“The thing is, Bream knew enough to use the Indians as straw dogs,” Charlie said. Eskridge’s enthusiastic nod belied his growing impatience. “He could be trying to divert attention from Alabama, which, not incidentally, is to ribs what Switzerland is to cheese. Plus, I bet he really is a Southerner.”
“You
“Only that the actual John Townsend Bream has been institutionalized in Mississippi for nine years.”
“That lends more credence to Southerner than if the institution were in New Hampshire,” Charlie said, but to blank faces. “And he certainly had the dialect down, and the accent-a lot better than the cast of
Eskridge rolled his eyes.
“You’d be amazed at the Russians’ linguistic training,” Doxstader said to Charlie.
Charlie wanted to hit something. “Why would Bream want us to think he’s a Southerner?”
“It’s an old spook trick.” Eskridge pushed back from the table. “So you don’t know who he really is.”
3
Charlie planned to spend the next couple of days in Laurel, Maryland, enjoying some R amp; R at Pimlico Race Course. Or so he told Corbitt as they returned to the airport, alleviating the base chief’s concern that Charlie would take his wild theory to the media.
In fact, Charlie drove a rented Ford Taurus 1,039 miles south. At Mobile’s city limits the sporadic shacks and farmhouses alongside the country road mushroomed into a collection of genteel antebellum homes and buildings that met his conception of the old South. Until several taller buildings appeared, and from behind them, taller buildings still. The skyline rose, like flights of stairs, to futuristic skyscrapers. This was certainly not the quaint Southern city that his hasty Googling had led him to envision, a few square blocks of charismatic office buildings and a “downtown” swaying to the sultry saxophones from little jazz clubs, the air scented with smoke from ramshackle yet charming ribs joints.
The country road rose into an elevated modern highway, spiraling in apparent defiance of the laws of physics over what Charlie initially took to be the Gulf of Mexico. It was the sort of construction that caused people to stop and marvel. Charlie indeed marveled at it, and he marveled even more at the body of water, which extended to the horizon, like any ocean. Except
He exited the highway at Water Street, a four-lane road paralleling the Alabama State Docks, check-in point for vessels from abroad. He drove alongside miles and miles of blackened iron piers, mammoth warehouses, and comparable container ships. Not only did the complex dwarf the city, an entire naval fleet could cruise into it without drawing notice from shore.
He had a feeling, like a cold coming on, that he’d greatly underestimated the amount of detective work that would be required to find Bream here.
He caught sight of a sign plastered onto the side of a warehouse-he’d seen one or two of them already, but only now did the significance register. It listed a Customs and Border Protection phone number for arriving noncommercial vessels to schedule in-harbor inspections. If Bream were checking in with Uncle Sam, he could do so from any number of harbors on the ocean-sized bay.
Charlie sat outside Mobile’s tourist information office with a map of Mobile Bay spread over his steering wheel. In the passenger seat was a pile of brochures that the zealous staffers had forced on him, including those of a charter fishing service, a children’s museum, various historical sites, and local real estate agencies-in the event that he really, really liked the contents of the other brochures.
Gusts off the bay spat bits of garbage around the parking lot. Dark sheets of rain belted the rented Ford. The horseshoe-shaped bay itself was 413 square miles, or twenty times the size of Manhattan. Its shoreline was eighty-four miles, and there were another hundred miles of beaches on either side of its mouth. He had a better chance of finding a needle hidden in New York than he did of finding Bream in Mobile.
And here was one for the annals of idiocy: He had actually thought he could row a boat across Mobile Bay, if needed, to look for Bream.
Bream had taken possession of the washing machine on Monday, three days ago. A fast yacht would take seventy hours to get here. The G-20 kicked off tomorrow evening. Presumably sometime before then, when security would be tightest, Bream would arrive with the ADM. Unless he’d taken a plane.
Charlie wondered what his father would do now.
He had no idea. That was the problem.
He called Alice, needing comfort as much as counsel. Five rings and her voice mail kicked in. She was probably in a conference room that didn’t permit incoming calls.
Just as well. He didn’t relish explaining to her how he’d charged down to Alabama on little more than a hunch.
He glimpsed a small ad on the back of a local pennysaver, placed by a private detective named Dave LeCroy, who specialized in marital infidelity. LeCroy’s black-and-white photo might have passed for one of a young, beardless Abraham Lincoln if not for the cell phone pressed to his ear. A comic strip balloon from his mouth declared, “I’ll get your man!”
4
Shafts of sunlight appeared to part the clouds when Charlie parallel parked on a low-rent stretch of Dauphin Street, Mobile’s answer to Bourbon Street according to the tourist information. The elaborate four- and five-story buildings indeed conjured those of New Orleans, but at eleven-thirty in the morning, Dauphin-pronounced
Charlie entered a squat building whose ground floor tenants included a “gentlemen’s club” and a tattoo parlor. A grubby flight of stairs brought him to a door stenciled with big gold letters: Offices of David P. LeCroy, Licensed Private Investigator.
Charlie had barely knocked when the door was flung open by a voluptuous young woman.
“Hi,” she said, adding, “I’m the receptionist.” She wore a white blouse and a modest plaid skirt. Her lofty heels, the absence of hose, and the tattoo of dice on her ankle suggested that she worked at the club downstairs, and that she threw on the blouse and skirt when the detective had a prospective client. “Mr. LeCroy is expecting you.”
As Charlie followed her through the tiny anteroom, he realized that she hadn’t asked him his name. She gestured him ahead into a faux-teak paneled office, where the man from the ad shot up from his vinyl chair.
“Great to meet you,” he said, pumping Charlie’s hand.
“Same.” Charlie heard the outer door shut and heels clicking down the stairs.
In real life, the latter-day young Lincoln was pushing fifty and stood no higher than Charlie’s nose. He’d used a good retoucher for his ad-much of his face showed remnants of teenage acne. His hair was not his. And he’d put money into his mouth. Perhaps too much. Flashing a game-show host’s smile, he said, “Take a load off.” His eyes never once met Charlie’s.
Sitting down, Charlie asked, “So how’d you get into detective work?”
“I like to help people.” Leaning forward, LeCroy nested his chin on his hands, a pointedly contemplative pose. Finally his eyes found Charlie’s. “How can I help you?”
“I have a friend who arrived or will be arriving here from overseas this week in a private yacht, but I don’t have a way of reaching him. He’s not big on turning on his phone or checking e-mail on vacation. I was hoping that, as a licensed PI, you’d be able to access the port’s entry database.”
The screen saver on LeCroy’s computer was a low-resolution photo of a naked blonde in the same chair Charlie occupied now. The detective clicked his mouse and she dissolved into a jumble of file icons. “Know the
