Cold Winter Rain (14 page)

“And then you showed up,” Parker said.

“
A stranger rides into town,” Agent Sanders said quietly enough so that only my end of the table heard.

Clark continued.  “There was always, also, the possibility that if Kramer and Woolf White did file a lawsuit, it would be a
qui tam
action, so we would be working together on the civil suit anyway.”

“
And you could use the civil suit for discovery in the criminal case,” I said.

Clark nodded.  “Well, maybe.  There would have been limitations on that, but this office would not mind having both matters open.”

“So now we all have a problem,” I told them.

“
Without problems, lawyers would be out of work,” Clark said.  “You want to tell us about a new one?”

I explained my new of counsel relationship with Woolf White and that asking me for information amounted to asking Bill Woolf for the same information.  The table sat silent for what seemed like five minutes but was probably fifteen seconds.

“Well, I guess we do, at that,” Parker said.

“
Thanks for the invitation,” I said.  “It’s been enlightening.  But at this point, I think we should all go somewhere else and do what we have to do.  Your jobs are to prosecute criminals.  I am not interested in trying to eliminate government corruption, noble though that pursuit may be.  I am a simple person.  My job is to find Kris Kramer.  And from that I shall not waver.”

I stood and turned toward the door.

“Goodbye, Mr. Slate.  For now,” Parker said.

I nodded without turning around, opened the door, and closed it behind me.

As I left the reception area after bidding goodbye to Molly Blevins, Agent Alston caught up to me.

“Slate,” he said.  He gestured toward a small conference room across from Katherine Parker’s office suite.  “Step in here.  I’m holding some property of yours.”

We went into the conference room.  Alston closed the door and handed my Glock back to me, then unstrapped the Ruger from his ankle and returned the small gun to me as well.

“No metal detectors on the way out,” he said.  “I could have handed you these outside, but Agent Sanders and I know your background.  Take care, Slate.”

“
I appreciate your confidence,” I said.

“
Think about cooperating with us, Slate.  Take the short way through this time instead of the long way around.  You want to find a missing girl.  So do we, and we want to finish this investigation.”

“
I’ll consider it,” I said.

“
Do that,” he said.

No one searched me on my way out.  I may have been the only ordinary citizen carrying two guns in a U.S. government facility anywhere on the planet.

The marshals nodded politely as I walked through the turnstile exit.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I’d been spinning my wheels.  I needed to return to basics.

I’d been hired to find a missing girl.  Her father had been working up a case that could send major political players and maybe even a few career criminals -- calling them mobsters was so twentieth century -- to prison.  I’d received a note from someone who wanted me to “STAY OUT OF THE OIL & GAS BUSNESS.”  Everyone, including me, seemed to think these facts were connected.  I needed to find out whether they were.

Returning to basics meant talking to the right people, maybe shaking someone’s cage, making something happen.  Doing something even if it’s wrong, and letting the rough end drag.

The employees of the federal government in that meeting wanted to find Kris Kramer no more and no less than they wanted to drink their dry martinis and eat their shrimp cocktails that night.

But the AUSAs in the Northern District of Alabama lived and died for prosecuting corrupt Alabama politicians.  That was where they made their bones.  And got their names in the newspapers and the political blogs.  They could and would do nothing for me aside from possibly having their technicians in Washington decipher the information on the thumb drive Akilah Ziyenga had entrusted to me.  Corrupt politicians were not my gig.  In Alabama, maybe everywhere, crooks in government were part of the background noise.

Slogging back through the cold mist, heading toward the Sheraton, I checked my voice mail and saw that Sally had called.  I hit reply without listening to the message.  This time she answered.

“
Hi.  Where are you?” I asked.

“
In my office.  The girls and I sort of want to hang around together right now.  Where are you?”

“
Walking the streets of Birmingham in the cold rain.”  I told her about the incident at the Tutwiler and checking into the Sheraton and meeting with the U.S. attorney and her supporting cast.  Then I said, “Look, I’m a little concerned about your safety.  I’m going to ask my police contacts to increase patrols near your condo.  I may have to go on a short trip.”

“
You know I can take care of myself.  But if it makes you feel better, go ahead.  Maybe it will make me feel better too.”

“
Good.  I will make the call, and I will call you back later this afternoon.”

I called Grubbs’ office.  He was out, but when I left the message about patrols with his administrative assistant, she promised that she would see that Grubbs gave the order.

Back at the hotel, I logged into the wireless network with the Mac and searched for Michael Godchaux in New Orleans.

There were four, none with the telephone number in Kramer’s file.  One Michael Godchaux, a guy I probably wouldn’t mind drinking a Dixie beer with, ran public relations for the Saints.  After the allegations that Saints defensive players earned bounties for injuries to opposing quarterbacks and the sanctions against Saints coaches and front-office personnel, this fellow must have felt like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

Another was a senior biology major at Tulane.

A third practiced tax law with one of the oldest law firms in Louisiana.  This one might be Kramer’s man, but a white shoe tax law practice, even in Louisiana, most likely did not put this fellow into intimate contact with the New Orleans Mob.

The fourth Michael Godchaux had earned a degree in accounting at LSU, but I could find no information on this accountant Godchaux after he’d finished undergraduate school.  That absence of information did not seem normal.  Instinct told me this accountant Godchaux and the Godchaux in Kramer’s notes were the same man.

I picked up my iPhone and keyed in the number for Michael Godchaux I'd memorized from Kramer’s notes.

Before I called, I considered turning off the Show My Caller ID feature but decided that Godchaux would be more likely to speak with me if I left it on.

Of course, no one answered; a default canned voice mail announcement played after six rings.

I left a message asking the caller to contact me at the Woolf White law firm in Birmingham -- I worked there, didn’t I? -- and hung up.

Ten seconds later, the iPhone rang and told me that the caller’s identity was blocked.  When I answered, a man’s voice said “Did you call me, Mr. Slate?”

“
Yes,” I said.  “Are you Michael Godchaux?”

“
You must know that, since you called me on this phone, but yes, I am Michael Godchaux.”

“
I could have keyed in the wrong number.”

“
Yes, but you didn’t.  I’ve been expecting you to call.”

“
Then my hunch was right.”

“
What hunch?”

“
You aren’t the Michael Godchaux with the Saints, Michael Godchaux the tax lawyer, or Michael Godchaux the Tulane student.  You are the Michael Godchaux who graduated
cum laude
from LSU in two double O two and then dropped out of sight.  Am I right?”

“
Hmm,” Godchaux said.  “I don’t know.  I don’t believe I am completely invisible.  People do step aside when I exit an elevator.  The doormen in the Quarter still try to entice me inside to see the girls.  But I did go to LSU, I do have an accounting degree, and my previous employer did ask me to make sure I did not Google well.”

“
Where are you working now?”

“
I’m not.  Look, I do want to speak with you, but further conversation needs to happen in person.  How soon can you be in Louisiana?”

I was tempted to say, about forty minutes, but Godchaux did not seem in a mood for explanations.  “How about tomorrow morning?” I suggested.

“All right,” he said.  “When you get here, call this number again.  I’ll give you instructions on meeting me somewhere downtown or in the Quarter.  Don’t call me again until you’re south of Lake Pontchartrain.”

The connection went dead.

I called Sally and told her I’d be getting an early start in the morning for the flight to New Orleans and that I’d see her when I returned tomorrow afternoon.

Then I called Bill Woolf and told him about the conversation with Godchaux.  He listened without comment and told me to take care and to remember to take a pocket tape recorder with me to New Orleans.  I checked the aviation weather on the Mac before shutting it down.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Sunday January 29

Lakefront Airport, on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, offers general aviation a close gateway to downtown New Orleans without mixing into the traffic around Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, which is actually in Kenner, Louisiana, west of New Orleans.

In 2001, the city of New Orleans joined a growing list of cities that discarded long-used names for their airports and changed the names to honor either an illustrious local citizen or someone of national or international renown.

New York changed Idlewild to JFK on Christmas Eve, 1963; a few presidents later, Washington, D.C., added Ronald Reagan’s last name to National Airport.

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.”