Jim McGill 02 The Hangman's Companion Read online

  McGill had never worried about anybody daring to suggest any impropriety between him and Sweetie. The honest reporters had too much respect for Margaret Mary Sweeney; the sleazy ones were too afraid she’d beat the snot out of them. Gabbi Casale, however, was an unknown quantity, unlikely to inspire the awe Sweetie did.

  “I’m being careful,” McGill said, “but thanks for the reminder.”

  “Other than bruising Glen Kinnard, how’s the case going?” Sweetie asked.

  McGill brought her up to date, and Sweetie snorted.

  “The Undertaker, huh?”

  “L’Entrepeneur, if you prefer the French.”

  “In this case, I do. Definitely cooler. And you’ve got a French sports reporter and a gypsy kid working for you?”

  “I’m an equal opportunity employer,” McGill told her.

  Sweetie was quiet for a moment. McGill knew she was processing what he’d told her, was working out a thought. They were comfortable with such silences.

  “I think you may be overestimating the bad guys,” Sweetie said.

  “How’s that?” McGill asked.

  “Well, you’re operating on the idea that your missing woman and The Undertaker don’t know each other, right?”

  “That’d be the smart thing to do.”

  “Yeah, but if you’re right, the whole thing started as some sort of sports betting scam, and it involves a stripper and a brawler, and the whole thing blows up when Glen Kinnard accidentally gets in the way. That doesn’t sound like a work of criminal genius to me. Sounds more like a low budget plan with marginal players and a lot of room for error.”

  McGill asked, “Why would the missing woman set things in motion if she knew The Undertaker? She’d have seen Kinnard wasn’t the guy she was expecting.”

  Sweetie said, “Maybe the hired muscle was late. Maybe she was getting impatient or had to pee, and figured things could work out with Kinnard. He’s a big guy. You know these mopes, Jim. If they were conscientious workers, they wouldn’t be lowlifes.”

  McGill could see Sweetie was right. “Damn, I must be getting old.”

  “You’re working a new beat,” Sweetie told him. “We’ll chalk it up to that and jet lag.”

  “Well, at least I had it in mind to ask if you’d have the time soon to come over here and lend a hand.”

  Sweetie told him she still had work to do at home, and recapitulated where things stood in the matter of Deke Ky’s shooting. This time it was McGill who was silent, thinking hard, and on to something.

  McGill asked, “How did Deke’s mother describe what had happened when she said her son took the bullet for her?”

  Sweetie told him, “She said they were just about to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner: Deke, his mom, his cousin, Father Francis. Ms. Ky excused herself to use the powder room. While she was there, the doorbell rang. So Deke went to see who’d come calling.”

  “And he got shot for his troubles,” McGill said. “By a sniper, we were told. A guy with a rifle, right?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So who rang the doorbell?” McGill asked. “Not the guy waiting to take the shot.”

  McGill heard Sweetie mutter under her breath. He had never heard her curse aloud, but he thought there were times when profanities butted up against the backside of her teeth.

  “Maybe you and I shouldn’t work cases unless we’re holding hands,” she said.

  McGill laughed. “Wouldn’t that be a picture for the scandal sheets?”

  “Yeah, I guess it would,” Sweetie said with a sigh. “I still like this creep Ricky Lanh Huu as the shooter. Ms. Ky fingered him, he’s got one DB on his rap sheet, and I’ve seen that he goes to confession in a Catholic church.”

  “I think you’re right,” McGill said. “But I don’t think the other guy, what’s his name…”

  “Horatio Bao.”

  McGill was quiet again, a new thought running through his mind.

  “Okay,” he said, “We both know Bao is the brains in your case. So no way is he going to be anywhere near the shooting, but he’s not going to farm it out to anyone who might turn on him. That means he trusts Ricky, and whoever rang the doorbell—”

  “Has to be somebody close, too,” Sweetie finished.

  “A longtime associate,” McGill said.

  “Maybe even family.”

  “Maybe. Gives you a place to look.”

  “But if Ms. Ky was right and she was the target, why shoot Deke?” Sweetie asked.

  “No pun intended, but maybe it was a bang-bang situation. Door opens, shot is taken. The deed is done before anyone can see a mistake has been made. Or maybe Deke stepping onto the bull’s-eye was an opportunity to send a warning. Talk and we’ll kill everyone you love. Or the shooter was just ticked off his real target wasn’t available. So he took the shot he had. You know how these mopes can be.”

  “Yes, I do,” Sweetie said. “I’ll see if Horatio Bao has a wife, somebody who could have rung the bell but can’t be made to testify against him.”

  “See about a girlfriend, too. One who might be expendable.”

  “Good thought,” Sweetie told him. “You’ve still got your A-game.”

  “Huh,” McGill said, unwilling to let go of his own failings. “Maybe we’re each seeing the other’s case more clearly from a distance.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Might have a good commercial for a phone company here,” McGill said. “Reach out and collar someone.”

  Pigalle, Paris

  29

  Having had no luck so far, Gabbi tried to think how a stripper might walk. One foot directly in front of the other, like a runway model? Get the hips swinging. Throw the shoulders back. Push the chest out. A look of hauteur obvious in the eyes and mouth. Or someone with feet tired from boogying on concrete for too many hours in do-me pumps. With a sore back from torquing her spine too hard on a pole. Wondering if the creep with the long fingernails had infected her when he scratched her abdomen stuffing a euro-note, that was also probably none too clean, into her G-string.

  She eschewed either of those possibilities, going with the springy, light step of an athlete who’d had some ballet lessons. Basically, her normal stride, with a little bit extra toe-push to give her modest bust a bit more bounce, her hair a bit more swing. Her regard for her surroundings was alert but not forbidding. For the right guy, she might…

  Well, she wasn’t going to find the right guy in Pigalle; Dad didn’t have to worry about that. In fact, there weren’t any takers at all on the Boulevard de Clichy. She had cruised by the marquee places like the Moulin Rouge and the Sexodrome without raising a wolf-whistle or even a second glance. The lack of response was enough to make a girl think: It was late, the creeps were tired, their eyes were bleary from drink, or they possessed barely enough brain cells to realize she was far too good for the likes of them.

  Certainement, ce n’etait pas de sa faulte. Certainly, the fault wasn’t hers.

  She hoped.

  Not having any success on the main drag of the red-light district, she headed for the side streets, and hoped she wouldn’t have any trouble with streetwalkers who might think she was encroaching on their turf.

  To move off an arterial street in Paris always made Gabbi feel like she was stepping back in time. Even after all her years abroad, a child of Chicago’s suburbs, she felt taken aback to find herself on a passageway that hadn’t been designed for automotive traffic. Adding to the archaic feeling of the narrow lanes, the wattage of the streetlights always seemed to drop by half. Torches placed in sconces might do as well. Shadows were everywhere and houses and shops that were old before America had declared its independence slouched against one another like companionable drunks. At any moment, she expected a tumbril to appear around a curve, hurrying off with its cargo of shackled royalty to keep an appointment with Madam Guillotine.

  The discordant elements to this historic vision were the neon lights of still more sex shops and strip joints, and hookers wh
ose public raiment—miniskirts, hot pants, and halter tops with plunging necklines—was far more meager than the undergarments of courtesans of old. The prostitutes, standing in knots on the pavement or pairs in doorways, didn’t fail to notice Gabbi. The appearance of an attractive white woman walking by herself was a rarity, as the creep who had grabbed Gabbi’s arm years ago had observed. The hookers, now, Gabbi saw, were more often than not black, immigrants from France’s former African possessions.

  If these women, plying their dangerous trade, had any means to protect themselves — or their commercial interests — it would likely be in the form of sharpened steel. It was simple economics: People who couldn’t afford guns used knives. Besides the monetary consideration, it would be more politically acceptable to the police, the public, and the pimps who ran the girls for a hooker to cut a john who gave her trouble than to shoot him. Gabbi had a gun, had it in her hand inside her purse, but she didn’t want to shoot anyone either.

  She stepped clear of any gathering of working girls well before she came to them. She heard muttered insults as she passed, sometimes in French, which she understood perfectly, sometimes in an unfamiliar tongue, whose tone was nonetheless unmistakably scornful. The commentary she did understand gave her the likely reason none of the guys working the doors at the clubs and shops had given her any verbal recognition.

  “Regardez la salope snob avec ses vètements chic.” Look at the stuck-up bitch in her fancy clothes.

  Gabbi had considered that her manner of dress could be a defect in her plan, but she was a State Department professional of no small standing. She couldn’t and wouldn’t dress like a hooker. That probably diminished her chances of being mistaken for the missing stripper, but it was likely also the reason the prostitutes didn’t see her as a direct threat and confront her with their knives. Or hatchets. Or whatever else they carried these days.

  Like everything else in life, her choice was a tradeoff.

  But she was getting tired, physically, mentally, spiritually. She wanted to be somewhere else. Somewhere love was more than a four-letter word, and not measured in euros per minute for whatever got you off. She didn’t want to walk back the way she came, run the gamut of the same women. They might think she’d taken offense at their insults and was challenging them. She’d loop around back to the Boulevard de Clichy and—

  “Diana!” A man’s voice, using French pronunciation.

  Out of the corner of her eye, to her right, she saw a man standing in a doorway waving to her. He was a middle-aged bantamweight with bandy legs standing in the doorway of yet another strip club, this one with a green neon palm tree shading a pink topless hula dancer. Glowing blue neon letters said: Paradis Trouvé. Paradise Found. The property, no doubt, of a sex merchant who could enjoy a joke at Milton’s expense.

  Gabbi turned to face the man. He pulled his head back when he got a good look at her. Then he tapped the fingers of his right hand to his forehead. My mistake.

  “Désolé.” Sorry.

  “De rien.” No problem.

  Gabbi continued on her way, both her step and her heartbeat quickening. It might be just a coincidence, of course, the little guy in the doorway of the strip club mistaking her for someone named Diana, but she didn’t think so. She’d tell McGill when she saw him, let him decide, but she felt certain this was the break she’d been looking for.

  If she had been any more self-preoccupied, she wouldn’t have heard the soft voice speak up behind her. A man speaking English with a French accent. “A woman such as you shouldn’t be down here alone.”

  But she did hear. And when she whirled to face the guy she had her gun out and pointing directly at his head. He immediately squeezed his eyes shut and put his hands in the air.

  Arno Durand. McGill’s French sports reporter.

  He told her, “I have often thought I might die at the hands of a beautiful woman, but one I had known intimately, and I would be undone in the boudoir, not on the street. With poison in my wine perhaps, or even on my lover’s breast, but never a gun.”

  “Open your eyes,” Gabbi told him.

  Being cautious, Durand opened only his right eye. It was enough to see that Gabbi had put her gun away and turned her back to walk off. He hurried to catch up.

  “You were here, of course, looking for someone,” he said.

  Gabbi didn’t reply.

  “So was I,” Durand volunteered. “Who were you looking for?”

  Gabbi picked up her pace, continuing to say nothing. Durand struggled to keep up, thinking maybe he should give up smoking.

  “Perhaps you were looking for the little fellow in the doorway back there,” Durand suggested. “Not that you knew it until he spoke up.”

  Gabbi cut him a quick pointed looked, remaining mute.

  Durand continued, “He mistook you for someone else, n’est-ce pas? Say the missing woman from under the bridge. The one M’sieur McGill says resembles you.”

  Gabbi winced at having her plan so easily penetrated.

  “No, no,” Durand said with sympathy. “It was a very good idea.”

  “Yeah,” Gabbi said, finally speaking, “so brilliant even you could figure it out.”

  “Mais non, I was working another angle. Did you wonder why such a small fellow was working as the bouncer back there?”

  Gabbi hadn’t, and now that the anomaly had been pointed out she was even more annoyed, and said, “No.”

  “It is a ruse to encourage the foolhardy to feel they have the advantage. They see the little fellow and think, ‘If that’s the best this place can do, I have no worries. I might even walk out without paying my check.’”

  Gabbi saw where Durand was headed. “But it’s not like that.”

  The reporter shook his head. “Inside, there lurks a monster.”

  He waited to see if Gabbi could make the connection.

  “The Undertaker?” she asked.

  The reporter nodded with a smile. He appreciated a woman with a good mind, as long as she had all the usual attractions.

  “To exit the club, I had to empty my wallet, and charge a credit card to the maximum.” Durand smiled. “Fortunately, it was a company card, but I was lucky I didn’t have to sign away the title to my apartment.”

  Gabbi ignored that and said, “The Undertaker working the same club where the stripper does her thing? That’s not the way Jim McGill figured it.”

  Durand gave her a Gallic shrug. “Who among us is perfect?”

  The reporter’s smirk suggested he just might be the one.

  Then he added, “I am without a euro for the Metro. May I have a ride home?”

  Rue Anatole France, Paris

  30

  Investigating Magistrate Yves Pruet sat on the balcony of his apartment overlooking the Seine, picking out the notes of a melancholy tune on his guitar. Playing had always come easily to him. His fingers always had the dexterity and the instinct to find their way to the right strings and frets. More important, he had the ear and the composer’s intuition to understand a melody the first time he heard it. He had taken lessons briefly, for the purpose of learning to read notation. After that, he explored on his own, using his playing as a meditation.

  If he had one failing with his guitar it was the lack of daring to think he could ever make his living with it. He had to smile, at least to himself, when recalling Nicolette telling him he should play on the Metro. Perhaps he would. Or find a small club where he might play under an assumed name, perhaps wearing dark glasses, for free drinks. Some place where his father would never hear of what he was doing. Augustin Pruet, cheese magnate, the son and grandson of successful businessmen, had tolerated his son’s love of music only because Yves said it helped him in the study of law. The senior Pruet was pleased by his son’s goal of becoming a magistrate rather than be content to work as a money-grubbing avocat. In the magistrate’s position, he told his son, there was the dignity of ridding the city of its verminous criminals.

  “Oui, mon père,�
� Pruet would think, “I am an exterminator of distinction.”

  Augustin, though, hadn’t anticipated that his son’s zeal would extend to holding a criminal highly placed in government to the bar of justice. He had to admire Yves’ courage for making it impossible for the government to do anything but convict the larcenous interior minister, even though the affair would bring his son’s career to a permanent halt. In recognition of that courage, Augustin had permitted his son to continue to reside in the apartment he’d bought for Yves and Nicolette. He had intended to deed the place outright to the married couple on their wedding day, but Yves had asked him to keep the title in his own name.

  “Why?” Augustin had asked.

  “There may be some small chance my bride-to-be loves me for a reason other than my guitar playing,” he’d responded.

  The senior Pruet had snorted, but he thought his son’s decision showed the wisdom of an older man. Augustin appreciated looking at the lovely Nicolette, but he loved his son far more than his daughter-in-law. One was blood; the other was not.

  As Pruet continued to play, he wondered, “What would you have me do now, Papa? Throw the American to the mob and be done with the whole affair? I am sorry to say that does not look like the right thing to do.”

  Pruet glanced at the painting on the ceramic tile he’d bought from Bertrand Kalou. The one that showed the menacing figure who had ventured under the Pont d’Iéna after Glen Kinnard had fought Thierry Duchamp to the death. The image was of a man seen from a distance, none of his features distinguishable. But in scale with his surroundings, the fellow was something of a giant. And his fists — accurately rendered, according to the artist — were clenched as he approached the bridge; his shoulders leaned forward; his whole manner was aggressive.

  The magistrate wouldn’t want to see such a fellow approaching him, not unless Odo were with him, not unless Odo had his assault rifle aimed and ready to fire.

  That was when Pruet realized he wasn’t alone. Someone was standing behind him. From the scent the breeze carried to him, Cacharel Liberté, it was his wife. Nicolette.