The Exile

by Allan Folsom

  “This is Paris, Nick, not L.A., and it was Alfred Neuss, not Josef Speer. And there were diamonds involved. The police see it as a murder-theft, nothing more. The MO was a coincidence. That’s why the LAPD guys are still there and not here.”

  “Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it isn’t.”

  Ford touched the brake and slowed to a stop behind a line of traffic. “What do you think you’re going to do about it either way? You’re not a cop anymore. You have no authority anywhere. You start probing and twisting, trying to find something, and people are going to start asking who you are and what you’re doing.

  “Neuss’s murder is bringing the whole thing back. The media’s perked to sell tickets, the tabloids will create a story where there isn’t one. Raymond was on TV worldwide. So were you. And people remember. You may have changed your name but not your face. What if somebody starts putting things together, guesses who you are? They get your name and find out where you live.”

  The traffic in front of them moved off, and Ford eased the Citroën forward. “What if that information gets back to the wrong guys on the LAPD who still want to know about John Barron—what happened to him, where he went, where his sister went? I warned you before about Gene VerMeer’s Web site. Now there’s a new one innocuously called ‘Copperchatter.’ Ever hear of it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s cops talking shop to each other around the world. And in cop vernacular and with cop humor and cop vindictiveness. I bet you the name John Barron comes up twice a month, egged on by VerMeer and kept in play by people who remember Red and Len Polchak and Roosevelt Lee and Valparaiso and Jimmy Halliday. They’re willing to pay money to find you, telling people you left something important behind in L.A. and they want to return it to you.”

  Marten looked away.

  Ford kept on. “You start making noise, Nick, and you’re putting your life and everything you’ve built in jeopardy. You’re exposing Rebecca, too, if somebody wants to take it that far.”

  Marten turned back. “What the hell do you want me to do?”

  “Turn around and go back to Manchester. I’m on top of this. If something breaks, you’ll know right away.”

  Ford stopped at a crosswalk for a red light. Pedestrians bundled against the January cold swarmed past in either direction, and for a moment the boyhood friends sat in silence.

  “Nick, please, do what I ask, go back to Manchester,” Ford said finally.

  Marten stared at him. “What’s the rest of it?”

  “Rest of what?”

  “Whatever it is you’re not telling me. I could see it the minute you picked me up at the airport. You know something, what is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m a big fan of nothing, try me.”

  “Alright.” The light changed and Ford moved the Citroën off. “When you read about the body in the park, what was your first thought?”

  “Raymond.”

  “It was automatic. Cut right through your gut.”

  “Yes.”

  “But we know Raymond’s dead and has been for a long time.”

  “Go on.” Marten studied Ford, waiting for the next.

  “When I first heard about the body in the park, nude and disfigured, before I knew it was Alfred Neuss—for the hell of it I had one of the Times staff reporters in L.A. do a little legwork.”

  “And?”

  “This morning, while you were on your way here, the information came back. Raymond’s file is missing from the L.A. County coroner’s office. It was deleted from the database. His fingerprints, photographs, everything—gone. Same thing with his LAPD records at Parker Center. The same with his file at the Department of Justice in Sacramento. The same with the report the Beverly Hills PD made after they went over Neuss’s apartment. The same with Chicago PD. And perhaps most interesting of all, the FBI database was hacked into—all the Raymond files and related evidence were completely deleted. They’re checking now with Interpol Washington and the department files in San Francisco and Mexico City where Raymond’s booking photo and copies of his fingerprints were. If the hackers got into everything else, what do you suppose they’re going to find?”

  “When did this happen?”

  “No way to tell.” Ford glanced at Marten, then back to the road. “There’s more. There were three people from the coroner’s office who were fired or transferred because of the cremation fiasco—two men and a woman. The men died three weeks apart and the woman vanished, all less than four months after the incident. The woman supposedly went to live with a sister in New Orleans, but there is no sister in New Orleans. Just an uncle who can’t remember the last time he heard from her.”

  Marten felt as if someone had just touched an icy hand to the back of his neck. This was the thing he had felt when he’d first read about the dead man in the park but had talked himself out of even bringing up ever since. “You’re suggesting Raymond might still be alive.”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. But we know somebody sent a plane for him, twice. It means he wasn’t working alone and whoever was helping him obviously had money, a lot of it.”

  Marten stared off. It was more of what he’d known all along. More of what had been so rudely dismissed by Chief Harwood in his resolute determination to end the Raymond story and protect the truth about what had happened to the squad. Abruptly Marten looked back. “What about the doctor who pronounced him dead at the hospital?”

  “Felix Norman. He’s no longer on staff. I have a couple of people looking into it now.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Marten looked off and then quickly back. “Does the LAPD know?”

  “I don’t think so, or if they do they didn’t make anything of it. The two deaths were apparently from natural causes. There was never a missing person report on the woman, and who goes back into old files and databases for information on a case that’s been officially closed and no one wants anything to do with?”

  Ahead, they could see the round edifice of Barrière Monceau, one of the myriad of tollhouses built around the old city in the late 1700s and one of the few still standing. Just beyond it was the sprawling winter drab of a city park.

  “That it? The place where they found Neuss’s body?”

  “Parc Monceau. Yes.”

  Ford saw the fire rise up in Marten’s eyes as they drew closer. Felt the electricity as he sat up straighter, unconsciously studying the streets, the surrounding neighborhood, the various approaches to the park. Looking for a way a killer might have come and gone. It was the cop inside him coming back to life. The very thing Ford had been afraid of.

  “Nick,” he warned, “stay out of it. We don’t know anything. Let me work this through with my guys in L.A. Give the Paris police a chance to come up with something here.”

  “Why don’t we just take a walk in the park and see what we see.”

  Three minutes later Ford pulled the Citroen into a parking space on the rue de Thann diagonally across from the park. It was just twelve-thirty when they got out and crossed the Boulevard de Courcelles in bright January sunshine, entered Parc Monceau, the Duc de Chartres’s elegant eighteenth-century innovation, through ornate iron gates near the Monceau Metro station, and started down the path toward the area where Neuss had been discovered.

  They were twenty yards down it when they saw three uniformed policemen standing outside a thick planting of evergreens towered over by a massive, winter-barren chestnut tree. Closer in and near the evergreens, two men in plainclothes stood together chatting. Clearly they were detectives. One was short and sturdily built and gestured here and there as if he were explaining things; the other nodded in response and seemed to be asking questions. He was younger and much taller than the first man and was by no means French.

  Jimmy Halliday.

  23

  “Get out of here,” Ford said the instant he saw him. Marten hesitated.

  “Now!” Ford said, and Marten turned and headed back in the other direction with Ford behind
him. VerMeer he might have expected, but Halliday? What was he doing here?

  “That’s exactly what I was talking about, only suddenly we’re a little closer to home.” Ford caught up with him and they went back out through the gates by the Metro station.

  “How long’s he been in Paris?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him before and, as I said, the LAPD’s been keeping their distance. He must have just come in.”

  “The detective with him, is he the one running the investigation?”

  Ford nodded. “Inspector Philippe Lenard, Paris Prefecture of Police.”

  “Give me the car keys. I’ll wait there. Halliday knows you. Go back and see what you can find out.”

  “He’ll ask about you.”

  “No, he’ll ask about John Barron.” Marten grinned just a little. “You haven’t seen him since you were in L.A.”

  Marten got into the Citroën and waited. Halliday. No matter their official posture, he should have expected the LAPD would send somebody. And Halliday, wherever he was currently assigned, knew more about the Neuss situation than anyone else on the force, so he was a natural. He might even have asked to come. It made Marten wonder if Neuss’s murder had sent the LAPD scrambling for information the same way Ford had put the L.A. Times on it—and if so, if they had come up with the same missing elements and, as a result, the same unnerving supposition: that somehow Raymond had been spirited away from the hospital alive, leaving a death certificate and a cremated body in his wake. And now, with his records gone, his possible accomplices either dead or vanished, and no one with any real knowledge of his true identity, he had suitably recovered and picked up from where he had been so rudely interrupted before.

  NEUCHTEL, SWITZERLAND. SAME TIME.

  Rebecca had first seen him when he was one of several guests who came to tour Jura in mid-July. Several weeks later she met him at a luncheon at the Rothfels home. He knew she was a patient at Jura and showed great interest in the new program there. They spent an hour or more talking and then playing with the Rothfels children, and in the end she knew he was in love with her. Even so it had been more than a month before he held her hand and another month after that before he kissed her.

  Those first months before he made any physical contact had been agony for her as well. The look in his eyes told her how he felt, and her feelings quickly escalated until they matched his or were even stronger. The most fleeting thought of him made her tingle, and the moments when they were alone together overpowered any experience she’d ever had, even if it was no more than a stroll by the lake where they watched the breeze ripple the surface and listened to the twitter of birds. To her, Alexander Cabrera was the most beautiful man she had ever known, or could have imagined knowing. That he was thirty-four and ten years older than she made no difference whatsoever. Nor did the fact that he was a highly educated, exceedingly successful businessman who just happened to be Gerard Rothfels’s employer.

  An Argentinean, Cabrera owned and operated Cabrera WorldWide, a company that designed, installed, and operated high-capacity pipeline delivery systems and served industries from agriculture to petroleum exploration and production in more than thirty countries. His corporate headquarters remained in Buenos Aires, but his large European center of operations was in Lausanne, where he spent parts of every month while still retaining a small office in Paris in the permanent suite he kept at the Hotel Ritz.

  Highly respectful of her personal situation as well as her position as an employee of his European manager, and wanting to disrupt neither his Lausanne office with undue gossip nor the household of which she had become an integral part, Alexander had insisted they see one another discreetly.

  For four wondrous and loving months their relationship had been just that, discreet—when he was in Lausanne on business, or when he could persuade the Rothfels into giving up their nanny for a night or two or three. He would spirit her suddenly away to Rome or Paris or Madrid. Even then their relationship was guarded—separate hotels, a private car to pick her up and whisk her away to wherever he was, and then later to take her back again. Moreover, in all the time they had known each other, never once had they slept together. That, he promised, was for their wedding night and not before. And there would be a wedding night. He’d pledged that, too, the first time he kissed her.

  This particular afternoon, warmly dressed against the January cold, Rebecca sat on a bench beside a frozen pond on the rolling grounds of the Rothfels home on the shores of Lake Neuchâtel and watched her charges—Patrick, three, Christine, five, and Colette, six—as they took ice-skating lessons. In twenty minutes they would finish and go into the house for hot chocolate. Afterward she would take Patrick off to play while Christine and Colette were given piano lessons and then schooled in Italian by the tutor who came at three every Tuesday and Thursday. At four on Wednesdays and Fridays another tutor came to teach them Russian, and after that spent an hour with Rebecca instructing her in the same. By now she was increasingly comfortable with French, Italian, and Spanish and was quickly approaching the same ease with Russian. German had been a problem for her and still was, the guttural sounds nearly impossible for her to manage correctly.

  What made today special and at the same time very difficult was that Alexander was coming to Switzerland for a business dinner that evening following a ten-day trip home to Buenos Aires. The difficulty was that the dinner was in St. Moritz, and St. Moritz was on the opposite side of the country from where she was in Neuchâtel. Moreover, he was due to return to Paris immediately afterward. Although they talked on the phone at least once every day, they had not seen each other in weeks and she longed to go to St. Moritz, if only to be with him for a short while. But because of his position as head of the company, his pressing schedule, and his own very dignified and proper view of their relationship, she knew it was not possible. And she had to accept it. Just as she accepted the secrecy of their relationship. When the time came for them to marry, he told her, the world would know. Until then their life had to remain theirs alone, theirs and the only others who knew—Rothfels and his wife, Nicole, and the burly Jean-Pierre Rodin, Alexander’s French bodyguard who went everywhere with him and took care of everything.

  Well, in truth, there was one other person who did know—Lady Clem, who had met Alexander for the first time when she visited Rebecca at the Rothfels’ in September and learned of his interest in Jura. She met him again in London during a Balmore fund-raising event at the Albert Hall, where he presented the foundation with a large and very generous gift earmarked especially for Jura. They met a third time when she visited Rebecca in Neuchâtel several months later. By then he and Rebecca were clearly involved with each other, and Rebecca took Clem aside to confirm it and to impress upon her the importance of keeping it secret, even from her brother, who was staunchly protective of her and would view her emotional maturity as delicate at best. After everything he’d been through with her, he might well react emotionally, if not irrationally, himself if he were to find out about the depth of her involvement with a man as worldly as Alexander Cabrera—a man, she was certain, he would see as using her as little more than a toy, which wasn’t so at all. Besides, it was what Alexander wanted, at least for now.

  “Not only that,” Rebecca told Clem with a girlish grin, “if Nicholas can have a clandestine relationship with you, there is no reason I can’t have the same kind of thing with Alexander. We’ll just make a game of it.” She grinned again. “‘Keep Away from Nicholas.’ Alright?”

  Clem laughed. “Alright,” she impishly agreed. Then, in a hooked-finger ritual between them, she promised to say nothing to Nicholas until Rebecca gave her permission to do so. As a result, even months later, Nicholas Marten still knew nothing of the conspiracy against him or of the love of his sister’s life.

  24

  PARIS, L’ECLUSE MADELEINE WINE BAR, PLACE DE LA MADELEINE. SAME DAY, TUESDAY, JANUARY 14. 2:30 P.M.

  Dan Ford dialed a number, then handed Halli
day his cell phone and picked up a glass of Bordeaux, waiting as Halliday changed his airline reservations so he could stay in Paris a few days longer than originally planned.

  They’d come here by taxi from the Parc Monceau twenty minutes earlier. Halliday had wanted a drink and Ford wanted to get him away from the park, and L’Ecluse, tucked away near the Place Madeleine in the bustle of the inner city, was far enough from the park and any route Marten might take to leave it.

  Ford had purposely walked Halliday out of the park at the Metro exit and across the Boulevard de Courcelles in plain sight, then waited there as he hailed a cab. He knew Marten was just down the street in the Citroën and hoped he would see what was going on and simply take the car and go to Ford’s apartment on the Left Bank. Whether Marten had or not, or whether he had seen them at all, there was no way to tell. For all he knew Marten could still be sitting there, waiting.

  “Sorry, I’m on hold.” Halliday indicated the phone and then picked up his glass of brandy and took a solid pull from it.

  “It’s alright,” Ford said. Halliday looked as if he’d aged a decade in the ten-odd months since he last saw him. He was thin, his face gaunt and lined, and the blue eyes, once so penetrating, now seemed drained and weary. His wrinkled gray slacks and light blue sports jacket looked as worn as he did.

  Clearly tired and jet-lagged, he had arrived from Los Angeles that morning and gone directly to Inspector Lenard’s office at the Prefecture of Police, and shortly afterward had accompanied Lenard to the murder scene in the park.

  What was interesting was that Halliday was no longer a member of the LAPD but a private investigator hired by Neuss’s insurance company to find out what had happened to the missing quarter million dollars in diamonds. Normally police had little to do with private investigators, but Halliday had been an LAPD detective involved with Neuss before, and because of it Lenard had no trouble welcoming him, the same as he had Dan Ford.