Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [38]
Carroll made soft clicking noises with his tongue. His eyes briefly met those of Isabella Marqueza.
She was quiet suddenly. His putting-green voice was throwing her off slightly. She obviously hadn’t expected to encounter the deck of photographs.
“Miller’s wife Judy here. Alive in this photo. Kind of a nice Midwestern smile.… Two little girls. Their bodies, that is. I have two little girls myself. Two girls, two boys.”
Carroll smiled again. He cleared his throat. He needed a beer—a beer and a stiff shot of Irish would go real good right now. He studied Isabella Marqueza a moment.
“In July of last year, you participated in the premeditated murders, the political assassination of all four Millers.”
Isabella Marqueza shot up from her seat in the interrogation room. She began to yell at Carroll again.
“I did nothing! You prove what you say! No! I did not kill anybody. Never. I don’t kill children!”
“Bullshit. That’s the end of our friendly discussion. Who the hell do you think you’re kidding?”
With that Carroll slapped the wrinkled manila portfolio shut, he jammed it back in his lopsided desk drawer. He looked up at Isabella Marqueza again.
“Nobody knows you’re here! Nobody’s going to know what happened to you after today. That’s the truth. Just like the Miller family in Brazil.”
“You’re full of shit, Carroll—”
“Yeah? Try me. Push me a little and find out for sure.”
“My lawyer, I want to see my lawyer—”
“Never heard of him—”
“I told you his name, Curzon—”
“Did you? I don’t remember—”
Isabella Marqueza stared at Carroll in silence. She folded her arms, then sat down again. She crossed her long legs and lit a cigarette.
“Why are you doing this to me? You’re crazy.”
This was a little better, Carroll thought.
‘Tell me about Jack Jordan down in Colombia. American business accountant. Machine-gunned to death in his driveway. His wife got to watch.”
“I never heard of him.”
Carroll clucked his tongue and slowly shook his head back and forth. He seemed genuinely disappointed. Sitting behind the bare, bleak office desk, he looked like someone whose best friend had just inexplicably lied to him.
“Isabella. Isabella.” He gave an exaggerated sigh. “I don’t think you get the total picture. I don’t think you really understand.” He stood up, stretched his arms, fought back a yawn. “You see, you no longer exist. You died suddenly this morning. Taxi accident on East Seventieth Street. Nobody bothered to tell you?”
Carroll was feeling dangerously overloaded now. He didn’t want to finish this interrogation.
An hour passed. Two hours. He desperately needed a drink.
“You were Francois Monserrat’s mistress here in New York. Come on. We already know about that. Two summers ago. Right here in Nueva York.”
Isabella Marqueza sat with her head hanging. She wouldn’t look up at Carroll for long stretches of time. Her right leg kept nervously tapping the floor, but she didn’t seem aware of it. She looked physically ill.
“Who the hell is Monserrat?” Carroll kept up his attack.
“How does Monserrat get his information? How does he get information that no one outside the U.S. government could possibly get? Who is he?”
Carroll could hear his own loud voice as if it were a foreign sound in an echo chamber. “Listen Listen to.… to me very carefully.… If you talk to me right now, if you tell me about Francois Monserrat—-;just his part in the bombings on Wall Street.… If you do that much, I can let you leave here, I promise you. No one will know you were here. Just tell me about the Wall Street bombings. Nothing more than that Nothing else.… What does Francois Monserrat know about the fire bombings?…”
It took thirty minutes more of cajoling, threatening, screaming at Marqueza, thirty grueling minutes in which Carroll’s voice turned hoarse and his face red, thirty minutes during which his shirt stuck to his sweaty body, before Isabella Marqueza