The Sweet Goodbye, page 4
He mixed drinks in juice glasses she found atop a small fridge. The glasses had paper lid protectors, crinkled like doilies. He ran the tap water until it was as cold as he could get it for her drink. Made his neat, then put the drinks on the side table next to the bed.
They were in no hurry and he refreshed their drinks once before they were finished. She had a beautiful body. Not much had changed. What was once taut was now firm; the beautiful blue eyes now had laugh lines framing them. He didn’t think there was much more change than that. Afterward, he turned on the television while she went to a chair in front of a desk-type vanity and began brushing her hair. She had put her sweater back on but was still in her panties. The room was warm. An electric radiator hummed in the corner.
“Do you know how long we been doing this?” she asked.
“Having sex in motels in the middle of the day?”
“Yeah.”
“Long time.”
“Twenty-five years.”
“You’re not counting Boston?”
“No.”
“What made you think of that?”
“Justin Long came in the diner today. He lives down in Portland now. Made me think of high school.”
“Yeah? You ever date him?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
She laughed and he went back to watching television. It was a game show that had a car spinning on a pedestal, and a woman jumping up and down. The woman eventually stopped jumping and sat in the twirling car. “Do you remember what I used to say about us having a week together?” he asked.
“Course I do.”
“Tell me.”
“You don’t think I remember?”
“Do you?”
“Want me to say it the way you used to say it?”
“Sure.”
“Pearl Lafontaine”—and she put on an exaggerated Southern accent—“if we had a week together, why, they’d be writing folk songs about us forever.”
“You do remember. I don’t know why I asked you to say it. I knew you hadn’t forgotten.”
“You asked because you like to hear it. And because you still believe it. Maybe.”
“I do. Do you ever think we should have tried for more than a week?”
“No. We’ve gone about it the right way.”
“Why do you say that?”
“ ’Cause it’s true. We see the world different, hon. I was raised believing the toughest days are always ahead, and you were raised believing they don’t even exist. That would have been a problem.”
A few seconds later, a chime came from inside her purse and she stopped brushing her hair. She took out a jewel-encrusted cell phone. Baubles and bright, shiny things, he thought. She’d always been that way.
When she put away the phone, her mood had changed though. She bit her lower lip for a few seconds before saying, “You should probably take me back to the diner, hon. You have things to do.”
“Who was that?”
“Beau. He wants to see you tonight. You and Tucker.”
“Tonight? Where?”
“The Grill Room at the Alexander. Eight o’clock.”
“Beau lives in the North Maine Woods. How the hell can he get here tonight?”
“Ah, hon.” And she went to sit beside him, ran her fingers through his hair, probably as blond and full as the day she met him. He had led a charmed life. The Prince in the Tower. She had often looked at him that way. “Beau owns a plane,” she whispered in his ear. “Did you forget, hon?”
6
THE SÛRETÉ DU Quebec file on Beau Lafontaine was delivered to Linton’s hotel room the day after Robert Powell was murdered. I was in the room when the courier came. My assignment had been changed and we were looking at a topographical map of Paradise Lake, the lake in the North Maine Woods where Beau Lafontaine had his main lumber camp. That’s where I would be heading when I got off the Lee shuttle bus the following day. The map had it as forty-seven miles away.
Linton opened the package and began to read the file, passing me the pages one by one when he’d finished with them. For a man with no criminal convictions, it was a lengthy file. More than fifty pages, although only three photographs. The Sûreté sergeant had missed one. Two of the photos were the booking shots from the smuggling charges when Lafontaine was a teenager. The third was more current, an attachment at the end of one of the reports, an FBI surveillance photo taken eight years ago. It showed a middle-aged man walking out of a strip club in lower Manhattan owned by the Hells Angels. It still had the original notation from the agent who took the photograph—“unknown long-haired countryman.”
Beau Lafontaine had black hair that fell past his shoulders. He was dressed in denim—pants, shirt and jacket—with a belt buckle as large as brass knuckles. He wore snakeskin cowboy boots with silver tips. He had a half beard and what looked like bad knife scars on his cheeks; he was smoking a cigarette and smiling at the camera, as though he knew it was there. He didn’t look to be a big man, but on a crowded Manhattan street, you would have been careful not to bump into him.
Unknown long-haired countryman. That was pretty good.
The file consisted of the two arrest bookings and two lengthy case-assessment reports, the ones that get written at the end of covert operations. The first report was for an operation code-named Baton, a joint Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Sûreté investigation into smuggling in the North Maine Woods. Because the Woods ran right to the Canadian border and were uninhabited, smuggling had always been common. It was an accepted way for poorly paid lumbermen to supplement their incomes. It had escalated though, according to the executive summary of the report; at the same time, it had gotten deadlier and better organized.
Beau Lafontaine was identified as a high-ranking member of the Malee, the oldest of the smuggling gangs in the North Maine Woods. The Malee were descendants of Acadian refugees and French voyageurs and they had worked the bush camps for centuries, gaining an almost mythical status among other lumbermen. Lafontaine’s mother had come to the Woods from Birmingham as a young girl, and soon married Guillaume Lafontaine, a Malee leader who ran the Little Creek bush camp.
That’s where Beau Lafontaine was born and that’s where he lived for three years, before his parents moved to another bush camp. Then another. And another. Lafontaine was raised in the North Maine Woods. The report said he might be the only person in the United States who could claim that. There were no permanent roads or settlements in the North Maine Woods. The population—according to every census that had included the counties of the North Maine Woods—was zero.
It was 3.5 million acres—a swath of land in the contiguous United States the size of four Rhode Islands—and no one lived there.
The North Maine Woods were America’s last true frontier, a place where you could fall off the grid, not fake doing that—with general delivery mailing addresses and Gore-Tex tents—but really do that. Operation Baton concluded smuggling in the Woods had increased dramatically, while also becoming more dangerous, the contraband no longer Canadian whiskey or American lobsters but methamphetamine, automatic weapons and Asian women who were moved like chattel between strip clubs in Boston and Montreal.
It attributed the change solely to the Malee, which the report said had become “a ruthless and deadly cultlike criminal organization.” Its leaders were seen as seers or prophets and the report estimated the gang now had effective control of nearly one hundred miles of an international border. It defined effective control as “the ability to smuggle contraband across the border at total, or near-total, control of timing and location.”
The joint-task-force investigation wrapped up after two years with arrests in the Eastern Townships of Quebec of several associate-patch bikers affiliated with the Hells Angels and some shady nightclub owners in Montreal and Boston. Not a single Malee was arrested. The cops had been unable to infiltrate the lumber camps of the North Maine Woods.
The second report was more recent, written four years ago, a postmortem on another joint-task-force investigation between the RCMP and the Sûreté, this one called Broken Wings, into the activities of the Hells Angels chapter in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Lafontaine had his own chapter in this report.
He was identified now as the leader of the Malee. Some heavily redacted wiretap transcripts let you know the Mounties had finally been able to get an informant inside a Malee lumber camp. A good informant it looked like, a go-between for the Malee and the Angels.
During the joint-task-force investigation, the cops became aware of a dispute between the Angels and the Malee over transportation costs through the Woods. Threats were made. The Malee held on to a shipment of meth headed for the Angels’ clubhouse in Sherbrooke. There were more threats. A wiretap picked up Yves Tremblay, president of the Sherbrooke Hells Angels, threatening Lafontaine, promising to “burn those fuckin’ woods down” if his shipment wasn’t delivered within the week.
The go-between set up a meeting between the two men. You could tell from reading the case notes that the Canadian cops were over the moon about what was happening. The informant would wear a wire to the meeting and that audio recording might become the linchpin for a criminal case against the Hells Angels. Maybe, finally, a criminal case against the Malee of the North Maine Woods as well.
Tremblay took three of his most trusted men to the meeting at Paradise Lake. The go-between led the way. Five days later the informant was found hanging from a tree beside a logging road near Sherbrooke. His recording equipment was shoved in his mouth. As for the bikers—they were never seen again.
Poof. Four Angels gone. That was quite a trick.
Now there was a banker dead in Birmingham, killed twenty-eight hours after we first heard the name Beau Lafontaine, and that was looking like quite a trick too.
“Might have been a good report to have seen yesterday,” I said when I put down the last page. But Linton didn’t answer me. His breathing had turned shallow and ragged, and in a few seconds, he stood up and went to the bathroom. I heard water running almost immediately.
I was still in Linton’s room a few minutes later, rolling up the topographical map, when there was another knock on the door. This time, one of the other FBI agents staying in the room next door. He had sheets of paper in his hand.
“We just got a lucky break,” he said. Linton gave him a blank look. Probably wasn’t the day to be talking to him about lucky breaks. “We got the warrant for the Lee brothers’ phones this morning,” he continued. “Here’s a transcript of a conversation they had fifteen minutes ago.”
Linton reached for the paper. He read it and then asked, “Travis Lee placed the call?”
“Correct. We think the original message must have come from the girlfriend.”
“Get downstairs and see if we can set something up.” He turned and looked at me. “Looks like we can use you for one more night, Barrett. Beau Lafontaine is on his way to Birmingham.”
7
THE LEAR LANDED at the Birmingham Regional Airport at seven thirteen p.m., looking as sleek and shiny as a star sliding down to earth. It was the sort of plane you don’t see often in Northern Maine. A Cadillac SUV from a local car service was waiting on the tarmac to greet it. A young driver in a gray uniform was standing beside an open rear-passenger door.
I sat in my rental car on the other side of the fence surrounding the commercial hangars. I had a pair of Bushnell 10x42 binoculars and good sight lines on the Lear. I watched the rollaway stairs get wheeled to the plane, the door open and Beau Lafontaine step outside. He stood on the top step a second, stretching his back, and I took a good look at him. I would have guessed his height at five seven, maybe eight, not a tall man, but he looked lean and fit, with skin so weathered and burnished, it resembled the underside of tanned leather.
He walked slowly down the steps after he’d stretched, and when he was on the tarmac, I saw that he walked bowlegged. He had long black hair, and just like in that FBI photo from New York, he was dressed completely in denim—pants, shirt and jacket—with a large silver belt buckle that twinkled in the predusk shadows. A second man followed Lafontaine off the plane and looked much the same. Only bigger. With more hair.
The young driver watched them come down the stairs and started shifting his weight from leg to leg. He was almost hopping by the time the two men reached him. The boy’s nervous, I thought, and suspected he had spent the last several seconds debating the wisdom of shaking these men’s hands.
He made the right call and didn’t try. I watched him usher the men into the backseat of the Cadillac, never open his mouth, never take his hand off the door handle.
* * *
—
I FOLLOWED THE Cadillac into downtown Birmingham, thinking about the men I used to see in my uncle’s bush camps. The good ones all looked a bit like Beau Lafontaine, had the same stature and build. The towering, hulking lumberjack—the Paul Bunyan of children’s stories—that was a myth. At least I never saw one in the camps on the Upper Peninsula.
Big men couldn’t run fast in the woods when a man needed to run fast. Big men were no good in canoes and pointer boats, the only boats used during a log run. Big men tired easily. Big men ate too much food. No, the men who did best in the bush camps were men who looked just like Beau Lafontaine.
When we arrived at the Alexander, the Cadillac pulled into the valet-parking lane and I kept going, turning around in two blocks and coming back, parking across the street from the hotel. The surveillance van was four vehicles ahead of me. I’d been sitting only a few seconds when my phone vibrated. It was Paul Linton.
“What time did he land?”
“Seven thirteen.”
“What kind of plane was it?”
“Some sort of Lear. Looks like the sixty series.”
“Sweet ride.”
“I have the tail numbers. The wives are inside?”
“Yeah, Tucker’s idea. He told younger brother it would make the meeting look more casual, like they weren’t worried about seeing Lafontaine. Travis didn’t think his wife would come and it would be a nonstarter, but he asked and she agreed and here we are. They’re just finishing dinner. We’re expecting the wives to leave when they get started.”
“You have someone in the restaurant?”
“Got them both inside. So it doesn’t look suspicious, one of them eating by himself.”
“So I stay here until they leave? Follow the Cadillac after that?”
“You got it. You can stand down.”
Stand down? Did he just say that?
* * *
—
THE FRONT OF the Alexander was floor-to-ceiling windows. I pulled out my binoculars and watched Lafontaine enter the hotel. He and the other man cut through the lobby and entered the Grill Room. There was a wide entrance for the restaurant, with a maître d’ table, and I watched them walk toward the Lee table. Watched the other diners keep their heads down while they passed, wait three seconds, then lift their heads and turn to stare.
Every diner. Every table. As I watched the heads bob up and down, I wondered how many knew that the boots on Lafontaine’s feet looked to be Tony Lamas or that he had just flown into Birmingham on a Learjet registered in his name.
The maître d’ seemed to know. He ran hurrying ahead of Lafontaine, snapping his fingers for more chairs to be brought to the Lee table. Before he got there though, the brothers were rising from their chairs, throwing their napkins on the table. Travis Lee was dressed in what looked like the same blue suit and white shirt he had been wearing when I saw him at the Starlight. Amanda Lee was wearing a low-cut dress that didn’t seem right for the season. The other woman was wearing a high-collared gray dress, and sitting on the other side of the table from Amanda Lee, she might as well have been a shadow.
When the maître d’ reached the table, Tucker Lee whispered into his ear. The man nodded his head furiously and then began scurrying toward the rear of the restaurant. Lafontaine and the Lees followed. The two women stayed at the table, eating desserts and not talking to each other.
* * *
—
IT WAS MY turn to phone Linton. He picked up on the first ring.
“The wives didn’t leave.”
“I see that, Barrett.”
“They’re going to a meeting room.”
“Probably.”
“Will one of your guys reposition?”
“Too risky. We weren’t going to get much from the restaurant, anyway. You know how well OmniMics work in restaurants.”
“So what are we doing here?”
“Waiting. Follow that Caddy when it leaves. You can continue to stand down.”
Yeah, he really said that.
* * *
—
I’VE ALWAYS TAKEN chances. When I was a teenager in Detroit, I lived three blocks from the main rail yard. Had forty-three lines coming in and out of that yard, but it was a shortcut to the bars in Greektown, so I cut through that yard just about every night. I had to judge distance and speed. Often had to cut between moving trains. Cutting through that rail yard saved me about ten minutes.
A few years back there was a newspaper story about a Wayne State coed who was hit and killed in that yard. I knew exactly what she’d been doing. Another risk-taker. I was sad to see her go.
I sat there looking at the Alexander Hotel, doing nothing as best I could. While the man we were after, who had just become the focus of this investigation, was on the other side of that courtyard, just past that water fountain, the one that wasn’t spouting water because it was still cold enough to freeze pipes at night and water fountains in Northern Maine were wishful thinking at the best of times. Just past that fountain, inside that hotel, talking to the Lee brothers, the man who could do magicians’ tricks with Hells Angels. Right there. Right now.
