Another door opened and the group stepped into an apartment. Incense blanketed the room, stronger than the cologne smell in the truck but not strong enough to cover the aroma of marijuana. Forte felt a little dizzy. “Let’s get this over with quick,” he said.
Fingers tugged at his blindfold. It came free. They were standing in a den decorated with a pin-striped sofa and two European-style contemporary chairs. A two-foot-high stack of electronics and computer graphics magazines leaned precariously next to an octagon coffee table made of a tile mosaic. A signed Blue Dog print that looked like an original hung on the fashionably cracked plaster wall behind the couch. Skull Cap was standing a hand-span away from Forte, glaring down at him. Poochie stood near the entrance to a hallway, next to a gangly man with stringy pale brown hair. “Benny gonna show you his stuff. This way,” Poochie said.
Down the hallway were two doors. One was shut. The other led into an office setup with a wraparound workstation that covered two of the walls. A 21-inch monitor glowed in the corner of the workstation. On a shelf above the monitor was a high-end scanner. The computer box that controlled the components hummed away on the floor under the desk. On the shelves above the workstation were piles of electronic gadgets and components. In the opposite corner of the room a digital camera on a tripod faced a chair in front of a dark blue pull-down background shade. Somewhere in the jumble a police scanner squawked with a dispatch to a domestic violence situation out in Chalmette.
“Show and tell, Benny,” Poochie said.
Benny was standing by the rolling chair, his hand twitching as he tugged at his earlobe. His eyes never left Poochie. He sat at the desk and clicked the mouse until Adobe PhotoShop opened on the screen. He clicked some more and three small photos appeared. He enlarged them. “Dude came here about seven months ago, needing some ID.” He pointed to the middle photo on the screen. “This is how he looked.” The picture showed a sharp-faced man with blue eyes and short spiked blond hair.
“He had some rough drawings of how he wanted the other two photos to look. I had to doctor them a good bit. He came back twice to check them before he was satisfied. Then I made the papers for him..” He paused and tapped the picture on the left side of the screen. “This is how I recognized it was the guy.” The picture showed a man with long black hair and eyebrows, dark eyes and a black beard. “I also lined up two cell phones for him, each with a year’s prepaid service. Untraceable.” He rotated his chair slowly to face the room. “Nobody can know I gave you this information. I wouldn’t get a nickel’s worth of business if people thought I would give them up.”
“Why are you giving this guy up?” Forte asked, knowing it was a cruel question. He regretted asking it as soon as he saw the desperate expression on the counterfeiter’s face.
“Because Poochie asked me to do it,” Benny said, his head bowed.
Forte felt suddenly tired. “Give me the names and addresses for all of the ID’s.” Benny whirled the chair around to the computer and clicked a few more times. After about ten seconds, the laser printer at the end of the desk whirred and the documents printed out.
Forte looked at them. He took out his wallet and removed a business card from it. Turning it over, he put it on the desktop, leaned over and wrote something. He handed the card to Benny. “Thanks.”
Benny took it. “Oh, one more thing. The guy didn’t seem like someone who would ordinarily be doing this, setting up other identities. I mean, I can’t put my finger on it. But it was like .... he acted almost like he was a cop. First time he came here, I thought he was going to bust me. The way he looked over the place, like he was looking for something to bust me for.”
Forte thought about that but said nothing.
Poochie nodded at Skull Cap. “Put the blindfold back on him and wait for me in the car.” Forte closed his eyes and felt the black cloth tighten around his head a bit more than necessary. He was guided back to the truck.
Ten minutes later, the front passenger door opened and slammed shut. “Let’s roll,” Poochie said.
Forte had the sensation that he was being watched by the drug dealer in the front seat. “I saw what you gave Benny,” Poochie said. He cursed softly, disgust in his voice. “You think he is gonna fold up his business, his life, and go to a treatment center?”
“It’s no life now, what Benny is living. He only thinks it is,” Forte said. His own voice sounded louder than usual to him.
“And you know better than he does how to run his life.”
“I know a junkie when I see one. Been there, done that, burned the tee-shirt.”
“Maybe he can handle it better than you.”
“Right. We wouldn’t have been there today if he could handle it.” Forte felt his anger rising. “Nobody can handle it.”
He heard the drug dealer sigh. “Preach it, brother.”
Forte forced himself to count to ten under his breath. “Poochie, if you had to sit and talk to every mother whose child has lost everything to dope – his job, his family, sometimes even his life – you would put yourself out of your own misery, fast.”
Poochie said nothing for a long moment. “Enough talk, Forte. Our deal didn’t include you preaching to me.” He muttered something to his driver. Forte could only hear “… damn ex-junkies think they…”
Forte was mute, thankful that he didn’t have to see Poochie at the moment. The worse thing was, the man was right. He had no right to tell anyone else what to do. As a good friend of his had once said: Everybody gotta learn from their own mistakes.
He slumped against the door and waited for the ride to end.
* * *
The small girl had set up the miniature table and chairs in a corner of the courtyard, as far from the sand box as she could get. “We no want to get sand in our tea, now do we?” She stood over the table with a plastic pitcher and carefully poured imaginary liquid into the tea cups on the table for her guest.
The man, knees poking above each side of the tiny table as he shifted in the small chair, picked up the cup and gingerly held it up close to his mouth. He tilted his head back, eyes closed in play ecstasy, then set the cup on the table and rubbed his stomach in a circular motion.
Forte watched from the walkway above the inside playground. Jackie Shaw stood next to him, watching him look down at the man with his niece. They could hear everything that was said in the courtyard by way of hidden microphones.
“Almost seems human, doesn’t he?” she said.
“Funny thing is, he is a likeable guy, if you can ignore the destruction that he has caused in people’s lives,” he said.
“Nice of you to let him come visit,” she said. “What made you do it?”
He turned his head and looked down at her. Her eyes were bright and expectant. He wondered how much she really knew about life. “Goodness of my heart?”
She shook her head slowly. “Ummm, don’t think so.”
“You don’t really want to know,” he said.
“Probably not. But it’s a good thing. She was lonely for her family.”
“Hopefully, it will all be over soon.”
Chapter 19
Sunday, 5 p.m.
The guitar was slightly out of tune but the boy playing it did a good job with the song anyway. His voice had a pure, clean sound that fit with the song, which talked of “a love that is fiercer than the love between friends, more gentle than a mother’s with a baby at her side.”
The singer stood at the front of a room with about fifty metal folding chairs arranged in rows and filled with people of every variety: street people with their ubiquitous plastic grocery bags and five-gallon plastic buckets with handles, strippers with teased hair and street clothes barely less garish than their on-the-job peel-away outfits, X-generation types in bowling shirts and baggy jeans. A few people were dressed more upscale. But not many.
Forte stood on the sidewalk barely outside the room leaning on the door jamb as he smoked Checkers number three and listened to the boy si
ng.
Just as the singer was wrapping it up, a man on the second row of chairs lurched forward and vomited. The people immediately surrounding him jumped out of the splash of his retching. Forte saw Manny jump up from the front row on the other side of the room and rush to a small closet off the meeting room. He came out with a rolling bucket and a mop and a roll of paper towels. He quickly mopped up the mess and wiped the man’s face. Another man sitting behind him leaned forward, slapped the man on the back and chuckled.
Manny then stood up in front of the room, raised his hands and said, “May the Lord keep you in this coming week from relying on your own strength so that you may enjoy His love and peace more fully.” The crowd of people milled around chatting and hugging each other. Manny stepped over to the man who had thrown up and put an arm around him. The man looked like he had drunk himself to sleep in a dumpster. Manny smiled and pulled out some money and put in the man’s ragged coat pocket. He saw Forte and held up a finger that meant “wait a second.”
Forte waited, feeling the nicotine do its work on him in the dwindling minutes of spring sunshine. The cigarette rush wasn’t much but on a day like today, it was something to be thankful for. After the business with Poochie, he had left a message for Pastor Hamilton in Houston, asking if he knew anyone with police experience and to call him on his cell phone. He had made a few more phone calls, including one to his reporter pal Jonathan Brach who told him the FBI had a witness in the Lamberths' neighborhood who had seen a van parked on a side street near the Lamberth house around midnight. The authorities were asking the media not to release that information, Brach said, but he thought it might be helpful to Forte. No more word had come in from the kidnapper by phone or e-mail and the FBI didn’t really expect any until the next day.
Nothing was happening with the Lamberth kidnapping but he had people checking on possibilities and he had a bit of information about the killer. Not much to work with but it was better than staring at a whiskey bottle and expecting an answer from it.
The meeting room for Manny’s street church had finally cleared out. Manny walked over to him. “Still don’t want to come in, huh?”
Forte pinched off the lit end of his cigarette and put it in his pocket. “Not today,” he said.
“It’s okay,” Manny said. “You are here.”
“You asked me to come see you,” Forte said.
“Yes,” said Manny. “Let’s go upstairs.”
Forte followed him up some stairs that led to a large apartment above the meeting room. The furniture was sturdy and the walls bare except for a single painting of an abstract woman dancing across slashes of red and yellow. A large honey-colored short-haired dog lay in front of the sofa. He looked up at Forte and huffed once then laid his head back on his paws. Forte sat on the couch and leaned forward to scratch the dog’s ears. “Hey there, J.D.,” he said to the animal.
The sounds of water running and dishes clinking came from the kitchen. Manny called out. “Tea?”
“Sure,” Forte said.
A few more clinks and clanks came from the kitchen as Manny put the tea kettle on to boil. He came to the door of the den and stood with his arms crossed while he leaned on the wall. “Be just a sec,” he said. “I saw it on the news, the Lamberth girl’s kidnapping. Sounded hairy.”
Forte stopped rubbing J.D.’s head and the dog nudged his hand. “Yeah,” he said, “hairy.”
“I’m sure there’s more to it than the news said,” Manny said.
Forte leaned back on the sofa cushions. J.D. huffed twice and raised his head to look at him, then lay back down. A pigeon landed on the ledge outside the screened open window and began its cooing as it paced back and forth with its head bobbing.
The tea kettle started whistling. Manny went to the kitchen and came back with two steaming mugs. He set one in front of Forte and sat in a faded blue easy chair.
“So,” Manny said, “talk to me.”
Forte sipped the orange flavored tea and talked. He told about the murder of the doctor, the call from Mrs. Lamberth, the situation with Poochie, the distraction of Freida, the kidnapping of the girl, the meeting with Jason Hamilton, and the dealings with Benny the counterfeiter. He realized as he talked that the tension in his shoulders, that he hadn't even recognized, was easing .
Manny sat and listened, his blue eyes bright under bushy white brows as he looked at Forte over his mug of tea. He said nothing except an occasional “Yes” or “Hmmm” to keep the narrative moving along. At the end of it he said nothing.
Forte waited for a response. “Nothing to say about all this?” he said.
Manny sipped slowly. “Do I look like a psychologist?”
“You wanted me to tell you about everything.”
“Yes. I didn’t say I would tell you anything though.”
“Oh I see. I blab and you say ‘Hmmm’.”
“About sums it up,” Manny said. He sipped noiselessly. “Though I will say something if you want me to.”
“Okay, say something,” said Forte.
“What do you want me to say?”
Forte stared at him. “Is this a game or something?”
“No. I mean, if you were me, what would you say? What questions would you ask? Seriously.”
Forte closed his eyes and rubbed his temples with the first two fingers on each hand. “I don’t know. I’d ask … if you thought you had completely failed. Could you have done anything different … what bums you out most about all this … what are you going to do next… questions along that line.”
Manny nodded and set his mug on the table next to his chair. “And suppose I did ask you those questions, what would you say?”
Forte looked at the older man and thought for a moment. “I’d say ‘Yes, I think I failed’ and ‘Maybe I should’ve not gone into Freida Lamberth’s room’ and ‘The Lamberth girl being in danger and afraid makes me so damn mad when I think about it’ and …” He looked down at J.D. the dog then back at Manny. “What am I going to do next? I’m going to follow up on my leads from Benny.”
Manny had closed his eyes and put his head back against the chair. “Sounds just about human to me.”
Forte looked at him hard, then chuckled.
Manny smiled. “I am not making light of all this. It is serious stuff. It’s just that sometimes we think everybody else has the answers and it turns out that our own answers, our own responses, turn out to be as good as anyone else could have come up with in the same set of circumstances.” He opened his eyes. “And you didn’t use cocaine over it. A good thing.”
“Yeah.”
Another pigeon landed on the window ledge. The two birds paced back and forth, their cooing mingled together like an atonal Oriental song.
“It’s funny,” Forte said. “The church thing, Hamilton’s church. It got to me some.”
“Oh?” Manny said.
“Yeah. It’s like they were playing their weekly role for a couple of hours. Put on nice clothes. Act holy. Feel better about yourselves. Then go home and yell at your kids or cheat on your taxes.” He looked at the birds on the ledge. “Not like your church downstairs anyway. I can see why you quit that big church in St. Louis.”
Manny frowned. “I didn’t quit. They fired me. For being a drunk. And a hypocrite. And you know what? They were right.”
Forte grunted. “Well, you are better off now.”
“I agree. But not because I got away from those church-role-playing people. I’m better off because I got broken.”
Forte said nothing.
“And I bet there were some broken people there at the big church in Houston, too,” Manny said. “But if I go around pointing out their brokenness before God has pointed it out to them, I will lose something and it won’t just be their good favor. I will lose the understanding of what it really means to give love and to receive it.” He paused and looked out the window, past the pigeons, at a point in the sky that no one else could see. “There are fools everywhere and we are i
ncluded in that group. God bless us all.” He focused on Forte again. “You may not see it now, but your own pain and brokenness have changed you. For the better.”
Forte searched the older man’s face for a moment. “Step by step,” he said.
“Amen,” said Manny.
Chapter 20
Sunday, 7 p.m.
The killer clicked the mouse and scrolled down the list of hits that had come up in the search for “Al Forte.” A dozen or so articles from the Times-Picayune web page, a feature story in BODYGUARD magazine, and several links to the Forte Security web page.
The day had been a long one. But the kidnapping of Hallee had gone exactly as planned. No one had been hurt. No bullet holes had marred the façade of the Lamberth mansion. He had put Hallee safely in the van and had driven across the bridge to the house in Gretna, pulling into the garage around back under the cover of night. No one had taken notice. The girl had not awakened until she was safely locked in her room.
She had awakened screaming. He had spoken to her calmly through the door, explaining to her that she would not be harmed as long as her mother came through with the ransom money. Eventually Hallee had stopped pounding on the walls and yelling. He had spent several days fortifying the room with soundproofing, especially over the window. The room had clothes, a bed and a chair, a television, and a refrigerator stocked with food. She would be as comfortable as she chose to be. Besides, she would only be there for a day and a night if everything worked out as planned.
He had already written the specific directions for the ransom. The e-mail message rested digitally on the laptop’s hard drive, in the Drafts folder of his Outlook Express program. The e-mail message – which eventually would be forwarded through several blind e-mail boxes – would be sent before noon the next day, Monday. It read:
Make preparations to phone the Nassau International Bank at exactly 4:30 p.m. today (Monday). Wire the money to account #Z498B-211Q5530. The bank will be expecting your call.