A few blocks over was a fastfood place, and I got a burger and coffee to go. While I was waiting I called Condon and told him to send his troops and when I hung up I knew there was no going back. I drove back to the wineshop and parked across the street.
I watched customers come and go. The big rush was on Friday and Saturday nights; Sundays were slower, so much so the place shut down at two in the afternoon. The clients now were mostly upscale couples, in to get wine for lunch or dinner, coming back out with their bottles in plastic carrying bags. By one o’clock I had counted fifteen customers, with an hour left before the shop closed for the day. But the Spiderwoman had yet to show up.
There had to have been an easier way, I told myself.
Too late to worry, I argued back.
At one twenty a police car drove up, and one of the cops went inside. I went cold all over, cursing them for their laxness. They weren’t being paid to buy tonight’s six-pack on city time; hadn’t anybody told them that?
But finally, an interminable seven minutes later, the cops drove off.
It was a felony, no matter how you looked at it. The last thing I needed was to compound it with a shootout.
Why the hell didn’t she come? It would all be so simple then: take her license number, get it run for an address, go there …
At one forty-five two black men opened the door and went inside. I put my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. Six minutes later there was a shot, followed by three more in quick succession. I felt something inside me spasm, and I knew this had been the worst idea I’d ever had.
Twenty
The door of the store flew open, and the two men came running out, their guns in their hands. I watched them vanish down the sidewalk and heard a powerful engine start. Three minutes later the first police car swung into the driveway, its blue flasher going, and I wondered if the same cop I’d seen before would get out, but these were two different ones. They ran inside, guns drawn, and a few seconds later another cruiser pulled up, blocking the street behind me. One of the first cops appeared in the doorway of the wineshop and yelled something I didn’t catch.
For the next half hour it was a circus. The detectives came, a pair I’d seen around but didn’t know well enough to speak to. But it wasn’t the cops I was interested in. It was the gray-haired woman getting out of the maroon Lincoln, walking toward the front door, stopping to talk to the policeman, and going inside.
She was wearing pearls, high heels, and a fur piece and I wondered if she sat around the house like that or whether she’d dressed just to come to a robbery.
I could imagine the scene inside right now, with the white-faced clerk explaining that it had all been very weird, the two black men had drawn pistols, made her lie on the floor, and she was sure it was a robbery, but even though they pulled the cash drawer out there didn’t seem to be anything missing, and the shots had only damaged some bottles on the shelves. They’d made a mess of course, spilling things off the counter and even ransacking the office in the back. Maybe that’s where they thought the real money was. And Francine LeJeune, her face tight, would go to the back office and look around at the clutter of papers all over the floor and the overturned chair and realize it was impossible, just now, to know what was missing, if anything was.
It would only be hours later that she would be sure that the address book was gone. Or the card file. Or whatever medium might be used for keeping such information. If they had found it. As they were supposed to.
Except that now I wasn’t sure I needed it, because the so-called robbery itself had done the job, drawn the Spiderwoman here, and as she climbed back into her Lincoln, I knew it was only a matter of my following, and I was glad I had my own car now, to wrestle in and out of traffic.
She probably wouldn’t expect to be followed. Holdups shake people, and her mind would still be on what had happened at the shop—if she was an ordinary person. But that was an assumption I couldn’t make, I reminded myself. She wasn’t ordinary; she was the Spiderwoman, and what ran in her veins was colder than ice.
So I hung back, letting her get four cars ahead on Magazine and speeding through a yellow light as I followed her left onto Louisiana, hoping there were no cops nearby.
It could be a wild goose chase, of course, but it was the only chance I had. The two “robbers” had also been looking for Scott, and they obviously hadn’t found him at the shop.
She was headed for Claiborne and probably the expressway. I had gotten her license number when she went past, but I didn’t want to wait for it to be run. Still, if I lost her, at least I had something.
I cursed myself for not having a car phone. The damn things were expensive, and very little of my work involved instant communications; I used a handheld radio when I needed to contact somebody on a stakeout. But right now I could have used a telephone on the seat next to me. Well, it didn’t do any good to wish.
She was on the interstate now, and I followed, rising above the city, the Superdome falling behind on the left. But she surprised me, leaving the freeway after a couple of miles for Claiborne again where it headed east, toward the Ninth Ward and the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal.
I followed her, weaving my way through the old Holy Cross district, an assemblage of shotgun houses tenanted mostly by blacks. In one of the houses, I rememberd vaguely, Fats Domino had been born, and a thread of the old tune “Walkin’ to New Orleans” popped up in my brain.
At the St. Bernard line, where the parish of Orleans ends, Claiborne changes abruptly to Judge Perez Drive, which says something about relative views of greatness. Claiborne was an influential governor in the last century; Perez was a segregationist despot in this one. He’d ruled Plaquemines Parish with an iron hand for about thirty years, and they’d thought highly of him in neighboring St. Bernard Parish, as well. He’d threatened to run an electric fence along the parish line, to keep out blacks and feds. For his trouble he was excommunicated by the Church, but when he died in 1968, he got a requiem mass, because, some suggested, in Louisiana even God takes bribes.
Why did I think the Spiderwoman and Judge Perez might have been political allies?
We were in Chalmette now, not far from the place where Jackson had defeated Packenham in 1815, with the help of a bunch of trappers and some pirates. The British had made the mistake of advancing over an open field, against musketry and artillery; I hoped I wasn’t about to make a mistake just as bad.
She took Paris Road south, to Highway 46, which ran alongside the river, all the way to Poydras, site of a succession of levee breaks that had helped save New Orleans up until this century, when the government finally built the spillways. You only survived along the river at somebody else’s expense. I thought: his broken levee was your good luck, because it gave the surging waters somewhere to go besides your own land. It was a dog-eat-dog attitude, and I wondered idly if it might not have something to do with the way some people still operated.
We were well out of Chalmette, almost to Meraux, the first in the series of small communities that lined the river, when ahead of me she turned in. I slowed.
It was a plantation house, set back two hundred yards from the road, with a lawn shaded by pecan trees. I saw her car winding its way up the drive and noted the two-foot-high brick wall supporting a wrought iron fence, reflecting as I drove past the already closed front gate, that she must have an automatic device to open and shut it.
I went another half mile, found a farm road, and turned around. From here I could see the big house, set off by itself, with the wall running completely around the property. It was the kind of wall you put up for ornamentation, or to divide your property from somebody else’s, not the kind that effectively keeps people out. I wondered if there was an alarm for that.
Two ways in, I thought: the front or through the fields. There wasn’t any cover in front, but the fields were thick with cane, almost ready for harvest. That pretty well decided it.
I went on to Meraux, found a pay p
hone, and called Sandy. “I need some backup,” I said. Then I told her what I was planning to do.
“Micah, you’re crazy,” she said.
“I know. But I can’t think of anything else.”
“You’re gonna get caught, and that’ll be it, man.”
“If Scott’s in there, it’s worth the risk.”
“You may not be dealing with Gabe Condon this time; did you think of that?”
“I know I’m not. Look, can you come?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Should I bring a black mask?”
“No. I’ll do the dirty work. I just want you for stakeout and backup.”
“What? You planning to be the first one-armed cat burglar?”
“Something like that,” I mumbled. Then I told her what to get at my office.
An hour and a half later she met me near the pay phone. I’d been back a couple of times, cruising past to ensure nothing had changed. More than that I couldn’t do without arousing suspicion. We only had two more hours until dark. I got the phone book and went through the Ls but there was no LeJeune listed for the area.
“Call Directory Assistance and get the number of the wineshop,” I said to Sandy. “My guess is they’re still open, so call whoever’s there and tell them you’re with the insurance company; that Mrs. LeJeune reported a robbery earlier and you need to call her back. Make sure you get her home number.”
She nodded and put a quarter in the phone, and a few seconds later I heard a very concerned insurance adjuster asking for information. Sandy, I had learned, could be anybody, anytime the occasion demanded. She said once that it came from being invisible in our society; that a black person trying to survive had to be able to play a multitude of roles.
After she’d made the second call she hung up and handed me a slip of paper. “Here. May I ask what you plan to do? Invite yourself for cocktails?”
“Hardly.” I smiled. She shrugged, knowing my mind was made up. Maybe it would work, maybe not. We’d see.
We made another next check of the house in her car, Sandy driving while I hunkered down in her back seat. Maybe, I told myself, when this was over, I would have a chance to sleep. A hundred years from now.
God, let Scott be there.…
“Micah, there’s more cars there now.” Her voice shook me out of my lethargy. “Looks like a little party or something. Must be expecting more, ’cause the gate’s open.”
I prayed that the party wouldn’t break up until after dark, until I’d had my chance.
There might be a contact alarm on the brick wall, but I didn’t think so, just as I didn’t think there’d be infrared beams on the lawn: too many false soundings from squirrels and birds. You could rig up a computer to screen them out, but it was expensive, and no system is perfect. No, the alarm system would be at the house itself. And if that was the case, it didn’t matter much, because all I needed to do was get close enough and then all hell would break loose with my blessings. I was more worried about guards, because they were less predictable, but I hadn’t seen any. Which meant they were probably inside; a little room off the entrance, with a peephole out onto the lawn, like in the governor’s mansion at Baton Rouge. And somebody sitting in a chair by the kitchen door.
We changed drivers on a side street and this time I made the swing past the plantation while Sandy drove all the way down to Violet and turned onto Highway 39, because in a small place like Violet you couldn’t stay in one place for very long without people noticing. Nothing had changed on the River Road except that there was less light. Good. Sundown couldn’t come quickly enough. This time I went all the way to Poydras, letting the air thicken into dusk, and swung east to where the highway met Judge Perez, where I turned north again, this time passing half a mile behind the house, which was a barely discernable blot now against a darkening sky.
I met Sandy at Cypress Point Shopping Center in Mereaux. We locked her car and got into mine, because if the cops found hers parked there, they’d revert to the usual stereotypes about blacks, especially when Sandy told them it had broken down. If they ran my plate, though, they’d get my name and profession and know something was up.
We went back the way I’d come, and she pulled over at the edge of the cane field, behind the big house. I got my equipment: a flashlight and the items she had brought, the latter stowed in my knapsack, as I had asked her to do. With my right hand, I put my left arm through one strap and drew the strap up to my shoulder. Then I slipped my good arm through the other strap and started my lonely trek.
I kept the sugarcane on my left, skirting the planted area, confident that I could duck into the thick rows of growth if anyone saw me. My feet slid on the ground barely dry, and once or twice I stepped into a puddle, feeling myself sink into the goo.
They call it gumbo mud, and before the levees it was deposited with the yearly floods, bringing fertility to the land. Now the floods are a thing of the past, but the mud is still there, though presumably some day its potential will be exhausted.
It was a strange thing to be thinking about, the problems of flood-plain agriculture. But it was a more pleasant subject than the one at hand.
I was halfway there when I heard the movement behind me. I froze, and my hand went down to the butt of my gun.
Footsteps. Dogging my own, gently crunching the fallen cane stalks. Too light to be human.
I turned slowly, letting the gun butt fill my hand.
The dog stared at me, head lowered, it eyes fixed on my own. It was a mongrel, part hound, part something else, maybe forty pounds. And it was growling.
I took a slow step backward and saw its haunches start to quiver. It was lean to the point of emaciation, probably living off whatever it could forage. Maybe somebody in one of the houses within a mile or so thought of it as theirs, but if it were found flattened in the road tomorrow nobody would grieve.
And if it launched itself at a stranger in the cane fields, nobody would give a damn, either.
I thought about the times I’d killed dogs in Nam, when their silence was the price of my life in some hamlet twenty miles from the nearest allied troops. I never enjoyed it, but I was a realist: I valued my own life more than I did a dog’s.
But if I shot now, I would be risking a mission that was already questionable at best. Maybe somebody would figure a hunter was in the fields, jacklighting, but not if they stopped to think about it: the sound of a short-barreled pistol is too different from that of a shotgun or rifle, and it was too early to be hunting at night.
I didn’t have much choice: forty pounds of hound is nothing to take lightly, and with only one good hand I was already at too much of a disadvantage. Unless …
Moving my right arm slowly, I pulled down the strap over my left shoulder and shrugged off the knapsack, letting it slide to the gound behind me. The dog’s lip lifted, revealing its fangs, and it snarled at my movement. I tried making friendly noises, but the growling only increased: it sensed I was an interloper, and even if this territory didn’t belong to it, it knew it damn sure didn’t belong to me.
I was reaching for the pack when it launched itself, a blur of gray that caught me off balance, giving me barely enough time to swing the pack between us. It snarled in frustration, and I rolled, trying to keep the heavy canvas between us as a shield. It tried to launch itself again, but this time when I swung the pack I caught it alongside the head, sending it rolling. It was up in an instant, but not before I made a hammer motion, clouting it between the eyes with the gun butt. It yelped, and I used the few seconds to reach into the sack, letting my gun go as I touched the object I wanted. I drew it out, flipping it on just as the animal flew toward me a third time.
There was a flash and a sizzling sound. The dog uttered a choked bark and fell like a dead weight. I waited a few seconds, catching my breath, but it only lay there, whining. It would be another couple of minutes before it was able to get back to its feet, and my guess was that it would head for the road with its tail between its
legs.
For the first time in my life I was greatful for a punk called Sammy Short, who’d tried to use the stun gun on me once and gotten clipped on the head for his trouble. My first impulse had been to throw it into the river, but then I thought it might one day come in handy. It never occurred to me that I’d end up using it on a dog.
I brushed myself off and put the stun gun in my belt, within easy reach. Then I picked up my revolver, shouldered the pack, and started forward again.
It took me fifteen more minutes of walking before I reached the rear wall. I halted and pulled out my binoculars and trained them on the back of the house.
All of the windows of the big house were lit and I searched each one in turn. The party seemed to be downstairs, if party it was: at any rate, I caught glimpses of men in evening clothes and a couple of women in frilly dresses. I moved my sights to the second story.
At the left end of the house there didn’t seem to be any movement, just pale light behind gauze curtains. But on the right I caught a shadow passing in front of the window like a spirit. I waited, my binoculars focused on the single square of light. The shadow appeared again, from the other direction. I waited. Three seconds later the shadow came again, retracing its steps.
Somebody upstairs was pacing.
Odd, while the celebration went on below.
I checked my watch. I had two minutes left before Sandy called. I flashed my light along the brick wall and then along the wrought iron bars, but there was no trace of an alarm system. Stepping up onto the low brick wall, I swung first one leg and then the other over the iron railings. Then I jumped down into the yard.
There were floodlights near the house, but the lawn was dark. I ran hunched over, heading for a giant elm that would provide cover. Once there I strained to listen; all I could hear was the distant sound of glasses clinking and an occasional high-pitched, woman’s laugh.
Deep Kill (The Micah Dunn Mysteries) Page 18
