A Quiet Vendetta (6 page)

Verlaine stopped three or four yards from Feraud. He nodded his head somewhat deferentially. Feraud said a word that Verlaine did not hear and someone appeared with a chair. Verlaine sat without question, cleared his throat, and opened his mouth to speak.

Feraud raised his hand and Verlaine fell silent.

‘There is always a price to pay,’ the old man said, his voice >rumbling from his throat and filling the room. ‘You have come to ask me for something, I imagine, but I must tell you that the principle of exchange holds court in my kingdom. If there is something you wish from me, then you must give me something in return.’

Verlaine nodded. He was aware of the rules.

‘Someone was found dead in the trunk of a car,’ Feraud said matter-of-factly. ‘You believe there is something I might know about this and you have come to ask me.’

Verlaine nodded once again. He did not question how Feraud knew who he was or why he had come.

‘And what makes you think that I might know something of such a thing?’ Feraud asked.

‘Because I know who you are, and because I know enough to realize there is nothing that escapes your attention,’ Verlaine said.

Feraud frowned, raised his right hand and took a draw from his cigarette. He did not exhale through his mouth but allowed the smoke to creep in thin tendrils from each nostril and obscure his face for a second. He wafted the brim of his panama hat and the smoke hurried away revealing his face once more.

‘I received a message,’ Verlaine said.

‘A message?’

‘It was simply one word: Always.’

The old man smiled. ‘Seems the whole world believes I have something to do with everything,’ he said.

Verlaine smiled with him.

‘So tell me a little about your man in the trunk of his car.’

‘His heart was cut out,’ Verlaine said. ‘Someone cut his heart out, and then replaced it in his chest. They drove him across town in the back seat of a beautiful old car, and then they put him in the trunk and we found him three days later. Right now we have very little to go on, but there was one thing. Whoever killed him drew a pattern on his back, a pattern that looked like the Gemini constellation.’

Feraud’s expression registered nothing. He was silent for some seconds, seconds that drew themselves into minutes. The feeling within the room was one of breathless tension, anticipatory and oppressive.

‘Gemini,’ he eventually said.

‘That’s right,’ Verlaine said. ‘Gemini.’

Feraud shook his head. ‘The heart was removed, and then replaced in the chest?’

Verlaine nodded.

Feraud leaned forward slightly. He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I think you may have a problem,’ he said quietly, his voice almost a whisper.

Verlaine frowned.

‘If this is who I think it might be . . . well, if this is—’ Feraud looked up at Verlaine, his transparent eyes now sharp and direct. ‘You have a serious problem, and I do not believe there is anything I can do to help you.’

‘But—’ Verlaine started.

‘I will tell you this, and then we will not discuss this any more.’ Feraud stated bluntly. ‘The man you are looking for does not come from here. He was once one of us, but not now, not for many years. He comes from the outside, and he will bring with him something that is big enough to swallow us all.’ Feraud leaned back. Once again he closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Walk away,’ he said. ‘Turn and walk away from this quickly and quietly, and if you believe in God then pray that whatever might have been the purpose of this killing has been served. This is not something you should go looking for, you understand?’

Verlaine shook his head. ‘You must give me something. If there is something you know you must tell me—’

Feraud once again raised his hand. ‘I am not obligated to tell you anything,’ he said, his voice edged with irritation. ‘You will leave now, go back to the city and attend to your business. Do not come here again, and do not ask anything of me regarding this matter. This is not something I am part of, nor is it something I wish to become involved in.’

Feraud turned and nodded at the man to his right. The man stepped forward, and without uttering a word made it clear that Verlaine should leave. Confused and disoriented, he was shown to the door, and once out on the veranda he started walking back the way he’d come, again feeling that eyes were burning right through him, his heart thudding in his chest, sweat glistening his forehead – a sensation that he had somehow walked into something that he might seriously regret.

He reached his car and sat for a while until his heart slowed down. He started the engine, turned around, drove back the way he’d come for a good thirty minutes before he finally slowed and stopped. He got out and leaned against the wing of his car. He tried to think in something resembling a straight line, but he could not.

Eventually he climbed back into the car, started the engine, and drove back to the city.

The FBI were waiting for Verlaine when he reached the Precinct House. The dark gray sedan, the dark suits, dark ties, white shirts, clean shoes. There were two of them, neither of whom looked like they’d smiled since their teens. They knew his name before he reached them, and though they shook his hand and introduced themselves respectively as Agents Luckman and Gabillard there was no humor in their tone, nothing warm or amicable. Whatever this was it was business, straight and direct, and when they expressed their wish to speak with Verlaine ‘in confidence’ he understood that somehow he’d managed to step on the toes of something that he was regretting more and more as each minute passed.

Inside his office it was cramped. Verlaine asked if they wanted coffee; Luckman and Gabillard declined.

‘So how can I help you?’ he asked them, looking from one to the other as if there really was no discernible difference in their faces.

‘A body was discovered,’ Agent Gabillard started. His face was smooth and untroubled. He looked singularly at ease despite the awkwardness of the situation. ‘In the trunk of a car last Saturday evening a body was discovered. An attempt was made through your Prints Division to identify the victim, and that is the reason we are here.’

‘The security tag,’ Verlaine stated.

‘The security tag,’ Luckman repeated. He turned and looked at Gabillard, who nodded in concurrence.

‘The identity of the victim cannot be divulged,’ Luckman went on, ‘save to say that he was in the employ of a significant political figure, and was here in New Orleans on official business.’

‘Official business?’ Verlaine asked.

Gabillard nodded. ‘He was here in the capacity of security for someone.’

‘The significant political figure?’

Luckman shook his head. ‘The daughter.’

Verlaine’s eyes widened. ‘So this guy was babysitting some politician’s daughter down here?’

Gabillard cracked his face with a smile that seemed to demand a considerable effort. ‘This is as much as we can tell you,’ he said. ‘And the only reason we are telling you is that you have a very credible and distinguished record here in New Orleans, and we trust you not to communicate anything regarding this matter beyond the confines of this office. The man you discovered in the trunk of the car was attending to a matter of personal security for the daughter of a significant political figure, and with his death the case becomes a matter of federal jurisdiction, and as such your attention to the killing and any subsequent investigation is no longer required.’

‘Federal?’ Verlaine asked. ‘She must have been kidnapped then, right? You guys wouldn’t get involved if it was simply a murder case.’

‘We can say nothing further,’ Luckman said. ‘All we ask of you at this time is to turn over any paperwork, case files, notes and reports that have been made thus far, and we will speak to your captain when he returns and clarify the position we are now in regarding this investigation.’

Verlaine frowned. ‘So we just drop it? We drop the whole thing, just like that?

‘Just like that,’ Gabillard said.

Verlaine shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know whether to feel frustrated or relieved. ‘Well, okay. I don’t see there’s a great deal more we have to talk about then. Medical Examiner and County Coroner will have their reports. You can collect those from the respective offices, and as far as I am concerned I haven’t yet filed a report. Hadn’t even gotten the thing off the ground.’

Gabillard and Luckman nodded in unison. ‘We appreciate your co-operation,’ Gabillard said, and rose from his chair.

They shook hands again, and Verlaine directed them to the front exit of the building. He stood on the steps ahead of the Precinct House, watching the generic gray sedan pull away and disappear down the street, and then he turned and walked back to his office.

He wondered why he’d said nothing of the message he’d received, of his visit with Feraud. Perhaps nothing more than the desire to hold onto something, to keep something of this as his own.

John Verlaine stood for a time, thinking nothing at all, and then he remembered the words Feraud had said, and the gravity with which they had been pronounced:
Turn and walk away from this quickly and quietly . . . This is not something you should go looking for, you understand
?

Verlaine understood little of anything at all. This morning he’d woken with a murder case, and now he had nothing. He did not resent the FBI’s involvement; he’d been around long enough to know that every once in a while a case could be taken right out of his hands. This was New Orleans, heart of Louisiana, and one thing he knew for sure, as sure as anything in his life: there would never be a shortage of work.

Robert Luckman and Frank Gabillard had been partners for seven years. Working out of the New Orleans Federal Bureau of Investigation Field Office on Arsenault Street, they believed that between them they had seen it all. Under the aegis of the United States Justice Department they investigated federal offences – espionage, sabotage, kidnapping, bank robbery, drug trafficking, terrorism, civil rights violations and fraud against the government. They also received alerts when security-tagged print identification requests were made by any law enforcement agency in Louisiana. Patched through FBI Co-ordination Headquarters in Baton Rouge, the ID request was flagged and a report was immediately logged with the local Field Office. Security tags were registered against any official given security clearance within the law enforcement or intelligence community: Police, National Guard, all branches of the military, FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Department of Justice, any arm of the Attorney General’s Office, Office of Naval Intelligence, NASA
et al
. The report was then pursued by the assigned FBI field operatives, and if the case in some way touched their territory they held the right to assume complete control of all files, records, documents, and any subsequent investigation that might be required. They also possessed the authority to clear the ID request and allow the local police to deal with the matter.

In this instance this was not the case.

On the afternoon of Wednesday 20 August, a nineteen-year-old girl called Catherine Ducane left her home in Shreveport, Louisiana. She was not alone. A fifty-one-year-old man called Gerard McCahill had accompanied her, driving the car, attending to her requirements, ensuring that the visit to her mother in New Orleans went without a hitch. Her father, Charles Ducane, had stood on the steps of his vast mansion and waved her goodbye, and once the car had disappeared from view he had returned inside to attend to his business. He did not expect to see his daughter again for a week. He was perhaps a little surprised not to have received a call to say she had arrived safely, but he knew his daughter and his ex-wife sufficiently well to understand that once they were together there would be little time for anything but shopping and fashionable lunches. By the time Saturday rolled around, Charles Ducane was embroiled in a legal complication that devoured every ounce of attention he could summon, for Charles Ducane was an important man, a figurehead in the community, an opinion leader and a voice with which to be reckoned. Charles Mason Ducane was Governor of the State of Louisiana, now in the third of his four-year term, at one time a husband, forever a father, Charles Ducane was always a busy man. Catherine was his only child, and through much of the year she stayed with him in Shreveport. There was little love lost between Charles and Catherine’s mother, Eve – so much so that Ducane wasn’t surprised to learn that Eve had not even called him when Catherine failed to show. But Ducane understood family as well as any man, and also appreciated that the bitterness and resentment that existed between himself and Eve did not also exist in his daughter’s world. Her mother was her mother, and what kind of a man would he have been to deny the girl her right to continue that relationship?

The man who’d accompanied his daughter was an ex-cop, before that an ex-Marine, and even before that an Eagle Scout of America. Gerard McCahill was as good as they came, and the times he had driven Catherine Ducane down to New Orleans on such trips numbered close to three dozen.

This trip, however, was different.

The prints flagged through Baton Rouge and passed to the FBI Field Office on Arsenault Street were those of McCahill, and even now that same fifty-one-year-old ex-cop, ex-Marine, ex-Eagle Scout was also serving his time as an ex-human being on the County Coroner’s metal slab. It was he who was now heartless, daubed in quinine sulphate, and wearing a paper tag on his toe upon which was inscribed the legend
John Doe #3456–9
.

And Catherine Ducane, she of temperamental moods, of exquisitely expensive taste, she of awkward moments and determined stubbornness, was gone.

Miss Ducane, nineteen years old, beautiful and intelligent and altogether spoiled, had been kidnapped.

This was the situation that faced Robert Luckman and Frank Gabillard as they walked from the Medical Examiner’s Office with Jim Emerson’s reports, as they crossed town to find Michael Cipliano and tell him as little as they could. This was the situation they confronted when they made the necessary phone calls to have Gerard McCahill’s beaten-to-shit cadaver transported from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where it would be inspected and examined by the FBI’s own Criminalistics and Forensics teams.