“You could be here all day,” he said.
“Unless I had a better offer.” Her voice gave away her age, perhaps still a minor, although her equipment suggested otherwise.
“There’s a guy works here name of Jimmy.”
“So? Am I going to play this next ball or not?”
Before he could explain the twenty dollars he proffered onto the machine’s glass surface, she advised him, “That won’t even buy you a hummer, sweetie.” She drew back the springed metal ram preparing to launch another ball, but LaMoia grabbed her hand, stopping her.
“Need a little face to face with Jim-bo, sweetie. The twenty’s just to keep the meter running.”
The twenty disappeared into the bib of the overalls. There wasn’t a lot of room left up there.
“A location where I might find him would be nice.”
She pointed to the ceiling. “He goes on in an hour. His is the first room on this side,” she said. Eyeing LaMoia actively, she added, “Another twenty you go home with a smile on your face.”
He offered her a big, toothy smile. “I’m smiling just thinking about it.”
“You got a car with a backseat? Pull it around back. Lemme know.”
“We’ll talk,” he said.
“No we won’t,” she corrected. She released the plunger and launched the steel ball into the flashing lights, bells and buzzers.
LaMoia found the stairs and climbed them to the second story. From the far side of the first door Oprah played loudly. He thought she had given him the wrong room—one of Smiling John’s active employees, he thought. He knocked carefully.
“Yeah?” came a male smoker’s voice.
LaMoia fished two twenties under the crack in the door. Probably a night’s wage in a dump like this. The twenties disappeared. LaMoia stood there for a full minute expecting an inquiry or the door to open. “Hey!” LaMoia spoke to the door.
Oprah went louder.
LaMoia knocked for a second time. He teased a hundred under the door, but brought it back to his side. He teased it through again. The information he sought could not be valued—nothing less than the Pied Piper’s identity.
“I think you got the wrong room.”
“Jimmy?”
“Heat?”
“Was once. Not anymore. Repo now. Don’t want you. My thing is with an individual from your last known address.”
“I don’t think so.” The forty came back through the door.
“The guy wears the same eagle as you do, only on his forearm. Yours is on your right biceps. That bird is the only connection to you. I’m not carrying any trouble for you. The artwork was done at your last address.” LaMoia fished the hundred half through. “Take it.” It sat there, and he suddenly saw it not as currency but as Sarah caught in a deadly tug of war.
The door came open a crack. Jimmy wore a goatee and glasses in dime-store frames. His dark hair was pulled into a ponytail. He looked dumb, like so many of them did.
“Three of you got the same tattoo. I checked with the prison. Of the three, they remembered you. You stayed a little longer than was on the original invitation.”
“You gotta be heat.”
“Was once,” he repeated. “The guy—the one with the eagle on the forearm—is laying bad plastic from San Diego to Seattle. He’s late on payments for a Taurus. I’m representing the car dealer.”
“Never knew him.”
“A name would help. That tattoo was seen laying down the plastic, but we got nothing but aliases. Medium security. You had to run into him.”
The man glanced down at the hundred on the floor.
“Plus the forty,” LaMoia said. “Name of a friend. Anything I can use?”
“Never knew him. Not personally. Not so as I knew a name or nothing.”
“Listen, if you’re milking me. … I’m light as it is—”
“It’s not that. I didn’t know him. You listening?” Disgusted, he said, “He was smooth, that’s all I know about him. Talk his way into anything, out of anything. Was a stunt man—”
“Con artist.”
“Right, a stunt man. In for some kind of something. Sucked up to the screws and the chief. Got his way: butts, weed, booze. Didn’t want to know him. You know? Fuck the little kiss ass.”
LaMoia ate up every detail. “But he got the same tattoo as you,” he reminded, hoping to spur some rivalry. Inmates were little more than boys in this regard.
“Got mine first, Goddamn it. Everyone admiring it, like. Hisself included.” He eased the door open wider, more relaxed. Oprah was on a small color set that favored yellow. Jimmy saw LaMoia checking out the TV and he said, “Got hooked on that bitch in the joint. Can’t give her up.”
“Know what you mean.”
“You watch?”
LaMoia shrugged. “You’re saying all the sucking up won him special treatment. That’s why you didn’t hang with him.”
“He got privileges,” the man complained. “‘Jungle visits,’ we called them.”
“Conjugal visits.”
“Only the butt suckers—the brownnosers—pulled off that kinda shit, I’ll tell you what. Doing time and getting cheese a couple times a month. Gimme a fucking break!”
LaMoia knew it went against the rules, meaning the visits had been arranged by the guards as a form of payment. “He’s married?”
“Two, three times a month he’s sucking and banging the bitch who put them both in the joint the first place, way I heard it.”
“She was also incarcerated?”
“A stunt team, they were. She gets driven over here from the slammer in Lamont, drops the lace and spreads ’em. They do the Dippity-Do and she’s back in the van for Lamont.”
Conjugal visits between two inmates was unheard of in Washington State. “Lamont?”
“It’s the big house for chicks.”
“The wife is doing hard time?” LaMoia sensed his chance to identify the two. The conjugal visits were certainly not official, which meant they would not carry any kind of paperwork. They reeked instead of payoffs, or—knowing this team’s record—a con job. A few screws and a transport were involved at a minimum. “He have money, this guy?”
“How you think he rubs up against the screws so good? ’Course he had money, somewhere. And it must have been quite a few yards. But I heard that about him—no one ran a stunt like this guy. He was in for ripping off old hags, I think. Something like that.” He glanced back at the TV where Oprah paced in front of the stage. “I don’t know shit about him. Stayed clear of that shit.”
LaMoia handed him the remaining forty to add to the hundred on the floor. “You sure you don’t remember a name?”
“No way.”
“Looks?”
“Average. Your height. You gonna run stunts on people, you gotta look average, know what I mean? They gotta trust you.”
“Not me,” LaMoia said. “I don’t trust him an inch.”
CHAPTER
Boldt and Daphne’s admission to the Bureau of Vital Statistics did not come from Montevette, the director of the boys’ home, nor did it come through the front door. Miss Lucy made the contact—at the back door—and in a matter of an hour instead of what might have taken days or even weeks through proper channels. They had no warrant; they were well out of their jurisdictional authority. They possessed only Boldt’s compelling urgency in his eyes and Daphne’s internal calm. With both barrels loaded, no one could refuse them, least of all Walter, a black man in his early fifties who wore polyester trousers and a starched houndstooth shirt. Walter, whose hair was graying at the temples, walked like a man sacrificed at fullback on an overly competitive high school team. His nose had been flattened several times and left to wilt on his face like the curled thumb of an old leather glove. He wore half glasses that magnified a string of dark moles under his left eye.
Boldt and Daphne were led down a long narrow aisle between gunmetal gray shelves that stretched fourteen feet into the air toward bare-bulb funnel
lights and the exposed steel trusses that supported the building’s flat roof. The volume of paperwork overwhelmed Boldt, for this was but one of dozens and dozens of such rows. “I hope this isn’t all adoptions,” he said.
“This here is birth certificates,” Walter replied, his strained voice absorbed like the spoken word in a snow-covered forest. “To your left, death and marriages—same thing, far as I’m concerned. That area toward that far wall is divorces. We got maybe twelve, fifteen stacks filled to the top with ’em.” He turned right, left and right again. A maze of paperwork, marked only by tiny white labels on the shelves and typed stickers on the boxes, the place seemed artificial to Boldt, created simply to overwhelm him. The prospect of dust and gum and paper cuts loomed. His impatience mounted; perhaps he could leave Daphne here to sort through it. But no, he answered himself, two sets of eyes were critical to such an undertaking.
Another right, left and right—they were working their way to this, the top floor’s far corner where a massive chain-link fence isolated the small reception area with its wood bench, wooden counter and black pens on chains. A woman named Amy glanced once when she heard Walter’s approach and a second time as a double take when she saw him in company.
“I need Ole Blue a minute, Amy,” Walter said, indicating the computer.
A computer! Boldt felt a rush of hope. “You’re computerized?”
“I’m not,” Walter replied, “but these stacks are all indexed on Ole Blue, and anything filed after nineteen hundred and eighty-eight is in his memory instead of on the shelves. Thank the lord.” He said, “Although it did cost four jobs up here on the seventh.” He smiled warmly at Daphne. “Seniority do have its privileges.”
Amy came to Walter’s rescue several times over the course of the next ninety minutes. He had trouble keeping the search targeted to all parishes, the system defaulting to citywide searches. The result was that adoption records were sorted parish by parish; neither of them could seem to convince the machine to do a districtwide search. The process was painstakingly slow.
Daphne requested printouts—the number of parishes stunned Boldt. Realizing he had the search dates wrong, Daphne explained patiently to Walter, “We’re particularly interested in adoptions registered from sometime in the last five to six months, right up to the present.”
“Nineteen hundred and eighty-eight to nineteen hundred and ninety-two, I wouldn’t been able to help you.” Hep you. “Ninety-two on they gone directly to the screen. Afore that we still done all the paperwork, but they filed it on computer and archived it on fiche. Now it’s straight to the computer and they run two of ’em—two different locations—one watching the other, backing it up, you know. Only paperwork is the signatures and the court documents. They can’t seem to figure this thing out completely. Always some kind of paperwork involved.”
Boldt’s patience, on the other hand, had run out. He kept his mouth shut and tried to stay out of things. Trudy Kittridge was going to be sold into adoption within a day or two—Boldt felt convinced of this.
With each search, Daphne requested another printout and then studied the results while Walter again isolated a particular parish and conducted the search. Boldt had the feeling that Amy might have accomplished this all much faster, but Walter and Miss Lucy shared an aunt or grandparent—some blood relative—and Walter was their man.
“Lou,” Daphne whispered, gaining his attention.
He joined her at a metal desk, taking a rolling chair that squeaked when he leaned forward.
She contained her excitement, using only her index finger to direct him, so as not to be overheard. No telling who else Walter might know or be related to. Her nails held a clear finish and were cut short. She had filed them recently.
Boldt’s eye followed the line she indicated. The filing was for January. The judge of record was Judge Terence Adams; the attorney, one Vincent Chevalier, whose mailing address placed him in the city. The very next adoption, recorded three weeks later, was again the work of Judge Adams and Vincent Chevalier. Her finger danced down the page. She glanced up and looked at him with wet, excited eyes.
Boldt withdrew his notebook and flipped pages hurriedly. The dates fit into the Pied Piper’s schedule remarkably well—the adoptions coming four to eight working days after each of the abductions. He counted back and realized that if these entries indeed belonged to the Pied Piper, as he now believed, then he still had between two and six days in which to find Kittridge. The adoption process took slightly longer to arrange than he had foreseen. It was the first ray of hope he had felt.
The printout for Tanipahoa Parish showed eleven adoptions performed over the most recent six-month period, all with the same pair: Adams and Chevalier. All but two of the children had been placed with couples living out of state. Prior to November there had been no adoptions in the parish for five months.
“We’ve got them,” Boldt whispered, disbelief permeating his words.
Daphne folded the printout, carefully aligning the corners and using her nail to make the fold. She said, “Now let’s hope we’re not too late.”
CHAPTER
Central air-conditioning provided the New Orleans downtown public library with a large population of homeless, some of whom were effective at passing themselves off as readers, others who abandoned the ruse altogether, sitting at tables while fighting off the exhaustion of walking the streets at night. Technically, the library could not ask them to leave unless they fell asleep. Eyelids fluttered. An occasional page of a newspaper turned in keeping with the act.
The homeless seemed to collect in the periodicals section, perhaps because of its abundance of chairs and tables. Perhaps because of the sports section. Boldt and Daphne split up. Most of the news they sought they believed too recent to have reached microfiche.
Boldt refused Daphne’s suggestion to approach NOPD’s Detective Broole about the attorney Chevalier’s dealings, this based on the assumption that a cop’s curiosity could put the word out on the street, which in turn could jeopardize their efforts.
LaMoia, who wanted to work the husband and wife conviction, also wanted to consult Broole. “Cops know more than newspapers,” he repeated one too many times, bringing Boldt’s wrath down upon him. Assigned surveillance of the attorney, Chevalier, LaMoia was halfway across town. He intended not only “to sit on the man” but to install a caller-ID box on Chevalier’s phone lines in order to monitor the attorney’s incoming calls. Legality was no longer an issue; they had no way to trace Chevalier’s outgoing calls without the involvement of Broole. A warrant would have to be justified. LaMoia had to justify that warrant, as well as keep an eye out for Hale.
Boldt denied both suggestions, electing instead to gather intelligence. The more fact, the more hard information they brought Broole, the better.
Boldt searched newspaper indexes for Vincent Chevalier. Daphne took Judge Adams of Tanipahoa Parish. Thankfully, the Times-Picayune ran a good crime beat.
The Times-Picayune was indexed monthly, available on the fifteenth of every month. The most recent index was for articles published in February. Boldt searched the months of January and February and found no reference on any Chevalier, including Vincent. He then waited his turn to access a reference computer terminal that at peak hours allowed each user only three consecutive searches, and maintained a line a half-dozen deep. Boldt was not used to waiting in lines, except for the office copier. His shield generally moved him to the front of any line.
Boldt restricted the search to the Times-Picayune database and then typed in the name:
V_I_N_C_E_N_T__C_H_E_V_A_L_I_E_R
The computer considered the request. Boldt caught himself holding his breath. A moment later seven listings scrolled down the screen, including publication date, partial headlines, page and column numbers. Five of the seven articles had been published in the paper nearly five years earlier. The first two listings had been page 3 stories, implying a relative importance to them. The last two were barely twelve m
onths out of date. The partial headline on the opening hit read: “POLICE DISCONNECT 911 SCAM …” The last article listed had a title that began: “APPEALS COURT SHOOTS …” That first listing swimming in his head, Boldt signaled Daphne—and half those in the reference section—with a frantic wave of the hand. He asked the person in line behind him how to print out a copy of his search results. A few minutes later, he and Daphne took seats in adjacent microfiche viewing stations, the appropriately boxed issues in hand.
“A nine-one-one scam,” he reminded urgently, clumsily threading the cumbersome roll of film into the antiquated machine. He threaded it upside down on his first effort; reversed, his second try.
“Yes, I caught that,” Daphne said calmly, trying to contain him. She threaded her machine correctly the first time and was reading text before Boldt.
“As in Millie Wiggins’ day care center,” Boldt said, still fumbling.
“Yes.”
“It’s them,” Boldt emphasized.
“It suggests a strong possibility, doesn’t it?”
He glanced at her incredulously, as he failed with the machine for the third time. “Goddamn it!” he hollered too loudly, his fingers refusing to cooperate.
“Here.” She leaned across him, corrected his mistake and restored the machine.
Boldt sped ahead to the article written five years earlier as Daphne returned to her station. “It was page three,” he said, prior to actually locating the article. “You’ve got to think that means it was pretty big news at the time.”
“Shh,” Daphne chided. “I’m on to something here.” But a moment later, as Boldt went silent, she couldn’t resist. She slid her fiberglass chair up against Boldt’s and looked on.
“Two hundred and eighty thousand,” she read. “It was run on the elderly.”
The Pied Piper Page 34
