“No trouble last night?” Moncoeur asked.
“None. I did exactly as you ordered.”
“Excellent. Let’s hope it’s enough to dissuade
Bosanquet from continuing with his snooping. Have you heard from the PI you
hired?”
“Yes. He faxed me his report this morning. Bosanquet
is forty-three. Separated, but not divorced. No children. Both his parents are
dead and he has one married brother. Resigned from the New Orleans Police Department
voluntarily — nobody seems to know why. Financially he’s been walking a
tightrope since then. Credit cards are maxed out, and he’s heavily overdrawn at
the bank. Has been involved in the start-up of a number of small businesses;
all of which flourished for a while, then faded whenever he lost interest.”
“Where is his estranged wife?”
Gilett knew exactly where she was, but he wasn’t about
to tell Moncoeur. It always paid to have an ace in the hole. “The PI hasn’t
been able to trace her. Do you want him to stick with it?”
“No, leave it for now. They’ve split up, so she would
be of limited use as leverage. I have another job for you. I want you to take a
trip to St Francis parish and set up surveillance on Jackson’s parents’ house.
Watch out for anything unusual, anything that might suggest they know into
which hole their son has crawled.”
The assignment rankled Gilett. In swamp country he
would stand out like rat shit in a bowl of rice. “How long do you want me down
there for?”
Moncoeur filled a long-handled paddle with water from
a wooden bucket. He splashed it over the hot coals. A cloud of super-heated
steam climbed and spread along the roof of the sauna. Gilett could feel his
nasal hairs burn.
“Until you learn something,” Moncoeur said.
Gilett had a craving to snap Moncoeur’s scrawny neck
like a dry twig. Who the fuck did he think he was? It they know nothing, I
could watch them ‘til Christmas for all the good it would do. Isn’t time a
factor here?”
“Give it forty-eight hours, then do whatever it takes.”
Moncoeur shut his eyes and lay back. The meeting was
over.
Gilett pushed open the door.
“One more thing,” Moncoeur said, his eyes still shut.
“No loose ends.”
This time there was no waiting around in the foyer of
Arena Victory’s headquarters. Val walked up to the security guard and told him
that two youths were spray-painting graffiti on a section of the exterior
marble cladding. The man thanked him and hurried off to investigate. Val gave
the receptionist a quick flash of his shield and asked her which floor Jarvis
Kraftson’s office was on. She hesitated for a second too long, so he swept his
arm across the top of her desk, spilling to the floor papers, a silver-name
plate, and a desk calendar.
“The fifth,” the girl blurted out.
He ripped the telephone’s lead out of its socket and
warned her, “If you so much as touch a phone for the next fifteen minutes,
you’ll be eating your Thanksgiving turkey in jail. Val rode the elevator alone.
Those young Turks who had witnessed his performance in the lobby seemed happy
to wait for the next one.
Kraftson’s office was directly facing the doors of the
escalator. Only he wasn’t VP of Human Resources as he had claimed. He was VP of
Development. Val charged in and waved his shield at another startled young
woman. He saw how the pout of her lips had been enhanced by collagen
injections. For a fleeting instant he wondered what it would feel like to kiss
her.
“Is your boss in?” he barked. She nodded and plucked
nervously at a silver locket at her throat.
“If I were you, I’d take my lunch break now.”
She reached out a thin hand to her telephone. Val
caught her by the wrist, took the receiver from her and replaced it.
“I said now.”
She lifted up her purse from an open drawer, stood,
and hesitantly backed towards the door.
With luck he might have two or three minutes alone
with Kraftson before security intervened. He waited until she had left before
charging into the inner office.
Kraftson was behind his desk, engrossed with his
computer screen, clicking on a mouse under his right hand. He glanced across, and
then jumped to his feet.
“How dare you intrude!”
“Sorry, I must have forgotten to make an appointment.”
Val went around his desk and grabbed a fistful of his shirt. Kraftson projected
an image of a man in control, but underneath he would be as soft as cotton. No
match for the beast that lurked within Val. He lifted a cigarette lighter from
the desk and rapped the heavy onyx base against the side Kraftson’s head. The
man’s eyes widened in horror. Val could smell his fear.
“You fucked with me, now I’m going to fuck with you.”
He bounced the lighter off Kraftson’s skull for emphasis. “Big mistake telling
me that Jackson had been fired. You cost a man his life.”
Kraftson’s face blenched. Val gave his mouth an
encouraging tap with the cold marble. Blood spurted out and his upper lip
started to swell. He wouldn’t be ordering any gumbo for a week or two. Val
withdrew the onyx a couple of inches.
“I was given instructions,” he croaked.
“By whom?”
“I can’t tell you that.” A drop of blood dripped off
his chin and stained the front of his shirt.
“How about trying that one again?” He gave his mouth
another tap with the lighter’s base. Stone cracked against enamel. “Or do you
want to find out how good AV’s dental plan really is?”
“Stuart MacLean, our CEO.”
Val had heard and read a lot about MacLean over the
past few years. Ambitious, a talented businessman, brash, an upstart. Verdicts
differed. But one thing the journalists all agreed on: MacLean was the
powerhouse behind AV.
“That’s more like it. Where can I find Stuart? Is he
in the building?”
“No. He hasn’t been here for months. He’s been
spending a lot of time in New York and Europe publicizing our flotation. I’ve
only ever met him at half-yearly strategy meetings.”
“What exactly is Jackson’s job?”
“He’s paid to take care of difficulties. Anything
dirty needs done, he’s the man. Leaning on labor organizers, bagman, payoffs,
all kinds of things.”
It didn’t come as any surprise to Val. “Where is he?”
“We don’t know. He vanished into thin air about a week
ago. Told nobody where he was going. We were instructed to drop everything and
search for him.”
“MacLean’s orders?”
Kraftson nodded.
“Why did Jackson kill Valerie Duval?”
Kraftson’s eyes widened. “I’ve never heard of her.”
“She was murdered ten years ago.”
“For Chrissakes, I was still in college then.”
Two security men crashed through the door. One of them
was the man who had held a blood-filled syringe to Val’s throat.
“Tell them to relax. We don’t want anyone hurt here,”
he told Kraftson coldly.
The frightened man twisted his head towards the
security guards. “Do as he says. He means business.”
The two guards swapped glances, then took a couple of
steps forward.
“Stay!” Kraftson shouted.
They stopped in their tracks.
“Do they do tricks as well?” Val asked, then turned to
the security guards. “The VP and I have concluded cur little tete-a-tete and
I’m going to leave now. If anyone tries to stop me or come after me, I’ll
return and rip his fucking heart out.”
Val let go of Kraftson’s shirtfront and he slumped
back into his chair. His top lip was turning an angry shade of blue.
Val waved the two guards away from the door and set
the lighter back down. They glared at him belligerently but cooperated.
Val slapped the flat of his palm hard against the ear
of the one he had recognized. “You can keep the cash and the credit cards, but
I want my driving permit returned.”
He was back on the street in less than two minutes.
Val bought a muffuletta sandwich and an espresso in a
deli on Canal Street and took a seat at the window to watch a sudden
thunderstorm bounce raindrops the size of pennies off the sidewalk. The smells
inside the Italian restaurant were intoxicating. Rich spicy sausages were
suspended from the ceiling, strings of dried garlic and peppers hung on the
wall behind the counter, and three whole wheels of parmesan were stacked on top
of each other next to jars of olives and pickled florets of cauliflower.
If Trochan had been murdered by FRAPH, as seemed
likely, then it was probably because he had inadvertently stumbled across them
in his quest for his former partner. It appeared that something had spooked
Jackson, Val brooded, and he wasn’t the sort of man to frighten easily. What
exactly had he done to bring FRAPH’s ire down on his head? His particular
talents had been long employed by Arena Victory, whose operation in
Port-au-Prince would have required some degree of alliance with FRAPH. Jackson
and FRAPH; FRAPH and Jackson. They could have been made for each other. Natural
allies, not enemies.
Val started to work backwards. Maybe some of the
Tonton Macoute held a grudge against Jackson. After all, he had taken an axe to
the wife of one of their number. They say revenge is a dish best enjoyed cold —
but ten years?
It was time to talk to Marie Duval again.
She was sitting at a desk in Marcus’s living room,
checking off a pile of second-hand books she had bought against a reading list
for her first semester. Angie had answered the door.
“Take a walk,” Val told her. “I want to speak to Duval.”
He was wound up and knew he’d blown it as soon as the
words were out of his mouth. It was the wrong approach to take with Angie. Now
nothing short of a hurricane would shift her. Fair enough. Maybe it was time
she found out the sort of person she had admitted into her home.
He spun Duval’s chair around and glowered down at her,
stabbing a finger in her direction.
“You set me up.”
Duval glared up at him, her eyes full of defiance.
“What do you mean?”
“Val, how dare you come here and start bullying my
friends,” Angie protested, inserting herself between them. Two days back in the
job and already you’re reverting to type.”
“Butt out, Angie,” he said, taking hold of her wrists
and moving her to one side. “This is between me and her.”
He spoke to Duval again. “I’m not the only person
you’ve told about Jackson. You talked to your friends in FRAPH first. Somebody
must have got a warning to him and he went into hiding before they had a chance
to kill him.”
Angie’s face lost its color and her mouth dropped
open. Val ignored her and concentrated on Duval.
“They couldn’t find him, so you recruited me. With my
detective training and police department connections, you knew there was a good
chance I would come through. But you hadn’t planned to let FRAPH know about me,
at least not until I had found Jackson for you.”
“You’re a crazy man!” Duval screamed. “No one but you
and I know about Jackson.”
“That’s crap. Because of you and your story, I offered
a man two hundred dollars to trace Jackson. It cost him his life.”
Duval got to her feet, shaking with anger, her eyes
full of hatred. Exactly the way they had been that night ten years before.
“I told you about Jackson and you didn’t believe a
word of it. You physically threw me out of your house. Now you burst in here
claiming that you had somebody searching for him. That’s one hell of a U-turn.
I’m sorry for the man that has been killed, but it has nothing to do with me.”
Val grunted. She had a point.
“Okay,” he said. “So what if you initially thought
that your ruse had failed? It doesn’t alter the fact that a man died because
you crave vengeance.”
“You’re so wrong. I don’t want anything other than to
be left alone to study and get on with my life. Can’t you understand that?”
“Only too well. How hard did your friends at FRAPH
have to lean on Assist Haiti before they agreed to sponsor you?”
All the fight suddenly left Duval’s face. It took her
a few moments to respond. “Is this another leap in the dark, or do you have
some reason for saying it?”
“Work it out for
yourself. You’re far from the only bright Haitian kid in Louisiana. What
would some of them give for the chance of a college education? Haiti needs
teachers, scientists and doctors, a damned sight more than they need Caribbean
Art graduates.”
Duval broke down. She covered her face with her hands
and started to sob, her whole body shuddering. Angie put an arm around her
shoulders and pulled her tight to her chest.
She looked up at Val. “Proud of yourself? What sort of
brute could do this to a young woman? Leave this house now,” she hissed.
There was no point trying to explain that as a
detective he had been expected to function in exactly this manner on a daily
basis. Something he had become all too good at. He wheeled around and left.