“If the police can’t find Denis, we certainly can’t,” she replied. “And besides, even if we could look for him—which we can’t—if we found him, we could only turn him over to the authorities. So why not let them find him?”
Hazel put her cup down with a soft thunk, pursed her lips, and looked from one to the other of them. “The police won’t find Denis because they don’t know where to look.”
Jake was so still he could have been frozen, and Carole Ann felt the dread rise up in her like a sickness. Yet she asked the question anyway: “And you do know where to find him? Simone told you where to find him?”
Hazel dipped her head once. “He’s either in Paris, with his father, or at home. They’re from a place down in the Caribbean islands called Isle de Paix.”
CHAPTER THREE
Carole Ann closed her eyes and inhaled slowly and deeply, containing the breath in her lungs for several long seconds before releasing it completely in an audible hiss that collapsed her chest. She repeated the action several times, aware that she had not and would not find relief in the exercise and that she was past the point of expecting any. Closed eyes and slow, rhythmic breathing would not, could not, halt Jake’s unrelenting tirade any more than they could or would erase the last three days. She persisted because, quite simply, she did not know what else to do. She did not, as a rule, engage in wishful thinking; she not only was much too pragmatic for that, but she rarely regretted that which already had occurred and even less frequently engaged in imaginings of what might have been. Yet here she was wishing, fervently, that the last three days had not happened or, at the very least, that the events of them had happened differently; for then Jake would not be cussing a blue streak and threatening to quit and move to North Carolina and start a catfish farm and breed Manx cats.
She maintained the rhythm of her breathing but eased open her eyes to catch a glimpse of him. He was furious. He had been furious since Sunday. The veins stood out in his forehead and in the backs of his hands, which were balled into fists. She closed her eyes again, aware that under different circumstances she’d have been able to find some humor in his fantasies. She massaged her temples and opened her eyes.
“Would you please sit down and stop yelling?”
“No Goddammit I won’t!”
“Then at least find some new cuss words.”
“I like these just fine, Goddammit! I also just love being up to my neck in a pool of watery shit with the damn government nosing around in my affairs and my partner poised to defend and protect a judge-murdering drug dealer, all of which will likely cost me a multi-million dollar contract! I wish to hell I knew some more cuss words ‘cause I’d sure as hell use ‘em!”
She closed her eyes again. She had no response and had given up the search for one because deep within, she agreed with him. “What do you want me to do, Jake?”
“No you don’t, C.A. Don’t put it on me. What do I want you to do? So now I’m in charge? What I say, goes? Since when, Goddammit?!”
She sighed and opened her eyes again and rose to her feet. “I leave tomorrow morning for Isle de Paix with a plan of action, Jake, a plan we—you and I—devised and agreed upon. But you’re cussing and complaining about everything we agreed to do, which I suppose means that we didn’t really agree. So. Jake, tell me what you want to do.” She stood still, watching him, waiting for his response, girding herself for another onslaught.
“Doesn’t this shit bother you, C.A.? Doesn’t the whole thing strike you as...as...”
“Bizarre. How’s bizarre, Jake? Does that get close enough to the feeling?” She managed to produce a sound from somewhere in her throat that could have been what remained of her wry, sarcastic humor.
He nodded. “Bizarre’s good, though it’s understating the situation by a mile.”
“So I ask you again: What do you want to do? What do you want me to do? What do you want us to do?”
Now he sighed and rubbed his eyes and rotated his neck. “We’ll do what we can, C.A. We’ll do what we’ve been hired to do and if you come across anything that puts one client in conflict with another, we drop Simone St. Almain. Just like we agreed.”
“But you don’t like it.” She was pacing now, slowly, head down, hands stuffed into the pockets of her black linen slacks.
“No,” he said quietly and soberly, “I don’t. I wish to hell I’d never heard of Hazel Copeland and Simone and Denis St. Almain or Mike Wong and the Agency for International Development. I’d like to have our nice, neat, lucrative contract with a tiny back-water island nation that time forgot the sole focus of our entire effort. We could find out who killed the constables, nuke their asses, install the new island police force, and collect our big, fat payment. But we’re long past that. We’re living in the middle of a...of a...”
“Of a Eugene Ionesco play, only this is more absurd. This situation makes his characters and their world seem normal.”
He looked at her from beneath raised eyebrows. “If you say so. But when have you had time to go to the theater?”
She laughed a real, warm, if thin, laugh, and it seemed to relax him. His shoulders dropped away from where they had been hugging his ears, and his hands unclenched, and the veins rippling his forehead smoothed out and calmed his visage. He didn’t quite manage a smile but he at least he no longer was snapping and snarling. And he wasn’t cussing, though that could well have been because he really had exhausted his extensive lexicon of idiomatic profanity. After all, he had been at it non-stop since Sunday morning. She winced. The words, “Sunday morning” caused almost physical pain. She still couldn’t believe what an incredibly bizarre day it had been, and what impossibly bizarre fall-out it still was producing.
When she returned to her office from escorting Hazel Copeland to the front exit door, Jake had been prowling and snarling and cussing, and while their erstwhile visitor had been the verbal target of his wrath, Carole Ann personally had felt his anger. He had insisted on accompanying her the following morning to speak with Simone St. Almain. And when she’d snapped at him, he’d snapped back. “No way I’m leaving you alone with the mother of a killer. No telling what you’re liable to get us into.” His tone had been angry and derisive and just slightly condescending. Even though she’d understood that he had no intention to wound her, his words had hurt. He had apologized. She had accepted his apology. And then Monday came.
Simone St. Almain was a little bird. A tropical avian, tiny and fluttery and brightly colored and sweet-voiced. Carole Ann had been surprised at her appearance. She’d seen the woman once before, briefly, at her son’s arraignment three days earlier, and though she hadn’t studied her at the time, she had considered that she knew how the woman looked. She found, upon confronting Simone, that she had no recollection of her diminutive stature or of her youthful beauty; for she was a beautiful woman, in a vague and fragile kind of way, as if she could easily break and shatter. Carole Ann looked more closely and saw that, in fact, Simone already had been broken, perhaps more than once, and pieced back together. Fragments and shards of herself were being held together by whatever force of life and will were at her disposal. Different women used different glue, as Carole Ann herself very well knew.
“Madam, if your son murdered a judge, it won’t matter whether we find him or the cops find him. He’ll have to come back here, and when he does, he’ll be in for it. There’s just no getting around that.” Jake, while he had been quietly polite, had not disguised his feelings about their visit or about Simone St. Almain’s son. He had spoken without rancor or hostility and yet Simone St. Almain had flinched as if he’d struck her. Flinched and leaned back into the cushions of the flower-print sofa in her tiny, immaculate living room.
“Denis did not do that thing, Sir. He never in his life has damaged another person or thing.” Her voice was light and fluttery and French-accented but she had spoken with a grave vigor. “It is a mistake and when you talk to him, he will explain it to you. He can explain how everything
happened.” Then she’d folded her hands in her lap, pursed her coral-painted lips, and watched them, waiting for their words.
“What do you mean, ‘explain how everything happened’?” Carole Ann had heard some unspoken thing in the woman’s words but Jake was not to be diverted from his principal point.
“If you know where you son is, you should tell the police...” Jake began but stopped at the reaction his words of advice produced. Simone St. Almain was shaking her head back and forth almost violently, causing her head to wobble on her thin neck as if it could roll off her shoulders and away from her. He had shrugged and looked at Carole Ann: ‘I’m done with this,’ his look had telegraphed. ‘It’s all yours.’
“Mrs. Copeland told us that Denis is either in Isle de Paix or in France. Is that correct, Simone, and if so, how do you know?” Carole Ann had spoken directly, without tone or inflection, the way she questioned witnesses when she wished to convey nothing of her thoughts or reveal the extent of her knowledge. While the tone was neither conciliatory nor combative, Simone St. Almain had seemed to find some comfort in it and had relaxed. She had exhaled a tiny sigh, unclasped her hands, smoothed out her dress against her thin thighs, and glanced at Jake before replying.
“If he is not here, then he is there. He has not called or visited me, so he is no longer here. There is no other place for him. He is either here, with me, or at home.”
“Did you speak with Denis on Friday night?”
Simone shook her head. “I didn’t know that Denis was not in jail until the police broke down my door Saturday morning. They took apart this little house looking for him. I told them that Denis doesn’t live here. He is a grown man and grown men do not—should not—live with their mothers.”
Carole Ann impatiently interrupted the soliloquy. “Did you speak with Denis on Saturday or Sunday or today, Simone? Either speak with him directly or receive a message from him?”
The woman shook her head back and forth, the thin neck wobbling.
“You said that Denis either was here or at ‘home.’ Which is ‘home?” Paris or Isle de Paix?”
“What difference does it make?” Jake snapped at Carole Ann before turning toward Simone. “Do you know how many mamas think their little boys ‘didn’t do it?’ If you mamas had your way there wouldn’t be any murderers or rapists or drug dealers in jail.”
Simone jumped to her feet, her tiny body trembling with a mixture of rage and fear. “If Denis is evil then so are you, Sir, for he is what you are! Un gendarme!”
Carole Ann and Jake stood speechless before Simone though for different reasons. Jake was merely surprised that the diminutive woman had responded so violently. Carole Ann was stunned by her words.
“What do you mean Denis is a police officer?”
Jake jumped as if he’d been hit. “What the hell are you talking about? Who says St. Almain is a cop?”
“That’s what Simone just said.”
“Bullshit!”
Simone rushed from the room and returned so quickly that Carole Ann and Jake had time only to glare at each other before she bore down on them, brandishing an envelope like a sword and breathing heavily. “I didn’t want to show you but you must believe me. You must help Denis!” And she thrust the envelope at Jake. His reluctance to accept the parcel irritated Carole Ann, who snatched it from him, opened it, and withdrew a handful of paper.
“Good Lord,” she whispered, passing the papers to Jake.
“Dammit to hell,” he exclaimed.
So distressed had he been by the sight of pay vouchers from the Drug Enforcement Administration bearing Denis St. Almain’s name that Jake had refused to accompany Carole Ann to lunch with Michael Wong, and she’d been only half-heartedly grateful. She hadn’t wanted him unnerving her with his picky scrutiny and constant cussing, but she had wanted back-up in case another bomb was to be dropped in her lap. Which is what had happened, though the thing hadn’t detonated. Yet.
“Isle de Paix is believed to be a haven for international drug traffickers, Miss Gibson,” Mike Wong had said in a gentle and non-accusatory tone, his dark eyes almost sad behind wire-rimmed glasses, “and the assassination of two unarmed constables with assault weapons would suggest there’s as least some justification for that belief.”
“We saw no evidence of drug trafficking on our several visits to the island, Mike,” Carole Ann said in what she hoped was a reasonable tone instead of a desperate one. “And I assure you that we’d never have accepted Isle de Paix as a client if we thought for a second that what you say has any merit.”
“I believe you, Miss Gibson, and I trust Patty Baker and anybody she works for. But US AID can’t possibly fund any projects on that island until that perception is eliminated.”
She had paused for a long moment, assessing both the words he’d spoken and the intent he’d implied. S AID would not act on the island’s request for assistance: It would neither grant nor deny. At least not yet. ‘Until that perception is eliminated.’ And if Gibson, Graham could not successfully eliminate the perception of Isle de Paix as a haven for international drug traffickers? And Mike Wong had shrugged his shoulders and grinned wryly and pushed a thick shock of silver hair out of his face and shrugged again. Then the smile had evaporated and he had concentrated on his turkey and provolone sandwich while Carole Ann’s appetite had evaporated.
C.A. and Jake had spent most of the night Monday, all of Tuesday, and most of Wednesday reviewing every note and every memory of their several visits to Isle de Paix, searching for some over-looked sign that the Collettes or other island officials knew of or suspected or were themselves involved in drug trafficking.
“We walked every mile of that island, C.A., and drove up and down and back and forth across it, and there wasn’t any odor of drug dealing!” Jake’s adamancy lasted for the time it took him to pace from one end of his office to the other. “Unless we missed it, C.A. Did we? Is that possible? Could we both have missed something so big and ugly as international drug dealing?” He sounded almost panicked.
Carole Ann shook her head but a mixture of worry and exasperation creased her face. “No, Jake, I don’t think we missed anything that big and ugly, but all this makes me want to take a closer look at that jet-set enclave on the north end of the island and at that resident population of scruffy-looking divers and charter boat captains. And to press Collette a little harder about his willingness to give them such a wide berth.”
“Ummhmm,” Jake said, coming to an abrupt halt. “You know, I thought his tip-toeing around that group of blue-nose tight asses was just typical politician-type behavior—you know, don’t mess with the rich folks; don’t do anything to ruffle their feathers. But there may be something else in it.”
“And I want to take a closer look at the new government ministers. I met them all, but I didn’t have real conversation with anybody but David Messinger. Who I think is a first class jerk, by the way.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Jake replied dismissively, “I know what you think and it doesn’t matter. He’s the new Minister of Justice and, starting in a couple of days, you’ll be seeing a lot of him and his new police chief.
“Dammit, Jake, I haven’t agreed to just drop everything and run down to Isle de Paix!”
“You don’t have a choice, C.A. We don’t have a choice. I can’t go because of that installation out in Fairfax County and we can’t send anybody—one of us has to handle this. That leaves you. And I don’t like it either!” He jumped to his feet and rapidly rubbed the palms of his hands together, striding up and down the room. “Hell, we don’t know what’s going on down there, and I sure as hell don’t like the idea of you wandering around in the middle of it, especially with St. Almain on the loose.”
“Oh, Jake, sit down and shut up,” Carole Ann said without the slightest hint of ire or anger.” He sat and they both brooded in silence for a while, thinking the same thoughts but unwilling to voice them. Carole Ann finally spoke, but on a different matter than thei
r thoughts: “Can we really speed things up and achieve the same success? Dammit, everything was so carefully planned out!”
“Yeah, it was. And, yeah, I’m worried that pushing people and plans into place too early might cause some problems.”
“Do you have any doubt that Messinger is the best person for justice minister?”
Jake shook his head. “Not a single one,” he replied forcefully and emphatically. “He was waiting for his contract, but when I told him what we were up against, he agreed to report to work a week earlier, and he’s bringing his police chief with him. And Collette says the interior and finance ministers are already on the job.”
“Jesus, Jake, that’s dangerous.”
“I know it is,” he replied quietly.
“Do they understand how dangerous?”
He shrugged, got up and began pacing again. “All we can worry about is whether Messinger can get that first group of cops down there and establish control before things get too far out of control.”
“Damn, I hate the thought of that!” She smacked the desk top with the flat palm of her hand, making a loud cracking sound. “All those years without cops, without the need for cops or an armed presence of any kind, and in a heartbeat, it all changes.”
“It was gonna change any way, C.A. Hell, it already had changed. That’s why they hired us. And already had hired a police force, remember? Tourists need to see ‘em and Isle de Paix needs tourists to climb out that financial hole.”
“Yeah, but they were going to be for show, Jake.”
“The hell they were!” he snapped. “I didn’t hire David Messinger to be a show horse. He’s a real cop, and that new chief is a real cop, and so are all the recruits. Just like violence is real, C.A.”
“Even in paradise.”
He gave her a wry grin and an elaborate shrug. “Paradise interrupted,” he said.
“If there are drugs there, Jake...”
Paradise Interrupted Page 4