"A Quiet Vendetta" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellory R. J.)

THREE

Robert Luckman and Frank Gabillard had been partners for seven years. Working out of the New Orleans Federal Bureau of Investigation Field Office on Arsenault Street, they believed that between them they had seen it all. Under the aegis of the United States Justice Department they investigated federal offences – espionage, sabotage, kidnapping, bank robbery, drug trafficking, terrorism, civil rights violations and fraud against the government. They also received alerts when security-tagged print identification requests were made by any law enforcement agency in Louisiana. Patched through FBI Co-ordination Headquarters in Baton Rouge, the ID request was flagged and a report was immediately logged with the local Field Office. Security tags were registered against any official given security clearance within the law enforcement or intelligence community: Police, National Guard, all branches of the military, FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Department of Justice, any arm of the Attorney General’s Office, Office of Naval Intelligence, NASA et al. The report was then pursued by the assigned FBI field operatives, and if the case in some way touched their territory they held the right to assume complete control of all files, records, documents, and any subsequent investigation that might be required. They also possessed the authority to clear the ID request and allow the local police to deal with the matter.

In this instance this was not the case.

On the afternoon of Wednesday 20 August, a nineteen-year-old girl called Catherine Ducane left her home in Shreveport, Louisiana. She was not alone. A fifty-one-year-old man called Gerard McCahill had accompanied her, driving the car, attending to her requirements, ensuring that the visit to her mother in New Orleans went without a hitch. Her father, Charles Ducane, had stood on the steps of his vast mansion and waved her goodbye, and once the car had disappeared from view he had returned inside to attend to his business. He did not expect to see his daughter again for a week. He was perhaps a little surprised not to have received a call to say she had arrived safely, but he knew his daughter and his ex-wife sufficiently well to understand that once they were together there would be little time for anything but shopping and fashionable lunches. By the time Saturday rolled around, Charles Ducane was embroiled in a legal complication that devoured every ounce of attention he could summon, for Charles Ducane was an important man, a figurehead in the community, an opinion leader and a voice with which to be reckoned. Charles Mason Ducane was Governor of the State of Louisiana, now in the third of his four-year term, at one time a husband, forever a father, Charles Ducane was always a busy man. Catherine was his only child, and through much of the year she stayed with him in Shreveport. There was little love lost between Charles and Catherine’s mother, Eve – so much so that Ducane wasn’t surprised to learn that Eve had not even called him when Catherine failed to show. But Ducane understood family as well as any man, and also appreciated that the bitterness and resentment that existed between himself and Eve did not also exist in his daughter’s world. Her mother was her mother, and what kind of a man would he have been to deny the girl her right to continue that relationship?

The man who’d accompanied his daughter was an ex-cop, before that an ex-Marine, and even before that an Eagle Scout of America. Gerard McCahill was as good as they came, and the times he had driven Catherine Ducane down to New Orleans on such trips numbered close to three dozen.

This trip, however, was different.

The prints flagged through Baton Rouge and passed to the FBI Field Office on Arsenault Street were those of McCahill, and even now that same fifty-one-year-old ex-cop, ex-Marine, ex-Eagle Scout was also serving his time as an ex-human being on the County Coroner’s metal slab. It was he who was now heartless, daubed in quinine sulphate, and wearing a paper tag on his toe upon which was inscribed the legend John Doe #3456-9.

And Catherine Ducane, she of temperamental moods, of exquisitely expensive taste, she of awkward moments and determined stubbornness, was gone.

Miss Ducane, nineteen years old, beautiful and intelligent and altogether spoiled, had been kidnapped.

This was the situation that faced Robert Luckman and Frank Gabillard as they walked from the Medical Examiner’s Office with Jim Emerson’s reports, as they crossed town to find Michael Cipliano and tell him as little as they could. This was the situation they confronted when they made the necessary phone calls to have Gerard McCahill’s beaten-to-shit cadaver transported from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where it would be inspected and examined by the FBI’s own Criminalistics and Forensics teams.

This was Monday 25 August, and already the world was beginning to collapse.

For these men, though New Orleans was their home, understood all too well that this was a city like no other. Dirty Creole kids in Nikes and grubby shorts, wise-mouths backflashing words that shouldn’t have come from the lips of those so young; the smell of a city cooking inside its own sweat; beyond the limits the sprawling outgrowths of Evangeline, domain of the Ferauds and their ilk; gang wars and drug busts and liquor stills, moonshiners brewing twenty-five-cents-a-bottle rotgut that would strip the paint off a car and eat holes in a pair of good shoes; smack addicts and hopheads and folks mainlining amphetamines like there was no time to look for tomorrow; the sounds and smells of all of this, and you just had to live inside it to even have an inkling of how it was. New Orleans was the Mardi Gras, it was finding serpents and crosses in the same cemetery on All Saints’ Day, the spirit of loa Damballah-wédo walking there beside you as you crossed the street; it was Easter Souvenance, the Festival of the Virgin of Miracles, the celebration of Saint James the Greater and Baron Samedi, it was inscribing the floor of sanctuaries with vévé to summon the ritual spirits. New Orleans the beautiful, the majestic, the passionate, the terrifying. And no matter the training programs, no matter criminal profiling and VICAP reports, no matter gun ranges and Quantico and sitting three exams a year, there was nothing that could take into consideration the mores and ethics of the society within which they lived. New Orleans was New Orleans, almost a country all its own.

Cipliano seemed relieved that Luckman and Gabillard were taking his John Doe away. They told him that an FBI vehicle would be arriving within the hour to collect the body.

‘Got a freakin’ leaper,’ he told them while chewing a toothpick. ‘Head like sidewalk pizza if you know what I mean.’

They did not, and did not pretend that they did. People like Luckman and Gabillard dealt with serious business, not the inconsequential deaths of junkie suicides.

They left quickly and inconspicuously, as inconspicuously as two dark-suited, white-shirted, clean-cut men could manage, and drove back to the Field Office on Arsenault to begin the unenviable task of profiling a kidnap of Governor Ducane’s daughter.

They took their time reading the reports they had collected, and here they learned of such things as the severed vena cava through right and left ventricle at base, severed subclavian veins and arteries, jugular, carotid and pulmonary; of seventy percent minimum blood loss, of hammer-beatings, of lesions and abrasions, of freezing a man’s skin in order to scrape it away from the trunk of a stunning burgundy car with rivet scratches on the wing. They learned also of a constellation drawn across Gerard McCahill’s back, the constellation of Gemini, the twins Castor and Pollux, the third sign of the zodiac. They read these things, and once again silently marveled at the sheer madness of humanity.

‘Where to from here?’ Gabillard asked when they were done.

‘Kidnap procedure,’ Luckman said. ‘Take the fact that she’s a governor’s daughter out of the loop, that’s irrelevant right now, and we run a routine kidnap procedure.’

‘I don’t think that Ducane would be happy with that.’

Luckman shook his head. ‘Don’t give a rat’s ass what Ducane thinks or doesn’t think. Truth of the matter is that there’s a standard kidnap procedure and we have to follow it.’

Gabillard nodded. ‘You wanna call it in to Baton Rouge?’

‘I call it in to Baton Rouge and they’ll take the case as well as the body.’

‘You got a problem with that?’

Luckman shrugged. ‘I got no problem with it. You?’

‘I got no problem,’ Gabillard said. He reached forward and lifted the receiver. He called Baton Rouge and spoke to Agent Leland Fraschetti. Agent Fraschetti, a veteran of twenty-six years, a man with a head as hard as a baseball bat, asked that one of them accompany the body from New Orleans and bring all available documentation with them. That, Gabillard said, he would willingly do. He figured it would pretty much kill the day stone-dead; when he got back it would be closing time.

Luckman chose to go with him. They drove back to Cipliano’s office and waited for the vehicle from Baton Rouge.

Two miles away John Verlaine looked from his window and tried to erase the image of McCahill’s body, the strange glowing lines across the skin, the sensation of disturbance that these recent events had instilled in him. This is no work for a human being, he thought, and once again managed to convince himself that were he not there the work would not be done.

It seemed to run its own relay: from Verlaine to Emerson, Emerson to Cipliano, Cipliano to Luckman and Gabillard, and when the body arrived in Baton Rouge, Luckman clutching the files and thinking of the game he would not now miss that evening, Leland Fraschetti was waiting there for them, his eyes wide with anticipation, ready to take his place in this bizarre concatenation of events. Leland Fraschetti was a dark-minded man, a cynic, a natural pessimist. A loner and a failed husband, he was a man who watched Jerry Springer just to remind himself that people – all people – were fundamentally crazy. Fraschetti was also a man who went by the letter of the law and, once Gabillard and Luckman had closed the office door behind them, he pored over the reports and summarized his findings, penning extensive notations regarding the errors the local police had made in their handling of the investigation thus far, and when he was done he e-mailed his proposal to the Field Office in Shreveport where local agents would handle the governor’s demands to be updated constantly on the progress they were making. The truth was, bluntly, that they had nothing, though Leland Fraschetti, pessimist though he was, would have been the last to admit such a thing.

By the early evening of Monday 25 August, twenty-seven local FBI agents from New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Shreveport were assigned to the standard kidnap protocol. Governor Ducane’s phones were tapped, his house was under twenty-four-hour watch; the Mercury Turnpike Cruiser was driven on a flatbed truck to Baton Rouge and housed in a secure lock-up where Criminalistics went over it time and again with infra-red spectrophotometers, ultra-violet, iodine and silver transfers. The plates were traced to the ’69 Chrysler Valiant, now rusted and broken and lying on its roof in a wrecker’s yard in Natchez, Mississippi, and thirty-eight vehicle storage units – including Jaquier’s Lock ’N’ Leave, Ardren amp; Bros. Rental Carports Inc., Vehicle Warehousing Corporation (Est. 1953), Safety In Numbers (Unique Combination Vehicle Storage) – were checked to see if any of their respective owners remembered the Cruiser residing there at any time in the past. No-one remembered anything. No-one, it seemed, wanted to remember anything, and by the time Tuesday the twenty-sixth rolled around, a frustrated Leland Fraschetti stood in the doorway of his office in the Baton Rouge FBI Coordination Headquarters and felt his heart sink. He had taken three Excedrin and still a migraine pounded through his skull and threatened to vent itself through his temples. He had unit chiefs calling from Shreveport and Washington DC, he had agents on double shifts and late hours, he had a task force mobilized that was costing something in the region of twenty-three thousand dollars a day, and still he had nothing to take to the High School Show ’n’ Tell. Criminalistics and Forensics had come back with almost the same report as had been prepared by Emerson and Cipliano, and there seemed to be no links between this case and anything from the past despite rushing a profile through Quantico. The thing sucked, sucked like a whirlpool, and Leland – he of the dark moods and lonely cynicism – was right in the vortex waiting to drown.

They went through McCahill’s records with a fine-tooth comb, they checked his ex-wife, his present girlfriend, his drinking buddies, his mother. They searched his apartment in Shreveport and found nothing that in any way indicated he had been forewarned of the events that were to befall him and his charge in New Orleans. There was no shortage of people who would have been more than happy to upset Charles Ducane, but that was standard fare for any politician. The returning Christ would have prompted public protests and harassment lawsuits. That was just the way of the world.

Tuesday afternoon Leland Fraschetti put an A.P.B. through the system for McCahill’s car. Every police officer in Louisiana would now be looking for it. A description and photograph of the girl was processed through the same system, and four thousand hard copies of that image were distributed through the ranks. But the truth of the matter was that the kidnapper had already gained six days on them. McCahill had been dead by midnight on Wednesday 20 August. It was now Tuesday 26 August. Catherine Ducane could have been in Paris by now, and they would have been none the wiser.

Leland Fraschetti did not sleep. He was a man who had never suffered from insomnia; it was not in his nature. He knew his place in the grand scheme of things, and he knew everybody else’s place too. He did not, as a general rule, take his cases home, but this one was different. It was not merely the fact that Catherine was a governor’s daughter. It was not the clamorings of the vulture press. It was not that the upper ranks were hollering all the way from Washington, threatening to send down one of their own details and get this mess fixed up. It was something else entirely. Fraschetti, never one to trust anything so abstract and unreliable as hunch or intuition, nevertheless felt that there was something else going on here. He did not think there would be any ransom demands. He did not believe that the tap system now wired into Charles Ducane’s house would record the electronically-altered voice of any kidnapper. He did not imagine that at any time a single finger belonging to a pretty nineteen-year-old girl would be delivered in a jiffy bag to the doorstep of Ducane’s mansion. Leland, ascribing his perception to nothing other than gut feeling, knew that there was a great deal more going on than the evidence suggested.

Had you asked him for his rationale, his reasoning, his motivation for this belief (and oh, how Leland snatched at any opportunity to detail such things), he would have shrugged his shoulders, closed his eyes for just a moment, and then looked you dead-square in the face and told you he didn’t know. He didn’t know, but somehow he knew.

Wednesday morning came and went. A little more than twelve hours and it would be four days since the discovery of the body, and though the immediate news flashes and guesswork reports had died their thirty-six-hour death in the journals and on the tube, still the fact remained that a governor’s daughter had seemingly vanished from the face of the earth. Ducane was already threatening to come down personally, but had been dissuaded from such a course of action by his advisors and legal briefs. Ducane’s presence, more as a father than a politician, would have stirred up the press all over again, and press attention was the very last thing in the world the FBI wanted. Not only would it generate the usual seven and a half thousand crank calls, every single one of them presenting another lead that would have to be followed up, it also – and perhaps more relevantly – would serve to highlight the fact that the most powerful internal investigative body in the country had accomplished nothing.

A little after two that same afternoon, as Leland was once again staring at a detailed map of New Orleans, its brightly-colored map pins indicating the route McCahill and Catherine Ducane had taken from the point they entered the city, an agent called Paul Danziger stepped through into the office and told Fraschetti there was a call he should take.

Fraschetti told him to deal with it himself.

Danziger insisted.

Fraschetti, on edge, frustrated more than he could ever remember, turned and snatched at the receiver.

‘Yes!’ he barked.

‘Agent Leland Fraschetti,’ a voice on the other end stated calmly, matter-of-factly.

‘It is. Who is this?’

‘Did you know that Ford only ever built sixteen thousand hardtop versions of the Mercury Turnpike Cruiser?’

The hairs on the nape of Fraschetti’s neck stood to attention. ‘Who is this?’ Fraschetti asked again. He inched around the desk and sat down. He looked up at Danziger, raised his eyebrows. Danziger nodded, confirming that they were tracing the call even as he spoke.

‘Shame of it is, I really loved that car. I mean I really loved that car, you know?’

Fraschetti’s negotiator training kicked in on automatic. Say nothing negative. Everything positive, everything reassuring. ‘I can only imagine. It is a truly beautiful car.’

‘Uh-huh, sure as hell is. I trust you and your colleagues are taking good care of her. You never know, I might need her back someday.’

‘Yes, we’re taking very good care of the car, Mr…?’

‘No names yet, Leland. Not just yet.’

Fraschetti could not place the accent. It was American, but there were undertones… of where?

‘So how can we help you?’ Fraschetti asked.

‘Be patient,’ the voice said. ‘There is a reason for all of this. A very good reason. In a little while, perhaps a day, maybe two, it will all become apparent. You’re gonna need the girl back, right?’

‘We sure are. She’s okay?’

‘She’s fine, a little temperamental, a little headstrong, but then you only have to look at her background, her family, and you could guess she was gonna be something of a handful.’ The voice laughed. There was something intensely disturbing about that sound.

‘So, as I was saying, you’re gonna need the girl, but in order to get the girl you’re gonna have to trade her for something.’

‘Of course,’ Fraschetti said. ‘Of course we understood all along that there would have to be a trade.’

‘Good enough. So I’ll be in touch. I just wanted you to know that you were doing a fine job, and in all honesty I wouldn’t feel the same way if someone else was handling things. I’m keeping tabs on everything that’s going on. I understand it must be somewhat stressful, but I wouldn’t want you guys to be losing any more sleep over this. This is a personal thing, and we’re gonna get it all figured out in a personal kind of way.’

‘Okay, I understand that, but-’

The line went dead in Fraschetti’s ear.

He waited a second, two, three, and then he was standing in the doorway of his office screaming for the result.

‘Call box,’ Danziger shouted from the other side of the main office. ‘Call box on Gravier… got two units on the way there now.’

The same place as the car, Fraschetti thought, and he knew, he just knew once again, that by the time those two units reached Gravier they would find absolutely nothing.

The Washington units arrived a little after seven. It was raining. Leland Fraschetti had not slept for the better part of thirty-six hours. Governor Charles Ducane had called the attorney general himself, figuring, perhaps, that as far as the legal and judicial system was concerned he couldn’t get much higher, and the attorney general had called the director of the FBI personally and told him to get his ass in gear.

This is a governor’s daughter we’re talking about, Bob, Attorney General Richard Seidler had told the director. A goddamned Louisiana governor’s daughter, and we have a bunch of half-assed kindergarten cops meandering all over the countryside with their thumbs up their asses waiting for someone to tell ’em the game is already in the third quarter. This is your nightmare, Bob, and believe me we better wake up in the morning all relieved and ready for breakfast or the shit’s gonna fly six ways to Sunday.

FBI director Bob Dohring listened and acknowledged. He did not retort in an antagonistic or challenging manner. As far as he was concerned, he had already sent two units down to New Orleans and that was as good as it was going to get. Attorney General Richard Seidler could fuck himself right in the ass, but then again Dohring figured the guy’s dick was too short.

Fraschetti was thanked for his work and sent home. Agents Luckman and Gabillard were thanked also, and temporarily reassigned to a field office in Metairie. Washington unit chiefs Stanley Schaeffer and Bill Woodroffe relocated everything from Baton Rouge FBI Co-ordination and set up camp in the New Orleans Field Office on Arsenault Street. They rearranged tables and chairs. They put up whiteboards and city maps. They listened to the call Fraschetti had taken over and over again, until every man present knew it verbatim. They processed every full and partial print from both the callbox and every coin in it near Gravier, and came away with two minor felons, a guy on parole after four and a half years in Louisiana State Pen. for molesting a fifteen-year-old cheerleader called Emma-Louise Hennessy, and a man called Morris Petri who, in August of 1979, had mailed a box of human faeces to the governor of Texas. Every other print was either too incomplete to process, or was a non-person as far as the federal government was concerned. No-one who fitted their profile had used that phone. Woodroffe and Schaeffer had known – even before they’d begun the exercise – that they were doing it for no other reason than form and protocol. In the final analysis, if everything went tits up and the girl died or was never found, their careers would be on the line for the slightest omission in procedure. They sat up ’til three on Thursday morning brainstorming, and came away with nothing but migraines and caffeine overdoses.

The baton had passed. The new runners were fresh and watered and willing, but the race had no apparent beginning and the end, if indeed there was an end, was nowhere in sight.

The track seemed circular, and even when Criminalistics came back with a third repetition of the autopsy results, with chemical formulas and blood types and hair samples and fingernail scrapings, it seemed they had all run like fury after their own tails and wound up back at the starter’s gate.

It was what it was, and what it was was a bitch.

Morning of Thursday the twenty-eighth. It was now four days and some hours since Jim Emerson had peered down into the darkness of the Cruiser’s trunk and spoiled his appetite. The city of New Orleans was going about its business, the press had been shut down on any reports regarding the kidnapping of Catherine Ducane, and folks like Emerson, Michael Cipliano and John Verlaine were spending their daylight hours looking at other bodies and other rap sheets, the car wrecks and Vietnams of entirely different lives.

A voice specialist had been enlisted to analyse the recording made of the call Fraschetti had taken the previous afternoon. His name was Lester Kubis, and though he looked nothing like Gene Hackman he had nevertheless watched The Conversation a good two dozen times. He believed that technology would advance to the point where you could listen to the smallest intimacies of anybody’s life, and he looked forward to that day immensely. Lester sat in a small dark room with his large headphones and pored over the brief section of tape for several hours. He came back with a somewhat tentative outline which suggested that the caller had spent time in Italy, New Orleans, Cuba, and somewhere in the south-eastern states, perhaps Georgia or Florida. He estimated the caller’s age at sixty to seventy years of age. He could not be precise as to his origin, nor any other specific identifying features. This information, though it would prove immeasurably valuable once they apprehended the caller, did not in any significant way assist their current investigation. The age bracket had served to narrow the field, but with a population of something around two hundred and fifty million spread across three and a half million square miles, they were still searching for a molecule in a ballpark. The fact that the call had been made from Gravier meant that the caller, not necessarily the kidnapper, was still in New Orleans, though it was nothing more than a couple of hours to the state line either way. The girl, Woodroffe felt certain, had been spirited out of Louisiana within hours of the kidnapping. Either that or she was already dead. Schaeffer was sure there was more than one man involved. The lifting of McCahill’s body from the back seat and into the trunk of the Cruiser would not have been easily done alone, but they both knew they were guessing and fishing. Schaeffer had taken three calls from the head of operations in Washington by lunchtime, and he knew they were as desperate as everyone else. Rare it was to be assigned to a case that had involved Bureau Director Dohring personally, and upon such things a career was exalted or finished. Schaeffer knew little of Governor Ducane himself, but imagined that, much like all governors, senators and congressmen, he would believe the world and all its resources available to him twenty-four seven. Such a case would not die down or disappear. Such a case would be among the highest-profile investigations until it was finished, one way or the other. And he, too, knew it would only be so long before Ducane would appear in person. No matter the life, no matter the pressures, a father was a father when all was said and done. Schaeffer knew Ducane had already threatened to fly down there and kick some FBI ass, but Washington had assured Schaeffer they were doing all they could to keep the governor in Shreveport.

By mid-afternoon on Thursday tempers were fraying and patience was as thin as rice-paper. Woodroffe had taken six men out to Gravier to trawl the area around the site of the car and the call box in search of anything else indicative of the caller’s identity or the killer’s motivation. Schaeffer held court in the Field Office, he and five men tracking through the entire chain of events since the discovery of McCahill’s body. There were many questions, but seemingly no further answers, and by early evening when Woodroffe returned empty-handed, Schaeffer believed they had reached an impasse.

At eight minutes past seven the second call came.

The caller asked for Stanley Schaeffer by name. He told the field agent who took the call that Stan would know what it was about, but refused to identify himself.

‘Good evening, Agent Schaeffer,’ were the words that greeted Schaeffer when he took the receiver and identified himself.

It was the same voice, undoubtedly. Schaeffer would have recognized that voice a hundred years from now.

‘You are well, I trust?’ the voice asked.

‘Well enough,’ Schaeffer replied. He waved his hand to quieten down the murmur of voices around him and took a seat at his desk.

Woodroffe gave him a thumbs-up. The call was being recorded and traced.

‘I am calling from a different callbox,’ the voice said. ‘I understand it takes approximately forty-three seconds to locate me, so I won’t waste time with asking how the investigation is going.’

Schaeffer opened his mouth to speak but the voice continued.

‘I told your colleague Agent Fraschetti that a trade would be required. I am now going to give you my terms and conditions, and if they are not met I will shoot the girl in the forehead and leave her body in a public place. Understood?’

‘Yes,’ Schaeffer said.

‘Bring Ray Hartmann down to New Orleans. You have twenty-four hours to find him and get him here. I will call at exactly seven p.m. tomorrow evening and he should be ready to take my call. At this time this is all I ask of you.’

‘Hartmann, Ray Hartmann. Who is Ray Hartmann?’

The voice laughed gently. ‘That is all part of the game, Agent Schaeffer. Tomorrow evening, seven p.m., and have Ray Hartmann there to take my call or Catherine Ducane is irretrievably dead.’

‘But-’ Schaeffer started.

The line went silent.

Woodroffe was in the doorway before Schaeffer had replaced the receiver in the cradle.

‘Two blocks down and east of Gravier,’ Woodroffe said. ‘We have a unit three or four minutes away already.’

Schaeffer leaned back in his chair and sighed. ‘Won’t find anything,’ he said quietly.

‘You what?’

Schaeffer closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘You won’t find anything down there.’

Woodroffe looked momentarily irritated. ‘You think I don’t realize that?’

Schaeffer waved his hand in a conciliatory fashion. ‘I know, Bill, I know.’

‘So who the hell is this Ray Hartmann?’

‘I’m fucked if I know,’ Schaeffer said. He rose from his chair and filled a paper cone from the water cooler. ‘I don’t know who he is or where he is, but we’ve got twenty-four hours to find him and get him here or the girl is dead.’

‘I’ll call Washington,’ Woodroffe said.

‘And give the tape to Kubis and see if he can find out anything else about this guy.’

‘Sure thing,’ Woodroffe replied. He turned and left the room.

Schaeffer drank his water, crumpled the cone and tossed it into the trashcan.

He returned to his desk and sat down heavily. He sighed and closed his eyes.

Outside it started raining, and a little more than two miles from where Stanley Schaeffer sat an elderly man, perhaps sixty-five or seventy, watched a stream of generic gray sedans invade a street not far from Gravier.

Tucking his hands in his overcoat pockets he turned and walked away. He whistled as he went, a tune called ‘Chloe’, a classic by Kahn and Morret that was popularized by Spike Jones in the ’50s, a song that told of a lonely girl searching for her lost love.

The old man had wanted to tell them more, had wanted to tell them everything, but as so many of his friends in the old country used to say, ‘A temptation resisted is the true measure of character.’ There was a time and a place for everything. The place was New Orleans, and the time would be tomorrow evening when Ray Hartmann came home.