BEFORE SHE'D DISAPPEARED in November 1994, Claudette Thodore had lived with her parents, Caspar and Mathilde, on the Rue des Ecuries in Port-au-Prince, close to an old military barracks.
The Rue des Ecuries linked two busy main roads, but was practically shielded from view at either end by gigantic palm trees. It was one of those tiny, blink-and-it's-gone places only ever known to locals, or outsiders looking for a shortcut, who forget it as soon as they've passed through it.
Max had got directions from Mathilde. She spoke perfect English, with Midwest inflections, possibly Illinois, not a hint of Franco-Caribbean.
As they got out of the car, Max caught a smell of fresh flowers mixed in with mint. Up ahead stood a man with a bucket and a mop, washing the road. The farther down the road they walked the more the smell intensified and made Max's nostrils smart. The houses either side of them were hidden behind solid metal gates and walls topped with stiletto spikes and razor wire. Only the tops of trees and telegraph poles, the rims of satellite dishes and filaments of TV aerials poked over, but there was nothing else to see. Max guessed the houses were bungalows or single-story buildings. He heard the furious sniffing of dog snouts under the gates, sucking up their smell through the gaps, breaking them down into familiar and unfamiliar. None of the dogs barked to alert their masters of strangers in their midst. That's because, Max knew, they were attack dogs. They never made a sound. They let you come all the way into their terrain, too far in to get back out, and then they went for you.
The mop-man eyed them as they approached, not once stopping what he was doing. Chantale nodded and greeted him. The man didn't reply, just looked them up and down through slitted eyes and a scowl, his body language oozing tension.
"I bet he's got Syrian roots," Chantale whispered. "He's washing the street with mint and rosewater. It's a Syrian custom, meant to ward off evil spirits and attract good ones. There was an influx of Syrian merchants here about forty or fifty years ago. They opened these little boutiques that sold everything to the poor. Every morning they'd sweep the street around the shop and douse it in herbal potions to bring them luck, prosperity, and protection. A few of them obviously got it right because they made a lot of money."
The Rue des Ecuries was the cleanest street Max had seen in Haiti so far. There wasn't a scrap of garbage anywhere, no stray animals and vagrants at the sides, no graffiti on the walls, and not a single crater or pothole in the road, which was immaculately paved with gray stone. It could have been any quiet, prosperous, middle-class side street in Miami or L.A. or New Orleans.
Max banged on the Thodores' gate four times, as Mathilde had asked him to. Soon after, he heard footsteps coming from behind the wall.
"Qui lа?"
"My name's-"
"Mingus?" a woman asked.
A dead bolt snapped back and the gate was opened from the inside, groaning horribly on its hinges.
"I'm Mathilde Thodore. Thanks for coming." She beckoned them in and then made more infernal sounds as she pushed the gate shut. She was wearing sweatpants, sneakers, and a loose Bulls T-shirt.
Max introduced himself and shook her hand. She had a firm grip that went with her direct, almost challenging stare. Had she smiled more, she might have been an attractive, even beautiful woman, but her face was hard and unyielding, the sort of mien you develop after seeing too much of the downside of life.
They were in a small courtyard, standing a few feet away from a modest, orange-and-white bungalow with a sloping tin roof, half hidden by untended bushes. A thick palm tree grew tall behind it, draping the structure in a blanket of yellow-dappled shade, while off to the right stood a swing, its chains rusted solid. Max guessed Claudette had been an only child.
Then his eyes fell on two bright green dog bowls set out near the swing, one holding food, the other water. He looked back, toward the wall, and found a big, house-shaped kennel.
"Don't worry about him. He won't bite," Mathilde said, noticing Max staring at the kennel.
"That's what they all say."
"He's dead," Mathilde answered quickly.
"I'm sorry," Max offered, but he wasn't.
"The food and water's for his spirit. You know how this country runs on superstition? We feed the dead better than we feed ourselves here. The dead rule this land."
Inside, the house was small and cluttered, the furniture too big for the available space.
The walls were covered in photographs. Claudette was in every one-bright-eyed, open-mouthed baby pictures framed and hung on walls, pictures of her in her school uniform, snaps of her with her parents, grandparents, and relatives, all of their faces orbiting hers like planets in a solar system. She was a happy child, smiling or mugging in every picture, the center of attention in group shots-physically and photogenically, the eye of the camera drawn to her. There was a photo of her standing outside the Miami church with her uncle Alexandre, which looked like it might have been taken after a service, because he was in his robes and there were smartly dressed people in the background. There was another of her standing next to a black Doberman. At least a dozen showed the girl with her father, whom she seemed to favor in both looks and with the lion's share of her affections, because she didn't smile so broadly or laugh at all in the few snaps of her and her mother.
The couples sat on opposite sides of a dining table. Caspar had given his guests a nod and a quick grip of the hand when they'd walked in, but he hadn't so much as said a welcoming word.
He didn't take after his brother. He was short and stocky, thick arms, bulky shoulders, neckbreaker hands lashed with veins, flat, wide fingers. His manner was gruffness skirting rudeness. His hair, thinning on top and cut low, was more salt than pepper. His face-far more forbidding than his wife's, starting to droop at the jowls and pool under the eyes-coupled with the way he was grinding his teeth, gave him a passing resemblance to a pissed-off mastiff. Max placed him in his midforties. He wore the same clothes as his wife, who sat next to him, drinking a glass of juice.
"You Bulls fans?" Max asked them both but looked at Caspar, hoping to break the ice.
Silence. Mathilde prodded her husband with her elbow.
"Lived in Chicago sometime," he answered, not making eye contact.
"How long ago?"
No answer.
"Seven years. We came back when Baby Doc was overthrown," Mathilde said.
"Should've stayed put," her husband added. "Come back here, want to do some good, bad's all that happens to us."
He said a little more but Max didn't catch it. He had a gravelly voice that buried more than it carried.
Mathilde looked at Max and rolled her eyes, as if to say he was always like that. Max guessed then that Claudette's disappearance had hit him the hardest.
He found a picture of father and daughter, both laughing. Caspar looked younger there, his hair darker and fuller. The picture wasn't that old, because Claudette looked as she did in the shot her uncle had given him.
"What else happened to you?"
"Apart from our daughter?" Caspar asked bitterly, finally looking Max straight in the face, his eyes small and bloodshot, silver points mired in sad, angry crimson. "What hasn't? This place is cursed. Simple as that. Ever notice how nothin' grows here? No plants, no trees?"
"It hasn't been good for us here," Mathilde quickly picked up. "Caspar used to be a fireman in Chicago, then he had an accident and got an insurance payout. We'd been talking about giving it up in the States and coming back here, so when we got a chance we thought let's go for it."
"Why did you leave Haiti?"
"We didn't-I mean, our parents did, in the early sixties, because of Papa Doc. My dad had some friends with links to dissident groups in Miami and New York. They tried to mount a coup, which failed. Papa Doc didn't just round up the culprits, but all their families and friends and their friends and family. Just to make sure. That was his way. Our parents guessed it was only a matter of time before the Macoutes came for all of us, so we got out."
"Why did you want to come back?" Max asked. "Chicago's not a bad place."
"What I been tellin' myself every time I kick myself," Caspar grumbled.
Max laughed, more out of encouragement than mirth. Caspar dead-eyed him back. Nothing was shaking him out of his grief.
"I think we both grew up in America with this sense of loss for what we'd left behind," Mathilde explained. "We always called this place 'home.' We had all these really fond memories of old Haiti. Especially the people. There was a lot of love here. Before we got married we swore we'd come back to live here one day-we swore we'd come 'home.' "We used some of the insurance money to buy into a store opposite a gas station, selling cut-price food and basic essentials to the poor. People didn't like us coming over here and just opening up a business and making money. They've got a word for us here. They call us 'diaspora.' It used to be an insult, like we'd chickened out, turned our backs on the country and only came back when things were good. Nowadays it's just another word, but back then-"
"Then it was all we heard," Caspar interjected. "Not among the everyday people-they were always cool to us, kind folk, mostly. We had a good relationship with them. Way we operated wasn't too different from the way Koreans operate in the black neighborhoods in Chicago-employ a few locals, treat 'em well, be respectful to everyone. We had no problem there at all. But the ones like us-with the businesses, our peers and neighbors-we lived up in Pйtionville then-they made it clear they didn't like us around. Called us all kinds of trash. See, the only way they woulda respected us was if they'd known us all their lives."
"So we ignored it and kept ourselves to ourselves, worked hard, treated people as best we could. After a while we moved down here. It was better. Our neighbors are people like us-immigrants, outsiders," Mathilde said, patting Caspar on the arm for him to calm down. "It's nice here. Real clean too."
"We're a tight community," Caspar said. "We operate a 'zero-tolerance policy' here."
"Against who?"
"Everyone we don't know. They're discouraged from, you know, settling down here. It's OK for them to pass through, as long as they do it quick. Animals and especially people. Plus we all take turns in sweeping the street, morning and evening, before sundown. We all look out for each other."
Caspar allowed himself a small, knowing smirk that told Max that he enjoyed busting the heads of those luckless homeless folk who bedded down in his street for the night. It was probably the only thing that made him feel good anymore. A lot of ex-cops Max had known were like that. They missed the juice of being out on the street and took the kind of jobs where they could still just about get away with roughing people up-club security, corporate muscle, bodyguards. Caspar was probably reverting to the person he'd been before happiness had intruded into his life and blown him off course.
"We've been happy here," Mathilde picked up. "Claudette made it complete. I had her a few months after we moved in. We hadn't been planning on starting a family, and I even thought I was too old, but she came into our lives and lit up all sorts of places in us we didn't know were there."
She stopped and looked at her husband. Max couldn't see her face but he knew from the way Caspar's look softened that she was about to dissolve in tears. He put his arm tenderly around his wife's shoulders and pulled her to him.
Max glanced away toward the pictures on the wall above them. They were good people. Mathilde, especially. She was the guts and brains of the pair, the one who kept her husband in check, the one who kept their show on the road. She'd been the disciplinarian in the family, which was why her daughter had preferred her father, who no doubt caved in at her first demand. He thought of Allain and Francesca Carver. They were a million miles apart, heading in opposite directions, no warmth or closeness between them, despite their grief. He'd known the loss of a child to wreck the strongest of marriages as easily as it pushed the most dysfunctional ones over the finish line. Claudette's disappearance, however, had united the Thodores, reaffirmed, in the darkest way, the thing that had brought them together.
He focused on a medium-sized photograph of Claudette on a swing, being pushed by her father, while the Doberman watched from a corner.
Mathilde blew her nose and sniffed.
"Business was good, even though the political climate wasn't," she continued, her composure regained. "One month we had two presidents and three coups. You could always tell whenever something was going down, because our business wasn't too far from the palace. Whoever was in power at the time would send his guys out to buy a load of extra gas for his getaway.
"The thing about this country is that all the gas comes from the U.S., so any time they want to bring down a president they threaten to stop the gas from coming in. Whenever there was a real danger of that happening you'd see one of the oil company's management roll up to the gas station-always these big fat sweaty white Americans looking like Bible salesmen. They'd tell the station manager to expect extra shipments because they'd had 'drought warnings'-their code for another changeover in leadership.
"The gas never stopped coming in because they were quiet coups. Not a shot fired. You'd be watching some TV program and then there'd be an intermission and a general would make an announcement on TV: this month's president had been arrested or exiled for treachery/corruption/speeding/whatever and the army had taken temporary control of the palace, and that would be that. Everyone carried on as usual. No one thought an embargo would ever happen. And then it did."
"We went out of business. A lot of our stuff came from the U.S. or Venezuela. Ships couldn't get through," Caspar said. "Claudette used to ask me why I wasn't going to work. I told her it was so I could watch her grow."
"They burned our business down-just before the marines landed," Mathilde said.
"Who?" Max asked.
"The military. They just wanted to make life as difficult for the invaders as possible. They set fire to a lot of amenities. I don't think it was personal-at least, not against us."
"Oh no?" seethed Caspar. "That was our life. It don't get more personal than that."
Mathilde didn't know what to say. She looked away, found one of the pictures, and fixed on it, as if willing herself there, back in time to happiness.
Max stood up and walked away from the table. Behind them were a sofa, two armchairs, and a medium-sized television on a stand. The television had a layer of dust on it, as if it hadn't been watched in a while or simply didn't work. He noticed a shotgun parked near the window. He looked at the courtyard, taking in the swing and the kennel and the gate. Something wasn't right about it.
"What happened to your dog?" he asked, turning back to the table.
"He was killed," Mathilde said, getting up and coming over to him. "The people who took our daughter poisoned him."
"You mean they came in here?"
"Yes. Come with me."
She led Max out of the open-plan area and into a short, dark corridor. She opened a door.
"Claudette's room," she said.
The Thodores had resigned themselves to the fact that they weren't going to see their little girl again. The room was a shrine, preserved, probably, more or less the way they had last remembered it tidy. Pictures Claudette had drawn were on the walls-mostly family sketches-Dad (tall), Mom (not as tall), Claudette (minute), the dog (in between her and Mathilde), standing outside their house-drawn in crayon, as jerky stickpeople. Dad was always blue, Mom red, Claudette green, and the dog was black. Her drawings of the Rue des Ecuries home showed the human figures twice the size of the house. Other pictures were simply squares of painted single colors with Claudette's full name at the bottom, written in an adult hand.
Max looked briefly out of the window and back to the room. He took in the bed-low, blue spread and a white pillow, rag doll peeking out from over the throw. He noticed the throw was smooth everywhere but in the middle, where it had been sat on and crumpled. He imagined either parent coming in and playing with the doll, soaking up their daughter's memory and crying their eyes out. He'd put money on Caspar being the more frequent visitor.
"The day she disappeared…I went to wake her up. I came in the room and saw her bed was empty and her window was wide open. Then I looked out and saw Toto-our dog-lying on the ground, near the swing," Mathilde said.
"Was anything broken in the house? Glass?"
"No."
"What about the front door? Had it been forced?"
"No."
"Did you notice anything about the lock? The keys don't often turn all the way after they've been picked."
"It worked OK. Still does."
"And it was just the three of you in here?"
"Yes."
"Anyone else have the keys to this place?"
"No."
"What about the previous owner?"
"We changed all the locks."
"Who changed them?"
"Caspar did."
"And you're sure you locked the front door that day?"
"Yes. Certain."
"Is there a back way in?"
"No."
"What about the windows?"
"Everything else was closed. Nothing was broken."
"What about a basement?"
"Not here."
"What's behind the house?"
"Empty lot. There was an art gallery, but it's closed down. The wall's fifteen feet high and covered with barbed wire."
"Barbed wire?" Max mumbled to himself. He looked out of Claudette's window at the wall. There were spikes running along it but none of the coils of razor wire he'd seen around the neighboring houses.
"I refused to have it," Mathilde said. "I didn't want it to be the first thing my daughter saw when she woke up."
"It wouldn't have made much difference," Max said.
He went back outside and walked over to the gate. There were bushes to the right. They would have made a noise if the kidnappers had landed in them. The kidnappers therefore came over the left-hand side of the wall, where the drop was ten feet into clear ground. They probably used a ladder to get up from the street.
They had to have scoped the place out before they came in. That's how they knew where the dog kennel was and which side to go over.
Typical predator behavior.
Max turned around and looked back at the house. Something in that bedroom wasn't right. Something didn't fit.
He started walking toward the house, putting himself in the mind of the kidnapper who had just poisoned the dog. Claudette's room was to the left of the front door. How many of them had come for her? One or two?
Then he caught sight of Mathilde through her daughter's window, standing with her arms crossed, watching him advance.
No windows broken. No locks picked. No doors forced. No way in around the back. How had they entered the house?
Mathilde opened the window and started talking to him. He didn't hear her. As she'd started to speak, she'd accidentally knocked something off the sill, something small.
Max walked over and looked down at the ground. It was a painted wire figurine of a man with a birdlike face. Its body was orange, its head black. The figurine didn't have a left arm, and, when he studied it closer, it didn't have a full face.
He'd just begun to understand what had happened.
He picked up the figurine.
"Who gave her this?" Max showed it to Mathilde.
Mathilde looked lost. She took the figurine and closed her hand around it, sweeping the windowsill with her eyes.
Max went back into the house.
There were half a dozen more wire birdmen lined up on the windowsill, by the bed, hidden by the glare of the sun coming through the glass. They were the same shape and color, except for the last one, which was broader because it was two figurines-the birdman and a little girl in a blue-and-white uniform.
"Where did she get these?"
"At school," said Mathilde.
"Who gave them to her?"
"She never gave me a name."
"Man, woman?"
"I thought it was a boy, or one of her friends. She also knew a couple of children from Noah's Ark."
"Noah's Ark? The Carver place?"
"Yes. It's a few roads down from the Lycйe Sainte Anne-that's Claudette's school," Mathilde said, and gave Max the name of the street.
"Did your daughter ever mention anyone talking to her near the school? A stranger?"
"No."
"Never?"
"No."
"Did she mention Ton-ton Clarinet?"
Mathilde sat down heavily on the bed. Her bottom lip was trembling, her mind churning. She opened her hand and stared at the figurine.
"Is there something you're not telling me, Mrs. Thodore?"
"I didn't think it mattered-then," she said.
"What?"
"The Orange Man," she said.
Max searched the drawings on the walls anew, in case he'd missed one of someone with half a face, but he'd seen everything there was to see there.
He thought back to the story of the kids who'd disappeared in Clarinette. The mother said her son had told her that "a man with a deformed face" had abducted him.
"Max?" Chantale called out from the doorway. "You need to see these."
Caspar was standing next to her with a tube of rolled-up papers in his hands.
From the way Claudette had told it, her friend, The Orange Man, was half-man, half-machine. At least his face was. He had, she said, a big gray eye with a red dot in the middle. It came so far out from his head he had to hold it with one hand. It made a strange sound too.
Caspar said he'd laughed when she'd told him. He had a thing for sci-fi films-Robocop, Star Wars, and the two Terminator films were his favorites, and he often used to watch them on video with his daughter, despite Mathilde's protests that Claudette was too young. To him, The Orange Man was a hybrid of R2D2 and the Terminator when his face comes off and reveals the machine beneath. Caspar didn't take it seriously, because he didn't believe his daughter's friend was any more real than those movie robots.
Mathilde was even less inclined to believe in her daughter's stories about The Orange Man. When she'd been her daughter's age, she had had an imaginary friend too.
Neither of her parents worried unduly when, in the last six months before her disappearance, Claudette began drawing more and more pictures of her friend.
"You never saw him? The Orange Man?" Max asked the Thodores, all of them back at the dining table, the drawings spread out before them. There were over thirty of them-from tiny crayon sketches to big paintings.
The basic design was of an orange stick person with a huge head. The head was D-shaped and made up of two joined-up vertical halves-a rectangle on the left and a circle on the right. The circle resembled a face, albeit an indistinct one-a slit for an eye, another for the mouth, no nose, a lopsided triangle passing as an ear. The other half was more detailed and scary-looking. It was dominated by a large, swirling circle where the eye should have been, and a mouth of sharp, upward-pointing fangs, closer to daggers than teeth. The figure's body was missing its left arm.
"No."
"Did you ever talk to her about him? Ask who he was?"
"I used to ask her if she'd seen him sometimes," Caspar said. "Usually she'd say yeah she had."
"Nothing else? She mention him being with anyone else?"
They both shook their heads.
"How 'bout a car? She say if he drove?"
Again, a shake of the heads.
Max looked back at the drawings. They weren't in any kind of order but he could see what had happened, how The Orange Man had first gained Claudette's trust before moving in on her. The initial drawings showed the man from a distance, in profile, standing tall among three or four children, all in orange, head flat in front and round at the back; a protuberant beak where a nose should have been. The children became fewer-down to two, then, most frequently, one-Claudette herself, standing before him, just like the figurine on her windowsill showed. In all the group pictures, the children stood apart from the man, but in the ones where it was just The Orange Man and Claudette, they were holding hands. The paintings showing Claudette's family life chilled Max to the core. She depicted The Orange Man standing right in front of the house, next to the dog, or with the family when they'd gone to the beach.
Claudette knew her kidnapper. She'd let him into her bedroom. She'd gone willingly.
"She say why she called him 'The Orange Man'?"
"She didn't call him that," Caspar answered. "I did. She brought home one of these pictures one day. I asked her who it was of and she said it was her friend. That's what she called him-mon ami-my friend. I thought she meant a school friend. So I said, 'Hey, you're friends with an orange man,' and it stuck."
"I see," Max said. "What about her friends? Did they ever talk about The Orange Man?"
"No, I don't think so," replied Mathilde. She looked at Caspar, who shrugged his shoulders.
"Did any other children go missing from Claudette's school?"
"No. Not that we know of."
Max looked at his notes.
"What happened the day of the-when you noticed Claudette was gone? What did you do?"
"We went looking," Caspar said. "We went house-to-house. Pretty soon we had a posse out helping us-neighborhood people, all canvassing, stopping people in the street, asking questions. I think, by the end of the day, between us, we'd covered every inch of two square miles. Nobody saw nothing. Nobody knew anything. That was the Tuesday, the day she went missing. We spent the next two weeks just looking for her. One of the guys here, Tony-he's a printer. He made these wanted posters, which we put up all over. Nothing."
Max scribbled a few notes.
"Were any ransom demands made?"
"No. Nothing. We didn't have much, outside Claudette and each other," Caspar said, his voice slipping on a tear, a wobble going through his tough exterior. Mathilde took his hand and he clasped it back. "Are you gonna find her for us?"
"I promised your brother I'd look into it," Max said, giving both of them an impassive look that was meant to flatten any hope they had.
"How are you coming along with the Charlie Carver case?" Mathilde asked.
"What do you mean?"
"Any leads?"
"I'm not at liberty to discuss that, Mrs. Thodore. Client confidentiality. I'm sorry."
"So you think it's the same people?" Caspar asked.
"There are similarities but there are differences," Max replied. "It's too soon to say."
"Vincent Paul thinks it's the same people," Caspar said, matter-of-factly.
Max stopped scribbling and stared blankly at the paper in front of him.
"Vincent Paul?" Max said as casually as possible. He looked briefly at Chantale, who caught his eye and directed his gaze to a set of photographs hung in an upper-left-hand corner.
"Yes. You know him?" asked Caspar.
"Only by reputation," Max said, and stood up. He pretended to stretch his arms and neck. He walked around the table to the photographs on the wall, shaking imaginary pins out of his hands.
There it was, in a corner, second in from the edge of the wall, a family photograph-Claudette, aged about three, Mathilde and Caspar, looking happier and an age younger, Alexandre Thodore in priest's collar, and, in the middle of them, sitting down, probably so he could fit into the shot, Vincent Paul, bald and beaming. The priest had his arm around part of his huge back.
Max guessed what it meant-Vincent Paul had been donating some of his drug millions to Little Haiti-but he'd keep it to himself.
He returned to his place.
"After we'd searched as much we could we asked the marines for help," said Mathilde. "I mean, we're both American citizens, so's Claudette, but you know what happened? We saw a captain and all he wanted to know was why we'd left the U.S. for a 'shithole like this'-that's what he called it. Then he told us the soldiers 'were too busy to help,' that they had 'democracy to restore.' On our way back to our car we walked by a bar and there was a whole bunch of marines in there, busy 'restoring democracy' by getting loaded on beer and dope."
"What happened with Vincent Paul?"
"We went to him after the U.S. Army turned us down."
"Why didn't you go to him first?"
"I-" Mathilde began, but Caspar cut her off.
"How much do you know about him?"
"I've heard good and bad, mostly bad," Max answered.
"Same as Mathilde. She didn't want us going to him."
"It wasn't that-" Mathilde began, but caught the don't-try-and-deny-it-again look her husband was giving her. "OK. With the troops here and everything, I didn't want it known that someone like him was out looking for our daughter. I didn't want us getting arrested as accessories or sympathizers."
"Sympathizers?"
"Vincent was tight with Raoul Cedras-the head of the junta the invasion overthrew. They were good buddies," Caspar explained.
"I thought Aristide would be more Paul's type?" Max said.
"It started out that way, for sure. Aristide was a good guy once, when he was a priest, helping the poor in the slums. He did a lot for them. But the day he got elected president was the day he started turning into Papa Doc. Corrupt too. Pocketed millions in foreign aid. Two weeks into his term Vincent wanted to cap his ass."
"I never thought people like Paul had principles."
"He's a compassionate man," Mathilde said.
"So he helped you?"
"A lot," she said. "He spent a month searching the whole island for her. He had people looking for her in New York, Miami, the Dominican Republic, the other islands. He even got the UN to help."
"Everything but hire a private investigator," Max said.
"He said if he couldn't find her nobody could."
"And you believed him?"
"We would if he'd found her," Mathilde said.
"Anyone else get in touch with you? The Carvers had other guys looking for their son before me. Any of them talk to you?"
"No," Caspar said.
Max jotted down a few more notes. There was one more thing he needed to know from the Thodores. "From what I've heard, loads of kids go missing here every day. Vincent Paul must have a lot of people coming to him for help. Why did he help you?"
The couple looked at each other, unsure of what to say next.
Max made it easy on them:
"Look. I know what Vincent Paul's up to, and I truly do not give a flying fuck. I'm here to find Charlie Carver and Claudette too, if I can. So, please, level with me. Why did Vincent help you out?"
"He's a friend of the family-my family," Caspar said. "My brother and him go back a ways."
"Paul gives your brother's church in Little Haiti money, right?"
"Not just that," said Caspar. "My brother runs this shelter for Haitian boat people in Miami. Vincent pays for it. He's invested a lot of money in Little Haiti, helped a lot of people get on their feet. He's a good man."
"Some people might beg to differ," Max pointed out and left it hanging right there. He stopped himself from saying that down the road from Little Haiti, in Liberty City, there were ten-year-old kids selling Vincent Paul's dope while one or more of their parents were probably smoking their lives to hell with the same shit. The Thodores wouldn't give a good damn about any of that right now, and why should they?
"Some people could beg to differ about you too, Mr. Mingus," Mathilde retorted gently, making a point as distinct from driving one home.
"They usually do," Max said. He smiled at them both. They were decent people: honest, hardworking, and basically good; the very same kind of people he'd sworn to protect. "Thanks for all your help. Please don't blame yourselves for what happened to Claudette. There's nothing you could've done. Nothing at all. You can stop burglars and murderers and rapists, but people like The Orange Man, they're invisible. They're like you and me on the outside, usually the last people you'd suspect."
"Find her for us, please," Mathilde said. "I don't care about the people who took her. I just want our daughter back."