The Diaries - 01 (24 page)

“Weeknights are
such a bitch,” he muttered as the connection buzzed.
 
He got her voicemail and was leaving a message
as he heard his call waiting tone beep through.

“…and frankly,
Donna, to get right down to it, I just want to feel you under me again.
 
I want to smell your hair, taste your mouth, and
experience your enveloping warmth one more time.
 
I know you regretted the last time because of
your boyfriend back home, but who are we both kidding?
 
The world is a selfish place, and he is a man
after all.
 
Do you honestly think he’s
sitting there at night, staring at your picture?
 
Call me, Donna.
 
I need you tonight.”

He hung up and
tossed the cordless phone on the couch.
 
“Entreating like a damned schoolboy,” he said to the walls as he ran a
hand through his wavy black hair.
 
Thirty
years of chasing women had been hard work and, while frustrating, it never
discouraged Jean
Jenois
enough to make him quit.
 
Then he remembered the phone call that had
come through and viewed the caller ID.
 
It was a French number, but one he didn’t immediately recognize.

Just when he was
about to call the next girl on the list, the phone rang again.
 
It was the same number.

“Hello,” he
answered, irritated.

“Bonsoir, this is Philippe
with
Fouriere
Food Supply.
 
We just wanted to let you know this week’s meat
and seafood deliveries are going to be a day late due to the weather.”

Jean straightened.
 
“Sorry, sir.” He cleared his throat.
 
“You have dialed the wrong number.”
 
He hung up the phone and walked to the
bedroom, choosing a cell phone from the small charging station on the shelf of
his well-appointed closet.
 
He dialed a
number and tapped his foot as he waited for an answer.

The gruff voice
spoke without greeting or preamble.
 
“Hold for Nicky.”
 
Jean chewed a
nail and waited impatiently.
 
Finally
Nicky came on the line.

“I need you to run
an inquiry, tonight.”

“And hello to you,
too, Nicky.”

“Don’t be a
smartass!
 
Can you do it?”

Jean squeezed his
eyes closed and rubbed his head with his free hand. “Do you know how hard this
is for me to do?
 
Once every few years is
acceptable…
maybe
…but I just ran one
for you six weeks ago for that
Ramzy
fellow.”
 

“Are they watching
you?”

“Even if they were,
I wouldn’t know.
 
But they aren’t or I
would have changed that amateurish wrong number signal months ago.”

Nicky’s voice was
eerily calm.
 
“I need this tonight,
Jean.
 
Do you understand?”

Jean decided Nicky
was too controlled, too calculating for his taste.
 
There were only a handful of people on earth
he actually feared, and Nicky Arnaud was one of them, at the top of the list.
 
“What is it, Nicky?”

“Is this line
secure?”

“It is on my
end.
 
Is it on yours?”

Nicky ignored the
question, transparently relaying the entire story of what had happened in Metz,
as Bruno told him, leaving nothing out.
 
He told about the killing of the book dealer and about Leon’s murder,
and then about the torture and killing of Gerard.

“Back up, Nicky,”
said Jean.
 
“What was the genesis of the
entire transaction?
 
How did it happen?”

“The book dealer
was a queer and a degenerate doper who owed us.
 
To save his ass, he tried to hustle the money from the man I’m now
looking for.
 
The man killed my cousin and,
according to my guy he left alive, this asshole moved like a trained
killer.
 
He claims he must be some kind
of commando or professional assassin, although they would have never known it
before he turned on them.
 
He was masquerading
as a fucking German, but the other homo said he was really an American.
 
He was trying to sell a cache of rare diaries.”

Jean had been
lounging on the bed, propped on an elbow.
 
Upon hearing the word “diaries”, he bolted upright, his eyes wide.
 
There was a pause as he collected himself,
swallowing thickly.
 
“Really? You don’t
say?”

“Had one with him
and claimed he had more, stashed somewhere.”

“Who were they
written by?” Jean asked without breathing.

“The fuck if I
know!
 
I’ll make sure and find out for
you before I scalp and flay him.”

Jean couldn’t even
breathe as his mind raced over the situation.
 
It had to be Gage Hartline, sneaky
bastard.
 
I’d bet a month’s pay on
it.
 
Sonofabitch found valuables on my
job and wasn’t even polite enough to inform me.

But diaries?
 
How could a diary be worth something?
 
Jean would have to come back to it.

“Do you, ah, have
a description of this fellow?”
 
Jean was
running his lanky hand through his hair again, hoping beyond hope the
description would match Gage.

“Slightly above average
height, athletic build and somewhere around a hundred kilos, or just shy of
it.
 
Short sandy hair and a heavy beard
with a little gray in it.
 
Spoke perfect
German and American English.”
 

Jean’s face spread
into a wide grin.
 
He couldn’t have described
Gage Hartline any better.

“So can you find
this guy?” asked Nicky, sounding irritable at Jean’s silence.

“It could take
some time, Nicky.
 
And it will be very expensive.”
 

They worked out
the details and hung up the phone.
 
Jean
stood still for a moment before walking to the den and closing the little black
book.
 
He poured two fingers of the
brandy and gunned it before donning his coat.
 

No date
tonight.
 
He now had somewhere to be.

***

Her name was
Carolina and Ellis’s heart went out to her.
 
As they walked to Michel’s store, he surmised she was likely depressed
and lonely by the personal tales she openly relayed to him.
 
Her husband of five years had left her the
previous year; the selfish architect of an affair with a younger woman.
 
Michel, her missing brother, had essentially
taken her in after her heartbreak.
 
They
met four or five times a week to cook dinner, drink wine, and bitch about what a
mess their lives had become.
 
And
Carolina insisted, poking her finger into the air for emphasis, Michel would
not disappear without telling her.
 
Ellis
believed her; something was indeed wrong.

As she turned the
lock at the back door of Michel’s shop, Ellis asked her if she had been in the
store since he had gone missing.

“
Oui
,”
she
said as she pushed the door open.
 
“It
looked as it always does, although I usually visit him in home.”
 
She led the way in, Ellis followed.

Cleaning
solution.
 
That’s what struck him
first.
 
Who knew, maybe Michel kept the
place immaculate, and smelling Windex and Pine-Sol wasn’t uncommon.
 
Rare book stores, in Ellis’s experience,
usually smelled musty, like his auntie’s home when he was a kid.
 
Ellis removed his notebook and scribbled a
note.

Carolina hit the
rear lights.
 
Bright fluorescent light
bathed the back area, boxes, tables and shelves in an antiseptic white luminescence.
 
To the right was a safe, locked and seemingly
undisturbed.
 

“Do you know how
to get in this?” Ellis asked, patting the six-foot safe.

“No,” she
answered, chewing her fingernail.
 
Ellis
walked the room, peering high and low, his actions slow and deliberate.

“Do you see
something?” she asked.

He barely shook
his head, gradually getting a feel for the space.
 
He’d learned many years ago that if there was
anything to learn, it usually wasn’t obvious.
 
Typically he was looking for the clues to a specific crime: a murder, a
theft, an assault.
 
But in this case
there were no defined parameters, and it was probably a wild goose chase
anyway.
 
He just wanted to help this poor
girl and, on an off chance, see if the missing book dealer had anything to do
with the man who mentioned hiding a diary.

“Can you get the
lights in front?” he asked as he stared at the floor, focusing on one spot near
the threshold to the storefront.

Carolina went to
the front. As the lights came on, Ellis looked at the spot again.
 
He would come back to it.
 
He turned his gaze to the front and, predictably,
the volumes and volumes of books displayed around the shop.
 

“Does he put any
of the more valuable books in the safe?”

“I don’t know,”
Carolina answered.

Ellis chewed on
his bottom lip as he made a circuit of the front, examining the sign and asking
Carolina if it was Michel’s handwriting.

“No,” she
answered.
 
“But Gerard would have made
the sign, and I wouldn’t know his writing.”

He studied the
sign a moment, finally turning off the light and moving into the back room
again.
 
The concentration of the cleaning
fluid was stronger in the back.
 
And there
was something about the room…

“Do you think
someone took something from the safe?” she asked, fear rising in her voice.

“No, no,” he said,
turning his eyes to her.
 
“Just trying to
get a feel.
 
So far, everything appears
to be normal, I think.”
 
A thought
occurred to him.
 
“When you came in
earlier today, was the alarm set?”

“No,” she
answered, panic washing over her again.

“Do you know the
code?”
 

“
Oui
.”

“Would it normally
be set?”

She nodded, her
lip trembling a bit.
 
“Unless he
forgot.
 
Michel’s head was sometimes…”

“Fuzzy?” he
offered.
 
She nodded.

He studied the spot
on the floor and the surrounding area.
 
The tables in the center of the room were a barrier, forcing the foot
traffic to take a path to the left or right.
 
The rear door and the bathroom were on the right; therefore the path to
the right probably endured more footsteps than the one on the left.
 
The concrete was darker, especially down the
center of the pathway, except for the one spot.
 
It was clean—it looked like new concrete, abruptly bounded on both sides
by the stain made dark from years of rubber soles.
 
There were striations to the outer edge of
the lighter spot that suggested someone had used a brush to scrub it.

Ellis placed his
notebook and pencil on the table and stared at the whitish area, moving in a
semi-circle.

“What is it?”
Carolina asked.
 
“What do you see?”

He gave her a
disarming smile, looking at the Braun coffeemaker near the back door; she
needed something to occupy her mind.
 
“Does
your brother have coffee?
 
Could you make
us some?”

With a tissue to
her nose, she went around the table, retrieved the pot, and walked to the
restroom in the back.

Ellis lowered his
head to the cold concrete, staring at the spot from every direction.
 
To the right of the spot, on the outer wall
was heavy-gauge wire shelving.
 
He
considered moving it, but with everything that was on it, he determined it
would be too heavy.
 
On the bottom shelf
was a stack of paper reams, another box of what looked like computer paper, and
an old cash register.
 
Ellis glanced up
and saw Carolina retrieving the coffee basket before heading into the bathroom
again.

He removed the
items from the bottom of the shelf, seeing that the floor underneath had also
been cleaned.
 
But under the center of
the shelf was something that began to confirm his fears.
 
It was a three or four inch-long gouge in the
concrete, perhaps one centimeter in width.
 
It began shallow, went deeper, and then became shallow again.
 
It looked exactly like the type of gouge made
when a bullet is fired at an angle into concrete.

“Need any help?”
he yelled.

“No,” she answered
with the sink running.
 
“Dark coffee?”

“Yes, please.
 
Very dark.”
 
Ellis was hurrying.
 
He saw
nothing in the brick outer wall, so he turned his attention to the items on the
shelf.
 
He removed each of them,
examining their underside, looking for a slug.
 
He found none.