Driving with one hand and eating the sandwich with the other, laying it down every so often on the greasy paper sack on the car seat beside him, he squinted into the high noon glare and thought about the best way to interview the pilot. So much depended on his immediate impression and on what Neuman had to tell him from Arnette’s file. He wished he had been able to read them himself, but he knew he had used up a lot of luck just finding the guy. He imagined what a man named Redden would look like, his mind entertaining several types, none of which seemed right to him. Still, by the time he passed the interchange at the South Loop and slowed for the Broadway exit, he had settled on a fair-complexioned, Irish-looking Southern farmer’s son. The South was full of them.
Graver waited at the post office parking lot for nearly fifteen minutes-plenty of time to choke down the rest of the barbecue and gulp the RC to the bottom-before he saw Neuman coming along Broadway. Graver got out of his car, locked it, and was taking off his tie as Neuman pulled up.
“You get the file?” Graver asked, closing the door.
“Nope, no file.” Neuman grinned, realizing that Graver knew all along that he wasn’t likely to get it He pulled out of the parking lot, got on the access road, and floated up on the freeway to join the traffic.
“Redden’s from Sweetwater, Texas,” Neuman began. “Father was a high school principal there. Went to college at Texas Tech, majoring in mechanical engineering, dropped out when he learned to fly. He was a crop duster for a while, a few years, then he got a job with a charter service flying people over the Grand Canyon. A few years at that, and he joined the National Forest Service in California flying firefighters into the summer fires. A few years at that. Next he turns up in the Rio Grande Valley, Mission, Pharr, that area. No visible employment, but visible money, so the DEA begins keeping tabs on him. They catch him one night in Ojinaga across from Presidio with a load of Mexican Brown. The State Department had the word out that they needed some pilots, and Redden was persuaded to go to Honduras and Nicaragua for some covert action. That’s what he was doing when he landed a load of arms on a little private strip outside Villavicencio, Colombia. After that he seemed to have disconnected from CIA to ‘independent’ work, probably with Kalatis. His bio peters out very quickly after that. Just sightings throughout Central America.”
“But there’s no warrant out for him?”
“Nope.”
“Christ Kalatis. I don’t believe that guy’s reach.”
“I don’t believe a lot that I’ve seen in the last twenty-four hours,” Neuman said. “I don’t believe Arnette. That place is like a government installation…”
“What about Ledet?”
“I didn’t spend much time on Ledet since he’s in Atlanta.”
“Remember anything about him?”
“He’s from Louisiana, Baton Rouge. Went to LSU. Apparently met Redden when they both were flying drugs on the border. I don’t think he was picked up by the DEA, he just showed up in Tegucigalpa shortly after Redden. Probably because of Redden. Their history generally parallels after that. I think they’re pretty good buds.”
Graver looked across the coastal flats as they left the city. The sun was fierce.
“Ledet from Red Stick,” he said. He could feel the sun’s heat radiating off the window beside him as it came through the glass like a laser and fell across his shoulder. The air conditioner in the car was cranked up as high as it would go as he stared out the window to the coastal flats.
Chapter 68
Eddie Redden lived on a piece of expensive property. He had a beachfront house that was protected from the street by a thick screen of pink and scarlet oleanders and clumps of cerise bougainvillea. Turning into the drive you could see a large, low-slung bungalow with a shallow-sloped roof, and Jamaican-style jalousies of bleached cypress. A deep veranda, flanked by palms, ran around to the back of the house where Galveston Bay glittered on the other side of a thick, emerald lawn that someone else mowed and fertilized and watered. Beyond that a dock ran out into the flats and a small blue skiff was tied to the pilings, bobbing in the southerly breeze.
There was a circle drive that exited on the other side of the lot, and where the front sidewalk met the drive a freestanding porte cochere of trellises covered with grapevines sheltered a black Alfa Romeo convertible. Neuman pulled up behind the Alfa and cut the motor. The two of them got out of the car and walked up to the porch and into the shade to the front door. The house was open to the breeze and you could see through to the porch in back. The daylight from the bright bay reflected dully off the burnished wooden floor in a long, luminous smear. Graver smelled gardenias on the breeze.
Neuman rang the doorbell. Nothing happened at first, no sound in the house. He rang it again, and a woman’s voice from somewhere inside said, “I’m coming,” politeness tinged with impatience. They didn’t hear her walking on the floor because, as they immediately observed, she was barefooted. She was suddenly standing on the other side of the screen door, adjusting the drape of a white cotton shift she had just put on. The smear of light from the wooden floor behind her went right through the thin material to reveal to them the space between her legs all the way to her crotch. The cotton shift was all she was wearing. She tucked some dull brown hair behind an ear, and cocked her head up at Neuman, squinting a little at him.
“Yeah?”
“Hi,” Neuman said. “Is Eddie in?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Joe… Dearden.”
“Jay Deer-den…?” She said it to herself like it was the most ridiculous name she’d ever heard.
“Yeah, Jay,” Neuman said.
“Well…” she said, dropping her eyes, seemingly truly puzzled as to how to answer his question. Not a particularly intelligent-looking woman, she had sharp features and a weathered face with an abundance of sun-induced freckles. It was a common feature along the Gulf Coast. She did, however, possess a shapely figure.
“He was expecting me,” Neuman said.
“He was?” she squinted up at him again. She turned and looked into the darkness of the house. Neuman reached out and quickly but softly tried the screen door. It was open. She turned back to him. “Well, shit, he’s not here,” she said.
“Who is it?” a man said from inside, his voice approaching.
“It’s for Eddie… Jay Deer-den?” she said, emphasizing again the apparent peculiarity of the name to her.
Like her, the man was suddenly in front of them, frowning into the light of the porch, standing partially behind the girl and wearing only a pair of jogging shorts with the word “Athletic” on the front of the right leg.
Neuman immediately recognized him.
This was the best they could hope for.
“Hey, Rick,” Neuman said in a long-time-no-see tone of voice, using his name so Graver would know they were talking to Richard Ledet. Then he jerked open the screen door.
Ledet hit the girl in the small of her back with both open hands, popping her head back and shoving her into Neuman who just as violently flung her aside as he lunged at Ledet. But the pilot’s bare feet had better traction on the wood floor, and he was three steps ahead of Neuman on a straight course through the kitchen toward the back porch to the bay. Luckily the screen door that led out of the kitchen to the porch was latched, and when Ledet hit it with his arms outstretched to shove it open ahead of him, his arms went through the screen. The cross brace of wood midway down the door caught him in the stomach, and the momentum of his weight took him crashing through it, but slowed him enough for Neuman to tackle him. The two men hit the floor of the porch with a whump and loud grunts.
Graver was on top of Ledet almost as soon as he hit the floor, jamming the muzzle of his Sig-Sauer against Ledet’s temple so that the pain of it alone would keep him there even without the threat of what it could do to him if Graver pulled the trigger.