Jim McGill 02 The Hangman's Companion Read online

  But that wasn’t what Galia had on her mind right now. She was thinking of her date — what else could she call it—with Sir Robert Reed the previous evening. The president had told her she’d be dining with Secretary of State Jeremy Kalman and Ambassador Garrett Byrne. After that she’d retire early. Given an unusually clear block of time, Galia had accepted Sir Robert’s invitation to dine with him. Politically, Galia felt it was the right move. She might learn something that would be to the president’s advantage.

  Personally, she couldn’t help but wonder if Sir Robert might actually have taken an interest in her as a woman. She didn’t see how. They’d never met before. But Galia had appeared on television any number of times. Certainly, as the president’s chief of staff, she wouldn’t be unknown to the ruling class in Britain. But could an elegant aristocrat like Sir Robert have conceived an affection for someone he’d seen only in the media? Someone who could stand to lose a few pounds. Again, she didn’t see how.

  Games were being played. She’d read The Irregulars, the book that detailed how Winston Churchill had used Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming and other charming Brits to lobby the American government to enter World War Two sooner rather than later. The plan hadn’t succeeded, but that hadn’t stopped Churchill from trying. Who knew what machinations Sir Robert had in mind now?

  For all that, Galia thought, it couldn’t hurt a girl to think just a little that she might be appreciated by a blueblood whose tastes weren’t reserved for clichés of feminine beauty. It was Sir Robert’s hair that allowed Galia to entertain that possibility. Its cut was impeccable, but draped across his forehead was an errant wavy lock. Not a flaw overlooked by a stylist but a statement made by Sir Robert: Manners would be observed, but individuality would be preserved.

  So, who knew? Maybe there was such a thing as an English aristocrat who could be infatuated with a slightly zaftig, dazzlingly brilliant American woman of high achievement.

  She still didn’t really see how, but it was fun to pretend.

  And that night the man who knew just how to behave with a real queen had treated her like one. He’d taken her to—what? A restaurant so exclusive it didn’t have a name. A private club with a fantastic kitchen. A property owned by Her Majesty with a royal chef doing the honors. All she knew was they went to an elegant brick townhouse in Westminster, had a private dining room to themselves, and the food and service was at least equal to that of the White House.

  Sir Robert had been wonderful company, telling her stories of his boyhood, recounting the natural wonders he’d seen while traveling with the queen, complimenting President Grant on the strength of character needed to win an election so soon after the loss of her first husband. He even had kind words for James J. McGill for so quickly catching the villains who’d committed the crime—and having the forthrightness to say they should all be be executed.

  “He’s quite a piece of work, the president’s henchman is,” Galia agreed.

  Sir Robert laughed. “And that’s quite the sobriquet he’s given himself.”

  At the end of the drive home, Galia hadn’t expected Sir Robert to walk her to the door and give her a kiss. But the chauffeur gave them a moment alone in the Rolls.

  “I had a wonderful night, Galia,” he said. “You are truly a remarkable woman. President Grant and the United States are fortunate to have you looking out for them.”

  The guy was good, Galia thought. She felt she was looking pretty special that night, but if he’d complimented her appearance, she’d have smelled a rat. Praising her ability, though, that pressed her pleasure button. Got her to relax enough that she didn’t pull back when he leaned in and kissed her.

  His mouth was only slightly parted, and the contact was brief but, my God, the man’s lips were as smooth as silk. She was unable to recall a kiss like that from her late husband or the handful of other boys and men who’d ever kissed her.

  It almost, but not quite, made her miss the card Sir Robert deftly slipped into her hand.

  A Secret Service agent stepped into the drawing room and broke her reverie.

  “Ms. Mindel, the president is coming.”

  Aboard Marine One

  8

  If Galia didn’t know better, she’d swear the president had gotten laid last night. She was especially sensitive to the gleam in Patti Grant’s eyes because she’d entertained the possibility she might be equivalently bright eyed this morning — for the first time in more years than she cared to think about. But James J. McGill was across the Channel in France, so…

  Oh, dear God, the chief of staff thought. It couldn’t be that Jean-Louis Severin had crept into the president’s bedroom and … Galia couldn’t bring herself to complete the thought. It was the stuff of Hollywood farce, and Washington, D.C. ruination.

  Patricia Darden Grant was much too smart — and too in love with her husband, Galia grudgingly had to admit — to allow herself to become such a figure of ridicule.

  Still, she had been unusually convivial — très charmant — with the French president, a man who’d only recently lost his wife to divorce.

  Galia probed delicately. “You had a good dinner with Secretary Kalman and Ambassador Byrne last night, Madam President?”

  Patti turned away from the window of Marine One. She’d been watching the English countryside swiftly slip past below as her party flew to Chequers. The RAF had extended the courtesy of providing an aerial escort. But the British aircraft didn’t crowd the president.

  She told Galia, “It was a good meeting, productive.”

  Paying attention to her chief of staff now, Patti saw the other question in Galia’s eyes, and she decided to answer it.

  “I talked with Jim last night,” she said with a smile. “I was feeling down about the leak and the uproar. I was displeased with Kimbrough’s pissy comments. I had serious doubts about what I had done. Felt as if I’d blundered badly, might even have to abandon the plan entirely. But Jim was so kind, so reassuring, so completely confident in me that I slept as peacefully as a child. I woke up feeling strong and certain that I’m doing the right thing. For our country and our allies.” The president took Galia’s hand and said, “You and I, we’re going to make this work.”

  Patti didn’t say a word about Jim singing her to sleep.

  If that tidbit was going into anyone’s memoirs, it would be hers.

  And then only if Jim consented.

  “How was your night, Galia? Sir Robert showed you a good time?”

  “Lovely,” Galia replied.

  She kept the sudden pang of envy she felt out of her voice. To have a relationship so cherished that a phone call could make you glow, it made her night on the town with an aristocrat seem like she’d spent her time doing laundry. Galia wondered for the first time since her husband had died if she would ever marry again. She didn’t think it would be possible as long as she was chief of staff. There was no time for a husband. Maybe a discreet lover then, someone with his own commitments, if she could find the right man.

  She repressed her personal feelings and handed a business card to Patti.

  “Sir Robert gave that to me last night.”

  The president looked at the card. It bore only a name: Giles Pembroke.

  “Who is Giles Pembroke?” Patti asked.

  “He’s a bookie.”

  Patti gave Galia a puzzled look.

  “He handles the action for the American ex-pat community in London. Lets us Yanks bet on Stateside sporting events. Sir Robert said Pembroke might be someone we should keep an eye on. Him and his clientele.”

  Patti made the leap. “Someone from our London embassy. The source of the leak.”

  “The mystery solved ever so discreetly, courtesy of Her Majesty.”

  The discretion took the form of a social encounter between the queen’s private secretary and the president’s chief of staff. But what had Sir Robert hoped to gain with his kiss? That was what Galia wanted to know. Simply to make her heart go pitter-pat, put her off
balance in case he should ever need something from her?

  Well, he’d have to do better than that to put Galia Mindel off her game.

  Rue de Lille, Paris

  9

  Investigating Magistrate Pruet had everyone gather in the basement of the building on the Rue de Lille. McGill, Gabbi, Kinnard, Pruet, Odo, and six Paris flics stood in a square space twenty feet to a side. The plaster ceiling stood ten feet above a cement floor. The walls were brick, painted white. Two small windows, both barred, rose a foot above the outside pavement and admitted daylight. But the preponderance of the illumination in the room came from four bright incandescent bulbs set in utilitarian ceiling fixtures.

  Two cops covered each of the three doors to the room.

  Kinnard took a few steps around the middle of the room, getting the feel of the place.

  He looked at Pruet and said, “If these walls could talk, huh? I bet a lot of the poor saps who got dragged down here talked, screamed, and begged for mercy.” He nodded to himself and smiled. “But whoever painted the place did a nice job of covering everything up.”

  The magistrate neither affirmed nor denied Kinnard’s accusation. He turned to McGill and said quietly, “It would be a great embarrassment, if no great loss, if you killed this man. It would be far worse, if he so much as hurts you seriously.”

  McGill leaned forward and whispered, “M’sieur le magistrat, surely it must have entered your mind that it would be helpful to see how well Kinnard can brawl.”

  A rueful smile crossed Pruet’s face. “You are a most perceptive man, Mr. McGill. You must serve your president well.”

  “Do my best,” McGill replied.

  “Hey, Jim,” Kinnard called, “let’s get this playacting on the road.”

  McGill looked at his former fellow copper. “Be right with you, Glen.” Looking back to Pruet, he continued sotto voce. “Having me suggest this tussle takes you off the hook somewhat. It wasn’t your idea. Now, Glen over there, he’s been dying to go after me for years. So things are going to get intense. Don’t let your cops jump in unless I say so.”

  Pruet asked, “And what will your signal be?”

  McGill looked at Gabbi.

  “Au secours,” she said quietly.

  Pruet gave them a thin smile. “Very well. Bonne chance.”

  McGill understood that.

  Kinnard’s patience was at an end. “Come on, McGill. Quit dickin’ around.”

  Odo handed McGill an old aluminum coffee pot filled with a pound of loose dirt. He took it and walked over to his fellow American. Kinnard was wearing the black leather jacket he’d had on the night of his fight with Thierry Duchamp. It was torn in several places, stained with blood, and half the collar had been ripped free of its stitching. On one arm, there were clear impressions of bite marks. McGill handed the coffee pot to Kinnard.

  “Your urn,” McGill said. He saw real pain — and anger — in Kinnard’s eyes. “Hold it the way you did that night.”

  Kinnard cradled the pot in the crook of his left arm.

  “How far away was Thierry Duchamp when he first noticed you?” McGill asked.

  “Ten, fifteen feet.” Kinnard’s words were clipped, his face reddening as the memories came rushing back.

  McGill stepped off the appropriate distance.

  “Now, you don’t speak French, but did he say anything to you?” McGill said, going along with Kinnard’s deception.

  “Yeah, I told him that.” Kinnard nodded in Pruet’s direction. “I told you, too.”

  “Yes, you did. So tell us now how much he said to you. A few words? Or did Thierry Duchamp go off on a rant?”

  Kinnard saw that McGill was trying to get at something, but he couldn’t figure out what, and that only added to his foul mood.

  “It wasn’t a rant,” Kinnard said. “I had to guess, he just cursed me out a little.”

  McGill had expected Kinnard’s ire, but what surprised him was the appearance of tears at the corners of Kinnard’s eyes. McGill had a flash of intuition. Kinnard’s daughter, Emilie, had told McGill that Kinnard had cheated on her mother. At the time, McGill had the feeling she’d been holding back. Something more shameful than infidelity. A more visceral reason to be alienated from her father. Now, McGill wondered: Had Glen Kinnard been a wife beater? With his temper, it wasn’t hard to imagine. That would certainly have given Emilie cause to change her last name.

  If so, that night under the Pont d’Iéna, had Kinnard not only been grieving the death of his wife, had he been bleeding inside at the way he’d treated her when she’d been alive?

  “So then what happened, Glen?” McGill asked, starting toward Kinnard.

  “I told you both,” Kinnard said, his voice descending to a growl. “The guy bit down on the broad’s finger and started clubbing her. That’s when I stepped in.”

  As McGill drew close to Kinnard, every pulse in the room began to race. McGill kept his focus on Kinnard. He said, “Sure, why shouldn’t you jump in? For all you knew, Glen, this dickwad might have told you, ‘Fuck off, asshole. I’ll beat my woman and you beat yours.’”

  Yves Pruet saw Kinnard’s eyes bulge with rage. If the president’s henchman hadn’t somehow captured Thierry Duchamp’s exact words, he’d still cut his fellow Ami to the quick.

  McGill then closed in on Kinnard and kicked the coffee pot out of his embrace. A howl of agony burst from him as he watched the pot fly away, bounce off the ceiling and a wall and skid across the floor, spilling its content. Before it came to a stop, Kinnard’s head whipped back toward McGill. His eyes were no longer those of a sane man.

  Kinnard leaped at McGill as if he were a predatory cat, fingers extended like claws, teeth bared. McGill wanted no part of a prolonged fight. Madmen were often inhumanly strong. He stepped quickly to his left, at a forty-five degree angle to Kinnard’s line of attack. He brushed Kinnard’s outstretched right arm away with his left hand. Then he grabbed Kinnard’s right wrist with his right hand, and pulled to accelerate his attacker’s momentum. As Kinnard’s head came into range, he hit him on the hinge of his jaw with a straight left hand. The nerve bundle there was so dense that hitting it a good shot — and McGill hit it a great one — was like throwing a lights-out switch, madman or not. Kinnard lost consciousness while he was still hurtling forward.

  McGill caught Kinnard under the arms before his head could hit the cement floor. He lowered the man gently, turning his head so the bruised jaw was up.

  Breathing hard after the adrenaline spike, McGill turned to Pruet. He said, “Imagine what might have happened to me if I hadn’t gotten out of his way.”

  “You might have wound up as dead as Thierry Duchamp,” the magistrate replied.

  Rive Gauche, Paris

  10

  The French were considerate enough to provide McGill with an ice bag for his left hand and some ibuprofen for general pain relief. A doctor had been summoned for Kinnard. The physician insisted on taking his patient to a hospital for x-rays and proper treatment. The investigating magistrate had not objected, merely sent along a police escort and reflected on what he’d just heard and seen.

  McGill decided that he liked Pruet.

  As he and Gabbi were leaving the basement at the Rue de Lille building, McGill noticed that Odo was going through the sequence of McGill’s move: step left, brush left, grab right, punch left. Someone else picking up his technique. Oh, well.

  Gabbi started her Peugeot and asked, “Where to?”

  “Lunch,” McGill said. “Ebbing adrenaline always makes me hungry.”

  “Okay. Have something particular in mind?”

  “Anything but horse.”

  She gave him a smile, but also shook her head. Not surprising, McGill thought. A lot of people had mixed feelings about him.

  “I know a Japanese place. Quiet. If you don’t like sushi, the tempura’s good.”

  “Yeah, I like tempura. They have crevettes?”

  This time her smile was unqualified. “You’v
e been studying. Yes, they have shrimp.”

  “Your brother own this restaurant?”

  “No. I’ll treat if you don’t have the cash.”

  “I’ll put it on my credit card. Lunch is on me.”

  “Merci,” Gabbi said.

  As they passed by, McGill noticed a line of vendors’ stalls alongside the wall lining the near bank of the Seine. Each one seemed to be offering printed material: books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets. He asked Gabbi, “Bookstores al fresco?”

  “En plein air,” she answered, translating the Italian to French. “This is a very literate part of the city. The Sorbonne is nearby.”

  McGill nodded. A part of him would always be a beat cop, wanting to know everything he could about his surroundings. Including the language most people spoke.

  Gabbi looked at her rear view mirror, frowned, and was about to say something when McGill’s phone played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” She waited while he answered.

  “Hello,” McGill said.

  “Dad, it’s me!” Caitie, his youngest child. Her voice was filled with such high-pitched energy he couldn’t tell if she was excited or terrified.

  “Caitie, are you all right?” His own voice, now anxious, drew a glance from Gabbi.

  “Oh, Dad, I’m great. I got an agent with William Norris! Her name’s Annie Klein.” This was followed by a squeal of glee.

  After Caitie had watched the video of her appearance at the rally where she and Sweetie had confronted the Reverend Burke Godfrey in LaFayette Square, she’d decided her future lay in motion pictures. And what could McGill say about that? He was married to a former actress. Fortunately, his ex-wife, Carolyn, Caitie’s mother, was imposing sensible restraints on their most impulsive child. An agent from a respectable firm to represent Caitie was her most basic demand.

  After that, well, there would have to be acting lessons because after all—