W. Griffin - Final Justice

O’Hara looked thoughtful for a minute, and judging by the look on his face, Matt was not very surprised at what came next.

“Matty, unless you really want to go back to the Louvre… You’ve been there before a lot, right?”

“Yeah, I have.”

“How would you feel about making arrangements to getting us to where… I forget where you said…”

“Cognac-Boeuf,” Matt furnished.

“Right. Where this sleazeball Fort Festung is.”

“Sure, Mick. Good idea. We better rent a car. I don’t know if we can find one to rent down there.”

“See if you can get us a Lincoln, or a Cadillac. These Frog cars look tiny to me. What I’d really like to have is my Rendezvous.”

The concierge in the lobby of the George V said it would be impossible to provide either a Cadillac or a Lincoln-much less a Porsche or a Buick Rendezvous-and he would therefore recommend a Mercedes.

“Unless M’sieu would like a Jaguar?”

“Tell me about a Jaguar,” Matt said.

He put the Jaguar rental on his American Express card, because every time he’d tried to pick up a bill, O’Hara had been adamant that the whole trip was on him. “Put your goddamn money away,” he’d say.

Signing the receipt triggered the memory of what Detective Olivia Lassiter had said to him in Alabama about his not even looking at the bill there before he signed it, and his first reaction was, “Screw her!”

But she stayed in his mind all day, and about six-thirty, as he sat in the hotel bar in the vain hope that Mickey would leave the Louvre before they threw him out, he remembered that Mickey had left his worldwide telephone in the suite. And after one more drink, he went to the suite, dialed Zero Zero One, and after some difficulty was connected with the Northwest Detectives Division of the Philadelphia police department.

“Detective Lassiter, please.”

“Who’s calling?”

“Sergeant Payne.”

“Hello, Matt. How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“I heard-”

“I’m fine, Olivia. Thank you for asking. I was about to send you one of those ‘having lovely time in Gay Paree wish you were here’ postcards, but I figured what the hell, I’d call you.”

“Matt, I’m working.”

“Can I call you later?”

"I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” Olivia said. And hung up.

The next morning at ten, Matthew M. Payne and Michael J. O’Hara, both more than a little hungover, watched their luggage being loaded into a powder blue Jaguar XK8 Cabriolet. Then they got in and, with Matt at the wheel, drove across Avenue George V onto Rue Pierre Charron, then turned right onto the Champs Elysees and headed for French National Highway A20.

They stopped for lunch in Orleans, then drove on, this time with Mickey at the wheel. At seven-thirty, by which time it was already too dark to take pictures, they pulled into the cobble-stoned forecourt of Le Relais in the village of Cognac-Boeuf.

“It looks,” Matt said, “as if it’s been here for centuries.”

“It looks like a dump,” Mickey said. “Is this the best we can do?”

“This is it, unless you want to go back to Bordeaux.”

Mickey wordlessly turned the engine off and got out of the car.

The only accommodation available was one room. It had two single beds and a washbasin. The bath and water closet were in separate rooms down a narrow corridor.

“And I’ll bet you snore, too, don’t you?” Mr. O’Hara inquired.

Their dinner-roast lamb — was very good, and so was the wine. At nine o’clock, they retired to their room.

“I want to get up early, find their house, and take a couple of shots,” Mickey announced, “then hang around for a while to see if I can get a couple of shots of Festung, and then get the hell out of here.”

They called their respective maternal parents, turned off the worldwide telephone because the battery was running low, and then got into bed.

“You know what else-besides forgetting to charge the phone in the car-you made me do when you decided to drink everything in Paris last night?” Mr. O’Hara inquired across the dark room.

“I can hardly wait to hear.”

“I didn’t call that jackass in the embassy.”

“You can call the jackass in the embassy in the morning,” Matt said.

They were both asleep by half past nine.

When it is half past nine in Cognac-Boeuf, France, it is half past three in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

At 3:33 P.M., Dianna Kerr-Gally, Executive Assistant to the Honorable Alvin W. Martin, stepped to the mayor’s door and coughed.

“What’s up?” he inquired.

“I’ve got Eileen Solomon on the line,” Dianna said.

“Put her through,” he said.

“She wants to know if there is any reason you can’t see her right now.”

“See me? As opposed to talk to me?”

Dianna nodded.

“Did she say what she wants?”

Dianna shook her head, “no.”

He shrugged.

“You think I should talk to her?”

“I think you should tell me if there’s some reason you can’t see her right now.”

“Tell our distinguished district attorney that my door is always open to her,” the mayor ordered. “And stall whatever’s on the schedule until she shows up.”

The Honoable Eileen McNamara Solomon, trailed by Detective Al Unger, appeared ten minutes later in the mayor’s outer office, and was immediately shown into the inner office by Dianna Kerr-Gally, who stood just inside the door.

“This is between the mayor and me,” Eileen Solomon said. “Do you mind?”

Mrs. Kerr-Gally smiled somewhat thinly and left the office.

Our D.A. is really pissed off about something. I wonder what? And what does it have to do with me?

“You seem a little upset, Eileen,” the mayor said.

“ ‘Little’ is an understatement, and ‘upset’ a euphemism,” she said.

“Well, let’s see what we can do to make things right,” the mayor said. “What’s happened?”

“I had a call just now from Walter Davis,” Eileen began. “He told me he was really delighted to be able to tell me that Isaac Festung would soon be returned to Philadelphia.”

“Well, that’s certainly good news after all this time.”

“Specifically, that he was reliably informed by the legal attache of our embassy in Paris… You do know, don’t you, Alvin, that for reasons I never really understood, they call FBI agents assigned to embassies ‘legal attaches’?”

“No, I can’t say that I did,” Martin confessed.

“Rephrasing, the FBI agent at our embassy has told Davis that the French court is about to extradite Isaac Festung.”

“And for some reason I don’t understand, you’re annoyed about that?”

“Davis said that as soon as the French court orders his extradition, the legal attache-read FBI agents-there will take custody of his person, and then they and U.S. marshals will escort him home.”

“You’re going to have to explain to me, I’m afraid, what’s wrong with that.”

“When I was on the bench, Alvin, after Festung jumped bail, I spent a lot of effort-and a lot of taxpayers’ money- trying to find him. After he was convicted in my court of murder in the second, and-surprising me not at all-the FBI had not been able to find him, much less bring him back here and lock him up, I spent even more effort and taxpayer money trying to find him and bring him back here.”

“And the FBI was not very useful in this, I gather?”

“What they did, Alvin, was notify Interpol. ‘Hey, fellas, the local cops here are looking for this guy. If you stumble over him, give us a call, huh?’ ”

Mayor Martin was tempted to smile, but wise enough to know that this was not the time to do so.