The pragmatist in the commissioner weighed in. “Detective, I think what’s happened here is that I am now exonerated from any wrongdoing in the shooting of this illegal. In fact, I’m technically the victim, aren’t I?”
But the wounding of Beauvais represented only one piece of the entire case jigsaw, and Heat moved forward to the next. “Except with Fabian Beauvais running around as a loose end, you had to do something about that.” Heat’s attention turned to Zarek Braun and Seth Victor, who remained stoic. “Am I right?”
“Bullshit.” Gilbert flung a hand in the direction of the prisoners. “Why are these guys here, anyway?”
“Are you saying you don’t know them?” asked Heat.
“Nope. Don’t.”
“Are you certain?”
Gilbert leaned toward them and glowered. “I have never seen them before this moment.”
Nikki moved on. All things in time. “What was Fabian Beauvais’s shakedown about?”
“I have no idea.”
“Mr. Gilbert, we know that a complaint got called in to the Midtown North Precinct by your security at your corporate office building when your extortionist, Fabian Beauvais, was seen trespassing.”
“Trivia like that wouldn’t come to my attention.”
“I expect not. But the reason for his trespassing was that he routinely stole documents for use in ID theft and fraud. I want to know what he scored that made you want to pay him off, and when that failed, to kill him.”
“You’re back where you were, Heat, clutching at straws.”
Watching Keith Gilbert rock back in his executive chair, the picture of confidence and self-possession, sage words reverberated from her past — the wisdom of her beloved mentor, Captain Charles Montrose, who once said, “Nikki, never underestimate the ability of the devils among us to see only the saints in themselves. How else could they go about their day?” Heat decided it was time to hold up a mirror.
“Fabian Beauvais was planning to get married. His fiancée’s name was Jeanne Capois. She’s dead now. Murdered.” Nikki briefly took in Zarek Braun. The man in charge of that killing registered nothing. “But before she died — and, probably why she died — Jeanne sat for some interviews with a documentary filmmaker. She had some interesting revelations.”
Detective Raley started the video selects he had copied to the thumb drive. The beauty of Opal Onishi’s interview technique was that it required no setup. Even edited down to four minutes of essentials, Jeanne Capois’s story was self-contained. Her lovely image filled the flat screen and, thus, the entire conference room as she recounted the journey she and Fabian had made from Haiti to America by way of the filthy, crowded, suffocating hold of a cargo vessel.
The core of her narration spoke of hopes raised, then dashed, then crushed over weeks that turned into months of squalid living conditions, debasement, and cruelty from their various overseers before landing in New York for hopeless days and nights of soul-robbing labor in exchange for a shitty meal and a putrid mattress in a locked room. “At first, I always asked the others,” she said, “‘Why don’t you run?’ and they would all say the same: ‘Even if we could get away, where would we go?’” Their bondage came from deadbolts and violence, for sure. But penniless foreigners, illegals in a strange land with no connections, were doubly captive.
“Fabian said he would make us free, and I believed him. My Fabby, he has intelligence and courage. So we did our labor. And we kept doing it, waiting for our chance. I was afraid they would put me into prostitution like the other girls, but they kept me in the entrepôt — the, um, warehouse — sorting papers and putting the tiny shred pieces together to make documents. I was worth more than sex work because I could read.
“We did that all last year. Then Fabian — he’s so smart — he got trusted with an outside job. With one of the crews that harvested paper from trash at office buildings. So he did that and then somehow got a side job butchering chickens to make enough to get us away. We have no money, though. I clean an apartment for a nice old man But my fiancé, he says he found out a way to make a big lot of money to get us home to Port-au-Prince and have our lives back.
“From anyone else, I would say big talk. But Fabian is smart and has that courage. He said he knows who runs the boats that brought us all here, and he is going to make him pay for him not to go to the police. He found out he is a powerful, rich man named Keith Gilbert. I hope Fabian knows what he is doing. Sometimes, I think he is too smart.” Her chuckle was the last thing on the screen before it went blank.
When all eyes in the room went from the flat screen to Gilbert, he dismissed their stares. Alicia’s especially bored into him in disgust.
“Oh come on, are you serious? I deny that.”
“It’s from the mouth of one of your human traffic victims,” said Rook.
“You print that, I’ll sue.” He turned to Heat. “You try to take that to court, you’ll get laughed out. It’s hearsay. Reality-show theater. Where’s the proof? It can’t be substantiated.”
“What if it could be?” asked Alicia. His head whipped toward her, but she was leaning the other way, sober faced, to address Heat.
“If it could be, that would be important,” said Nikki.
“Let’s talk about this then. I’m in trouble, I know it. I didn’t kill anyone. I’m so sorry I hurt that man, but I didn’t kill him, did I?”
Nikki had been in these conversations so often, she could lip-synch them. So she began. “Are you saying you want some kind of deal?”
“If I told you what Fabian was blackmailing him with, would that be worth something?”
“Do you know what it was?”
“She doesn’t. This is bullshit.”
“Would it help? What if I said I knew where the documents were?”
Heat said to Alicia, “Ms. Delamater, if you have material evidence to lead to an arrest and conviction in this case, I will offer you a deal.”
“What kind?”
“Fuck you both.”
“I will personally speak to the DA about making the most liberal deal possible. I can’t promise you what, but I can promise it will be the best they can do.”
They waited as Alicia, the cast out mistress and political liability, weighed all that. “They were shipping manifests.” She fixed an icy grin on her ex-boyfriend, who rolled his eyes. “Shipping manifests, including names of men, women, and children I realize now must have been slaves, or whatever you’d call them.” Gilbert dismissed her with a loud exhale, but she went on. “There is also accounting of how much was paid per unit. That must mean people.”
“You’re guessing.”
Unfazed by him, no longer under his thumb, Alicia continued. “There was more. Not only manifests but an accounting printout of bank transfers going back over nine years. I spent a whole weekend reading them after you shut me out, Keith.”
“What kinds of transfers were they?” asked Heat.
“They all came out of the big fund generated by moving the units. Units, God, that’s sick. But the payouts were a million here, a half mill there — millions and millions over time to accounts with weird names. Let me think. Most of the payments went to one called Framers Foremost.”
“Alicia,” snapped Gilbert.
“Framers Foremost?” said Rook. “That’s a super PAC named after the framers of the Constitution. They’re a clearinghouse that bankrolls political candidates.” He turned to Gilbert. “So that’s it. You were using your ships for human trafficking so you could generate income off the books to launder into a political war chest. Brilliant!”