Crescent City Connection (14 page)

Abasolo said, “Let’s get Cappello in on this—and then let’s go talk to Joe.” Lieutenant Joe Tarantino, in charge of Homicide.

The rest of the day was dizzying. They went from Tarantino to the captain in charge of the detective bureau, right up to the acting superintendent. It was only about three hours before Skip found herself at FBI headquarters.

She’d worked with one of these dudes before—Special Agent Turner Shellmire. “So you figured it out, too,” he said.

“Figured what out?” Skip said, knowing she hadn’t figured much out at all.

He pointed out the window, somewhere in the direction of the river. “The Crescent City Connection.”

It was the name of a bridge across the Mississippi. “This dude knows us.”

THE WHOLE THING had happened so fast Daniel was a little woozy. He’d lived a long time in Idaho with people who didn’t give a damn; he’d seen a lot of things, but he’d never seen anything like this. Anything remotely like this.

He was feeling kind of schizophrenic about it. On the one hand, exhilarated, a little dizzy. On the other, a little down. Like somehow it shouldn’t have been so easy. Like it’s the kind of thing people talk about but don’t actually do. Because for one thing they wouldn’t know how. For another…

He didn’t quite know what the other thing was. That path made him feel kind of wiggly and crawly, like he needed to get away, quick. He knew what it was, deep down, but he couldn’t bring himself actually to think the thought: Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea.

Also, it was making him feel strange new ways about his father that he hadn’t sorted out yet. Respect was way high on the list. The man had actually pulled it off. He couldn’t get over it.

And he had done it with such ease. It was as if he had snapped his fingers, and—poof!—the asshole was dead.

It made Daniel feel weird, no question about it. Like his dad was different, or maybe even more than the person he knew—wasn’t really his dad, but some kind of evil magician.

Truth to tell, Daniel was a little in awe.

He thought:
You can think and think about a thing and still not
have any idea what it is until you actually do it. Like sex. Or being a father. Or killing an animal.

For some reason he hadn’t thought killing a person would feel like getting broadsided by a truck.

It had happened so damn fast.

His father had called him into the office in a kind of excited rage, almost frothing at the mouth, furious but getting off somehow. Daniel could see he was getting off.

“The bitch is out there again, son. The bitch is on the move. It’s like God sent her to torment me.” He grinned all of a sudden. “But we’re gonna get her, Daniel. We are going to get her.”

Daniel sighed, sitting down without waiting for an invitation. His dad ran a formal office even though it was in the living room of an apartment. He sat at a desk and if you were called there, you sat across from him. “What’s up, Daddy?” He had his dossier to do.

“Listen, we have to do another one.” His dad’s mouth was tight, but his muscles fairly rippled under his polyester shirt. His body was a coiled spring.

His dad had done Billy Hutchison, yes. Daniel knew it in some part of his brain, but he hadn’t been in on it—it was a California operation, and Jacomine had used California people, loyalists from his Blood of the Lamb days. Half the cops in the country might be looking for Errol Jacomine, but he still had quite a little underground following.

His dad had told him how he did it, too. He had picked only the most loyal lieutenants. He had been sure that the people at the top were absolutely trustworthy. And those people now formed the network that had become the Jury.

Daniel knew all that perfectly well, but it still seemed rather abstract; kind of exciting, yet distant.

Now they were going to do someone, and Daniel had proof they could—the Hutchison proof. His stomach fluttered.

“You know that good police chief they almost got in New Orleans?” Lightning had shot out of his father’s eyes.

“Yeah. I think so.” Daniel wasn’t all that sure what he meant—he’d been too busy with the Lovelace problem.

“Some asshole killed him.” He pounded a fist on his desk. “I will not have that. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ I will not
have
it!”

“Oh, shit.” He remembered now. An honest cop. You didn’t see that every day in Louisiana.

“We are going to do the asshole that did him. We are going to get the bitch.”

“Hold it, Daddy. Wait a minute. It was a woman?”

“No. Where’d you get that idea?”

“You said we’re gonna get the bitch.”

His father chuckled. “I certainly did. Well, I certainly did say that. Because this time we are. Detective Skip Langdon’s who I meant. Mine enemy. Every time I turn around the bitch is out to get me. Always has been, right from the first time she laid eyes on me. Some kind of weird grudge, probably about something simple like sexual repression—nearly always is. Hell, I can’t figure it out. You ever have anybody hate you, Daniel? For no reason? It’s a baaad feeling. I never did a damn thing to piss her off, so I have to conclude she was sent by the forces of Satan to torment me.”

“I thought you said God sent her.”

“Why would I say that? She couldn’t have come from God. If she’d have come from God she’d have been on our side.” His father’s voice had the slight edge that Daniel was getting to know—it seemed familiar, as if he remembered it from childhood, but at first he hadn’t recognized it as a danger signal. He did now and he kept his mouth shut.

“Detective Langdon made the arrest,” his father said. “Some peckerwood crazy who’s going to get off on an insanity defense.” He shook his head. “Worst thing that ever happened to justice in this country.”

Daniel nodded. “Amen to that.”

“So we’re just going to shoot her prisoner right out from under her, thereby savin’ the taxpayers the cost of a trial.”

Daniel nodded again.

“See, this is the way it’s gonna work. Later on today, when they finish beating him with rubber hoses, or whatever they do, they’re taking him on a Hollywood walk. That’s where they trot out their prize criminals on the way to be booked. So the media can get some nice footage and make the cops look good.” He sat back in his chair, hands folded in his lap, a contented, happy man, the fury and frothing only a memory. “And that’s when we’re gonna get him.”

“How’re we gonna know when it is?”

“We have contacts, son. We have some real good contacts.”

“In the police department or the media?”

“Both.”

Daniel never knew if these things were true. Probably his dad had one contact in either the police department or the media. But who cared? He always seemed to know the right person in the right place. Either that or he had a lot more followers than Daniel imagined.

“Now here’s a map of the area. The beauty of it’s that nobody, absolutely nobody’s going to be watching the Broad Street overpass. Assholes’ll be falling all over themselves to get their smug little faces on TV.” His dad pronounced it TEEvee, on purpose, Daniel thought, to belittle it. “You’ll have time for one shot. Just as they clear the edge of the building.”

This was what he had come here for and what he wanted to do. All the same, Daniel felt his breathing go ragged.

“And another thing,” his dad said. “In three days we’re moving all operations to New Orleans.”

“What?”

It was a rhetorical question that his father didn’t dignify with an answer.

“Now get down the road, son. You’ve got plenty of time to find us a place before you have to get up on that overpass. Okay, let’s think now. We need something big enough for a lot of people—the four of us here and three or four more, say. And it has to be in a neighborhood where you wouldn’t notice white and black people together, all coming and going at the same address. And I guess that means a place with a lot of foot traffic, since
we’re
going to have a lot.” He closed his eyes. “Magazine Street. A nice duplex on Magazine Street. Or just off it. Irish Channel, anyway.”

Daniel was getting into it. “No. Is Magazine Street a main drag? That’s the best. Nobody’ll notice a thing.”

How am I going to find it in one day?
he wondered.

In the end he hadn’t. He didn’t know New Orleans, for one thing, and for another, he didn’t want to miss his appointment on the overpass. He ended up staying overnight at a Holiday Inn.

Holed up in his room, drinking some beer he’d bought, he watched himself on television, shooting Nolan Bazemore.

Or rather he watched Bazemore fall dead and then saw himself leaving the scene, as the police would say. Some cameraman had been quick enough to catch him. But you couldn’t begin to see who he was—he was just another dude in a baseball cap and shades. He was cool, too, hardly even running, just walking fast.

Still, it wasn’t nearly as much fun as television the next night—watching the reactions to the letter. He’d mailed it in New Orleans right before he did the hit.

Various public officials said sober things about vigilante action and taking the law into your own hands—a shrink had opinions on the kind of crazies who’d do a thing like that. And one reporter had had a great idea. Gal named Jane Storey.

Jane had done man-in-the-street interviews. A man in a business suit said, “These people are scary because they’re doing what a lot of us would like to.”

A dignified black man dressed in a waiter’s uniform seemed as mad as Daniel’s dad had been: “This man, this Bazemore killed our only hope of gettin’ out of this mess we’re in.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that, it’s gone. I’m sorry, I think there’s a lot to what they’re sayin’. I’m sorry, I can’t say I disagree with ’em.” He shook his head, a sad look on his face that made Daniel think of the old expression “more in sorrow than in anger.”

A woman in a pink power suit—Daniel was sure she was a liberal-assed lawyer who’d benefit mightily from a good fuck—said, “I thought it was just another group of racists when they killed Billy Hutchison. But… you know… the ACLU defends everyone from pornographers to Nazis if it has to, to protect the First Amendment. These people are like that—they couldn’t have picked more different enemies. They’ve proved to me, anyway, that they’re not racists and they’re making a point. I mean, you can’t say they’re not making a point. They’ve got something to say.”

The camera turned to Jane, who said to the audience: “Too bad they felt they had to kill to be heard.”

“Yeah!” Daniel shouted. “You got it, Jane, baby. Too damn bad, ain’t it? But, listen—otherwise, who’s gonna listen?”

He couldn’t believe The Jury had so much support.

That day, the day after the hit, Daddy called him into the office.

“Okay, Daniel. Goddammit, okay. The Lord’s work is getting done, even if ours isn’t.”

Daniel grinned. He couldn’t be in that bad a mood, not after what they’d accomplished.

“Have you got the dossier?”

“What?”

“On Rosemarie Owens.”

He’d all but forgotten. He’d put it on a back burner. His father hopped around so much, Daniel wasn’t even sure he’d remember it.

He said, “I’m working on it.”

“All right, boy. All right. You work on it.” Jacomine sounded vague. “What about the girl?”

“Lovelace?”

“Of course, Lovelace. Goddammit, who the fuck else are we looking for?”

“I’ve kind of had my hands full, Daddy.”

“Now is when we’re going to get her. Have you got that?” He was intense today; his eyes were lasers, but he hadn’t raised his voice and he hadn’t hit his son.

After the session in which he’d been struck three times, Daniel had given some serious thought to leaving The Jury. Prayed about it.

In the end the whole hitting thing seemed stupid. Daniel could lay his father out any time he wanted to. If it bothered him so much why didn’t he just do it? Or else quit the movement and go back to Idaho. He asked himself and he asked God. And the answer he got was:
It doesn’t bother me that much. In fact, it’s kind of humorous.

But the hitting was a signal—it meant his dad was under stress. And he wasn’t under stress today. He was mellow as a Buddha.

“Okay,” said Daniel. “You bet. I thought maybe we could put our heads together on it. Brainstorm, maybe.” He didn’t pause for an answer. “I’ve been racking my brain wondering where to look for her. Where would she go?”

His father was steepling his hands again. “To her mother.”

“Naah. Jacqueline’s off with one of her crazy boyfriends—climbing the Andes or some kind of shit.”

“Well, then it’s obvious. Isn’t it, son?”

“I don’t know. Does she have a boyfriend I don’t know about?”

“Hell, you’re her father.”

“I just thought she might have written you.”

“Written me? Did you forget I’m a wanted man, boy? She can’t write because she doesn’t know where I am. Unless you told her, like you told her everything else.”

“Okay, no boyfriend. Her roommate’s her best friend and she’s still at school.”

“Well, bully. So who does that leave?”

The answer came to him like a visitation from an angel. “Isaac. Her only uncle.” He snapped his fingers at the realization. “She’s with Isaac.”

“And where’s he, son?”

“I don’t know, sir.” Daniel was so humbled at realizing how simple it all was, he forgot to be on the defensive.

“Well, I do. He’s in New Orleans. Least he was last time I looked.”

“New Orleans? Where we’re going? How could he be in New Orleans?” It was the last place Daniel would have thought of. Yet it made sense; New Orleans was easily accessible from Jackson, where Lovelace had disappeared.

Sure she’d head for New Orleans.

“He didn’t go there because I was there, that’s the only thing we know. I didn’t pay much attention, because what was the point? But we kept loose tabs on him, and that’s where he was.”

Daniel went to Daddy’s reference shelf and plucked a New Orleans phone book. “He’s not listed.”

“I could have told you that.”

“Okay, help me, Daddy. Help me. You know where he lives, don’t you?”

“Nope, sure don’t.”