Medusa (13 page)

“Amen to that.” Tiller sighed deeply and got to his feet. “Well then, let me go call this crazy bastard in the blue suit, and make up an errand for us to run.”
 

I got up and walked out of the hotel. Like most days in New Orleans, it was sunny and cheerful, and there was a sea breeze blowing in from the east. I went to the car and began to drive out of the city, to the place where Mafalda had told me the funhouse was located. My thoughts kept drifting back to her, though.

She was a very beautiful woman, the kind that men everywhere longed to have, the kind men wanted to fall in love with, the kind whose beauty could make men write bad poetry and make even worse decisions. There was a downside to her beauty, in that if she met the wrong men at the wrong time in her life she would probably move from one failed relationship to another, or worse, be used by one psychopathic pimp after another until she was all used up.
 

As much as some people loved the idea of strippers, it was, like magic, a business of illusion. Sure, some young women worked their way through college stripping, but all too many didn’t. Where you end up has a lot to do with that first turn you make.
 

There was another side to that business, inextricably tied to drugs and the confused morality that led so many young women down roads paved with unrealistic notions, a road that leads to profound unhappiness. Like the serpent in the garden, it all looked and sounded so good, but it came with a heavy price. I had seen where many ended up, and there was no star on Hollywood Boulevard for them. Instead there was addiction, prostitution, prison, and the grave.
 

I can watch Mafalda do her snake dance and wonder at her beauty, but a part of me knows that she can only dance that dance so many times, and stay lovely for only so long. Then the bill will come due, just like it does with everything. And when that happens, she will have to pay the tab, just like everyone else.
 

The snake tempts you from innocence, after all. After that it’s pay, pay, pay.

Chapter 15

Tiller called Corsack at the cell phone number that Roland had given him. Corsack answered immediately. Tiller told him that Roland had to go register with the New Orleans police, and Corsack seemed to accept this bit of obfuscation without further elaboration.
 

“While he’s busy, I thought maybe we could check into this case ourselves,” Tiller said.

“Yes, yes!” Corsack agreed energetically to the idea. “I give you an address where to pick me up. Give me perhaps an hour, hour and a half, for there is something that first I must do.”
 

Tiller said he’d meet him in an hour and a half, and wrote down the address on a piece of hotel stationary. Then he sat down on his bed and resumed reading the newspaper. He had finished the cartoons and the political section, in that order, and was halfway through the world news when there was a knock at the door.
 

“Who is it?” Tiller called gruffly, without getting up. “I didn’t order any room service.”
 

“Police,” he heard from the other side. He recognized the voice as that of Detective Bishop.
 

“Well, come on in, then, it isn’t locked.”
 

Bishop came through the door. Behind him was another man that Tiller hadn’t seen before. He was obviously a detective, too, fit and solid, with close-cropped red hair and piercing, active brown eyes.
 

Bishop entered without preamble. “Detective Tiller. We need to talk.”
 

“Is that so.” Tiller still didn’t get up, although he laid the newspaper to one side. “Some days,” he reflected aloud, “you just can’t get through the paper without people bugging you.”
 

“Yes. So it would seem. Detective Tiller, this is Detective Burns.” Bishop indicated the other man. Tiller nodded in greeting but said nothing. Bishop went on. “I told you if you needed our help, we would be glad to provide it. And now, you need our help.”
 

“Really now. I thought maybe that you meant we should come to you. Now, why was I thinking something as foolish as that?”
 

Bishop frowned and looked back at Burns. He turned back to Tiller and spoke, haltingly, like a man with something to hide. “There are some things about your friend Corsack that you need to know. Some things that he has deliberately kept from you.”
 

“Corsack and I are not exactly friends, Detective Bishop.”
 

“Be that as it may, you have been observed traveling in his company.”
 

“I don’t deny that. Corsack led us to believe that he might have some information that would be useful to our investigation. Seen traveling together, eh? I take it from that, and this little visit, that you’ve been keeping Longville and me under surveillance?”
 

“Not exactly. We’ve been watching Corsack, not you two. Corsack seems to have taken a sudden keen interest in your investigation, which makes us very curious, because we wonder how your business here is connected with what he’s been dabbling in. That’s why I’m here.”

Tiller rose now and stretched a little, and rocked on his heels. “Go on.”
 

“Corsack has been working with a local criminal organization for the past few months. We had him under surveillance, then lost him during a very crucial period in our investigation.” Bishop paced the room while he talked.
 

“I want to level with you, Detective Tiller, because I think I can trust you. So I am going to lay it out for you, the run-down on a case we’ve been working on for three months.”
 

Bishop paused to see if his words had the intended impact on Tiller. Tiller made a noise and nodded, and Bishop, after a second, went on. “We had learned that he was acting as a go-between for a big shipment of heroin into the Port of New Orleans. We had a couple of the players under surveillance, but things went bad at the port the night of the bust, and there was a shootout. Apparently some kind of dispute about the amount of the payment promised. We nabbed a survivor, a Cuban who told us that Corsack had been the contact in the United States who helped set up the deal.”
 

“So, you’re telling me,” Tiller reflected, “the deal went south and the drugs didn’t change hands?”
 

“That’s right. To make matters worse, the night of the shootout, Corsack dropped off our radar. There was chaos at the scene. When our surveillance team picked him back up, maybe two weeks later, there was word on the street that the shipment had arrived, but that the local parties had yet to take possession of the goods when things went sour. It seems that Corsack is the only one alive who knows where the goods are. He somehow arranged to have the heroin moved at the last minute. The buyers are angry, and seem to be putting the squeeze on Mr. Corsack in some way. Currently, he is keeping the whereabouts of the drugs a secret. But all we have is hearsay on the guy. We need someone close to him to find out where that heroin is, before maybe he decides to find another buyer and put it on the street himself.”
 

Bishop lifted an eyebrow at Tiller.
 

“Don’t look at me. He’s one mysterious—and damned peculiar—son of a bitch. I’m hardly surprised that he’s caught up in the import-export biz. But why would he go to all of the trouble of setting this deal up and then not go through with the swap? Moreover, I’m a cop. Roland’s an ex-cop. Why would somebody up to his neck in organized crime come to us? I’m afraid a lot of the angles just don’t make sense.”
 

Burns, the other detective, spoke up now.
 

“Well, there are . . . how should I put it . . . complications. You see, we know from a wiretapped telephone conversation that there was a breakdown in communications between Corsack and the drug buyers at the time of the original deal. Somebody quoted one price, somebody quoted another. That precipitated the shootout. The drugs had already arrived, and only a couple of people knew where they were stashed. This was insurance in case something happened . . . like the something that actually
did
happen. Drug smugglers are the most paranoid criminals you’ll ever see, as you probably know. So the locals who were putting up the money for the deal decided that they needed insurance against Corsack screwing them, or coming to us, since he’s the last man standing who knows where the stuff is.”
 

“So what ‘insurance’ was that?” Tiller asked, though he thought that he probably already knew the answer.
 

Burns looked at Bishop and frowned. Bishop nodded for him to go on. “We learned yesterday that they have his wife. They’ve been holding her somewhere for two weeks, maybe longer.”
 

“Jesus Christ.”
 

“Yeah, now, when you and Mr. Longville got into town, Corsack ran straight for you, for some reason. We thought for a while that he had hired you to help get her back, or even to hit the people who were holding her. I have to admit, I’m as mystified as anybody about his interest in you guys. I can’t see a connection between your case and Corsack.”
 

Bishop spoke up again. “We think he’s contacted them again. Maybe they’ve arranged a swap. Maybe he’s just tired of waiting. We have to get to him, bust him and the rest of them, all at once, before anybody gets hurt.”
 

“What about Corsack’s wife?” Tiller ventured.
 

“Of course we want her to come out of this safe. Corsack is working against us, so that makes it that much harder.” Bishop squared his jaw, but looked down at the floor.
 

Tiller stared at him hard, until Bishop looked up and met his eyes. “But, regardless of the fact his wife was abducted, and he’s being coerced, Corsack still goes to prison? Pardon the hell outta me, guys, but that sounds like a raw deal.”
 

Bishop looked at Tiller levelly, and did not avert his gaze. “Raw deal? Maybe. Life’s full of them, Detective, as you are no doubt aware. Never mind Corsack’s current reasons, heroin smuggling is a very big deal. There’s no way we can allow him to walk away or cut a deal after the kind of operation that he helped facilitate. He was the middleman on this, and no one was holding his wife when he set it up. He came into the whole thing with his eyes open. I’m sorry, Corsack has to go down.”

Chapter 16

Tiller got into his rental car, but before he started the engine, he tried calling Roland to let him know of his meeting with Bishop and Burns. He got a message instead, informing him that Roland’s cell phone was currently unavailable. Wherever he was, he was out of range of the nearest cell phone tower. Tiller left a voicemail and went out. Things were moving quickly now, and he needed to stay one step ahead of them.
 

He needed to pick Corsack up, but there was no way, as a police detective, that he could in good conscience let Corsack walk away. The situation with the man’s wife, however, brought certain factors into play that, had it been Tiller’s case, he would have considered as mitigating. However, he also realized that it was not his case.
 

Bishop had a tough call to make, but he was in a city that was presently full of tough calls. The heroin smuggling ring was in Bishop’s city, so it was Bishop’s case and that was that. Tiller didn’t even particularly like Corsack, but he felt that the man was out on a limb. Something told him that Corsack wasn’t the drug cartel type. He seemed to be a simple man, narrow of purpose. Tiller didn’t think Corsack wanted to do anything but get his wife out of the current situation, and walk away.
 

Tiller could get behind that. He wouldn’t help Corsack escape. He would even prevent that, if it came down to it. Beyond that, though, he would help Corsack rescue his wife, if he could. None of that was new. As a police detective, as a moral man, all of those things needed no reflection on his part. The thing that kept him sitting there in the car for those extra minutes was a fateful decision that he knew he had to make.
 

It was a moral dilemma of the sort Tiller dreaded, because he was a right-and-wrong type of guy, a thinker in concrete concepts. He hated the modern world, with its moral paralysis, and its muddled sense of right and wrong. One could usually find the right thing to do, if you were one of the ones lucky enough to still
have
a sense of moral obligation. As far as he could tell, it seemed that reasonable, moral people were being rounded up and held in camps somewhere, guarded by Advertising and Marketing executives, before being methodically exterminated.
 

Tiller hunched his shoulders, took a deep, calming breath, and let it out slowly. Then he took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose between his right thumb and forefinger. Should he level with Corsack about what the future held for him? Should he tell him that Bishop and Burns had the evidence against him, and only needed to learn the whereabouts of the drug stash before they charged him?
 

He knew from what Bishop and Burns had told him, that even if Corsack knew they were almost prepared to spring the trap, he couldn’t flee, couldn’t turn aside from his quest—his wife’s life depended on it. So Tiller made his decision, there in the car in those few sparse minutes. Corsack was in a two-way jam, and at the moment Tiller was all that he had in the way of an ally. He’d level with the guy, because that’s what he’d want, if he were in Corsack’s shoes. Besides, he needed Corsack to take him to the place that he talked about before, the place where Roland was headed at this very minute. He’d help Corsack find his wife, and whatever happened after that, well . . . happened. Tiller could live with that, he decided.