The Pied Piper

by Ridley Pearson

  CHAPTER

  The following morning at 11:22, Boldt and Daphne checked into the Soniat House under the name Brehmer. Deep in the French Quarter on a quiet side street away from the T-shirts and the smell of stale beer, away from the movie crews and tourists swollen with crawfish and hot sauce, the hotel’s office and courtyard were accessed through a single door painted kelly green. They stepped into another, older world, a New Orleans Boldt had not yet experienced, but one he quickly realized lingered beneath the surface glitz and souvenirs. Its cobblestone courtyard resplendent in a lush jungle of deep greens and sharp vivid colors, the Soniat House delivered the New Orleans of the nineteenth century.

  The male receptionist wore a dark suit, looked Boldt in the eye and bowed his head slightly to Daphne. “We have a lovely room for you, Mr. and Mrs. Brehmer. Charles will show you the way. I note that your stay is open-ended. We will need notice day after tomorrow if you’re intending to spend the weekend with us.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem.” Boldt paused a beat too long as he signed the guest slip, in part because he had to remember to sign Brehmer’s name—it was Brehmer’s credit card he was using—in part because the daily room rate was twice his rental car’s weekly rate.

  As a couple they were shown through the courtyard and up a century-old set of winding wooden stairs, past a seven-foot-tall oil portrait of a southern general, and a smaller oil of a harlequin in full regalia. Boldt had no way of knowing how far Chevalier’s influence reached, or what kind of underground existed in this city, but it didn’t take an Intelligence officer to understand it was a place of influence peddling, of favors. For this reason, they had changed nothing about the Brehmers’ hotel reservation or the couple’s itinerary.

  Charles keyed open the extremely narrow nine-foot wooden door and motioned for Daphne to lead the way. He heard her gasp as he followed into the long hardwood hallway, its walls covered with oil paintings, light sparkling from a cut glass chandelier. The hallway ended at a large bathroom all marble and brass. Through another pair of towering doors to the left was a sitting room with a crushed velvet love seat, two French chairs and three seven-foot windows that started at floor height and led out onto a balcony with flowering baskets issuing green waterfalls of tendrils and runners and overlooking the narrow street and a nunnery beyond.

  Charles, the bellman, explained in his warm affected voice that a century earlier city property taxes had been assessed according to the number of a building’s exterior doors, and so huge, double-hung windows had taken their place. He lifted one, admitting the sounds of the Quarter as a horse-drawn buggy passed and the driver’s voice was heard lecturing his passengers on the Soniat House’s place in the city’s history. Breakfast—biscuits, juice and coffee—would be served on the balcony.

  The bedroom held a four-poster with a red satin duvet, flanked by antique end tables hosting leaded glass lamps. A telephone was the only fixture that brought the suite into the current century. Boldt tipped the man, whose footsteps faded down the impossibly long hallway. The door to room 22 bumped shut.

  Any of the hotel staff could be on Chevalier’s payroll—bellhops, chambermaids—their every move might be monitored. They would maintain the impression of being a married couple. The Brehmers had a dinner reservation arranged in advance by Chevalier that Boldt and Daphne would honor. There was no saying to what extent Chevalier screened his prospective buyers. Certainly he conducted credit reports. Perhaps he placed the adoptive parents under surveillance for a day or two preceding the adoption; this would help explain his having made various arrangements for both the Hudsons and the Brehmers. Any such possibility required Boldt and Daphne to play along, at least on a superficial level—a married couple excited by the prospect of an adoption.

  “We had better practice our signatures,” she said in a businesslike manner.

  She ordered a mint julep from room service; Boldt, a ginger ale. When the waiter had come and gone, they sat out on the balcony in green wicker chairs with chintz padded cushions, the sonorous clip-clop of horse and buggy carrying up the cobblestone street. They worked on their forged signatures. Intricate shadows from the wrought-iron artistry played onto the decking, black and white and gray, like Chinese shadow puppets. After attempting a page of signatures, Boldt glanced over at her, his face flushed from the heat. He said, “Want some irony?”

  “The laundry service provides the irony,” she said, clearly feeling the bourbon.

  Boldt smirked, finished the ginger ale and said, “The irony is that the tables have turned. Now who are the con artists trying to steal a baby?”

  CHAPTER

  Commander’s Palace roared with the music of gracious dining—cocktail patter, the chime of fine tableware, corks drawn from the necks of wine bottles. Boldt and Daphne, as the Brehmers, were shown to a table in the restaurant’s lavishly painted second-story lunchroom. An army of waiters descended upon them, the men clearly taken in by Daphne’s beauty.

  She owned the place from the moment they arrived, the maître d’ charmed by her fluent French and the plunging neckline of her afternoon purchase.

  Boldt lowered his head and toyed with the butter on his bread plate.

  “Don’t sulk,” she said.

  “I’m not. I’m thinking about John’s call.”

  LaMoia had tailed Chevalier the night before, following him north to the small town of Méchant. He had not been alone. A second car had also been following Chevalier. LaMoia had kept his distance, but he was guessing Dunkin Hale.

  “So where’s the Russian army?” Boldt asked Daphne. “The Bureau,” he clarified. “They have an active field office here in the city, probably a fairly large one. An out-of-town agent working a case of national importance. Where’s the backup?”

  “I see what you mean.” She lightly buttered a piece of bread and recommended he try it.

  Boldt said, “The only explanation I can come up with is that he’s running this advance work solely for Flemming, which means Flemming does not want the rest of the agency to know about New Orleans. Why?”

  “There’s a cornbread, and a rosemary. If you go with the pork tenderloin, the cornbread’s the ticket.”

  “Is Flemming so political that he would bury this kind of connection until he has hard evidence?”

  She said, “Kay Kalidja painted him exactly that way. Have you decided? It’s a toss-up between the pork and the catfish.”

  “He must have traced the rental car to Salt Lake by now, which means he has the DeChamps identity—the credit card. How much more does he need?”

  “I’m going with the catfish,” she replied. She sampled a celery stick. In an exceptionally private voice, she said, “Do you know the real story of the Pied Piper?”

  “The flute and the children,” he said.

  She waved the celery stick like a conductor’s baton. “No. No. In the thirteenth century, the Pied Piper was hired by the German city of Hamelin to rid the town of its rat infestation. He did just that—got rid of the rats—and legend had it that he charmed them away with his flute; in fact he probably poisoned them. Once the rats were gone, the city refused him payment. He responded by killing over a hundred of the city’s children.”

  “This is folklore, right?”

  “No, some version of the man existed. One of our earliest documented serial killers. The folklore came from Goethe and Robert Browning, who retold the story with a little sugar on it.” She placed down the celery. “The Crowleys served their time and then were denied an adoption. They are denying others children. You think his decision to play an exterminator is random? It fits his role as the Pied Piper. They could have kidnapped one of these children and kept it for themselves, but they did not. They elected to take from the fertile and give to the barren, combining Robin Hood with the Pied Piper. They hold a grudge. This is not about profit, this is about payback. I’d like to think they’re predictable, but they are not. They feel justified in what they’re doing. They understand the
joy of adoption. It’s been denied them. They’re angry.”

  “We’re all angry,” Boldt replied.

  Two hours later, a hazy moon rising in the sky, its light spilling into the Soniat House courtyard despite the illumination of the city, Daphne and Boldt slowly climbed the wooden staircase toward their suite in silence. She stopped at the top of the stairs and, gazing down into the courtyard, said, “No matter what, this is a beautiful hotel.”

  As Daphne prepared for bed in the bathroom, Boldt sat on the crushed velvet couch feeling both fatigue and anticipation: Chevalier was going to contact them about the adoption; his best opportunity for rescuing Sarah lay ahead.

  He placed his gun and ID wallet in the bed’s end table, emptied his pockets, hung up his sport coat and tie, removed his shoes—all the little rituals he had come to accept as preparation for bedtime.

  Daphne appeared, wrapped snugly inside a hotel robe. “Which side?” she asked.

  He pointed, as uncomfortable as she.

  A few minutes later he entered the bedroom in boxer shorts and a T-shirt; thinner than he had been since his twenties, the terror and tension of the last few months starved off him.

  Propped up against a number of pillows, her face caught in the bedside light like a half-moon in a summer sky, Daphne shone equally as brightly. She looked up from a tourist magazine, her brown eyes tracking him as he crossed the room and climbed into his side of the bed.

  “This is weird,” she said.

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  “I think I snore,” she said.

  “That makes two of us.”

  He ate the chocolate that had been left and read the “tomorrow’s forecast” card. Stormy. When she switched off the bedside lamp a knife blade of light sliced through a crack in the drapes, bathing the bedroom in an artificial dusk.

  He rolled onto his stomach, thinking that Liz occupied a bed far from here, alone, frightened, concerned about their baby girl.

  It was for her sake he said his prayer.

  “Good night,” Daphne sighed, exhausted.

  “Good night,” Boldt replied, knowing sleep would elude him once again.

  At 8:00 A.M. exactly, the telephone rang in room 22 of the Soniat House. Daphne Matthews, wrapped in her hotel robe and drinking a cup of hot chocolate, secure beneath the porch overhang in one of the green wicker chairs, sat with her legs tucked up under her as a light rain stained the stone facade of the convent across the street. She placed down the hot chocolate cradled in her hands and hurried into the suite’s antebellum sitting room hoping to give Boldt the needed rest, but he snagged the telephone.

  “Hello? … Speaking … yes, Mr. Chevalier … ten o’clock? No, no. That’s why we’re here. We can’t wait. Ten o’clock then.” He hung up. “I guess we passed the test.”

  “I’ll order up some tea.” She felt as hungry as she’d ever been. Room service offered biscuits, and only biscuits. She ordered for two.

  LaMoia heard from Boldt five separate times between 8:15 and 9:45 that Friday morning. They discussed photography, the importance of field notes, surveillance position, retrieving numbers from the caller-ID box LaMoia had fixed to Chevalier’s line in the basement of his office. Boldt sounded as nervous as an actor on opening night.

  LaMoia felt more like a ball player before the game—filled with the excitement of anticipation, his muscles restless in a welcome ache of need, his mind singular and focused. He had slept in only fits and starts since his return from Méchant late Wednesday night, early Thursday morning. Despite this, he felt refreshed. Ready.

  He felt bound and determined to avenge himself and his professional dignity. His suspension would be removed from his record if the charges proved false, which they would. But to apprehend the Pied Piper—to receive a commendation in the middle of a suspension—would be the ultimate rat’s tail up the ass of Internal Investigations. He licked his chops with expectation.

  He had long since established his surveillance position when Boldt phoned him the first time. Chevalier’s apartment communicated with his second-floor law office. His Cadillac had remained parked behind the building all night. Room lights had come on at 7:00 A.M. Chevalier had not left his rooms since that time. For Boldt and LaMoia, this presented one of three possibilities in terms of the Kittridge girl: Chevalier had phoned the girl’s kidnapper; the kidnapper had called Chevalier; or arrangements had been made well in advance of the exchange and would go off as scheduled, unless otherwise notified. This last option made the most sense given the Pied Piper’s penchant for preparedness, for it limited the number of phone calls between the two players and thus limited any chance of identifying the guardian’s whereabouts; furthermore, it helped explain Chevalier’s tight control of the actions of the adoptive parents—the kidnapped child was already scheduled for delivery, the purchasing parents had better show up.

  But if either of the other two options proved true—a last-minute exchange of phone calls between the players—it presented investigators with the opportunity to locate the guardian’s safe house ahead of the adoption meeting, meaning LaMoia might be able to establish surveillance on the safe house while Boldt or Matthews followed whoever dropped the child, increasing their chances of identifying an individual to follow back to Sarah.

  Matthews was, at that very moment, attempting to contact Broole in hopes of obtaining Chevalier’s outgoing calls.

  For his part, LaMoia needed access to the caller-ID well ahead of the 10:00 A.M. meeting to monitor what calls had been received by Chevalier.

  He left the surveillance post he had established on the third floor of an arsoned building a half block down and across the street from Chevalier’s office, and clawed his way into a pair of faded green coveralls purchased at the local Salvation Army outlet, pulled on an ill-fitting baseball cap and negotiated the back fire escape, leery of the building’s central stairs, which were about as trustworthy as crisp toast. The ostrich cowboy boots stuck out from this ensemble, certainly capable of giving away his disguise, but some things a guy just couldn’t compromise.

  LaMoia believed a disguise, any disguise, was built primarily on one’s presence. It was not the worker’s coveralls, nor the banker’s three-piece suit, nor the telephone lineman’s rigging that convinced the unsuspecting; it was the way in which those clothes, that gear, was filled out. If a man dressed down as a street person but walked with the posture of a Marine, forget about it. If that same man exuded a primal menace, then the sidewalks would part to accommodate him. A building’s maintenance man understood himself, believed others could not live without him, felt the control given him in the master key he carried, the wrench in his toolbox.

  LaMoia approached the building’s service entrance with his cocky attitude intact, as he had five times before. The pick gun admitted him effortlessly. He switched on the interior light, in no hurry to be seen ducking inside—he had every right to be in that place. He belonged. Fuck ’em all.

  He reached the back room where he uncovered the caller-ID box he had placed on the attorney’s two voice lines—so accommodating of the phone company to mark each line for him in advance; sometimes the juju went with you. To his regret, Chevalier had received not a single call since LaMoia’s inspection of the system the night before. Popular guy.

  Maybe Broole had something for them; Chevalier’s outgoing calls were equally important. Or maybe they weren’t going to be handed any bones. Maybe Sarah’s chances came down to this one meeting in a sleazeball attorney’s office in the middle of the hottest city on earth. Maybe it was all up to his own abilities to follow whoever delivered the Kittridge kid, follow him or her for as long as it took, follow this person right back to the elusive Pied Piper and little Sarah Boldt.

  He liked the sound of that. Maybe destiny was on his side.

  CHAPTER

  Posing as Cindy Brehmer, Daphne dressed in Ferragamo flats, a cream linen sleeveless shift and a simple string of pearls with matching stud earrings. She wore a light
blush, pale red lipstick, mascara, a hint of eye shadow and a bead of penciled eyeliner.

  Boldt’s wrinkled khakis and blue Oxford button-down did not live up to his wife’s appearance. His pale, gaunt face with its prominent cheekbones and sunken eyes lent him the look of a man struggling with disease. Little more than his wife’s escort, a man to carry the empty child seat, he took to opening doors for her, arranging transportation for her and carrying on a one-sided conversation, playing the doting husband perfectly, caught in his wife’s wake like a piece of flotsam rising and falling beneath her mood swings.

  He took the wheel of the Volvo rental, chauffeuring her out of the Quarter, through downtown and into a mixed neighborhood that bordered the Garden District. He drove several blocks out of their way to arrive heading south so that the Volvo could pause briefly immediately below the burned-out shell of a structure that LaMoia had described to him.

  “Lou—” Daphne began.

  “I know,” he answered.

  “You wait for chances like this, you work toward them, and then suddenly they’re upon you and—”

  “I know.”

  “This is going to be a mess to untangle, Lou.”

  “Chevalier’s phone records and the paperwork filed at Vital Statistics will give us all these kids back. It may take awhile to sort it all out, but it’ll happen. These kids are going home: Trudy Kittridge first.”

  “How do we live with ourselves if something goes wrong?”

  “Trudy’s going home,” he repeated defiantly. There was no mention made of Sarah. LaMoia had to stay with Lisa Crowley at all costs, providing Lisa Crowley showed.

  Boldt pulled the Volvo into the back lot. He shut off the engine, but neither passenger nor driver moved, frozen in concentration and second thought. Boldt’s hands remained on the wheel; Daphne’s sat folded in her lap.