The Storm Murders (12 page)

Of course he did. Cinq-Mars lightened up.

“I’m sorry. I apologize. Look. A couple of guys attempted to rob us in the lobby. They tried to pick my pocket and her purse. They were good at it, too. Professional. Now those same two men—one downstairs to keep a lookout—break into my room. That’s not coincidence. It’s impossible for that to be coincidence. Pickpockets aren’t burglars and vice versa. I just arrived in this city today. I’m being targeted. I’ve come to you first, of course, you need to be informed. But I also want to talk to the police on this because it is not simply a random incident.”

Clearly, the man appreciated his manners.

“I’ll call,” he said. “They come in half the time than if you call yourself.”

Cinq-Mars had no trouble believing that that was true.

Together, the Head of Security, Sandra and
É
mile Cinq-Mars went upstairs to see what might have occurred in their room. The men formally introduced themselves on the ride up, and Everardo Flores offered an apology on behalf of the hotel for the incident.

“Do you think,” Cinq-Mars asked him, “I could get another room and have it booked under another name? Given what’s occurred?”

“I’ll see to it, sir,” Flores said. “I won’t say half, but, this time of year, with Mardi Gras coming up, maybe twelve or fifteen percent of our clientele are here under assumed names anyhow, so what’s the difference?”

“Why are they…?” Sandra started to inquire, then changed her mind. “Never mind. Don’t answer that.”

“Mardi Gras,” Everardo Flores explained anyway. “Strange things happen.”

They disembarked on the seventeenth floor once again.

This time, no one was in their room.

As far as they could tell, nothing was stolen, which only deepened their concern. The thief, if that was his proper designation—and Cinq-Mars had his doubts about that—had proven himself to be considerate and tidy.
É
mile’s clothes remained unpacked, and it was obvious that the intruder had searched through his gear without unduly disturbing anything. The edges of his shirts had been lifted. The smaller pockets in his suitcase unzipped. Drawers had been opened and Sandra’s things mildly rearranged. One tidy crook, then, who had probably intended to leave the premises as he had found them, as if he had never been there at all.

“But if he stole something,” Flores pointed out, “then sooner or later you’d know that you’d been robbed.”

“Not if he was looking for information,” Cinq-Mars contradicted him. “If that’s what he came for, and found it, we might never have known he was here.”

“What sort of information?” Flores’s query was not skeptical, and Cinq-Mars gave him a glance. A lesser mind might have assumed by now that these hotel guests had panicked, perhaps mistaken room service for the mob. That they were bumpkins. But Everardo Flores apparently took Cinq-Mars at his word and was not treating the event lightly. Nothing stolen, no one hurt, and yet the intrusion felt serious. Even, perhaps, ominous.

Cinq-Mars was examining his suitcase again, trying to remember what he might have had in it. In the washroom, items had been removed from his toiletries bag and set aside, most likely to facilitate a more thorough examination of the contents, but what, indeed, could the man have been searching for?

“That I don’t know,” Cinq-Mars admitted. “Maybe whoever invaded my room didn’t know either.”

“I know what’s missing,” Sandra piped up.

Seated on the bed, she now stood to show them. She pointed to the front of
É
mile’s suitcase, but he couldn’t see what was gone.

“Your name tag’s been torn off.
And
your baggage tag from the airline! My baggage tags are still on my luggage, and I know that you never take your tags off for months—not until your next trip.”

Cinq-Mars concurred. He had a leather name-and-address tag attached to the handle, and a baggage tag from the airline, and both were now gone.

“You’d think, if he broke into the hotel room of people he previously tried to rob, he might already know your names,” Flores remarked.

“Proof of the visit, maybe. Something to show a boss. Or he’s a collector.”

“Of name tags?” Sandra asked.

“Souvenirs.”

“Or he failed to rob you the first time. So he came back.”

The police knocked and announced themselves. Cinq-Mars opened the door and the two uniforms entered and shook hands with Flores first, whom they seemed to recognize. Cinq-Mars didn’t bother to mention that he was a retired detective as the introductions were being made, but he noted that the officers were efficient, if somewhat disinterested. They obviously had no clue as to why they’d been called to this scene, and with some urgency, when nothing more than a couple of tags had been swiped. At least they were not being outwardly sarcastic, although they did give each other looks, as if to ask, “What’s next? Do we get called if a guest farts?”

They showed more interest when Flores told them about the first incident, but again they came back to the relevant information. “So, nobody actually pinched your wallet?”

“No, sir.”

“Nor your purse?” the other officer inquired of Sandra.

“No, but he had my wallet in his hand.”

“Which he picked up off the floor, is that right?”

“He made it look that way. Before that it was in my purse.”

“This is before they accidentally bumped into you.”

“That was no accident,” Sandra let him know, her temper flaring. “That’s the point. The wallet may never have been on the floor.”

“I see,” the first officer said. He had an Italian name which Cinq-Mars had instantly forgotten. D’Amato or D’Amico. Simple enough, but it slipped his mind.

“He was on the job,” Flores said quietly, obviously feeling the need to defend the hotel’s guest.

“Who? Him?” the Italian asked.

“Neither here nor there,” Cinq-Mars told him.

“That true? You were a cop somewhere, sir?”

Conceding the point with a nod, Cinq-Mars admitted, “Detective. Montreal.” Then he added, in case that was not enough information, “Canada.”

The officer surprised him, this D’Amato or D’Amico. “You know what they say. New Orleans. San Francisco. Montreal. Those are the three most lively cities in North America.”

Cinq-Mars knew that, but he was surprised that this man did, too. Then he remembered that the Internet filled people’s heads with an abundance of useless information, particularly when it came to lists and to ranking places and products. “That is what they say.”

“And your description of the intruders again?”

A hopeless cycle, so he indicated Flores with a jerk of his thumb. “Both of them, they looked like him.”

“So two small Mexicans.”

The hotel guy gave him a look.

“Fit,” the officer added. “A couple of small-build,
fit
Mexicans. About his age, too?”

“I’d say so.”

“All right. Not much we can do here, sir. The guy stole nothing—”

“My husband’s name tags,” Sandra interjected, and
É
mile wished that she hadn’t brought them up again.

“Yeah. Well, let’s be grateful he didn’t grab the entire suitcase. Of course, then we’d have an actual crime.”

“Hey, Aldo.” The quieter of the two cops spoke up to get his partner’s attention. He indicated the door, and Cinq-Mars recognized the instant change in the young officer’s demeanor. He’d seen that look before, when a subordinate’s unwarranted confidence yielded to dismay in the presence of a superior officer.

In the doorway stood a man of some heft, emboldened by a stomach that overlapped his belt, who dangled a gold shield from a packet stuck in his suit’s chest pocket. The man had short, tightly curled hair, but his features and skin tone suggested a racial mix that was relatively rare. African and Asian DNA predominated a blend that might include Caucasian and American Indian, making identification of his ethnic origins a challenge. Half a dozen disparate peoples might be willing to claim him as their own. What struck Cinq-Mars though was that the atmosphere in the room had been transformed, in part because their non-crime inexplicably warranted a detective, and in part because the two officers in the room were obviously wary of this man. Possibly—likely, he gauged—they feared him.

“Sir,” the one called Aldo sputtered. He damn nearly saluted.

“Big case?” the new arrival inquired. His presence was further amplified by an impressive baritone voice.

“No, sir,” Aldo briefed him. “Nobody hurt. Nothing—nothing of substance taken, sir.”

“Nothing of substance,” the detective repeated as he came into the room. “Good evening, ma’am,” he said to Sandra with a nod. He had a wide smile and teeth that gleamed. “Evening, sir,” he said to Cinq-Mars. Abruptly, surprisingly, he dismissed the two men in uniform. “I’ll take it from here,” he let them know.

When the door closed behind them, the new man pointed to Flores and said, “I don’t know you. You’re Security, right?” Again he smiled brightly, invitingly, as if welcoming everyone into the fold.

“Head of, sir. Everardo Flores.”

“Hmm. Yes. Sorry. We have met before. I’m—”

“Pascal Dupree,” Flores said. “I know who you are, sir.”

Dupree said nothing at first, expecting nothing less than recognition from Flores, yet seemed unimpressed by his own local fame. He grinned again and gestured to the tall retired detective. He asked Flores, “Do y’all know who he is?”

“Well,” Flores hesitated. “I know his name. I know he was on the job.”

Dupree nodded. He asked Flores to stay although the man had not shown any sign of leaving. Dupree stuck out his hand, “Sergeant-Detective
É
mile Cinq-Mars, I’m guessing. Honored to meet you, sir. Sergeant Detective Pascal Dupree, New Orleans Police Department.”

“How do you do? I wasn’t expecting a detective for our little break-in.”

“Soon enough, sir, I’ll ask y’all what the hell you’re doing in New Orleans. But before we get to that, fill in the blanks for me, if you don’t mind, on what this kerfuffle is about.”

Cinq-Mars did so, briefly and succinctly, while Dupree flipped through a series of expressions that denoted his interest and at times his amazement. When the visiting detective was done, he said only, “I take it that y’all don’t know me?”

The Montreal cop was flummoxed. “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

Dupree nodded, grinned, and looked over at Sandra. To her he said, “I’m the guy he came here to see.”

Suddenly, Cinq-Mars grasped the situation. He went to his suitcase again to dig out the notes he prepared from the FBI files that Bill Mathers had sent him, but even as he did so he was not expecting to find them. The wee notebook, especially purchased for the occasion, was gone.

“I can’t verify that,” Cinq-Mars told Dupree. “But your name rings a bell now. My notebook’s been stolen.”

“Is that significant?” the big man asked him.

“How do you mean?” He was thinking that the fellow’s broad smile kept him off his game. He couldn’t gauge why he was so happy and consequently couldn’t figure him out at all.

“Well, sir,” he said, although his inflection made it sound more like
whale suh
, “is there something in your notes that somebody who stole them from you will find significant?”

He thought about it, concluding, “Hard to say. I think most people would find my notes cryptic.”

“Cryptic,” Dupree repeated.

“I guess it would depend on who’s looking.”

The heavy black man changed the subject. “Are there many Duprees in your part of the world? You’re a Frenchman, right? It’s necessary to go back a ways, some would say a long ways, but there’s a trace of Cajun in me. My grandma on my mom’s side was a Filipina, about the only pure blood in me. But then my granddad, her husband, was a black-Cajun mix. My dad’s half black, my mom also has a white mom and a black father. One of those. So I’m a mongrel, but contrary to popular opinion I’m not some junkyard dog. I don’t inhale the breath of the dead. But I got enough of a trace of Cajun in my dancing shoes to earn the name Dupree. Some kind of French, no? Even though as you might tell from my accent, I hail from Mississippi. We all live complicated lives, don’t we?”

Cinq-Mars sat on the bed beside his wife. This man was beginning to sound like he did himself during an interrogation. Go all over the map in a discussion in order to tie the person up in his head and deliberately confound him then slice through to the heart of the matter. He wished he’d get to the heart of the matter.

“No Duprees where I come from,” Cinq-Mars told him. “But Dupuis. Dupree could easily be a corruption of that.”

“Corruption,” the detective repeated, and smiled.

“Like my name, Cinq-Mars, could be a corruption of Saint Marc, possibly. That’s one explanation. Or it can mean the fifth of March for some reason. Nobody’s one hundred percent sure.”

“Oh I get you, Detective. It’s just that that word—”

When he paused, Cinq-Mars repeated it for him, “Corruption.”

“It’s not a word nobody wants to say out loud in this town. Not in the company of a policeman.”

Sandra posed the question. “Why not?”

That great white-toothed grin again. “A few of our officers recently got sixty-five years each. Now that’ll be a good long stretch for them, don’t you think? Should teach them a lesson, no?”

“What did they do?” she asked.

“Ever heard of Danziger Bridge?” He carried on when she shook her head no. “A few of our officers killed innocent citizens there, just a week after Katrina. The victims were poor people. Hungry people. Folks without their homes. They were in a desperate plight. So our boys went down there and shot them. Killed two. Wounded a bunch of others. Four others. One young man was shot and as he lay dying an officer of the law went about kicking him. Really made him suffer before he died. He was a mentally challenged boy but some would apply that distinction to the cop. A few of our boys, not enough of them if it was up to me, got sixty-five years for that.”

Sandra had another question. “Why did the police shoot them?”

“Did I not explain that?” Before answering, Dupree shot a glance across at Everardo Flores, a look which Cinq-Mars interpreted as meaning,
I don’t know you, but I’m going to say what I think in front of you anyway.
“Why, ma’am, my fellow officers shot those people because they were poor, hungry, homeless, and scared, but mostly they shot them because they were black. The cops said they were shot at, opinion contradicted by the evidence, and by witnesses, including police witnesses.”