, and took a chair with my back to the wall.
From there I could see the front entrance in the mirror behind the bar. A potted plant and an ornate wooden screen shielded me from the direct vision of anyone standing in the entrance.
Ten-forty came and went, and fifteen more minutes passed by. The bartender and I were the only two people in the bar except for a middle-aged couple who must have confused the bar with the concierge’s desk and wandered over to ask directions to some art gallery in the French Quarter.
I was nearly ready to ask for a real drink when the bartender looked up at me from his paper and raised his chin a little.
In the mirror I could see, just inside the entry, a heavy, short man with dark red hair, wearing a blue-striped button-down shirt, khakis, and burgundy penny loafers. He looked harmless and, as far as I could tell, unarmed. I reached into my inside jacket pocket and started the microcassette tape recorder I’d retrieved from my briefcase before leaving Birmingham.
Godchaux walked up to the bar and told the bartender he expected to meet someone. The bartender nodded in my direction. “Would that be the gentleman?” he said.
Godchaux turned in my direction. “I believe it would,” he told the bartender. “Double espresso, chicory, black,” he added.
I stood as Godchaux walked over and shook my hand.
“Michael Godchaux,” he said. “Slate, do you mind if we sit in the other corner under the TV?”
Catching the attention of the bartender, Godchaux gestured to the flat screen monitor hanging in the opposite corner of the bar.
The bartender picked up a remote and powered on the monitor, tuned to ESPN. Talking heads discussed the NBA season.
“Moderate volume, please,” Godchaux said.
I followed Godchaux to a two-top almost underneath the monitor. Somehow I doubted that Le Pavilion management referred to a table for two in Le Gallery as a two-top. I would always be more Waffle House than haute cuisine.
Godchaux sat with his back to the wall, and I moved my chair so I could see both the bartender and the front door. The bartender brought Godchaux’s espresso, and Godchaux placed a ten-dollar bill on the table.
As the bartender retreated, Godchaux looked at me through heavy glass lenses with translucent beige frames. The lens curvature made his eyes look like blue marbles swimming in milk. “So?” he began. “You found me. Now what?”
“Do you know that Don Kramer’s daughter is missing?”
“I read about it online, on al.com. Kramer didn’t
mention it. I know nothing of Kramer personally. He’s a lawyer, and I suppose I’m a client. Was a client,” he corrected himself. “I do know about Kramer’s death. But I didn’t know he had a daughter or that his child was missing before I read it in the newspaper. Is there some connection to the qui tam case?”
“Yes. I think there is a connection, but I can’t connect the dots. I hoped you might have information that would help. And just so you know, finding the daughter — Kris — is why I’m here. It’s what I was hired to do. I really don’t care what your involvement may have been with regard to the issues Kramer was investigating, except to the extent that you have knowledge that may lead to finding Kris. Understood?”
Godchaux nodded, the eyes swimming behind the eyeglasses. “Yes,” he said. “I have no idea whether I have any knowledge that will assist you at all, Mr. Slate.”
“It’s just Slate. I don’t know whether it will help me, either. But do I infer correctly that you are willing to answer some questions?”
“Yes.”
“You said you expected me to call. How did you know my name?”
Godchaux sipped his espresso. “A day or two before Kramer died, he called me from an airplane and gave me your name. Told me if anything happened to him you would eventually call me.”
“So it seems that Kramer arranged this meeting. How did you and Kramer meet?”
“I called him. In the course of my work with my former employer, from time to time I acquired information I thought might someday be useful to me. Kramer’s history with the Louisiana oil and gas business was part of that information.”
“If Kramer wanted us to meet, don’t you think he wanted you to relate to me everything you had told him?”
Godchaux glanced up at the bartender. His back was to us, and he was drying whiskey tumblers.
Godchaux’s eyes swam toward me again, and he shrugged. “Everything? I don’t know. But something important? Something essential? Yes. I just don’t know what that essential fact might be.”
“Then we need to begin at the beginning.”
Godchaux shook his head. “Don’t waste my time. I want to help, but I don’t want to spend one second more speaking with you in public than necessary. You tell me what you know. I’ll fill in the gaps.”
So I told Godchaux about Kramer’s visit to me, about my walk down to the railroad tracks in the middle of the night in the rain, about my meetings with Leon Grubbs and Susan Kramer, about the note on my computer, the clumsy attack in the hotel room, about the files at the Woolf firm, about the handwritten notes in the sealed file, about the memory stick, about my pleasant meeting with the feds, about Akilah Ziyenga.
I skipped the funeral, and I left out the soccer coach and the image of Kramer’s unseeing eyes staring up into the cold winter rain.
When I finished, Godchaux looked at me for several seconds without speaking.
Finally, I spoke. “What did I leave out?”
“I’m sorry,” Godchaux said. “I’m trying to decide what to tell you and where to begin. You know a little, but it’s like you see the outside of a building without knowing anything about the interior. You know less than I expected.”
“The memory stick.”
Godchaux nodded. “What you don’t know is really the meat of the qui tam case.” He nodded again. “Okay. Here we go.
“You have been told and you have seen information that some Alabama public officials may have been cut in on what was essentially a skimming, or underreporting, operation conducted by oil production companies to the detriment of small lessors of oil and gas lands to these companies. And that this, should I say, revenue-sharing arrangement occurred because of the background of litigation over similar issues in Alabama, going back twenty or thirty years.”
“The producers were buying protection,” I said.
“Protection from lawsuits, protection from prosecution,” Godchaux nodded. “But the information you have is conclusory and derivative. No proof.
“I provided the proof to Kramer. Names, deposits, bank transfers, bank account numbers.”
“How?”
Godchaux sighed. “Well. Short version of the whole story. In my last semester at LSU, I encountered a little problem with a professor in a senior tax accounting class. For some reason the guy must have thought I was gay. I’m not. This professor came on to me in his office, and I rejected him. I had to reject him physically. Shoved him away and got out the door.
“I didn’t tell anyone, and I figured it was over. Then, after the final exam, but before graduation, the department head summoned me to his office. This professor had accused me of cheating on the final. I did not cheat. I could have aced that exam before the semester started. It was an easy class.
“I had to tell someone. I had this uncle, my mother’s brother, who worked as the business manager for a big commercial fishing outfit. My parents were dead; they died in a car crash when I was five. Various uncles and aunts took turns raising me.
“So I told my uncle about this thing with the professor. Twenty-four hours later the department head saw me walking into CEBA, the college of business building. They renamed the building a few years ago. Now it’s Patrick Taylor Hall. Anyway, the accounting department head asked me again to step into his office. I figured this was it. I was being expelled.
“The department head sat down behind his desk and looked out the window. He told me to sit down, but he never looked at me. After a few seconds, he said in a very calm manner — he had this very deep, resonant voice, probably from smoking a pipe — ‘A very serious mistake has been made. Your final grade in the tax course has been reinstated. Professor Downey has withdrawn any charges about academic misconduct, and all documents related to those allegations have been destroyed.’”
Godchaux sipped his espresso. “After graduation my uncle told me I should go to see a named partner in one of the big downtown law firms. I’ve forgotten his name, and I think he’s passed on. I laughed and said, ‘Uncle Ray, I’m not a lawyer.’ And he said, ‘The lawyer will introduce you to someone. You need to go,’ and he gave me the telephone number and address.
“So I made an appointment, put on my interview suit and drove down from Baton Rouge. The lawyer turned out to be one of those half-retired guys who put on their suits every day and go to their offices just to have a place to go and read the paper and drink coffee in peace. I don’t think he had an assistant; the receptionist showed me in. Great office. Top floor, great view of the city. Lots of trinkets from the oil business lying around, stock and bond announcements in Lucite — you’ve seen this stuff. I guess the old man was quite the oil and gas lawyer in his day. Exceedingly polite. Perfect combover. Blue seersucker suit with white bucks. Comes around the desk, shakes my hand. Then he opens an inner door and gestures. Shows me into what was obviously once his work room, not that he worked much anymore. An antique table, old, made of smooth but unstained wood. Maybe barn wood.”
Godchaux shrugged. “Anyway. Sitting at the table is a guy who looks like Paul Sorvino.” Godchaux raised his eyebrows. “You know the movie Goodfellas? That’s the guy. So this guy half stands, shakes my hand, tells me to sit down. ‘I understand you’re a fine accounting student,’ he says. Sounds like he’s from Brooklyn, like some natives of New Orleans do.
“I say something self-effacing, then he says, ‘So would you like to come work for me?’ And I say, I don’t even know what business you’re in. He cocks his head a little and then he says, ‘The money business.’ Then he makes that apologetic palm-up gesture, you know? Mostly oil and gas properties, he says, a few other things. We need someone young, eager to learn, he says. Someone both competent and discreet. Then he names a salary that I’m sure is fifty per cent more than any other recent LSU accounting graduates are earning.
“So I took the job. That was eleven years ago.”
“But you are no longer employed there, I assume,” I said.
“Correct.”
“You take some
precautions. But you don’t mind walking around New Orleans during the day. Are you sure that’s safe?”
“The Michael they know has dark hair, doesn’t wear glasses, dresses well, and is thirty pounds lighter. Hey,” he said, “If De Niro could gain sixty pounds to play Jake LaMotta, I figure I can do thirty to stay alive.”
“If this becomes a federal criminal matter, you could end up in the witness protection program.”
Godchaux shook his head. “I don’t think so. If I learned — or taught myself — anything in those eleven years, it’s how to disappear.” He patted his jacket pocket. “Second passport. Different name.”
When I didn’t respond, Godchaux went on. “Right. So, you need to know whether I can help you find Kris Kramer. Sorry. I have no idea where she is.”
“The memory stick.”
Godchaux nodded slowly. “Amazing how the capacity of those little thumb drives has grown in just a few years. Have you spoken with anyone else about it?”
I went over Moeller’s efforts without using his name and explained in a general way that the United States attorney’s office had expressed interest in the data on the memory stick. Godchaux listened without comment.
“Have the feds offered you anything in exchange for the data?” Godchaux asked when I had finished.
I had decided what I wanted from the feds, but I wasn’t about to share that with Godchaux. “Not exactly. More on the order of you give us the stick, we do the decryption and share the data with you. And in the interim allow you the pleasure of working with a real live U.S. government agency.”
Godchaux cleared his throat and leaned forward slightly. “I trust you, Slate, so here goes. He lowered his voice a couple of decibels. “I created the file on the memory stick, Slate. And I can give you the password. I could give you the decryption key as well, but why not let the government have their fun? It’s not unbreakable. And you should get something out of their desire for those data. So I’d suggest you extract some exchange from the government in addition to their agreeing to decrypt the information on that thumb drive. At the very least, it will give you more time while they work on the data.”
Cold Winter Rain Page 14