Sloan raised inquisitive brows. “Not exactly a flattering handle.”
“He always kept to himself,” Breaux explained, “and he hardly ever went out of his place until everyone else was off the street. He didn’t know about life on the treadmill — nobody was even sure how he made his living except me. See, he lived in the apartment over this bar, and his mail was delivered down here. Pete got a disability check every month from Social Security.”
“When and where was he killed?”
Breaux pointed overhead. “Little over a month ago, right upstairs in that four-room walk-up. Same place he lived in for the last twenty years.”
“Have you known him all that time?”
“Only ten years of it.”
Reno asked the bartender, “You’re sure the death was ruled a homicide?”
“According to my brother, that was never in doubt. Pete was shot once through the heart, probably as he answered his door. And there was no gun found in the apartment, so it wasn’t suicide.”
“All right, so NOPD nosed it and couldn’t find the killer. No offense, Justin, but what’s the percentage for you? It’s not usual for anyone except family to hire a P.I. and nose into a murder cops have closed out.”
Breaux’s mouth quirked, not quite a grin. “I sense more than I can explain, okay? Actually, I tried to investigate it myself — you know, on the Internet with those P.I. services? I found no family or known associates. Pete never owned a car, never had a driver’s license or criminal record, never even had a phone — the only paper trail he left was his utility bills. As for my interest in the matter...”
Breaux shrugged a shoulder. “I got a wife and three kids, and without them I’d go nuts. Pete had nobody, and I was the best — probably the only — friend he had. We’re open all night here, and he’d come down sometimes toward sunrise when it was slow. We’d talk. He wasn’t sneaky, just shy and messed up.”
Breaux moved down the bar to make change for a customer who disappeared into one of the video poker booths.
“I’m also thinking,” he resumed when he returned, “how Pete could have been rich if he’d had an ounce of business sense. I think he was one of those... idiot... you know...”
“Idiot savants?” Reno suggested.
“Yeah, that’s it. Just a second.”
Breaux did a deep kneebend and rummaged on a shelf beneath the register. When he turned around he laid a cheap composition book in front of Reno. “If you decide to take this case,” he said, “you’ll want to read a good chunk of this. Read a couple of pages now.”
While the bartender filled a few more orders, Reno did. It was all neatly printed in purple ink. The work was fiction, and the heavy emphasis on looks, clothing, and turbulent emotions soon identified it as romance.
“You sure Pete wrote this?” he asked Breaux. “I don’t read the bodice-ripper stuff, but my ex did and I used to look at it to get her idea of a real man. Ask me, this reads more like it was copied from a published book.”
Breaux’s grin of expectation upgraded itself to a victory smile. “You think so too, huh? Hell yes, Pete wrote it — in the wee hours he used to fill dozens of notebooks like this sitting right here at the bar. This is one he asked me to keep. Romance novels were the only books he read — three or four a week, he claimed. His apartment’s stacked full of them.”
“How ‘bout the notebooks — they still up there?”
Breaux’s smile melted like a snowflake on a river. “The cops thought I was the landlord and let me go up there. The only notebooks were blank. But this is why I’m suspicious — I watched Pete fill up those notebooks and then, as regular as the equinox, take them with him to the post office. Where was he sending them?”
Reno read a few more paragraphs. One sentence especially impressed him and he read it aloud: “ ‘Hers was a more subtle, sloe-eyed beauty that left glowing retinal afterimages when he closed his eyes.’ ”
He looked at Breaux. “Has the apartment been cleaned out yet?”
Breaux shook his head. “Landlord lives in Lafayette. Hasn’t got around to it yet.”
Reno said, “There’s no proof that Pete’s notebooks are linked to his murder, but I’ll shake a few bushes and see what falls out.”
The first indigo traces of evening colored the sky in feathery fingers by the time Reno retrieved his Jeep Commander from the U-Park-It on Decatur. He did his best thinking while behind the wheel, so he spent the next half-hour cruising St. Charles Avenue, just dogging the streetcars and trying to let some daylight in on the life and death of one Peter “Sneaky Pete” D’Antoni. Unlike police detectives, who were steeped in the inductive method and gathered a ton of information to obtain a pound of conclusions, Reno applied Occam’s razor to crime detection — keep the theories as simple as possible. Genius, he reminded himself, is the ability to see what’s been there all along.
I sense more than I can explain. Despite understanding what Breaux meant, Reno still had too little information. He swept right, onto Broadway, and bisected the Tulane fraternity ghetto, picking up Freret Street and heading downtown again. Lights blazed a halo over the French Quarter by the time Reno started up the rubber-runnered stairs behind the Ragin’ Cajun. All he had to sweat, he realized at a glance, was a conventional lock at least twenty years old. He dug the key ring full of copper shims out of his hip pocket and went to work on the mechanism. In thirty seconds the tumbler surrendered with a metallic snick.
Night heat was more suffocating, especially in New Orleans, and someone had closed and fastened the wooden shutters, turning the small apartment into a sweatbox. For a moment he stood just inside the door, listening. Only the wheezy rattle of a dying fridge and the distant sissing of water in pipes. He moved farther inside and detected the musty smell of old dust and lingering food odors.
He slapped at a light switch and sent a quick glance around to acclimate himself. The dingy little walkup cried out for painting, plastering, and paper-hanging, but was at least orderly. Even the waist-high stacks of romance novels that overflowed several large bookcases and lined every wall were neatly aligned.
Reno moved through a doorless archway into what was intended as a small dining room. However, D’Antoni had evidently used it as a reading room — a blue chintz easy chair was surrounded by more stacks of books, all romance paperbacks. The minimalist kitchen contained a ‘fifties-era refrigerator, a four-burner stove, and an ancient soapstone sink.
He popped open cabinets and pulled out drawers but found nothing that seemed useful. Reno rolled a seven, however, when he poked through the small bedroom that opened off the front room. He found a USPS Express Mail receipt tucked into a ceramic vase. The writing on the customer’s copy had faded, but he could make out the date: June 19, 2002. It was the address, however, that instantly focused his mind:
Romance Writing Contest
c/o Lydia Collins
28 Audubon Lane
New Orleans LA 70118
Reno read Gambit and other local media aimed at the culture vultures, and he recognized the name of Social Registerite Lydia Collins, a lawyer turned literary agent who was said to be the éminence grise behind some successful local writers. His reaction to the name was less a clear idea than a premonitory tingle. By the time he’d locked up and headed back to his car, however, the tingle had become a hunch.
“I confess I’m somewhat intrigued, Mr. Sloan,” Lydia Collins said as she led Reno into a salon featuring Regency furnishings and an Italian marble fireplace. “Why would a private investigator be interested in our writing group’s annual romance-fiction contest? I don’t normally associate it with hugger-mugger and derring-do.”