"Did you hold a gun on Burgoyne?"
"Yes."
"You got a cop killed, Dave."
"They had that kid staked out like a goat under a tree stand."
The sheriff was breathing hard through his nostrils. His face was dark, his candy-striped snap-button shirt tight across his chest.
"I can't quite describe how angry this makes me," he said.
"You wanted the truth."
"You're damn right I do. Stay right there."
He went out the door and down the corridor, then came back five minutes later, his blood pressure glowing in his face, the lines around his eyes like white thread.
"I’ve got Don Ritter and an IAD man in New Orleans on the line," he said, and hit the button on his conference phone.
"What are you doing, skipper?" I said.
He held up his hand for me to be quiet. "Ritter?" he said, standing erect in the middle of the office.
"What can I do for you, Sheriff?" Ritter's voice said through the speaker.
"Listen and keep your mouth shut. You set up a prisoner from my jail to be murdered and you almost got one of my people killed. You set foot in my parish again and I'm going to find a way to bury your sorry ass on Angola Farm. In the meantime, you'd better pray I don't get my hands on you… Is that IAD man still there?"
There was a pause, then a second voice said through the speaker, "Yes, sir, I'm right here."
"If the media want to buy that pig flop you people put out about y'all cleaning up your act, that's their business. But you either get to the bottom of this or I'm going to put an open letter on the Internet and notify every law enforcement agency in the country of the kind of bullshit you pass off as police work. By the way, spell your full name for me," the sheriff said.
After the sheriff hung up, his throat was blotched with color.
"Hypertension is going to put me in a box," he said.
"I wish it had worked out different. I never got a clear shot."
He drank a glass of water and took a deep breath, then his eyes settled on my face.
"Burgoyne's brains splattered on you?" he said.
"Yes."
"It happened to me in Korea. The guy was a prisoner I was taking back to the rear. I used to get up in the middle of the night and take showers and wash my hair and swim in the ocean and all kinds of crazy stuff. What's the lesson? Better him than me."
His hand rested on the end of my shoulder and he kept massaging it like a baseball coach working a stiff place out of his pitcher's arm.
That night a fisherman on Calcasieu Lake, over by the Texas border, saw a man park a white automobile by the water's edge and start to walk away. Then the man looked back at the car as though he had forgotten something, or as though he'd had an argument with someone and could not quite bear to leave the other party with the last word. The man gathered an armload of creek wood and dry weeds and yellowed newspaper and sifted it through the windows on the seats, his face averted from the dust. He brushed his hands and shirt clean and took an emergency flare from the glove box and popped it alight. Then he methodically fired the inside of the car and stepped back from his work just before flames curled out over the roof. He tossed the flare hissing into the lake and "walked down the road.
The next morning, which was Friday, the car was identified as the one stolen from NOPD by Johnny Remeta.
But he had dumped it over on the Texas border, I told myself. Which meant he was probably fleeing Louisiana and did not want to add a federal beef for interstate transportation of stolen property to the charges already pending against him.
Good. I was sick of Johnny Remeta.
I tried to forget that he had a 160 I.Q. That he was just the kind of perp who would burn a stolen car on the state line to let people think he was gone.
The call came at noon.
"Why'd you do that out there in that glade? I mean, walk into all that shooting and cut me loose?" he said.
"It's none of your business why I do anything," I replied.
"I never saw anybody do anything like that."
"You're an escaped felon. I'm a police officer. Don't get the wrong idea, Johnny."
"I called to say thank you. You don't want my thanks, it's on you. But we got a mutual interest, Mr. Robicheaux."
"No, we don't. Get that out of your head. You come around here again and you're going to be back in custody."
"You want the guys who killed your mother. That's the word on the street. You think they're the same guys who're trying to pop me."
While he was talking I was waving my hand at Helen Soileau out in the hall, pointing at the phone so she would start a trace on the call.
"I met Jimmy Figorelli when I first got to New Orleans. He said if I wanted some work, I should rent a post office box and leave the box number for somebody named M.G. at a cafe across from the open-air market on Decatur. I wrote the box number down on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope and wrote M.G. on the outside and gave it to a black lady behind the register at the cafe. When I was going out, she said, 'Maggie only eats here on the weekend. I'll give it to her then, okay?'"
"I'm writing all this down. You've got to go slower," I said.
"Good try."
Change the subject, I thought.
"What was the front money?" I asked.
"I didn't say I got any front money. Sir, I didn't say anything that indicates I committed a crime."
"Did you burn the car to make us think you'd blown the state?"
"I started thinking about those cops leaving me chained up while a sniper tried to cut all my motors. That's what they call it. They use a hollow point or a steel-claw bullet to core a plug out of your head. If the target is armed, his motors shut down and all his muscles die…Anyway, their car got burned. They can buy a new one… Say, forget about waving to that woman cop to trace this call. I'm on a cell phone."
He broke the connection.
I dropped the receiver on the desk blotter and went to the window.
The parking lot was full of cars and noon-hour traffic was backed up on the streets from a passing freight train. Then the caboose of the train clicked down the track, the red-and-white-striped mechanical guard rose into the air, and the traffic flowed out of the side streets and the parking lot, the white sun reflecting blindingly off the windows like the swimming, mismatched eyes of the mythological Argus.
I went into Helen's office.
"He was outside?" she said.
"He had to be."
"He knows the drill. He was guessing. Every one of these morons wants us to think he's a criminal genius."
"He knew I waved to a 'woman cop.'"
"You put out an APB?"
"Yeah. No luck."
She put a stick of gum in her mouth and chewed it while she read the notes on my legal pad. Her hair was bright yellow and waved and molded into place with chemical spray.
"The go-between on the hit is somebody with the initials M.G.?" she said.
"First name Maggie," I said. Our eyes locked on each other's.
"Maggie Glick? I thought Maggie Glick was doing fifteen in St. Gabriel," Helen said.
"Let's take a ride to New Orleans Monday morning."
She stood a ballpoint pen upside down on its cap and studied it. "I've got a lot of work in my basket, Dave. I think right now this guy is NOPD's headache."
I nodded and went back out in the hall and closed her door softly behind me.
She followed me into my office. "I know I said I'd help, but this stuff is starting to eat you up," she said.
"What stuff?"
"About your mother. Sometimes you just have to let the bad guys drown in their own shit."
"You're probably right," I said.
Ten minutes before 5 P.M. she opened the door to my office and leaned inside.
"Did you see the B amp;E report on Passion Labiche's house?" she asked. "No."
"I didn't know about it, either, not till a few minutes ago. Somebody came through a screen and tore her house up but didn't take anything except a box of old photos."
"Photos?"
"Remember I told you about Passion saying she'd seen Connie Deshotel's face in an old photo?"