Vikki Valence indeed had been there, and she now told her story.
Some people are police buffs, civilian amateurs with a fascination with the world of cops and their doings. Al Marcel's interest was politics. He'd painted Vikki in the nude when she'd first started going out with Raoul Garros. During the sessions when she modeled for him, she'd gossiped about Raoul and his friends and associates and their doings. Marcel hung on her every word and encouraged her to tell him more.
Later, when Raoul passed her along to Marty Paz, she'd had to be more circumspect in her meetings with Marcel. Paz was the jealous type. His busy schedule at the consulate and at LAGO left her with a lot of free time on her hands, especially in the daytime. She managed to keep on meeting regularly with Marcel for coffee and drinks in little, out-of-the-way places that high rollers like Garros and Paz wouldn't be caught dead in. She kept Marcel entertained with plenty of gossip about the comings and goings of her rich, powerful Venezuelan 'friends.'
A couple of times, Paz had used her apartment to meet with an older man, a white-haired old gentleman. He gave her money to go shopping so that she'd be out of the apartment during those meetings. That was fine with her; she wasn't interested in his boring deal making and mysterious meetings and whatnot.
Once or twice, Paz had slipped up, and while talking to his bodyguards when Vikki was in earshot had mentioned the old fellow's name: 'Beltran.'
The name meant nothing to her, but Marcel had been very excited when she'd mentioned it. He wanted to know everything about this Beltran, when he met Paz and for how long, was he alone or was someone with him; no detail was too minute for Marcel when it came to this Paz.
The way he carried on, Vikki suspected that Beltran was a lot more than the polite, gentlemanly old geezer she'd taken him for, which now piqued her interest in him, too. She could never really come up with much, though, because Paz's meetings with Beltran were few and far between, and he made sure she was out of the apartment during their conclaves.
Only recently, in the last week or so, a change had come over Marcel. He wasn't his usual breezy self; he was a worried man. Scared. The change in his demeanor threw a scare into her, too.
The last time they'd met for coffee — on Thursday, only forty-eight hours ago — Marcel had been a frightened man indeed. He was a mess, with dark rings under his eyes, nervous, jumpy, constantly looking over his shoulder and giving a start each time a stranger entered the little coffee shop where they were meeting. He sat at a rear table, facing the door.
He warned her that she was in danger, too, due to her closeness to Paz, that 'sinister forces' were closing in on the Colonel, and if she wasn't careful, she might be caught up in events that were about to overtake him, events with dire and possibly even fatal consequences.
He refused to say more than that, telling her that she was better off not knowing and what she didn't know couldn't hurt her. He did hand her a matchbook with a name and telephone number written on the inside of the cover.
The name was a set of initials unknown to her: CTU. She'd heard of the FBI and CIA, of course, but never of CTU. Not that she followed current affairs much; her interest in the news extended to what headliners were playing at what clubs.
Marcel didn't go into any long explanations, merely telling her that CTU was a U. S. government agency, like the Department of Homeland Security, only tougher — much tougher, was the impression she got. If something happened to him, Marcel, or to Paz, or if she ever felt herself in danger, she should call the telephone number he'd written down, the number of CTU's public hotline.
She should call and be sure to mention the name Beltran. On that point, he was very specific. That name was a key sure to unlock their interest, and they would move quickly to secure her safety.
She asked Marcel what he meant by something happening to him or Paz, but he wouldn't elaborate. He'd cut the meeting short and made a hurried exit, scurrying away, scuttling down the sidewalk with his head down and his shoulders hunched, as if awaiting a blow.
He'd put the fear in her, and she couldn't shake it. Worried, she'd gone to his place on Belle Reve Street the following day, on Friday afternoon, determined to find out what it was all about.
What she found instead was a corpse — his. He lay sprawled on his studio floor with a bullet hole in his head. No question about whether life lingered in him; he couldn't have been any deader. Terrified, afraid now for her own life, she got out of there fast.
She was in a panic, not thinking straight. She walked around in a daze for several hours, in shock. Not until twilight approached, and with it the remembrance that she had a show to put on tonight, that her performance was imminent, did she return to some sense of herself.
She'd used a pay phone to call the CTU hotline and pass on her message. Then she'd gone back to her usual haunts, to her apartment over the Golden Pole, trying to fake a semblance of normality that would see her through until CTU agents came to pick her up and take her to safety.
It was torture, mental torture, for her to go through the motions of doing her act for several sets on Friday night going into Saturday morning. As was his custom, Marty Paz had come to see her last set and then accompany her upstairs to her apartment for an erotic tryst.
She didn't know if he'd had Marcel killed, even done the job himself, or if he was merely an innocent party — innocent in the matter of the death of Al Marcel, that is. Marty Paz could be charming, even courtly, in his way, but innocent he could never be; he was a carnivore born and bred — a dangerous man, capable of extreme violence. Vikki knew the type; she'd seen enough of them in her years of working the exotic dancer circuit, and the milieu of vice, hoodlums, and gangsters in which it flourished.
It had been an ordeal of a different sort for her to 'entertain' Colonel Paz early that Saturday morning in the amatory fashion to which he was accustomed; as with her striptease act, which she'd performed flawlessly earlier that night, once again professionalism came to her rescue, as she did what came naturally. The Colonel certainly seemed no different than usual in his manner or attitudes, giving no sign that he suspected her of anything or intended to do her harm.
Dawn was breaking that Saturday morning, when he'd finished dressing, given her a goodbye kiss, picked up the briefcase that he habitually carried with him and took everywhere he went, and exited her apartment, going downstairs and into Fairview Street — only to step into a whirlwind of violence, gunfire, and mass murder.
Vikki had already been poised to run, and even before the last gunshots had stopped echoing, she'd thrown on some clothes, grabbed her bag, and slipped down the backstairs and out the rear exit of the building.
She was on the lam. Luckily she knew Bourbon Street and the French Quarter inside-out, knew all the back alleys and cellar clubs and shortcuts. She knew better than to take a cab or hire a car, since the drivers were required to keep records of the destinations of their passengers. She avoided the buses and streetcars for similar reasons.
She managed to put some distance between herself and the Golden Pole before ducking into an after-hours club, one where the action was still going strong when the sun was coming up. She'd managed to persuade a passing acquaintance to give her a ride to the riverfront. She had him drop her off several blocks away from Belle Reve Street, parting from him with promises of showing him 'a real good time' the next time they met.
She went to the one place she was sure was safe: Marcel's house. He was already dead; the killers, whoever they were, wouldn't be back. She'd lay low there, contacting CTU and waiting until they came to pick her up and take her to safety.
It was pretty grim there, in the murder house. She couldn't bear to look at Marcel's corpse, so she'd rolled it up in a sheet of canvas, covering it up and pushing it across the floor to the far side of the studio.
Her plan to contact CTU for help hit a potentially fatal snag when she reached into her bag for her cell phone and found it wasn't there. Frantic, she turned the bag upside down, emptying its contents on the floor. No cell. She must have lost it sometime this morning during her wild flight from the Golden Pole as she ran through alleys, climbed fences, and squirmed under guardrails to make her escape.
Marcel had a cell, she knew; she'd seen him use it. She searched the bungalow, looking for it, but couldn't find it. She forced herself to examine the corpse, turning out the dead man's pockets in search of a cell. No luck. She became aware that another searcher had been through the place before her. Cabinet drawers showed signs of having been ransacked; pillows and cushions had been slashed open and the mattress stripped of its bed coverings and overturned. No doubt the culprit was Marcel's killer. Maybe he'd taken the cell.
There was no landline telephone on the premises. Vikki was pinned in place for lack of a phone. She didn't
