Читать книгу Murder Jambalaya - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 8

CHAPTER FOUR

The police took an unconscionable amount of time getting there, and it seemed much longer than that because I had nothing to do but wait. They also took their time in getting around to dealing with Tosche and me, and we almost had to find our way back to Pointe Neuve in the dark.

They weren’t quite finished with us then. A deputy met us at the dock, and, after we had refilled the motor’s gas tank and located Ed to return his key, we were escorted into the presence of the sheriff himself. He had set up a temporary headquarters at his parked police car, and he was directing the questioning of every Pointe Neuve resident about the stranger Old Jake had been seen with.

He looked more like a folksy used car dealer than an officer of the law, but he certainly was no one’s fool in police matters. He already knew all about me from reports his men had radioed, but he wanted a peek for himself.

From his questions, I gathered that all of the local residents except the witnesses we had already talked with were disclaiming any knowledge of either Old Jake or the stranger.

First he cross-examined me on my testimony. Then, as though he half suspected I might have dented Old Jake’s skull myself, he turned his attention to my own movements two weeks previously.

“Jay Pletcher?” he asked finally, giving me a searching look. “Is that J-A-Y?”

I’d had a long, exhausting day, and I definitely had not received my money’s worth for the time invested. The deputies at the cabon had been downright miserly in passing along information.

“It’s ‘J’,” I said. “The letter ‘J.’ I was named J-A-G-D after my German great-grandfather, but no one can pronounce it, so I just call myself ‘J’.”

He decided to ignore that. “You’re staying at the Hotel Maria Theresa?”

“I haven’t stayed there yet, but I’m registered there.”

“Just so we know where to find you. Better plan on sticking around for awhile.”

“I’ll be here a lot longer than that,” I promised.

Tosche and I trudged back to his jeep. Fortunately it had stopped raining.

“This pretty much nails down the rumor about DeVarnay being seen down here, doesn’t it?” Tosche asked as we drove off.

“The police certainly will take it that way,” I said. “To me, it’s just one more damned complication. The fact that a man’s suitcase is there doesn’t automatically prove he arrived with it. It would help to know what was found in the cabon in the way of fingerprints, but I’ll get that eventually. If DeVarnay left them all over the place, that, of course, settles it. If not, there are other possibilities, and all of them will have to be looked into. The most urgent problem right now is to find out what could have taken a millionaire antique dealer down to Pointe Neuve in the first place. According to his personal history, it wasn’t hunting or fishing, and from what I saw of Old Jake and his cabon, it couldn’t have been business.” I thought for a moment. “I’ll have to talk to a customs officer.”

“You mean—he could have been smuggling something?”

“It’s a possibility. I don’t know enough about the sources of antiques to know whether there would be any profit in smuggling them. Or in smuggling something else, such as drugs, under the guise of importing antiques. I’ll have to ask about it. A customs officer is the logical place to start.”

“You’d want a special agent,” Tosche said. “My brother knows one.”

“A special customs agent?”

“Yeah. Dick—that’s my brother—sometimes comes up with tips for him.”

“What’s your brother’s business?” I asked.

“That’s hard to say. Mostly he buys and sells. He knows where and how to dispose of things. You show him something, he knows who might be interested. He sells some of the stuff himself in the flea market at the New Orleans French Market.”

“Can he make a living that way?”

“He seems to. He isn’t getting rich, but he gets along all right, and he enjoys what he’s doing. If you have any investigating you want done in the French Quarter, he knows it inside out. He can arrange for someone else to look after his tables at the market when he’s busy with other things, and it’d give him something different to do. My brother gets bored easily. Until he started this buying and selling kick, he never held a job long.”

“If he’s available, I’m sure I can use him,” I said. “Just for a start, I’d like to meet this special customs agent as soon as possible. If DeVarnay has stuck his foot in something, I want to know about it.”

“I’ll call him now,” Tosche said.

We stopped at a gasoline station, and he called his brother. When he came back to his jeep, he announced, “He’ll give his friend a call and see if he’s available tonight. Either way, he’ll be waiting for us in your hotel lobby.”

Neither of us had much to say for the remainder of the ride. Eventually the lights of New Orleans appeared on the horizon, and we crossed the Greater New Orleans Bridge and plunged into them.

The streets of the New Orleans French Quarter are not the world’s best-lit thoroughfares. Streetlights are infrequent and sometimes oddly placed—they may be located some distance from intersections where one would expect to find them. The French Quarter’s numerous galleries, or balconies, further complicate the lighting. If the lamps were located at the height common for them in most cities, French Quarter sidewalks would be deeply shadowed by the galleries. Perhaps this is the reason the lights are placed lower than usual, but that further reduces their effectiveness.

The principle streets are well-lit despite this because each business establishment lights its own store front and the adjacent sidewalk with floodlights attached beneath the building’s second floor gallery. On side streets, however, such as the one where the Hotel Maria Theresa was located, gloom may prevail.

Although the hotel was small and family operated, its security was commendable. The lobby’s outside door was kept locked at all times. One rang the bell; the duty clerk pressed a button that sounded a buzzer and released the lock. Then he checked to see who was entering. We passed the test and left the dim street for a small, warmly lit lobby, where we found Tosche’s brother, Dick, waiting for us. If it hadn’t been for Dick’s height and sturdy build, he would have looked like a high school kid. His blue eyes, slow grin, and rugged good looks echoed those of his brother. The only clashing note was produced by his long hair, which made him look like an exceptionally robust hippy. He gave his brother an affectionate hug, and then he very politely shook hands with me.

“He’ll tell you all about it,” Charlie told him. “I’ve got to run.”

They exchanged hugs again, Charlie turned at the door, gave us a wave, and disappeared into the gloom outside. I hadn’t offered to pay him. He had made his deal with Raina, and I had no idea what it was, so I left the obligation for her to settle.

In that casual fashion, I found I had switched guides. Dick said, “The customs agent will be waiting for us in a bar near here.”

“Does the bar serve food?” I asked. Since the skimpy airline breakfast, I’d had only the sandwich in the Pointe Neuve café and the three stolen bottles of Blackened Voodoo Lager Beer I consumed while I waited for the deputies.

He said of course.

“What about jambalaya?” I asked.

He thought jambalaya would be straining the bar’s resources at that time of night, but probably it could manage almost any kind of Po-Boy sandwich I could think of.

“Good,” I said. “I’m hungry enough to take on a live alligator, but I may never be able to face jambalaya again.”

The thought of food made me feel immensely better. I asked for my key at the desk, discovered that neither Raina Lambert nor anyone else had left a message for me, and invited Dick Tosche up to my room while I changed.

I’d had adventures enough for one day. All I wanted was a bite to eat, a quiet talk with the special customs agent, and then a good night’s sleep. Unfortunately, Fate had my future programmed differently.

As I mentioned earlier, my room was on the second floor with a gallery overlooking the hotel’s charming courtyard. Because I have lived in hotel and motel rooms much of my adult life, I know all the quirks there are concerning locks and doors, and when I left my luggage that morning, I had found out which sort I had to contend with at the Hotel Marie Theresa. As a result, I unlocked the door and opened it in one smooth movement, at the same time motioning with my head for Dick Tosche to enter first.

He did—at a run. He tore into the room and just failed to nail a fleeing figure that went out the door to the gallery in a flash and disappeared over the railing. It wasn’t an enormous drop to the ground if one first hung by one’s hands from the gallery floor, and of course that is what the intruder did. The only impression I got was of an unusually tall, lank, shabbily dressed male.

Tosche didn’t hesitate; he followed him, and I chased after the two of them, noticing as I passed through the room that one of my suitcases was lying open on the bed where I certainly hadn’t left it. When I reached the railing, the intruder, running with immensely long strides, was vanishing into a doorway. Tosche was ten feet behind him. I would have been a poor third, so I went to phone the desk.

A few seconds passed before anyone responded. I was still blinking because I hadn’t expected my flea market buy-and-sell expert to be such a peerless man of action. I explained the situation to the night clerk: There’d been an intruder in my room. He had exited by way of the balcony, and my friend had chased after him.

“They just ran out through the lobby,” the night clerk said. He hesitated. “Should I call the police?”

“I really do think they might appreciate it. This character seems to have a facility for getting into hotel rooms. If he does that often, he’ll give New Orleans a bad name.”

“Right,” the clerk said. I was just about to hang up when I heard, over the phone, the outside bell ring and the buzzer sound as the clerk responded. He announced, “Your friend just came back.”

“Alone?” I asked.

The clerk sounded surprised. “Yes. Alone.”

“Then he didn’t catch him. I’m sorry to hear that. Send him up.”

I turned to the open suitcase. As far as I could determine without touching anything, we had interrupted the intruder just as he was getting started, and nothing was missing.

Tosche arrived muttering angrily to himself. “There was a car waiting down the street for him.”

“Never mind,” I said. “You get an A plus for effort. You have super reflexes. Did you get a good look at him?”

“Good enough. I know the guy. He’s a street character—goes by the name of Little Boy. Maybe because he’s so tall and gawky. I also got the make of the car that picked him up, but they had the license number covered.”

I gave him my sincere congratulations. “Some people live out their entire lives without ever finding out what fate intended them for,” I said. “Thanks to this little adventure, that won’t happen to you. You’re a natural-born witness. All of this will interest the police exceedingly, and the more interested they are, the less they’re inclined to hurry. You’d better telephone the bar and let your friend know we’ll be late.”

A short time later the police arrived along with the manager. When they learned that Tosche had recognized the intruder, they suddenly had visions of solving a number of similar crimes at one swoop. They sent for a fingerprint expert and assigned one of their number to take a detailed statement from Tosche. Another officer huddled with the hotel’s manager and tried to figure out how the intruder had gotten into the hotel and then into my room.

As far as I was concerned, these were the wrong questions. I wanted to know how he knew which room was mine.

When a sergeant arrived, I gave him time to take in the situation, and then I briefed him on my earlier adventures. For confirmation, I referred him to his colleague, Lieutenant George Keig.

“Do you think this may be connected?” he asked.

“If you’ve ever doubted that the night has ears, this is your proof. The sheriff announced to anyone within hearing that I was staying at the Hotel Marie Theresa. Obviously someone did hear and got curious about me.”

“But you came directly back.”

I said patiently, “One keeps stumbling onto all kinds of unexpected modern conveniences in the hinterland, and one of them is the telephone. It would be stretching credulity—mine, anyway—to suggest that Little Boy’s breaking into my room at this particular moment was only a coincidence. One of those clannish Cajuns overheard the sheriff and informed someone by telephone that Charlie Tosche and a stranger, name of Pletcher, had been making inquiries about Old Jake and his companion, after which they went to Old Jake’s cabon and found his body. Pletcher was staying at the Marie Theresa Hotel. Almost any Pointe Neuve resident with an insistent curiosity could have picked up that information and passed it along. The only thing that puzzles me is why anyone would bother.”

The sergeant nodded at my opened suitcase. “What did he find out?”

“Nothing except my name on the ID tag. We must have interrupted him just as he was getting started. He didn’t even have time to mess up my wardrobe.”

“We know all about Little Boy,” the sergeant said. “His name is Griff Wylan. The ‘Griff’ probably is short for something, but no one knows what, not even Wylan. At least, he says he doesn’t. He had a long juvenile record, but he’s supposed to be going straight, now.”

Dick finished his statement, I made a brief one, and then we claimed urgent business and left the room to the fingerprint expert. The manager followed me down the hall, fervently promising to have the lock changed on my room at once.

I doubted that it would make any difference. Little Boy must have entered the room through the door—he wouldn’t have risked climbing onto the gallery from the well lighted courtyard—so he certainly owned an effective master key. Probably it would work just as easily on any replacement lock the management had. It was more important to find out how he knew which room was mine, but the police would be looking into that.

I bade the manager good evening, told him I probably would be out late—which certainly wasn’t unusual behavior for a New Orleans hotel guest—and left him.

Outside the hotel door, we found the street marked off by a blaze of light at either end of the dim block: In one direction, Royal Street; in the other, Bourbon Street. Scatterings of tourists were drifting past on their way from one to the other. Even at that distance, a blare of music reached us from Bourbon Street. New Orleans jazz can be good, indifferent, or thoroughly bad, but it is always loud.

We turned toward Royal Street, where the sidewalks were jammed with tourists casually shopping or avidly discussing restaurant menus. We struggled through the crowds for two blocks and then escaped into a side street.

L’Endroit, a bar and night club located between Bourbon and Royal Streets, was convenient for any kind of French Quarter rendezvous. Further, it was large, dimly lit—with dangling ceiling ornaments shaped like musical instruments that threw convenient shadows—and throbbing with exuberantly loud live music that made it difficult to hear one’s own conversation, let alone overhear someone else’s.

Dick introduced me to “John,” a heavy-set man with a large, good-humored face and a thick but neatly trimmed beard. He wore a beret, a vest with sparkling ornamentation on it, and, in one ear, a gold earring with a small diamond. One glance at him shattered any stereotype I might have been fostering concerning customs agents.

We took places on either side of him and ordered drinks. I thanked him for waiting and gave him my card. He glanced at it and murmured into my ear during one of the band’s less noisy passages, “Dick said you wanted to see a special agent.”

Dick was sipping his beer and watching the crowd. I leaned close to John’s ear—the one without the earring—and described my day’s adventures. The steady, blaring beat of the music began to get on my nerves long before I finished, but John seemed to ignore it. He listened intelligently and didn’t interrupt with questions.

Finally he asked, “Are you buying it that DeVarnay really was the man with Old Jake?”

“I’m regarding it with extreme skepticism,” I said. “The waitress was a convincing witness, and the men weren’t bad, but before I can chew it thoroughly and swallow it, I’ll have to know what a person with his background could have been doing down there.”

“Did he fish or hunt?”

“Not according to what I know about him. I’ll have to find out for certain. In the meantime, I’m wondering whether there would be any money in smuggling antiques. He seems to have built a highly prosperous business quickly. Since smugglers play rough, it might explain his disappearance. He could have been done away with, or he could have found it expedient to go into hiding.”

John meditated for a moment. “I’m certain stolen antiques find their way into the New Orleans market all the time,” he said. “These would come from surrounding states, some of them peddled illegally by heirs without other heirs knowing about it. Of course my department wouldn’t come into that. An antique dealer shops around and picks up things at second hand stores, or discard sales where the owner doesn’t know their true value, or anywhere at all. Depending on his personal standards of honesty, he also may have contacts that steer stolen goods his way. It’s all in the day’s work to him.

“But I’ve never heard of any activity in smuggled antiques, and I don’t know of any instance where a legitimate firm in the French Quarter has brought contraband into this country by way of imported goods or antiques—hidden in hollowed out pedestals or some such thing. Handicrafts and jewelry have no duty if they’re imported from any of a list of disadvantaged countries, so there would be no point in smuggling anything from there. We do have to watch the possibility that goods might be sent to one of those countries from Europe and then shipped from there to the U.S. to avoid duties.”

“Antique stores frequently deal in jewelry,” I remarked. “Sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether it’s old or new. Does anyone smuggle jewelry these days?”

“Rolex watches are a problem right now, but these most commonly are smuggled in by individuals. They’ve bought one and don’t want to pay the duty on it. If DeVarnay is smuggling anything, it wouldn’t be antiques—jewelry or whatever. If a thing is a hundred years old, it’s duty free anyway, so why smuggle it?

“But it might be profitable to smuggle in expensive new jewelry disguised in some way. Another possibility is antique art. There’s a big underground market for pre-Columbian art from Central and South America. Pieces are stolen from archeological sites, or native temples, or even from museums. If they’re authentic, they can bring huge prices. They aren’t often brought in through New Orleans, though. The most common route is across the Mexican border with a tourist trying to pass the item off as a fake picked up cheap. There are plenty of fakes around, so sometimes it works. It’s illegal to take those things out of the originating country, and we have agreements to cooperate on this end, which makes the operation illegal all the way—and that results in scarcity and higher prices. Ivory goods are another profitable item. Anything relating to endangered species can’t be brought in legally, so the smuggling of fancy ivory carvings is highly lucrative.

“Except for those few things, I can’t see your antique dealer profiting from smuggling. Of course his store could be a sideline or a front, and his business down in the bayou country could have had nothing to do with antiques except that he uses them as a cover for his smuggling profits. We had a case here where two businessmen with legitimate operations went into drug smuggling to get rich quicker. They bought barges and leased them to smugglers. When caught, they claimed they were businessmen innocently leasing barges. Since they were on the scene at three in the morning, the court didn’t buy that.”

“I hadn’t thought of DeVarnay’s business being a blind,” I said. “I haven’t looked at the store, yet, but from what I’ve heard, it certainly sounds respectable.”

“It would,” John assured me.

“Then his smuggling—if he’s doing any—may have no connection with antiques?”

“The antique business would provide an excellent cover. Antiques come from odd places, some of them shady though perfectly legal. The markups can be tremendous on valuable items picked up cheap, so the store could be used to disguise the profits on something like drugs, which can be tremendous, too.”

“How would it be managed?” I asked.

“That depends on where your antique dealer stands in the hierarchy. Usually there’s a mother ship. Drugs are transshipped—maybe to something inconspicuous like shrimp or fishing boats or to a special small boat that’s fast and doesn’t draw much water. It may be extremely expensive with the very latest in electronic equipment, costing a couple of hundred thousand dollars, and the operators would have no compunction about abandoning it if circumstances require that. The profits are so huge they can write it off as one of the costs of doing business. They would need a safe place to take the drugs to, so it wouldn’t be unusual for them to have a way station down in the swamps.”

“Something like Old Jake’s cabon?”

“Right, but they would prefer a place where the drugs could be picked up by truck as well as by boat. The more options they have, the better. Or they might take them to a dock where there’s plenty of legitimate all-night activity and it wouldn’t be unusual for a truck to be picking up a load at two in the morning. There are all sorts of angles, and these people are ingenious.”

“And ruthless,” I suggested.

“Especially ruthless. There’s so much money involved. Down in the bayous, the smuggling business can easily get mixed up with legitimate business. It’s a cash operation, but so is fishing. People have their own boats, they set their own hours, and they have their own private fishing territories. They have no legal title to them, but they defend them as though they did. If they find someone else poaching, they may resort to gunfire.

A few years ago, there was a problem with Viet Nam refugees. The refugees had been fishermen in Viet Nam, so when they arrived in the U.S., they started fishing, and actual gun wars resulted when they encroached on someone else’s territory. No one down there is going to be concerned about how you make your money, whether it’s by fishing, or some kind of import business, or by smuggling. As long as you don’t interfere with them, they won’t interfere with you. An outsider could quickly get into trouble. You’d better know the people down there, and make sure they know you, before you start any kind of operation.”

“Then DeVarnay could have got in over his depth.”

“It’s possible. It’s even likely if he was trying to operate there without taking the necessary precautions.”

“But his antique business has been flourishing for years. If it’s founded on illegal imports, he must have been at it for some time. Presumably he would be established there by now. And if he got in over his depth, I suppose he might have been abducted, but why was Old Jake killed?”

“DeVarnay could have been trying to shift his territory or expand it, but of course all of this is sheer speculation. I don’t suppose you have a bit of evidence that he was anything but an especially shrewd antique dealer.”

“That’s true,” I admitted. “But in that case, what was he doing down in Old Jake’s cabon?”

John grinned and shook his head.

“You aren’t impressed with my antique dealer as a smuggler?” I asked.

“Not on the basis of what you’ve told me. If you turn up any real evidence, we’ll be glad to work on it.”

He gave me a telephone number I could call if I wanted to see him again.

Dick Tosche and I walked back to my hotel.

“Have there been any rumors about DeVarnay?” I asked.

“You mean among the street people? Most of them know about him. Not only is he a prominent antique dealer, but he pays well for tips on where to find antiques. Information like that circulates with the speed of light.”

“Are there any rumors about him being involved in something shady?”

“I haven’t heard any. Do you want me to inquire around?”

“Please do. Just for a start, I’m curious to know whether he has a street connection—a person or persons who work for him regularly.”

At the hotel, we asked the night clerk whether the police had made any progress. He told us someone belatedly remembered that Little Boy—under his real name, Griff Wylan—had worked for the hotel for a short time a couple of years before, and several of the employees knew him. Following that up, a detective figured out what had happened. Little Boy had contrived to get himself admitted through a rear employees’ entrance by pretending to call on a custodian who lived at the hotel. From there he made his way to the front, got my room number from the register when the duty clerk had to leave the desk for a moment, and entered with a master key.

That answered everything except what he had been after and why, thus leaving the puzzle just as murky as it had been before.

“How can I get in touch with you?” I asked Dick.

“Sister Merlina will take messages for me.” He paused and then added, “She’s a witch. Certified. Nice girl, too. She runs a little curio and witchcraft shop out on Decatur.” He dictated the phone number.

“That sounds splendid,” I told him. “Before this is over, we’ll probably need her.”