Gator Aide (36 page)

Dolly made a hard right onto the dirt road that led down to my car. Her assessment of my character gnawed at me. It bothered me enough to make me feel I had to justify my actions.

“Listen, gators are still being poached by the truckload down here, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s all tied in with the drug trade. Doesn’t what’s happening matter to you, Dolly? Your son is dead. So is Valerie. There have to be hundreds of others just like them back in this swamp. If Hillard Williams is involved in this, so is the New York mob. They’re getting rich off hooking these kids on crack and cocaine, and shipping the rest up to New York. It has to be stopped.”

Dolly glanced at me and sneered. “And you’re just the one to do it, right, princess?”

I reached over and shut off the tape. “And what have you been doing about it, Dolly?”

“I was handling it my own way, Porter. I was doing just fine taking care of Hillard Williams, till you started shoving your nose in where it doesn’t belong. You Yankees are so damn dumb, thinking you can come down here and jump in with both feet. There are other ways to get things done, hotshot.”

We were almost at the swamp, and I was running out of time to confirm my suspicions.

“How is that, Dolly? By blackmailing Williams and Kroll with some sex tapes? Valerie just might have you to thank for getting her killed. What were you doing, anyway, besides grabbing a few grimy dollars off the man who probably murdered your son?”

Pulling in close to my car, Dolly leaned across and opened the passenger door. Sitting back, she kept her face only inches from mine, the booze still strong on her breath. “That tape was sent to you as a warning, princess. Don’t you know that nothing’s ever gonna change around here? Valerie’s death proved that to me. I was doing you a favor by showing you what you were up against. Hell, you’ve got the next mayor of New Orleans backed up by the chief of police. I was trying to help save your life and my husband’s along with it, you stupid bitch.”

I got out of the car as Dolly leaned still farther across the seat.

“Hey, princess. I got another tape to dig out for you. It’s one you’ll really like. It’s got that detective friend of yours on it. See, he used to come around to visit Valerie, too. He started off asking a bunch of questions, but then he got to staying for dessert. Hell, it got to the point that’s all he began coming for. In fact, I’ve got some of Valerie’s best work on those tapes. Maybe it’ll give you some pointers. She always had the most fun with him. Has he been good for you, too?”

Dolly didn’t wait for an answer as she pulled the door closed. Shifting into reverse, her car churned up a mound of loose gravel, spitting out a trail of hazy dust as she tore down the road and disappeared around the first bend.

I walked over to the edge of the swamp, and, leaning in toward the cattails, threw up what little I’d eaten that day.

The revelation that Dolly had
been the one to send me the videotape answered my question as to who Valerie’s partner had been. But other questions were still piled up like dead bodies at a morgue. I slumped behind the steering wheel, my hands shaking from too much soda and candy and too little sleep. I tried hard not to think about Santou. I suspected every word she said was true. All I knew was that I was dead tired of thinking, and more than anything else, I just wanted to go home, go to sleep, and not ever dream again. I put my head down on the wheel, ready to burst into tears, when a hand reached out from behind the front seat and clamped itself hard on my shoulder.

“Where the goddamn hell you been, Bronx?”

I shrieked and jumped, then turned around to see Charlie Hickok. Having been scrunched down on my backseat, he was struggling to work his way into an upright position.

“I’ve been spending all night nearly getting myself killed looking for you, Charlie!” I barked at the man who I should have been happier to see than anyone else in the world.

Hickok let loose a chuckle as he played with the bill of his cap. “You mean that was your lil ol’ bonfire I seen over in the distance? You’ve been busy tonight, Bronx. You can tell me all about it in the boat. Let’s get the lead out.”

Charlie’s motorboat was tied up next to the one I’d stepped out of only a few hours earlier. I was no longer so anxious to head back out into the swamp, having had more than my share of adventure for one evening. Or, to use one of Charlie’s phrases, I felt as if I’d been stonewashed and hung out to dry. I stalled to give myself some time.

“What are you doing here? I thought you were supposed to be out with Trenton.”

Charlie untied the boat from its stump. “Hell, I been out there all night poking around. But things are just about to heat up now, so I thought I’d cut you some slack and deal you in on the action. Give you a taste of what real agents do.”

Charlie stood up and waited for me to jump into the boat. “That is, unless you don’t wanna be an agent no more, Bronx. What is it? Make your mind up real quick, cause I don’t have no time to waste on slackards.”

I thought of New York and what my life had been. The auditions, the angst, one heartbreaking relationship after another. In a sense, it didn’t seem as if anything had really changed all that much. But if I didn’t follow through with this, it would be one more failure I’d have to live with. And then where would I go? Besides, I’d already become hooked on the adrenaline rushes, being in on the hunt, and the feeling that I was at least attempting to do something worthwhile.

I looked over at the man who’d fought both outlaws and the system every step of the way, dressed in his fatigues and duck-billed cap, handing out approval about as willingly as he would a hundred-dollar bill, and it struck me as the ultimate irony. Some people had their gurus, their shrinks, or their plastic surgeons. I had Charlie Hickok. Shaking myself out of the stupor that had overtaken me, I silently damned whatever forces had brought me to doubt myself and my work. I headed toward the boat.

“Get a move on it, Bronx. The night is young, and we got huntin’ to do.”

Charlie pulled out two Baby Ruths and threw me one as I took my place on the wooden seat in front of him. The motor on his boat burped in unison with the bullfrogs as we slipped away from land and headed into the swamp. This time I told Charlie everything I knew, filling him in on the tie-in I’d made between Pasta Nostra, Buddy’s clubs on Bourbon, his fish-packing plant, and the connection with the all-encompassing Global Corporation.

Charlie sniffed at the air before turning down a narrow offshoot of water. “Global is right. Those boys are screwing up all over the damn place. That Sabino ain’t nothin’ but a straight-up hoodlum, who’d as soon snuff you out in a New York second as give you the time of day. Hillard’s got himself back in it but good, this time.”

There was something eerily familiar about this fingerway of the swamp, which made me wonder if I’d been down this route before. The faint sulfuric smell of fire still lingered in the air. Charlie took the last bite of his candy bar, and I handed him the unfinished half of mine. He crunched up the empty wrapper and the crinkling shot through me like machine-gun fire, causing every nerve in my body to stand on end.

“Little jumpy tonight ain’t ya, Bronx? Must be Budwell gettin’ to ya.” Charlie chuckled softly. “That Buddy’s always been an el kooko kooko with that Nazi stuff. But up till now it’s all been fun and games. Still, I guess it had to go over the edge sometime. So, those good ol’ boys have been holding their meetings back here, huh?”

“Those good ol’ boys nearly killed Gonzales and me tonight.”

“The key word here, Bronx, is almost. You’re still alive, ain’t ya? Calm down. You’ll live longer.”

I concentrated on listening to the sounds around me, to the chain-saw buzz of mosquitoes, the swirl of water from a gator’s tail, the comforting hum of the engine. Anything to keep my mind off Santou.

Charlie tugged at his cap, as he always did when there was something he wanted to say. “Let me fill you in on a secret here, Bronx. If you’re gonna think about what you’re doing all the time, you’ll never make it through the day. It’ll blow your mind.”

I studied Hickok’s face in the darkness and wondered if I was looking at a preview of myself twenty years down the line. “Did it ever blow your mind, Charlie?”

“I’ve been run over in a boat and left for dead in the marsh a couple of times. I’ve had my personal life blown to high tarnation. Hell, I’ve even been shot at on special occasions. That’s when you learn if you’re really an agent. When you put your life on the line to do what you believe in. It happens to everyone, Bronx. Don’t ever let ’em tell you different, or they’re damn liars. It may be the first time when you think you’ve been caught in a sting, or it can sneak up on you later, like a bad case of heartburn. Either way, you make it through with your wits still about you, or ya don’t. It’s kinda like an initiation. So you might as well find out as soon as you can.”

Gliding through the swamp with its carpet of duckweed and interwoven branches of cypress closing off the sky above, there seemed no more fitting place in which to be tested. So far I’d been in agent purgatory, my every move on trial, with Charlie as judge and jury. I was ready for it to end one way or the other.

The quality of the air changed as the bayou widened to form a small lake, and then narrowed once more to a thin sliver of murky water. Working its way out to Atchafalaya Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, the area was uncharted and unknown by all except local diehards, making it easy to disappear in this watery wilderness—or to hide whatever you might want kept secret.

“Something else, Bronx. I got tired of your constant yapping about that damn gator. So I slit the thing wide open about a week ago for a quick look-see, and you ain’t gonna believe what I found. Seems someone got the bright idea of stuffing forty packets of cocaine down that sucker’s throat. Each one wrapped in a piece of chicken, to make the going down easier. We’re talking one hell of a last meal. That sonofabitch popped his lights with a major high on.”

Charlie snickered as he waited for me to join in.

“Well, what the hell’s the matter with you? I thought you’d be happy about the damn thing.”

I was tempted to say “I told you so,” but held myself back. I had to decide whether or not to tell Charlie just how easy it had been to swipe Hook out from under his nose. It was a foregone conclusion that sooner or later he was bound to find out. But it wouldn’t be tonight. Not in the middle of this swamp, where I’d have no place to escape his wrath.

“Why didn’t you tell me when you found out?”

Charlie snorted, scaring off a water moccasin that had wriggled over to the boat for a better view. “Why the hell should I? You ain’t exactly my coworker on this case, Bronx. Just remember that. As far as you’re concerned, it don’t change the fact that we still got a dead gator on our hands, no matter how it was killed.”

I didn’t bother to argue his logic. “It had to be Valerie Vaughn.”

“That’s a guess, Bronx. What makes you say that?”

I wondered how much Charlie already knew, and how much of this would be news to him. “Because it all adds up. It was her gator. She was Hillard Williams’s mistress. I think she was murdered not only for stealing his drugs, but because of what she knew. I’ve got a hard-core videotape of her entertaining both Williams and Connie Kroll together in her apartment. Valerie was getting to be too much of a threat for the powers that be.”

“Does N.O.P.D., or should I say Santou, know about this tape?”

The one saving grace I had in this entire situation was that I had never trusted Santou completely. But it still didn’t stop me from feeling like a fool. “I wasn’t sure what would happen if I told him about it. For all I knew, it could have landed right back in Kroll’s hands. I decided not to tell anyone for a while.”

“Okay, Bronx. I’ll give you some slack on that for the moment, only because it’s pretty much common knowledge. That all you got after all this time?”

Winning approval from the man was like asking for the sun, the moon, the stars, and the next solar system.

“Williams must have tried to ditch her when he began his run for mayor. Valerie probably decided she deserved severance pay, and somehow got her hands on the cocaine. Between that and threatening Hillard with blackmail, it was enough to get her killed.”

Charlie pulled at a reed, sticking the end in his mouth. “That it, or ya wanna go for the gold?”

If I was wrong and making an ass out of myself, I figured why bother to stop now.

“Gunter Schuess is the one who killed Valerie Vaughn. My guess is that when Hillard discovered part of their stash was missing, he demanded it back. Valerie probably denied having done it and creatively hid the evidence. When Gunter turned up at her place, he planned to murder her either way.”

Charlie gazed off into the distance, as if he were looking for something. “So where does Global come in?”

I felt as if I were back in school, trying to pass a major test. “Global has to be the shell company that’s used to cover the drug operation. It also launders all the drug money, along with Budwell’s other businesses.”

The air had begun to smell of salt. We were getting closer to open water.

“You ain’t tied up all the loose ends yet, Bronx.”

If what I had come up with so far was true, I figured I’d done a hell of a job. I ran the cast of characters through my mind, trying to figure out what I had missed.

“I’d say that Vinnie Bertucci was sent here by Sabino to keep an eye on both Hillard and Schuess. Sabino probably figured that either one of them was capable of getting greedy and digging into the communal pot.”

“Not bad. But you haven’t filled me in enough on Schuess.”

“Besides the fact that he’s a manipulative psychotic with a fondness for using razors on women, there doesn’t seem to be much left to say.”

Charlie ran the reed back and forth between his teeth, openly pleased at the fact he knew something that I didn’t.

“Sheeet, Bronx! That lame-o story of his about being Hillard’s liaison don’t hold no water. That dog just don’t hunt. In fact, his name ain’t even close to being no Gunter Schuess. He’s the Butch Cassidy of Germany. That loony toon has had the German police on his ass real bad since before he landed it here in Louisiana. It seems that sonofabitch was running some underground group of psycho skinhead Nazis. He escaped out of Germany after a shootout with the police.”