One Forgotten Night Page 16

  “Same story. Could have been tampered with, could have been a mechanical failure.”

  “That and the brakes together? That’s a hell of a coincidence. If you had to call it—”

  “Off the record,” Gina said, “I’d say someone tinkered with the car to cause the accident. But there’s absolutely no way to prove it.”

  “I don’t need proof. I know who did it.” Mike was startled by the quiet menace in his voice.

  “One more thing,” Gina said quickly. “There’s a bullet embedded in the back seat—”

  “Oh,” said Mike, “that was me.”

  “I don’t even want to know,” said Gina, and hung up.

  * * *

  Mike reached Julien Duchesne’s apartment building ten minutes later. He figured Duchesne wouldn’t have left for work yet, and he was right. Duchesne, clad in a mulberry-colored silk dressing gown, opened the door a few inches, leaving the chain secured.

  Mike showed his badge and said, “I’d like a few words with you.”

  “In reference to—?”

  In reference to my kicking your teeth in, you slimy bastard. “In reference to Nina Dennison.”

  Julien’s brows rose. “My dear Officer, er, Novalis, I don’t see what you and I have to say about Miss Dennison. Is this an official inquiry?”

  “I’m concerned about her safety,” Mike said. “As her fiancé, I assume you’re concerned, too.”

  Something flickered in Julien’s eyes then; it was a look almost of triumph, as if Julien knew something that Mike didn’t. But when he spoke his tone was polite and exaggeratedly patient. “Is there some reason I should be concerned?”

  “I assume you know that Miss Dennison was in an automobile accident last night.”

  Duchesne gasped. “Is she...is she all right? What happened?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No. I spent the evening here alone. I had a headache and took my telephone off the hook. Tell me, what happened to Nina?”

  “Nothing happened. She wasn’t hurt.” Duchesne grinned nervously; Mike supposed that the grin might have been one of relief, but he didn’t think that it was.

  “Thank God,” said Duchesne fervently. “If you’ll excuse me, I must go to her.”

  “Just a minute,” Mike said, and he shoved his foot into the door so that Duchesne couldn’t close it. “Don’t you want to know how the accident happened?”

  “Whatever I need to know I’ll hear from Nina,” Duchesne said coldly. “Now please remove your foot.”

  “I’ll tell you how the accident happened,” Mike went on as if Duchesne hadn’t spoken. “It happened because some scumbag sliced the brake fluid line on her car. And just for insurance he jimmied her air bag. Now, Duchesne, do you want to tell me what you were doing to Nina Dennison’s car at three o’clock yesterday afternoon?”

  Julien stared at Mike, and the blood drained from his face. “Are you accusing me— You’re crazy! I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “I want some answers, Duchesne. Why’d you rig Nina’s car? Was it you who shot her?”

  “You’re insane,” Duchesne said, “and I’m not listening to another word unless you have a warrant.”

  “I don’t need a warrant to tell you this, Duchesne. If anything happens to Nina Dennison, anything, I’ll be back. And your door won’t be the only thing I kick in.” Mike gave Duchesne’s door a single powerful kick. The chain broke and the door flew wide open.

  Julien sprang back. “Get out! Get out of here right now!”

  “Don’t forget what I said,” Mike told him, and left.

  “I’ll have you kicked off the force for this!” Julien screamed after him before slamming the door and locking it.

  * * *

  Just as he expected, Mike didn’t have to wait long. The summons to Hecht’s office came before ten o’clock.

  Entering the chief’s office, Mike had a feeling of déjá vu so strong that he almost laughed. Hecht was there, and so was Irons, dressed in the same gray suit—or one just like it. Hecht was frowning and chewing the soggy end of an unlit cigar. Mike was impressed; Irons must have ordered Hecht not to light up, and Mike knew that Hecht wouldn’t have enjoyed taking orders in his own office.

  “Novalis, what in God’s name do you think—” began Hecht, but Irons held up a hand.

  “I’ll handle this,” he said in his precise, clipped voice.

  Irons looked to Mike to be more curious than angry. “Detective Novalis, I’d like you to explain to me just what took place at Julien Duchesne’s apartment this morning.”

  Mike told the truth: He had gone to Duchesne’s apartment to shake the man up and, he hoped, scare him away from making any further attempts on Nina Dennison’s life. He explained that he’d seen Julien near Nina’s car and that he’d been following her when her brakes failed.

  “Are you aware, Detective Novalis, that the police mechanics found no evidence that Miss Dennison’s car was sabotaged?”

  Mike wasn’t about to drag Gina Donnelly down with him. All he said was, “It doesn’t surprise me. That kind of sabotage is almost impossible to prove, if it’s done right.”

  “And you believe that Julien Duchesne was responsible.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it may interest you to know, Detective Novalis, that Julien Duchesne is working with me.”

  “He’s FBI?” Mike said disbelievingly.

  “No, he’s a civilian. But he’s cooperating with our investigation of Zakroff and Duchesne. He’s our man on the inside. This is completely confidential information, Novalis, and I wouldn’t be telling you anything if I weren’t afraid that you might somehow manage to screw things up worse than you already have.”

  “You checked Duchesne out?”

  “Of course. His record’s completely clean. We know him inside and out. He’s got a personal relationship with the Dennison woman, but I’ve got no reason to think he rigged her car to try to kill her. He also told me that you accused him of being the shooter in the attack on Dennison.” Irons’s voice grew acid sharp. “I told you that was just a drive-by, Novalis. When are you going to get it through your head that I know what I’m talking about?”

  “Duchesne’s alibi checked out for the time of the shooting?” Mike persisted.

  Irons sighed. “Yeah, it checked out. I’ve got forty witnesses who say he was in a nightclub in Geneva, Switzerland, when Dennison was popped. Do you want to see their sworn statements?”

  Mike shook his head. Irons was no fool; he wouldn’t have discussed the alibi if it weren’t tight.

  “Good,” said Irons. “Look, Novalis, I’m not out to yank your chain on this. Maybe you had something going with the Dennison woman, I don’t know. It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”

  Mike stared back at him, giving no answer.

  “You say you’ve been watching Dennison for a week. Let me remind you—” here Irons glanced at Hecht, who nodded “—that your superior officer gave you a specific order to stay away from her. I don’t know how he intends to discipline you, and I don’t care. But I’m warning you, you’re starting to look like a psycho. Maybe you’ve got it in for Julien Duchesne because he’s putting it to the Dennison woman.”

  Mike hated sitting there like a kid in the principal’s office, listening to this pompous jerk pick him apart. He could feel himself boiling just beneath the surface. Stay cool, he ordered himself. You’ve heard worse. And he had. Some of the sessions he’d had to sit through after Jack Renzo’s death would have tested the patience of a saint. God knew they’d almost broken his.

  “So let me make this real simple, Novalis,” Irons said, his face hard. “From now on, Julien Duchesne is off-limits. Nina Dennison is off-limits. Everyone and everything connected with Zakroff and Duchesne is off-limits. One slip and I’ll have you up on charges. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yeah, you’re real clear.” Mike stood and leaned forward, looking down at Irons. The man’s hair was getting pr
etty thin on top, Mike noticed absently. In fact, he had a regular bald spot going on the crown.

  “Just tell me this,” Mike said. “Are you and your team of hotshot feds going to do anything at all to protect Nina Dennison?”

  Irons threw his hands in the air and turned to Hecht. “How do you get through to him?”

  “Give it a rest, Novalis,” Hecht snapped.

  Mike addressed his boss. “Come on, Morris, you can’t tell me there isn’t something hinky about this woman almost getting killed twice in two weeks?”

  It was Irons who answered. “Coincidence,” he said. “Unfortunate, but things happen.”

  That pushed Mike over the edge. He seized Irons by the lapels and glared down at the smaller man. “Coincidence, you bureaucratic son of a bitch? Are you gonna say it’s just coincidence when the next accident happens—”

  “Novalis!” Hecht roared.

  Irons shook himself free of Mike’s grip. “That’s it, Novalis. I’ve tried to give you a break because of your record, but you’ve crossed the line. Hecht, are you going to deal with this—” he straightened his jacket “—or am I?”

  “You’re suspended, Novalis, as of right now,” said Hecht. He held out one meaty hand.

  A long minute passed. Then Mike unholstered his gun and took his badge out of his pocket. He laid them both in Hecht’s hand.

  “Damn it, Novalis, you know I have to do this.”

  Mike just nodded. “And I had to do what I did.”

  Hecht shook his head. “You’re a good cop, Novalis, but you’ve gone off the rails on this one. Now I’m out one man, and I’m already shorthanded. Well, you know the drill. Go home, get some rest. There’ll be a disciplinary hearing—I’ll be in touch.”

  Mike turned to leave.

  “One more thing, Novalis.” It was Irons. “I’ve spent too much time setting up this investigation to watch it go down the tubes now. Stay out of our way.”

  “Listen to the man, Mike,” Hecht urged. “Or it’ll be worse than suspension. You know what it’s like when the feds get involved.” The glance he shot at Irons wasn’t friendly. “I won’t be able to bail you out.”

  “I understand,” Mike said tonelessly. Then he walked out of his boss’s office, dumped his current case files on Detective Sarris’s desk and went home.

  Chapter 9

  Mike realized that he hadn’t eaten since the previous afternoon. He stopped on the way home for a bag of fast-food cheeseburgers and ate two of them in the car, tossing the crumpled wrappers into the back seat. The third burger was for Sig.

  “Here you go, buddy,” he told the grinning dog, who wolfed down the cheeseburger in a single chomp and then commenced leaping madly about the loft, clearly delighted to see his master home in the middle of the day. “Get used to it, boy. You’re gonna be seeing a lot of me for a while.”

  Mike took Sig for a walk. Then he did his laundry. Then, just for the heck of it, he took Sig for another walk. All the while he chewed on the puzzle of Nina Dennison and Julien Duchesne.

  He still wasn’t sure about Nina. Maybe she was mixed up in the smuggling racket. Or maybe Irons was right, and she was a completely innocent, phenomenally unlucky bystander. But this scenario bothered him—two near-fatal accidents in two weeks just didn’t make sense. He couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was out to get Nina. Would the unknown attacker be luckier the third time?

  And what was the real deal with Duchesne? It stuck in Mike’s craw that Duchesne was in tight with Irons and the feds; Mike was positive that Duchesne’s presence near Nina’s car had been no coincidence. But he had no proof, and Duchesne looked to be untouchable. He wondered what Duchesne had done to earn Irons’s confidence. Probably volunteered to spy, or set someone up. Irons could talk all he wanted about how Duchesne was on the side of the angels—Mike didn’t trust him. And it wasn’t just jealousy, although Mike’s innate fairness forced him to admit that there’d been a grain of painful truth in what Irons had said.

  As Mike paced restlessly around his loft, trying to decide what to do with himself, he noticed that the message light on his answering machine was blinking. He hadn’t seen it earlier because it was half-hidden by a sprawling Boston fern.

  He stared at the light for a moment without moving. There was no reason in the world to believe that Nina had called him. In fact, there was every reason to believe that he was the last person she’d want to talk to right now. He hadn’t forgotten the look on her face last night when she’d discovered that he’d been following her. She’d accused him of being suspicious of her, of thinking that she had lied to him all along. That look had held all the hostility of their first encounter in the hospital, and something else as well: pain. As though he’d betrayed her. It had cut him like a knife. But what really hurt was the knowledge that she’d been right. He had been suspicious of her. Even after he’d gotten to know her, even after he’d spent the night with her—even after he’d fallen in love with her, damn it!—he’d been unable to take her word. He’d wanted to believe her, he really had, but he just hadn’t been able to forget the hard lesson Karen had taught him. Nina had deserved better.

  He moved slowly toward the phone, hoping against hope that he was going to get another chance. He could almost hear Nina’s voice. So he wasn’t completely surprised when it came floating up out of the machine.

  “Hello, Mike, this is Nina,” ran the message. “I’m sorry you’re not at home, because I’ve realized that in all the confusion last night, I never did thank you for saving my life. So, thank you.” There was a pause; the tape crackled and hissed. “I’d really like to talk to you. I’m leaving for a business trip—I’m going to a gem auction in Colombia with Julien and Marta. I’ll be back in a couple of days. If you’d like to get together, call my home machine and leave a message. If not, no problem. I’ll understand. Anyway...thanks again.”

  Mike’s heart was pounding. The fact that Nina wanted to see him again was almost overshadowed by his sudden, sharp anxiety. She was going to Colombia with Julien Duchesne? Forget jealousy—this trip was just plain crazy! He remembered Nina’s description of the wild and woolly gem auctions and the even wilder emerald mines. Anything could happen to her down there. An accident would be laughably easy to arrange.

  He dialed her home number. Her machine answered. Mike almost hung up, but then he decided to wait—she could be screening her calls while she packed for her trip. “Hi, this is Nina,” her machine said. “Please leave a message and I’ll call you back.” There was a single short beep before the tone; Mike knew that it meant there was already one message on the machine. After the tone he said urgently, “Nina, if you’re there, pick up! This is Mike.”

  There was no answer. Mike punched in Nina’s remote call-in code; he’d seen it in her address book when he searched her belongings after she was shot. He didn’t feel particularly virtuous about listening to a message that someone had left for her, but he was beyond worrying about details like invasion of privacy. The tap had been taken off Nina’s line so he couldn’t pick up her messages the usual way. And hopefully, nobody else could. He figured he needed all the information he could get. Listening to her machine could be a matter of life or death. Nina’s life or death.

  The message on her tape played back: “Hi, sis, this is Charley. Listen, I got this package that you sent. What am I supposed to do with it?”

  That was all. Charley was Nina’s brother in Chicago, Mike recalled. So she had sent him something. Maybe the package contained emeralds—Nina’s share of the smuggled stones. Maybe it held some kind of evidence—whatever the searcher had been looking for in Nina’s apartment. Or maybe the package was just someone’s birthday present, in which case Mike knew he was going to end up looking like an idiot. But he didn’t care.

  Quickly he dialed Nina’s office number and got Debbie, Nina’s secretary, who informed him that Nina had already left for the day. “She won’t be back for several days,” Debbie said. “Can I take a message?�
�

  “Debbie, this is Detective Novalis. I was in the office a week or so ago. Remember me?”

  “Sure do.”

  “I need a favor. Can you tell me what flight Miss Dennison is booked on to Colombia?” Mike was betting on the fact that most law-abiding citizens never questioned a request or an order from a law-enforcement officer. He was in luck—Debbie chirped out the information without hesitation and didn’t even ask why he needed to know. She knew him as a policeman; it would never have occurred to her that he’d been suspended from the force just two hours earlier.

  “Flight 555 through Miami,” he repeated. “Thanks, Debbie.”

  He checked his watch: the flight was scheduled to leave Philadelphia International in less than half an hour. There was no time to try to get a message to Nina at the airport. Besides, what would he say? He ran down the rickety warehouse stairs—the elevator was too slow—and jumped into his car.

  Mike had a couple of near misses on his way to the airport, but luckily he still had his portable flasher. He clapped it to the roof of his car and drove like hell, making liberal use of his horn. Still, it took him twenty minutes to get to the airport. He double-parked in front of the TWA terminal, grateful for the police plates that he’d been using ever since he came off undercover duty. The airport cops might grumble about having to direct traffic around his car, but at least they wouldn’t tow it.

  “Flight 555, quick, which gate,” he snapped to one of the curbside baggage handlers.

  Surprised, the man blurted out, “B 13.” As Mike ran off, he heard the handler mutter, “Swell manners.”

  Mike tore through the terminal, putting on an extra turn of speed when he heard the final boarding call for flight 555. He reached the gate just as the technicians were preparing to disengage the jetway.

  “Hold it!” he called out.

  The ticket agent said, “Sorry, sir, this flight is ready to depart.”

  Mike had given some thought to what he would use to impress people now that he no longer had a badge. He pulled out his wallet and flashed his police union card. With an ID photo and a fancy seal, it looked fairly official, unless you scrutinized it closely. Or unless you stopped to remember that a police officer was supposed to have a shiny gold badge. He was hoping that he could keep the ticket agent so off-balance that he would do neither.