Jim McGill 02 The Hangman's Companion Read online

  The funeral arrangements for the two slain officers almost came to grief as well. The widows had agreed to an ill-considered departmental suggestion to hold the wakes for both men at the same funeral home. The dead cops were both African-American so there was no problem of skin color. But there was a good deal of heated debate between the friends and families of the two cops as to which of them was to blame for their deaths.

  Ozzie Kent had been a hard charger, openly ambitious for promotion and plain clothes assignments. Tom Willets’ first instinct had been to use his head, think things through, and never go off halfcocked. Kent’s friends blamed Willets for not having his partner’s back. Willets’ friends accused Kent of getting fatally ahead of the situation by not waiting for backup.

  Charges of cowardice and stupidity were exchanged by two camps of armed and angry men and women. Then McGill shouted, “Hey!” And everyone took note of the two horrified widows. That problem was resolved when Glen Kinnard said, “Let’s take this outside.”

  Bloodshed in the parking lot of Mooney’s Funeral Home would have been inevitable if two cooler heads, McGill and Kinnard, had not prevailed. McGill corralled the Willets backers. Kinnard, brought his reputation as a head breaker to bear and intimidated the Kent side before it could get out of control.

  Then the two peacemakers turned to regard each other.

  Not a bit of love was lost between them.

  Captain McGill told Sergeant Kinnard, “Take your people inside. You can have thirty minutes, and none of us will speak ill of either of our fallen comrades in front of their families.”

  Kinnard nodded, started to lead his people back into Mooney’s, then he stopped. He belatedly remembered to give his superior officer a salute. It was right after that McGill saw a young girl standing in the doorway to the funeral home. She’d seen the whole fracas. But after meeting McGill’s eyes, she ducked back inside, not holding the door for the approaching Glen Kinnard and his people.

  Looking at that young girl all grown up now, McGill asked, “Are you Sergeant Kinnard’s daughter?”

  Emilie nodded.

  “How’s he doing?” McGill asked.

  Emilie said, “Not so good. He killed a man in Paris.”

  “Paris, Illinois?”

  The young woman shook her head. “France.”

  That was when McGill remembered hearing Kinnard’s wife had been born in France—and his daughter, Ms. LaBelle, must have taken her mother’s name.

  “Was your mother with your father when this happened?”

  Emilie’s face turned sad. “In a manner of speaking. Dad took Mom’s ashes home.”

  McGill sighed. “I’m sorry, Emilie.”

  “Me, too. Thing is, Dad said the guy he killed was attacking a woman, and the French have a law that says you can’t just stand by and let something like that happen.”

  “Really?”

  Emilie nodded.

  “He didn’t shoot the guy, did he?”

  McGill knew Europeans had a whole different attitude about handguns.

  “No,” Emilie said. “It was a fist fight … though Dad said the other guy mostly kicked him.”

  McGill could only imagine what a bloody brawl a fight to the death must have been.

  But what he didn’t understand was how a charge could have been brought against Kinnard.

  “I’m not sure I understand the problem,” he said. “If your father was obligated to intervene, he did what was required of him, even if it went badly. Where’s his legal jeopardy?”

  “There are two problems,” Emilie explained. “The guy Dad killed was some kind of sports star, a real big deal over there. And the woman Dad said the guy was beating, she disappeared.”

  Two big problems, McGill thought.

  Kinnard clearly needed help … and Paris wasn’t very far from London.

  Where, as far as he knew, White House minions would have him touring museums and glad-handing locals while Patti was doing her thing.

  He wouldn’t mind blowing all that off.

  Thing was, though, he had never really liked Glen Kinnard.

  He’d almost been involved in a fight with the guy himself.

  “I hate to ask this, Emilie, but my business partner would get on me if I don’t.”

  “You mean money? Dad says he’ll pay whatever it takes.”

  “He asked for me?”

  “No, he just wanted an investigator. You were my suggestion. I remembered you from that night at Mooney’s, and I read about what you did for Chana Lochlan. I had to persuade Dad you’d be the right choice, but it wasn’t too tough a sell.”

  McGill thought about the situation for a moment and then came right out and asked, “Your dad still a sonofabitch?”

  Emilie didn’t take offense. She smiled, looked just a bit proud.

  “Not nearly as bad as he used to be,” she said.

  Arlington, VA

  9

  Secret Service Special Agent Donald “Deke” Ky tried for a third pushup. The first rep had almost killed him. The second one left him bathed in sweat. The third one was making every muscle in his body twitch, like someone was passing an electric current through him. Which was far from the worst pain he’d experienced over the past six months.

  When Deke had been shot last Thanksgiving night, a .223 round had passed through the right side of his chest. The result was what the docs had called a high velocity penetrating chest trauma. At the points of entry and exit he had suffered fractured ribs, but, lucky for him, the scapula hadn’t been hit. The pectoral and infraspinatus muscles had been punctured. Hemopneumothorax—the presence of blood and air in the pleural cavity—followed. Deke had also been fortunate that the shooter had fired from short range. The round hadn’t had the chance to start tumbling, which would have created a much larger area of damage.

  His biggest break was the fucker with the rifle hadn’t placed the round a couple inches to the left where his heart lay beating. He would have been dead before … before his mother had caught him. She never did let him hit the floor. As he felt the world slipping away, he’d been aware that she grabbed him under his arms, eased him down, and cradled his head on her lap. Then with an intimacy he hoped never to experience again, she stuck a finger into the wound in his chest and pressed her palm against the exit wound in his back.

  Sliding down into a deep black hole, he’d heard his cousin, Francis, the other guest at dinner, speak from what seemed a great distance. First, he called 911, demanding an ambulance. Then, with Francis’s voice growing ever more faint, Deke heard his cousin begin praying for him, in English, Latin, and Vietnamese. God must have been listening in on at least one of those channels because they told him the ambulance got there in a hurry. He was on his way to the hospital with the driver going for a new land speed record once his mother told the crew he was the Secret Service agent who guarded the president’s henchman. She said she never left his side until they took him into surgery.

  His chest was drained, he was transfused, flooded with antibiotics and sewn back together. His bones knitted and his muscles mended. He tried to do his physical therapy with his usual discipline. But his will, which had never failed him before, was lacking.

  That was when he got lucky again. His father came to visit from South Carolina, where he lived with his family and worked as an undersheriff in Charleston County. Talbert Perkins never really had a relationship with Musette Ky, not beyond saving her from a couple of drunk GIs who stumbled out of a Saigon bar as she was hurrying past. The grunts mistook Musette for a bar girl, started flashing scrip her way and making grabs at her. Tal had intervened and being bigger than the other two boys combined they didn’t argue with him.

  As politely as he knew how, he’d said to Musette, “If you’ll allow, ma’am, I’ll walk you where you’re goin’. See no one else troubles you.”

  He hadn’t known if she even spoke English, but he figured everyone understood good manners. She smiled at him, and if that had been as far
as it went he’d have been happy. But she did speak English, had understood every word he’d said.

  “Thank you, sir. You may walk with me.”

  That was when Tal saw Musette wasn’t full-on Asian. Not with those blue eyes. She had white blood in her, and her English had an accent that wasn’t Vietnamese.

  He smiled back, was tempted to offer his arm to her, but didn’t.

  They just walked along, Tal feeling like the shy boy who couldn’t believe the pretty girl was letting him walk her home from school. Only they didn’t go to a private home. Musette stopped in front of the Rex Hotel, a billet for U.S. military personnel with pay-grades far above Tal’s. That was when he noticed how nicely Musette was dressed. Her ao di hadn’t been paid for by any grunt humpin’ the boonies like him.

  He took a step back, as if he had finally realized he wasn’t good enough for her. The frown that clouded her pretty face made him think he was right. She was going to turn on her heel and scoot. But then she grabbed his hand and led him into the hotel.

  Taking him upstairs, she said quietly, “I have a very important meeting but not for an hour. Without your help I might not have made it at all.”

  That was her only explanation. She opened the door to a room and there was a bed. A ceiling fan was on, turning slowly. With her back to him, she started to undress. He’d never known anything like it, a woman he’d just met undressing for him—and he was engaged to a real sweet girl back home.

  Looking over her now bare shoulder, Musette said, “Close the door.”

  He did. Locked it, too.

  What he told himself, he’d been feeling real scared lately. The war was all but over, and the good guys weren’t gonna win this one. Worse than that, Tal had a dread he couldn’t repress that he was gonna be the last American fool to die in Vietnam.

  Wasn’t a bad rationalization for taking up a beautiful woman’s offer.

  But if it hadn’t been that it would have been something else.

  From their one time together, a period of less than an hour, they created a child. Not that Tal knew about his son until Deke was three years old and living in the United States. He received a photo and a letter at work. Would have been awkward explaining things to Dorothy Mills, his fiancée, except she had Dear Johned him before he got home. He was married to Eleanor Hanks Perkins now and he told her his war story. Being a wise woman, Eleanor told him to do right by his boy, but stay away from that woman.

  So Tal wrote his son from the time he was little, including pictures of himself, but not his family. He always put five dollars in with the letters, ten when Deke got older, and had $11,000 saved for him by the time he was ready to go to college.

  When Tal showed up at Deke’s hospital room, it was only the fourth time father and son had met in person. Deke told his father about his continuing listlessness, and Tal had a question.

  “These doctors a yours, they know much about gunshot wounds?”

  “They put me back together pretty well, but they look like they just got out of junior high.”

  “You ever hear of plumbism, Donald?”

  His father always used Deke’s Christian name.

  Deke said plumbism was a new one to him.

  “It’s doctor talk for lead poisoning. You got hit with a brass jacketed round, but the bullet’s core is lead. Smacking into all those ribs a yours, that .223 mighta left fragments of lead behind. Get the doctors to give you a real good scan, see if they can find anything. Because if you got lead inside you, son, it can cause all sorts a trouble.”

  Including neurological deterioration, the doctors told him after they found and removed the fragments. Might even have killed him if they had been left in place. Deke was so relieved to be truly on the mend he didn’t sue the doctors and hospital as his mother wanted him to do. He did accept a quarter-million dollar settlement, though, and sent half the money to his father. A college fund for future generations of the Perkins family.

  With a grunt and the determination that no amount of pain would stop him, he began a fourth pushup.

  Georgetown

  10

  When Sweetie showed up at the office and took a seat in one of McGill’s visitor chairs, he told her they had a new client.

  She said, “When it rains it pours.”

  “You, too?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Not to take the shine off your news, but I think mine is about the biggest case we could get. I’m not even sure we can take it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Might put us in bad with the feds.”

  McGill sat back in his chair and cracked a smile.

  “I’m pretty well connected these days, remember?”

  “Still. I’m not saying we, personally, are going to get spanked, not with Patti behind us, but it might make things awkward even for her.”

  McGill made a beckoning gesture with his right hand: Give.

  “Deke’s mother came to see me at St. Al’s this morning, right after Mass finished. She said the reason the Secret Service can’t get anywhere with finding Deke’s assailant is because he wasn’t the target … she was.”

  McGill sat forward. “Someone wanted to shoot Deke’s mother? Why?”

  “Just what I wanted to know. Ms. Ky said a man she knows wanted to involve her in the commission of a crime, but she refused to participate. Her refusal came after certain details of the crime had been shared with her. Knowing those details without becoming a participant in the crime made her a danger to the man.

  “She also said that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, she answers her own front door. It’s a hostess thing with her. Last Thanksgiving, she was just coming out of the powder room when Deke opened the door. She’d been in a hurry to get it herself because she’d heard the doorbell ring. Instead, she got to see her son get shot.”

  McGill took a moment to absorb all that.

  Then he said, “You don’t know the man’s name or the nature of the crime because she didn’t tell you.”

  “She didn’t tell me, she said, because I couldn’t say for sure we’d take the case.”

  “Without specifics,” McGill said, “you don’t have much to take to the cops.”

  “Or the feds,” Sweetie said. “As it was, she asked me for a promise of confidentiality. I said okay.”

  “What do we know about Deke’s mother?” McGill asked.

  “Her name is Musette Ky. She emigrated from Vietnam not long after the fall of Saigon. She’s a single mom, a successful businesswoman, owns catering, floral, and interior design shops in Northern Virginia.”

  “Any of those occupations seem shady to you?” McGill asked.

  “Coke smugglers, at one time, used roses for a cover.”

  McGill remembered that. But drug runners didn’t recycle old gags. It almost seemed half the fun for them was figuring out ingenious new ways to slip their products past the cops.

  “I don’t see it,” he said. “Are any of Ms. Ky’s businesses big enough to launder money for someone?”

  “I never asked Deke, but the impression I got is they aren’t. My feeling is, Deke’s mom made good on a scale of personal affluence. Not a big money way.”

  “So why would someone come to her about playing a role in a crime?”

  Sweetie shrugged. “Only way to find out is to commit to taking the job, but even then I think Ms. Ky is going to tell us only so much.”

  McGill considered the matter. Reluctant informants inevitably held back information that implicated them in some criminal act. Taking part in a crime, not just hearing about a plan and saying no thank you. He wondered exactly what Musette Ky was up to.

  “You think she told you the truth?” he asked Sweetie.

  She took a check from Deke’s mother out of a pocket and slid it across the desk. It was made out to McGill Investigations, Inc. in the amount of $10,000.

  “She’s putting up a good front anyway,” Sweetie said. “If we accept the job and need more money, she’s willing to spend wha
tever it will take. If we decide not to help her, she trusts us to tear up her check.”

  McGill stared at the check, mulled the situation further. Musette Ky had a clear, confident signature. The upward stroke of the “y” in her last name looked like a rocket blasting off.

  He said, “One thing Deke told me about his mom right after he started guarding me, she said he had to be prepared to give his life for me.”

  “Your point being?” Sweetie asked.

  “Two points. What kind of caterer, florist or interior designer would cop an attitude like that? The other point is I don’t think Ms. Ky would work productively with Celsus.”

  “A third point is we’d both like to catch whoever shot Deke.”

  “Yeah. I think we can take this case. We’d be working for a private citizen. Trying to keep her safe. If we happen to close a case for the Secret Service at the same time, good on us. If there’s any heat from Celsus, I’ll take it.”

  Sweetie smiled, as if McGill’s decision was what she’d expected to hear all along.

  “Ms. Ky will also bear watching here, Margaret,” McGill said.

  “I know,” Sweetie told him. “So what’s your case?”

  11

  “Paris,” Sweetie said after hearing the story of McGill’s meeting with Emilie LaBelle. “You think that might make for some jurisdictional hassles?”

  “You mean you don’t think I can just check in with the local coppers and go about my business?”

  Sweetie laughed. “If you were an ordinary gumshoe, they’d give you the bum’s rush. Maybe shanghai you into the Foreign Legion. Being Patti’s husband, they’ll probably let you see the sights before sending you home.”

  “I can be charming,” McGill said.

  “You can carry a tune, too,” Sweetie acknowledged.

  “I travel on a diplomatic passport these days.”

  “And you got gold stars on your report card at St. Andrew’s.”

  “Your confidence is overwhelming,” McGill said.

  Sweetie put things in perspective. “Imagine a French private eye arriving in Chicago, trying to clear another French guy who had killed a Bears’ superstar. You think that would go over big? Guy’d be lucky if the board of the Lyric Opera didn’t do him in.”