An Evil Shadow (19 page)

“Does Kellerman have a church?’

“Yes. A very beautiful one as it happens. St.
Dominic’s in the Irish Channel. He does a lot of good work with refugees and
low-income families. Insisted on taking mass yesterday despite his personal
tragedy.”

“Crescent City Holdings owns some property in the
Channel?”

“Quite a lot. We buy up historical buildings with the
intention of restoring them and leasing them out at rents people can afford.
Sometimes it can take years. The demand for emergency accommodation rarely
slackens, so often the restoration has to take second place to putting a roof
over the heads of needful families.”

“Do you own any property in the French Quarter?”

“A little. Two nineteenth-century apartment houses,
both of which have been restored.”

“Exactly where in the quarter?”

“One’s on Toulouse, the other’s on Basin Street,
opposite the entrance to St Louis Cemetery Number One.”

Val held out his hand. “Monsignor Charbonnet, you’ve
been a big help. I’d appreciate if you could keep this between us for the
moment.”

Charbonnet appeared perplexed for a moment, but his
eyes went back to the file on his desk. “Certainly. Anything you say.”

It was six twenty-five when the switchboard operator
buzzed through to Captain Clements’s office and announced that a Troy Pollack
was on the line. Clements checked his watch and his insides turned to jelly.
Why had Pollack broken his routine? Had Lausaux spotted him outside his office?
Though he didn’t know how. He had remained there until noon and Lausaux had
failed to put in an appearance.

“Put him through.”

“Troy here.” Pollack’s voice sounded mean and harsh.

“Why are you calling early? Has something happened?’

“You tell me. What has our mutual friend Chief
Bosanquet been up to?”

Clements relaxed slightly. The timing of Pollack’s
call didn’t seem to mean anything significant, probably intended to keep him
off-balance. “He’s been out most of the day. He had a message to call back some
guy on the Securities Exchange Commission in Washington.”

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know. I called his cell phone an hour ago,
but it was in use.”

“Didn’t you try again?”

“I was intending to, but you rang early.”

“John, I’m very disappointed with you. You’re not
keeping up your side of the deal. You’ve taken my money, but you’re not doing
anything to earn it. Maybe it’s time I spoke to your wife.”

“No! Please don’t call her. She hasn’t been well.”

“What else can I do? We had a deal, but you’re not
telling me what I went to hear.”

“You’re asking too much of me. You can’t expect me to
hound-dog Bosanquet and run the UNOPD at the same time. He would catch on
immediately that was something up if I neglected my duties here.”

There was no response for a few moments. The delay was
like a hand twisting Clements’s gut.

“Okay, I won’t disturb your wife this time. But I will
in the morning if you mess me around anymore.”

“I’ll do whatever you ask.”

“That’s more like it. I want you to pull the guard on
Marcus Bosanquet’s house.”

Clements hesitated. “I can’t do that.”

“John, tell me you didn’t say that. Of course you can
do it. Make some excuse, but stand down those officers.”

“Why? What are you going to do?”

“That doesn’t concern you, though I guarantee there
will be no repercussions for you. This time tomorrow you’ll be sitting behind
the chief’s desk and you’ll never have to hear the name Troy Pollack again.”

“I don’t want anyone hurt.”

“Nobody will be, just as long as you do this one last
favor for me.”

“Okay.”

“That’s more like it. Now you’re thinking like a
parent.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Val parked his car close to the entrance to St Louis
cemetery No. 1 and stood on the sidewalk near the gates while he took a long,
careful look around him. Fully aware of the dangers, Trochan must have had a
valid purpose to come here after dark and Val thought he knew what it was.

He shifted his attention to the opposite side of the
street. An expensive Italian restaurant was sandwiched between a restored
apartment house and the offices of a legal firm. Trochan’s body had been found
just inside the cemetery, but what if he had been there so he could surveil the
buildings opposite without attracting undue attention? Only he hadn’t
anticipated that there would be somebody watching the same building.

Val crossed over. Crescent City Holdings had done a
fine preservation job on the apartment building. Restorers had repaired all the
lacy filigree ironwork, casting new sections where necessary, and stripping
generations of paint from the original iron before decorators had applied a
fresh coat. Craftsmen had cleaned and re-mortared the redbrick. The wooden
windows and shutters were varnished teak, the stucco of the sills end surrounds
painted a lime green
.
Baskets of
camellias hung from brass hooks fastened to the teak ceiling of every balcony.

Right next to the entrance was a small cast iron
plaque proclaiming how Crescent City Holdings had carried out the restoration in
1995.

The building super was a black man in his early
fifties, with a grizzled, gray beard. He was skinny and walked with a limp. The
lenses of his glasses were thicker
than
the bottoms of shot glasses. Val gave him a quick look at his shield.

“What can I do for you
,
officer?”

“Is Donny Jackson a tenant here?”

The black
man
shook his head. “No sir. We have no one of that name.”

“He may be using
a different name.” Val took a copy of Duval’s sketch from his jacket pocket
and unfolded it. “This remind you of anyone?”

The super took the sheet and drew it close to his
eyes. “That’s a lot like Lonnie Dupree. He ain’t here right now.”

“When do you expect him?”

“Could be a week, could be a month. Hard to say. The company
leases the apartment. He doesn’t spend much time in New Orleans. Usually lets
me know in advance when he’s due back, but must have forgotten this time.”

‘That could be him. I want to see inside his
apartment.”

The super squinted up at Val. “You got any paper?”

“Only the green sort.” Val held out a twenty-dollar
bill. The hand that snatched it moved faster than a striking cottonmouth.

“Right this way. The apartment’s on three.”

Val followed him into a smell elevator and made the
short trip to the third floor. The super produced a bunch of keys, selected
one, and opened the door to apartment 36
.

“Let me put the power on for you. With Dupree being
off so much of the time, I keep the juice turned off.”

After some fumbling behind the door, the light came
flooding on and the air-conditioning unit kicked in.

“You going to take a while? Only I’ve got plenty of
chores to be getting on with.”

“Don’t let me stop you. I’ll turn the power off before
I leave.”

“Mind you do,” the super said. He closed the door
after him.

Val took a quick look around the living room. There
wasn’t much to see. The furniture was generic; the type found in every
twenty-five-dollar motel from New Orleans to New York. The one exception was an
expensive sound system. Val had a riffle through the CDs. Donny was a big fan
of country and of Cajun. There were a bunch of circulars on the coffee table.
Val went through them all, without finding anything of interest.

The bedroom was next. The closet contained a selection
of jackets and trousers, a couple pairs of jeans, a dozen brightly-colored
Bermuda shirts, and a chartreuse seersucker suit. Val winced. Subtlety wasn’t
the guiding principle in Donny’s sense of style.

The bed had been stripped, but there were no
bedclothes in the closet or the bedroom drawers. There was, however, a matching
set of well-worn Samsonite luggage. All present and correct, and all empty.

The bathroom was tidy and clinically clean, except for
a long splash of dried blood on the underside of the ceramic sink. Val wouldn’t
have spotted it, only he had bent down to run his fingers along the gap between
the pedestal and the wall.

Val found nothing of interest in the spare bedroom and
the kitchen. What was he searching for? An address book, a diary, or some old
correspondence, credit card receipts, check book stubs. Anything which would
give him some clue as to where Donny was hiding out. Only he could provide the
last few answers Val was seeking.

He went over the living room for a second time,
checking under chairs in case Donny had taped something to their underside,
examining the backs of pictures and mirrors. Opened every CD box. Fanned
through the pages of three soft porn paperbacks. Stuck his fingers down the
back of the couch and found a few quarters.

Reluctantly, Val conceded that he was wasting his
time. He turned off the power, closed the door and rode the elevator back down
to the lobby. A row of brass mail boxes were set into the wall next to the
entrance, each one engraved with its apartment number. He found 36.

The super pocketed another twenty and opened it.

Two more circulars and one hand written envelope,
addressed to Lonnie Dupree. Val slid a finger under the flap and removed the
birthday card that it contained. Signed only by Rita, there was a letter from
her written on the inside leaf.

She started by apologizing in advance should the card
fail to reach her son in time for his birthday. His father and she had been
preoccupied with finding a clandestine way to assist Duval locate a college
place. They were getting nowhere, until finally, in desperation, they had
approached Assist Haiti. At first, the operations director didn’t want to know,
but eventually reconsidered and agreed to help out. It was the perfect
solution. If Roy came up with the cash, Philip Lausaux could guarantee Duval’s
acceptance by the UNO, and in addition, would pass it off as an Assist Haiti
scholarship. The true identity of who was footing the bill for her education
would never need be revealed.

Val stopped reading for a moment. He would like to
know, now that the Jacksons were dead, what Lausaux had done with the money.

The letter went on. Rita hadn’t take to Lausaux and
didn’t think any man prepared to do something for nothing could be trusted. He
was too fond of asking probing questions, too keen to delve into why Roy had
kept Duval in the dark about who her real father was and the existence of her
half-brother.

Val could understand Roy Jackson’s reticence. What a
family get-together that would have been.

Rita finished the letter with a warning. Ever since
Roy’s last meeting alone with Lausaux — when her husband had handed over the
money — he had been acting moody; she had a feeling he might have let slip more
than he should have.

Val closed the card and returned it to its envelope
and pocketed it. One way or another Lausaux had tumbled the Jacksons’s dark
secret. His curiosity aroused by the Jacksons’s entreaty, he may have compelled
Roy into spilling the beans.

Exactly how many beans, Val couldn’t be sure. Lausaux
may have unearthed for himself the connections between Valerie Duval’s murder,
the implausible employment of Donny by Arena Victory, and Crescent City Holdings.
Then, having put two and two together, he conceived a plan to profit from it
and at the same time avenge the humiliation he had endured over the hog
debacle.

All well and good, Val admitted to himself, but, as
Paul Larson had so succinctly put it, Wall Street wouldn’t let a little thing
like murder or exploitation come between it and a profit. There had to be some
other angle to the Valerie Duval killing. An angle that Lausaux must have
established. His disappearance and the bloodstain in the bathroom pointed to
Donny Jackson having provided it.

Val walked back to where he had left his car.

Angie was almost finished writing a letter to a cousin
in Houston, sharing the news of her pregnancy and swearing her cousin to
secrecy, when the ringing of the doorbell startled her. She put down her pen.
Nobody was expected and Marcus was at a faculty meeting, not due home for
another hour at the earliest. With the UNOPD car stationed outside, she knew
she was being silly, but Val had upset her with his talk of Haitian thugs and
she had been feeling jittery ever since. She left the security chain on when
she opened the door.

“Madam Bosanquet, I’m so sorry to disturb you,” Philip
Lausaux apologized.

“Not at all.” Angie’s heart started to beat again and
she removed the chain and opened the door fully. “Marcus isn’t at home right
now. Maybe you could come back later.”

“It’s really you I’ve come to see. To discuss what we
are going to do with Marie Duval.”

“I didn’t realize. Please, won’t you come in?” Angie
unfastened the chain and opened the door fully.

Lausaux entered and Angie showed him through to the
living room. She asked him to take a seat on the couch.

“May I offer you a drink?” she offered.

“Only if you join me.”

“No can do. I’ve recently found out that I’m
expecting. I’ll stick to a soda. Cognac?”

“That would be perfect.”

Angie moved over to the antique bureau that Marcus and
she used as a drinks cabinet.

“How do you like it?”

“In a highball glass, lots of ice.”

She poured a double shot and popped a can of diet soda
for herself. She picked up the silver ice bucket. “Please, make yourself at
home while I fetch the ice. I won’t be a minute.”

In the kitchen, she filled the ice bucket from a
plastic bag in the icebox and opened a packet of cheese sticks and emptied them
into a glass dish.

Lausaux was standing next to the bureau, admiring a
painting Marcus had recently acquired. He had his highball glass in his hand.

“I hope you don’t mind, it’s been a very trying day,”
he said. “I’ve poured your soda.”

“Not at all. Let me put some ice in that.”

Angie used a pair of tongs to drop ice into Lausaux’s
drink and her own. They clinked glasses and sipped at their drinks.

“Val Bosanquet came to see me this morning,” Lausaux
started. “He asked me to renew the charity’s offer of financial backing to
Marie Duval. I’m afraid I was rather abrupt with him.”

“I haven’t spoken to him today.”

“I’ve been thinking it over and perhaps I was too
hasty. But the way I understood it, Miss Duval has made up her mind not to
accept any financial help from Assist Haiti. She comes across as a very
resolute young lady.”

“She certainly is.” Angie took another drink of the
soda. It tasted odd. Her doctor had warned her that she might experience some
alteration of her tastes. “You want me to speak to her?”

“If you would. Marie confided in me about what close
friends the two of you had become in a short time. And she might listen to
reason quicker if it was coming from another women.”

“I’ll do all I can,” Angie said. She shivered and felt
pins and needles tingling her arm. Maybe she had put too much ice in her drink.
“But as you say, Marie can be very stubborn when it pleases her.”

“At least we’ll have tried,” Lausaux said, then smiled
apologetically. “Do forgive my rudeness. I didn’t congratulate you on your
pregnancy. What are you hoping for?”

“I haven’t taken a scan yet, so I’m keeping my fingers
crossed that it will be twins. A boy and a girl. Lots of twins in my family.
I’m due in late May.”

Lausaux raised his glass and smiled. “Let’s drink to Gemini.”

Val parked in a nearby street and followed the iron
railings to the front gates of the church. Monsignor Charbonnet was right. St
Dominic’s was a very beautiful building. When the Irish had built it in the
1870s, they had spared no expense. Its architecture and stonework were
exquisite. As is the way with churches, it had changed very little since its
construction. Other than a coat of city grime and the installation of electric
light, the church remained the same. The five largest stained-glass windows
depicted the four apostles and St Patrick.

Inside, all was quiet. Two women were sitting apart in
the center pews, their heads bowed. Val felt the familiar unease creep over
him. Did his lack of any kind of faith mean something was missing from his
life? Ten years ago he would have claimed a definite no, now he wasn’t so sure.
Like Voodoo, he had also had to adapt to a constantly changing world; to a
world that contained passions and greeds that he couldn’t begin to comprehend.
But according to the laws of nature every action produces an equal and opposite
reaction.