Murder in the Irish Channel (Chanse MacLeod Mysteries) (24 page)

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I winked. I preferred not to know how Jeph and Abby got the information I asked them for. “I’m sure Jeph would never risk doing anything that would put him behind bars again.” I finished my po’boy and crumpled up the butcher paper as I chewed. I tossed it into the garbage can next to my desk and washed the last bite down with another swig of Abita. I leaned back in my chair and sighed. I was full, and it felt great.

Paige carefully wrapped up the second half of her sandwich and placed it in her enormous Louis Vuitton knock-off purse. “Which brings me to why I’m here,” she said carefully, not meeting my eyes.

“And here I thought you missed me.” I faked an injured tone. “I’m wounded. You mean you only come see me when you want something from me?”

“Fuck you.” She gave me a look that could sterilize a lizard. “Last time I checked, the phone works two ways, asshole. You haven’t exactly been ringing my phone off the hook since you started seeing Rory.” She sniffed. “You get a cute boy in your bed on a regular basis and your friends cease to exist. I see how you are.”

“Just yanking your chain.” I laughed. “It is good to see you, you know. And what can I do for you?”

“Yeah, well, I
do
feel bad about it, but the damned magazine takes up so much time, and then Ryan on top of that…” She conceded with a nod, leaning back on the couch and putting her sandal-clad feet up on my coffee table. “But we’re working on a story about the Luke Marino lawsuit, and oddly enough, your name came up when I was meeting with Martin—the reporter I’ve got chasing the story.” She smiled at me. “And I figured you’d be much more likely to talk to me than to some reporter you don’t know.”

I frowned, shaking my head. “I really don’t know a lot about the suit itself, Paige. You’d have to talk to Luke, or Loren McKeithen—he’s not the lead attorney on the case, but he does love to see his name in print.”

“Loren was the one who gave my reporter your name,” Paige replied. “As soon as Martin filled me in, I told him to let me handle talking to you. He wasn’t too happy about it.” She grinned. “Like I’m going to horn in on his story. I’ve never once stolen a story in all my years in journalism.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Paige.” I crossed my arms. “You know damned well all you had to do was call and ask me to talk to this Martin guy, and I would have. So?”

“We-ell, okay, the thought of leaving the office early was kind of appealing, and I haven’t seen you in weeks, and it’s been years since we’ve sat around brainstorming about one of your cases,” she admitted, pulling a joint out of her purse. “And Ryan got some killer stuff last week.” She passed it to me. “Take a whiff.”

I held it to my nose and inhaled, and whistled. It was good pot, very strong and green smelling. And we did used to get stoned and talk about my cases—several times, it had helped break the case.

I passed it back to her with a frown, looking over at the clock on my desk. “I don’t know if I should get stoned,” I said slowly. “There’s a lot of work I can still do on the case today—” I broke off and thought about it for a moment. Rory was doing bar testing that night and wasn’t coming by because he wouldn’t be off work until after eleven.

A night off wouldn’t kill me—and was there anything I could do tonight that would make a difference? No, there wasn’t—and Abby was still on the case.

I lit the joint and inhaled, passing it back to her.

“What do you want to know about Luke Marino?” I asked after blowing the smoke out in a massive plume toward the ceiling fan. “I can’t say much about the suit because I really only know the bare bones—why he’s suing and what it’s about.”

“Why do you think Mona O’Neill decided to change her testimony?”

“Therein lies the rub.” I grinned. My mind was getting softer around the edges, and I could feel my muscles relaxing. It was very good pot. “Maybe Mona’s testimony was a lie to begin with.”

“Oh?” Her eyebrows went up.

I explained what Abby and I had been theorizing at Slice. “I mean, you remember what it was like those last few days before Katrina came ashore, right? The panic and terror? Do you believe she would have sent her teenage son off with her daughter and driven across the bridge to keep an eye on Cypress Gardens—when the
owners
left town?” I shook my head. “That story always bothered me.”

“And after all these years, she gets a guilty conscience because her church is closing?” Paige rolled her eyes. “But you said Jonny confirmed that he left town with Lorelle and her family.”

“That doesn’t mean Mona didn’t leave herself. Maybe she sent Jonny off with Lorelle, drove over to check out the place, and left herself later.”

“And Luke got her to go along with a plan to scam the insurance?”

“The only person who can really answer that is Mona, and I don’t think anyone’s ever going to be able to ask her again.”

“You’re pretty sure she’s dead.” Paige passed the joint back to me. I took another hit and handed it back. She stared at it. “What if you’re wrong?” She put it to her lips and inhaled. “What if she’s in hiding somewhere?”

I shook my head. Even though I was getting stoned, I wasn’t about to tell Paige the theory that Mona might have killed Robby and gone into hiding. I didn’t have any proof—and while I knew I could trust her, it didn’t feel right. “I’m not wrong,” I replied. “She hasn’t touched her debit card or any of her credit cards. Her bank accounts haven’t been touched. Unless she was carrying a big wad of cash around with her—which I rather doubt—she’s just vanished. People don’t vanish without money—you know that as well as I do—and she left behind a check for fifty grand, which she could have just cashed.”

“Maybe she’s in protective custody.” Paige tried to pass the joint back to me but I waved her off. She pinched it out and placed it in the ashtray on the coffee table. “The Feds aren’t exactly going to give two shits about letting you know where she is—or Loren or the cops, for that matter.”

“Protective custody?” I stared at her. How stoned was I? I wondered. “Where on earth did you get that idea?”

“Ah, sit back and let me tell you some things
you
don’t know.” She gave me a sly glance. “After the storm—Luke Marino was approached by Social Justice—do you remember them?”

I did, vaguely.

After the levees failed and eighty percent of the city had been left homeless, a group called Social Justice had come to the city in late September and set up a campground in a park on the West Bank. They had a medical clinic, a food tent, and supplies—providing a place for people to stay when they came back to check on their houses, or to stay while they waited for FEMA trailers to be delivered while they worked on their homes. I had considered volunteering there myself when I heard about it—I saw a piece on CNN about it while I was evacuated in Dallas. The guy in charge was a large African American man with dreadlocks named Hakim Ali, and he spouted a lot of anti-government, anti-Republican rhetoric during the course of the interview.

“Did you know that in the early spring of 2006, when Luke Marino was struggling to rebuild with no help whatsoever from his insurance company, he contracted Social Justice to run Cypress Garden?”

I shook my head. “I still don’t see the connection.”

Paige rolled her eyes. “Some things never change. You really need to start reading the newspaper.” She opened her massive purse and pulled out a folder, which she put on the coffee table. “Hakim Ali didn’t found Social Justice on his own, or run it. He was the face of the group, but he was partnered up with a white guy—Alex Davis. Is any of this ringing a bell?”

Paige always lectured me on my refusal to be up on the news. “Not a bit.”

“Alex Davis turned out to be an FBI agent, working undercover to get evidence on Hakim Ali for the federal prosecutor.” She laughed. “I can’t believe you didn’t hear about any of this. Seriously, Chanse. Anyway, Alex disappeared without a trace in late 2006. Still nothing?”

There was something there in the dustiest corners of my memory. “I remember vaguely hearing about a Fed snitch vanishing.”

She nodded. “That’s when the story broke—when Alex Davis disappeared. About a week later, when he hadn’t checked in, the FBI came looking for him and the story broke. It was a big deal—Hakim claimed it was all a government conspiracy because he criticized Bush and FEMA publicly, and because he was black, it was all racist, blah blah blah.”

“They never found Alex Davis, did they?” It was starting to come back to me slowly. “And they never were able to prove Hakim or Social Justice had anything to do with him disappearing.”

“Sound familiar?” She winked at me. “Hakim is a witness in the Marino case, you might be interested to know—a witness for Global Insurance.”

“Seriously?” I couldn’t help myself—I started laughing. “Mr. Power-to-the-people-corporations-are-evil-and-destroying-the-planet is siding with an insurance company? What a fucking hypocrite.”

“I know, it made me laugh my ass off when I first found out about it.”

“You think there’s a connection between the Alex Davis disappearance and Mona’s?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? Mona was involved with Cypress Gardens and was a star witness for Luke Marino. Hakim Ali was on the other side, under investigation from the FBI, and now she’s gone. Maybe she knew something—we don’t know what she knew.”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t make sense, Paige.”

“So the dots aren’t all connected.” She lit a cigarette. “But something about all of this stinks to high heaven. Maybe Mona somehow found out something about Hakim Ali, and the Feds put her into protective custody—”

“Doesn’t explain Robby’s murder.” I closed my eyes and leaned back. “This case! It’s driving me crazy, nothing makes any sense.” I thought for a moment. “I think the key to all of this is Mona changing her testimony. That’s the one thing that doesn’t fit with everything else I know about her.” I started ticking things off on my fingers. “She was loyal, she was honest, she was deeply religious, she was like family to the Marinos. So why would she stab them in the back, at the last minute?”

“Her son needed money.” Paige shrugged.

“But even that doesn’t make sense.” I shook my head. “I mean, I’m not her, but if my son needed fifty grand, she had ways of getting it besides selling out to Global Insurance. Jonny’s trust still has about sixty grand in it. She had certificates of deposit she could have cashed in. She could have taken out a mortgage on her house.
And
she had a cashier’s check for fifty grand from Morgan Barras, made out to her, that she could have turned into cash any time she wanted to.” I shook my head. “All she had to do walk into a bank, and voilà. Problem solved.”

“Maybe that money was the payoff for changing her testimony. You do know Morgan Barras is a shareholder in Global Insurance? And he bought Cypress Gardens from Luke a few years back.”

“The check was dated two weeks earlier,” I pointed out. “Why would she have held on to it for so long if she took it to help out Robby?”

“That doesn’t mean it was given to her two weeks ago,” Paige blew a few smoke rings toward the ceiling fan. “She may not have gotten it until it was too late. Maybe she went over to Robby’s to give it to him, found the body, and got the hell out of town.”

“Without her car and with no money?” I blew out a breath. “I wonder whose blood that was in her car.”

“Maybe she killed Robby. Or maybe she got his blood on her when she found his body. And that’s how it got in the car.”

“I can’t believe she would have killed her own son.” I shook my head. “No matter how much he might have pissed her off, it just doesn’t play with everything else I know about her. I mean, even if he exposed that she had an affair and Jonny was her lover’s child, who cares? It was twenty years ago.”

“Well, someone killed him—and Robby sounds like he needed killing.” She stubbed the cigarette out. “I mean, why would he tell Jonny they didn’t have the same father? And you said they looked alike, right? That’s just a shitty thing to do.”

“They looked like their mother,” I replied absently. There was something there, and I cursed myself for getting stoned. My mind was too foggy to grab hold of the idea that was trying to form in the back of my mind. Someone had said something—but the more I tried, the more it slipped out of my grasp.

“If she did have an affair, she wouldn’t be happy to have it all come out, even if it was twenty years ago, but you’re right, she wouldn’t have killed her son over it.” Paige glanced at her watch. “Damn, when did it get so late?” She tapped the file she’d placed on the coffee table. “This is some of what we’ve dug up on Social Justice. Take a look—you might find something useful.” She stood up and picked up her bag.

I kissed her on the cheek at the door. “This was fun—and thanks.”

“Yeah.” She gave me a hug. “I miss you, you know. But with everything—”

“No worries.” I kissed the top of her head again. “We all get busy.”

I watched her walk to her car and waited for her to drive off before going back inside and bolting the door.

My mind was still a little muddled, so I microwaved a cup of coffee and carried it back into the living room. I picked up the file and started reading.

Hakim Ali had quite a checkered past indeed, I thought when I closed the file an hour later and put it back down. He’d been born here, in the St. Thomas housing projects—and was a product of the New Orleans public school system. But he was the kind of success story people could get behind—no father, his mother had been a drug-addicted prostitute, and he’d grown up in the projects. He’d worked hard in public school, not joined a gang or gotten involved in drugs, and had gotten into LSU—he was actually there at the same time as Luke and I. He’d worked his way through college, eventually getting a double degree in political science and African American studies. While at LSU, he’d gotten involved in several organizations that would have most likely set off some alarms at the FBI—he’d converted to Islam and changed his name, joined the college Communist Party and a black power group reputed to have ties with some anti-American Islamic groups in Africa.