“Why would Surrette kidnap Felicity Louviere? Why would she be of interest to him? Is he working with Caspian?”
The line went dead.
CLETE HAD MADE several calls to people he knew in Vegas and Reno and Atlantic City and had found out little he didn’t already know about Caspian Younger. He tapped into another resource, a notorious New Orleans attorney by the name of Philo Wineburger, also known as Whiplash Wineburger. No one could say Whiplash was low-bottom, because Whiplash had no bottom. Over many years, he had fronted points for porn vendors in Baton Rouge and Miami, helped keep cockfighting legal in Louisiana, and represented not only the Mob but a Nicaraguan drug lord named Julio Segura, right up until the day Clete and I blew Julio apart in the backseat of his Cadillac.
My favorite story about Whiplash involved his indignation at his divorce hearing when his wife described walking in on him while he was in the sack with the maid. When the judge asked Whiplash what he had to say in his defense, he answered, “I’m no snob, Your Honor!”
Clete came up to the main house early Sunday morning. He was carrying a yellow legal pad, the top two pages filled with ink. He asked me to sit out back of the house, where we could be alone. He looked like he had just showered and shaved and put on fresh clothes and was in charge of his day, but I knew he had gotten little if any sleep the previous night.
“Here’s what I got,” he said. “After Caspian’s father killed his credit lines at all the big casinos, he ran up a six-figure tab with a couple of shylocks in Miami, then couldn’t make the vig. So he borrowed more from some guys in Brooklyn, not telling them he was on the hook with these other guys in Miami. This time he invested the money in a big coke transfer. Ever hear of La Familia Michoacana?”
“In Mexico?” I said.
“Yeah, they’re meth addicts and religious crazoids,” Clete said. “They cut off people’s heads and leave them on curbsides with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. According to Whiplash, Younger financed a two-hundred-grand shipment of coke that was supposed to go through a tunnel under the border somewhere around Mexicali. It gets even better. The shylocks bundled up a bunch of queer with real bills and passed it on to Caspian, who used it to pay the Mexicans. Can you imagine paying those guys with counterfeit? They were going to take his skin off.”
“How’d he get out of it?” I said.
“His father bailed him out and got him in G.A. again, but it didn’t do any good. He went right back to Vegas for more of the same. Get this: The shylocks told Whiplash they didn’t like dealing with Caspian because they didn’t trust Felicity.”
“Why not?”
“She was honest. These guys consider honesty a character defect,” he said.
“Did Wineburger know anything about Surrette?”
“He didn’t know the name, but he said Caspian had the reputation for being an easy mark and for hanging around weird people. I think the tail has been wagging the dog on this one.”
I waited for Clete to continue. He set down his legal pad and propped his hands on his knees and watched two white-tailed does and a fawn walking along a trail through the trees. Wildflowers were growing inside the shade, and the deer began grazing, indifferent to our presence. “I can’t take this, Dave,” he said. “I think about Felicity in the hands of that guy, and I start to go crazy.”
“We’ll get her back.” I placed my hand on his shoulder. It felt like a chunk of concrete. “Did you hear me?”
“Where do you think he took her?” he asked.
“A place with a basement.”
He lowered his head and shut his eyes. “I’m going to find Caspian Younger. If he doesn’t tell me where Surrette is, I’m going to do some things I’ve never done. There won’t be anything left of him.”
“You want to let Surrette make you over in his image?”
The back of his neck was flaming, his chest rising and falling. I could smell the heat in his clothes.
“She made a choice, Clete. Maybe we have to honor it.”
“That’s sick,” he replied.
“You said it yourself—she was willing to risk her life to save the waitress. In her way, maybe she’s making up for her daughter’s death. Guilt is a luxury we don’t have time for, partner.”
“I wish I’d run off with her to Nevada.”
“She’s still married. That’s not your way,” I said.
“That didn’t stop me from getting it on with her.”
When others show levels of courage that seem beyond our own capabilities, we feel reduced in stature and are left wondering if a spiritual component is missing from our makeup. I once saw a black-and-white photograph of a Jewish mother walking with her daughter to a shower room in a Nazi death camp. The mother was holding the little girl’s hand. The weather was obviously cold; they were wearing cloth coats and scarves tied on their heads. They were flanked on either side by barbed wire and surrounded by other children filing into the same room, inside a concrete building somewhere in eastern Poland. No other adults, except the Nazi guards, were present in the photograph.
There was no cutline on the photo that would explain the incongruity of the mother among all the children. The viewer could come to only one conclusion: She had asked to die with her daughter. The white sock on the little girl’s left foot had slipped down on her ankle. I have never been able to forget that image, nor the courage that the mother had shown in refusing to abandon her child, even at the cost of her own life.
It’s my belief that the great heroes in our midst are the ones we never notice. I believed Felicity Louviere was one of them.