The Caesar Clue (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized. “You just don’t look like an Henri.”

  “He’s right,” the woman said. “Don’t look like a Lavelle, neither.”

  The shopkeeper gritted his teeth. “All I need is crap from some one-armed detective.”

  “Don’t make fun of the man, David,” the woman ordered. “He can’t help hisself, but you can. Some of the gris-gris have to be handled by a man that’s pure hearted and you ain’t, honey.”

  “Christ,” Lavelle swore.

  “Was there something you wanted to tell me?” I asked him, smiling blandly.

  “No. Isn’t my business who goes up to your hole. I hope it’s a damn burglar.”

  My smile started to go away.

  “Man or woman?”

  “Orang-utan. At least, he had red hair.”

  “He went up and then came down again?”

  “He went up and stayed.” He shrugged. “I thought maybe he was a friend of yours that had a key. He was in a business suit.”

  “How long ago?” I asked.

  “Couple of minutes.”

  I nodded. “Thanks, Henri.” I walked through his shop, to the back door leading onto the patio. I shut the door quietly and listened, but all I heard was the gentle gush of the fountain and, behind it, from over the wall, distant car horns.

  I started up the iron stairs and came out on the second floor walkway. I put my ear against the back door, heard nothing, and carefully inserted my key into the lock.

  Cigarette smoke told me that my visitor was in the front room—my office.

  I picked up a baseball bat from beside the refrigerator and started for the doorway but my feet crunched down on something.

  “Bang, you’re dead,” a voice rasped from just inside the doorway, and I froze.

  “What…?”

  A form moved into the area in front of me and I heard a guttural laugh. “Peanut shells. I put ’em on the floor. I figured you hadn’t learned anything from Nam.”

  Years fell away and my mouth opened in amazement as I stared at the man in front of me. The red hair was a little longer, the belly slopped a little over the buckle, and this time he was wearing a rumpled business suit instead of camouflage fatigues, but in every other way he was the same.

  “Solly Cranich!” I said, lowering the bat. “For God’s sake, I almost brained you. …”

  “You didn’t come close,” he laughed. “You’re getting soft, Micah. I could’ve wired this place to blow you into seven million little bitty pieces.”

  “I guess you could’ve,” I acknowledged, and then grabbed his outstretched paw. “You jimmied my door, too, I suppose.”

  He shrugged. “Let’s just say I let myself in. Last time we were together, in Saigon, we agreed there wouldn’t ever be any locks, that any time …”

  “I know what we said,” I chuckled. “We were both drunk.”

  “Best way to be, back then.” Solly’s smile faded. “Look, I heard about your getting hurt and all. Tough.”

  “Lots had it worse.”

  I opened the refrigerator.

  “Oh, I helped myself to a beer,” he said. “But I think there’s some left.”

  “Thanks.”

  I got out two more, followed him into the office and took a seat behind my desk. Solly lit up another cigarette and leaned back in his chair.

  “So you’re a private eye these days,” he said. I listened for pity but there wasn’t any.

  “I enjoy it,” I said. “And I’m not bad at it, people say.”

  “Hell, you’d be good at anything you set your mind to.” He watched me pop the aluminum tab of my beer can with one hand but there was no sympathy in his eyes. I was glad.

  “Thanks, Solly. So what brings you to New Orleans? Are you out of the Corps?”

  “Jesus,” he laughed, taking a long pull of beer, “you’re never out of the Corps, you know that.” He came forward slightly in his chair. “Truth is, I was in range of getting my thirty when I caught a piece of shrapnel in Beirut. Part of a special team they sent in to ferret out our hostages. They put a plate in my head and gave me my papers. I thought I was just another old major, of which the woods are full. But then one day a civilian that liased with us from a spook agency sat down next to me in a bar and asked if I didn’t want to make use of my experience. Hell, I jumped at it.”

  I felt a momentary pang of envy. “CIA?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. It’s one of these conglomerates, a little bit of everything from DEA to State Department. Tell the God’s truth, there ain’t a lot of ‘em I’ve got use for. Bunch of little Ivy League shits, most of ‘em. But they let me alone mostly. And I got it good. How can I complain? You know me, Micah. I’m an OCS man, never made it to college, don’t know anything about management theory and all that crap. I just know how to take an objective if they give it to me. I thought when Evelyn died it was the hardest thing I ever went through.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He waved away my sympathy. “But it wasn’t nothing like having to take off my uniform. So when this came along, well …”

  “I’m glad for you, Sol.”

  “Thanks, Micah.” He tapped his ash in the empty beer can.

  “So how did you find me?” I asked.

  He sighed. “Well, I never was any good at cover stories; that’s what got me blown up in the first place. Truth is, they sent me.”

  “To find me?” A tingle of excitement passed through me. I was happy enough now, I had my own life, but suppose …?

  He nodded, expression serious, as if he understood my thoughts and didn’t want to raise false hopes.

  “It’s this damn plane crash. My agency is involved.”

  The deflation was over in a second. “I see. But why come to me?”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Micah. We’ve been through too much. We know about this Morvant woman.”

  I shrugged. “You probably know more than I do.”

  “We know she made a call to this number before she got on that plane. It’s easy enough to get phone records. We talked to a cop, says she left a message for you.”

  “I guess that’s no secret. But the fact is, Solly, I never heard of the woman before and don’t know what she wanted, except for me to meet her at the airport.”

  He finished his second beer. “Hell, I believe you. But I need to pick up the tape.”

  I thought for a second, then got up and went to the refrigerator. I brought back two more beers and passed him one.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Establish identity, for one thing. They may never find her body. And maybe they can enhance the tape, you know, and play it to some relative, if they ever find one.”

  “Good try, Solly. But you’re right: You can’t lie worth a damn. There’s more to it.”

  He grinned ruefully. “Well, I told them a bullshit story wouldn’t work, but I tried.” He leaned almost out of his seat now, his eyes burning with the old fire I’d last seen on search-and-destroy missions in the Mekong.

  “Micah, look, even I don’t know everything that’s involved here, but what we’re dealing with is terrorism. The lady was a part of the group. We think she was carrying the bomb and it went off by mistake. We need to keep a lid on all of this, because we don’t know how many of them may already be in the city. Our guess is she called you so they could set up some kind of cover with you as the fall guy.”

  “She’s not foreign,” I said. “Her accent was local and she knows the city.”

  “Lee Harvey Oswald was American.” He cleared his throat.

  He was right, of course. “And if you catch them, then what?”

  “We do what has to be done,” he said levelly, then took another swallow of beer. “Anybody don’t like it can write their congressman.”

  “Our congressman would probably agree,” I said. “So would almost everybody else.”

  “Good,” Solly said, his face suddenly hard.

  I took another swig, all the m
emories of Nam rushing back, and for a second it was good: the mixed spice and vegetable smells of the markets, the delicate, fragrantly scented women on the boulevards of Saigon, the excitement of another world. Then the other memories returned: smoke and burned flesh, and the sound of rotor blades overhead, body bags on the runway.

  I reached into my drawer and brought out the tape. “Here you go, Solly. I hope it helps.”

  “Thanks, Micah. The group’ll appreciate it.”

  “The group,” I said. “Does that make you a groupee?”

  He struggled to his feet. “Screw you,” he said. “And I’d get a good lock on the door.”

  “Next time I’ll booby trap it,” I said. “By the way, if I need you, where will you be?”

  “I’m at the Clarion. Call this number,” he said and scribbled seven digits on a card.

  He stuck out a hand. “Thanks, Micah. Semper Fi.”

  “Semper Fi, Sol,” I answered as he started down the stairs. “Good hunting.”

  He was older and slower, but even so, I’d hate to take him on, and I felt sorry for the bad guys if he ever caught them. Yet despite his bluff demeanor, I’d always recognized that he was a compassionate man, who hated to kill. Besides the Corps, the love of his life had been Evelyn, who had understood him and supported him. He responded by using the time other men spent in the Saigon whorehouses to write her long letters about the country and its people. Now he was alone, but at least he had something useful to do. I hoisted my bottle and drank once more to his success. People that bombed airplanes didn’t deserve much consideration.

  The phone broke in on my thoughts and I picked it up, half expecting to hear my father’s voice, from Charleston.

  “Mr. Dunn?”

  It was a woman.

  “Speaking. Who’s calling, please?”

  “I have to talk to you. It’s important. I’m a friend of Julia Morvant.”

  3

  My mouth went dry. It was the last thing I expected to hear.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “Never mind my name. Did Julia contact you before …” I waited but my caller didn’t want to finish the sentence.

  “We need to talk,” I said. “Can we meet somewhere?”

  “I just need to know,” the woman said, a thin edge of hysteria in her voice. I judged her to be in her twenties and local.

  “We can talk,” I said, trying to soothe. “But face-to-face. I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  It was a safe promise and I waited to see if my bluff would work. Finally I heard something like her breath sucking in.

  “Okay. Chad R’s on Baronne in half an hour. I’ll be at a booth in the back.”

  “Good enough. I’m fortyish and I’ll be wearing a guayabera. My left arm doesn’t work, so I’ll be easy to spot.”

  “I know,” she said, and the line went dead.

  The clock on my desk read six-thirty. Plenty of time to drive over. Equally interesting, it meant she had called from a radius of a mile. Of course, that included a lot of the city, but my guess was that she’d been at the bar all along, nerving herself, and accepting that it might come to a face-to-face. I thought about calling Sal Mancuso and asking him to try to set up a tail, but then I discarded the idea. Likewise the notion of putting Sandy on her, even if I could have gotten Sandy there in time. The girl knew me, somehow, and for that reason trusted me. The best way to lose your reputation is to breach a trust. No, I’d play it straight.

  It was already dusk when I parked across the street. Chad R’s was a hole in the wall that had once been a Mexican restaurant and before that part of a mission for winos. The mission was gone but not the winos, and a couple of them looked at me wistfully as I started across the street, eliciting an angry honk from a cab. They were hoping I’d be hit and lie still long enough to let them pick my pockets, but no such luck.

  Some New Orleans bars have character and some just have tourists. Chad R’s had neither. It was a watering hole for commuters who told themselves they’d wait out the traffic and then said the hell with it, they didn’t want to go home anyway. There was a big shrimp net over the bar, implying some nautical connection, and, for no apparent reason, paintings of famous matadors over the half dozen booths against the far wall. No one cared about the incongruity, any more than they cared about a new face in the doorway. The two men in the first booth were already well on their way to incoherence, one declaiming against the Levee Board for some political dereliction while his companion nodded blankly. A woman with bleached hair was draped over a stool, looking bored, and a spark of hope flickered in her face as she saw me and then as quickly went out as I passed.

  The woman I’d come to meet was already seated in the last booth, a drink in front of her. She regarded me with sad, puppy-dog eyes that made her seem older than she could possibly have been. Not bad looking, well-dressed, but a little too made up and definitely tired.

  “You know my name,” I said, sliding in across from her.

  She fished a cigarette from the pack on the table and I watched her flick a gold lighter.

  “Okay. My name is Belinda, if it’s that important.”

  “It makes conversation easier.”

  The waitress appeared and I asked for a Lite Beer; I’d already had my limit, with Solly.

  She stared at me with the doggy eyes as she dragged on the cigarette and then looked away as she exhaled.

  “I want to know what she told you,” Belinda said.

  “You know, relations between a PI and his client are confidential,” I said pleasantly. “Maybe you could explain what your interest in this is.”

  “She’s my roommate,” Belinda said. “She left a week ago. Told me she was going to Jamaica. She called me the night before last, scared. Told me her flight number and asked if I knew anybody that could meet her at the airport and guard her.”

  “And you gave her my name.”

  “It came to mind. You did a job for a friend of mine once.”

  “Mind telling me who?”

  She tapped her cigarette into the ashtray. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Did she tell you anything else when she called? What she was scared of, for instance?”

  Belinda frowned and shook her head slowly from side to side. Her necklace caught the light and shot little arrows of gold at me. “Well, there was one thing she said, but it didn’t make any sense.”

  “Do you remember what it was?” I could tell I was going to have to plumb for every scrap.

  “You’d have to know her. She was my good friend, but she’s—she was kind of a flake. Always reading heavy things and quoting them. It could piss you off. But she was okay, down deep.”

  It was clear Belinda wasn’t the kind to read heavy things, but that didn’t make her unique.

  “What did she say?” I asked patiently.

  “She said she’d done it, whatever it was. And then she said, ‘It’ll make Marc Antony look like a piker.’ Marc Antony. I remember that. He was a guy in some film I saw once. Marlon Brando.”

  “You’re right.” The waitress brought my beer and I sipped it, trying to make sense out of the comment.

  “Belinda, why did she go to Jamaica? I mean, it obviously wasn’t vacation, was it?”

  She looked away quickly. “I’m not sure. It’s not important.”

  “It’s damned important,” I said. “Everything about Julia Morvant is important. Sixty-seven people are dead and the cops can’t even find her name in the phone book or the motor vehicle file. Her passport was phony. Now you tell me she was your roommate, but you won’t give me your real name—no, I don’t believe it’s Belinda—or any of the details. Why should I help you?”

  “Because I have to know if she told you anything, for God’s sake.” She blushed and then seemed to draw back. “I’m sorry. I just can’t tell you any more.”

  “Then I guess we’re wasting each other’s time.”

  A look of alarm flashed across her face. “No! Liste
n, you don’t know her. She’s special. She’s my friend. She helped me, she was there when I needed her. Can’t you understand? I can’t just pretend she never existed. I’d have died for her.”

  “Belinda—or whatever the hell your name is—something tells me you’re in over your head, just like she was. Listen, these people, the ones who blow up planes and carry Uzis, are nobody to play with. If you’re straight with me, I can help you. I have some contacts, people that can put you under protection, even give you a new identity. Don’t try to do this alone. For God’s sake, trust me.”

  “You didn’t know Julia,” she protested. “I did.”

  “Okay, you’re right. And I want to know why she’s dead, too.” I searched for a common thread and failed. “Look, is there any chance she could have been carrying a bomb?”

  Belinda’s face mirrored shock. “A bomb? What are you saying? That she…?” Her head rocked from side to side. “No. That’s crazy. Never.”

  She frowned and then sighed almost inaudibly. “She didn’t tell you anything, did she?”

  Before I could answer she was rising.

  “I have to go to the little girl’s room, do you mind?”

  I thought quickly, but I couldn’t remember any exit, so I shrugged. “I’ll wait.”

  As she got up, a faint aroma of exotic perfume lingered, tickling my nose. It was thirty seconds later when I remembered the door at the end of the hallway that connected with the alley. When I heard the door open and close, I knew I was in trouble.

  I laid some money on the table and walked back out onto the street. I was just in time to see the red 280-Z pull away from the curb and squeal off toward the uptown area.

  She’d been quick, and I’d been slow, but it hadn’t been a complete loss. At least I’d gotten the license plate number. I struggled to pull my note pad from the pocket at my waist, and pressed it against my body with the heel of my hand while I scribbled the license number, using the pen I kept tied to it with a string. The winos watched, half interested. It was probably the best show of the day.

  I called for Mancuso but he’d signed out, so I tried him at home.