I had to go through three flunkies before I got to Billy. “What you want?” he said. “You know this is Survivor night.”
“I forgot, Billy. Want me to call back? I can call back.”
“This is the two-hour finale, then the reunion show. Won’t be over ’til eleven and I’m shutting it down after that. Now you got something for me or don’t you?”
I could hear laughter in the background and I hesitated, picturing him hunched over the phone in his den, a skinny, balding white man whom you might mistake for an insurance salesman or a CPA, no doubt clad in one of his neon-colored smoking jackets.
“Jack, you better have something good,” Billy said. “Hair’s starting to sprout from my palms.”
“I’m not sure how good it is, but…”
“I’m missing the immunity challenge. The penultimate moment of the entire season. And I got people over, you hear?”
Billy was the only person I knew who could pronounce vowels with a hiss. I gave him the gist of it, trying not to omit any significant details, but speeding it along as best I could.
“Interesting,” he said. “Tell me again what she said when you spoke to her.”
I repeated the conversation.
“It would seem that Miz Verret’s agenda is somewhat different from that of the Darden Corporation,” Billy said. “Otherwise, she’d have no compunction about reporting your conversation.”
“That was my take.”
“Voodoo business,” he said musingly.
“I can’t be sure it’s got anything to do with voodoo.”
“Naw, this here is voodoo business. It has a certain taint.” Billy made a clicking noise. “I’ll get back to you in the morning.”
“I was just trying to do you a favor, Billy. I don’t need to be involved.”
“Honey, I know how it’s supposed to work, but you’re involved. I got too many eggs in my basket to be dealing with anything else right now. This pans out, I’m putting you in charge.”
The last thing I had wanted was to be in business with Billy Pitch. It wasn’t that you couldn’t make a ton of money with Billy, but he was a supremely dangerous and unpleasant human being, and he tended to be hard on his associates. Often he acted precipitately and there were more than a few widows who had received a boatload of flowers and a card containing Billy’s apologies and a fat check designed to compensate for their loss and his lamentable error in judgment. In most cases, this unexpected death benefit served to expunge the ladies’ grief, but Alice Delvecchio, the common-law wife of Danny “Little Man” Prideau, accused Billy of killing her man and, shortly after the police investigation hit a dead end, she and her children disappeared. It was rumored that Billy had raised her two sons himself and that, with his guidance, hormone treatments, and the appropriate surgery, they had blossomed into lovely teenage girls, both of whom earned their keep in a brothel catering to oil workers.
Much to my relief, no call came the following morning. I thought that Billy must have checked out Pellerin and Verret, found nothing to benefit him, and hadn’t bothered getting back to me. But around ten o’clock that evening, I fielded a call from Huey Rafael, one of Billy’s people. He said that Billy wanted me to run on out to an address in Abundance Square and take charge of a situation.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Billy says for you to get your butt over here.”
Abundance Square was in the Ninth Ward, a few blocks from the levee, and was, as far as I knew, utterly abandoned. That made me nervous.
“I’m coming,” I said. “But I’d like to know something about the situation. So I can prepare for it, you understand.”
“You ain’t need nothing to prepare you for this.” Huey’s laugh was a baritone hiccup. “Got some people want watching over. Billy say you the man for the job.”
“Who are these people?” I asked, but Huey had ended the call.
I was angry. In the past, Billy had kept a close eye on every strand of his web, but nowadays he tended to delegate authority and spent much of his time indulging his passion for reality TV. He knew more about The Amazing Race and Project Runway than he did about his business. Sooner or later, I thought, this practice was going to jump up and bite him in the ass. But as I drove toward the Ninth Ward, my natural paranoia kicked in and I began to question the wisdom of traipsing off into the middle of nowhere to hook up with a violent criminal.
Prior to Katrina, Abundance Square had been a housing project of old-style New Orleans town homes, with courtyards and balconies all painted in pastel shades. It had been completed not long before the hurricane struck. Now it was a waste of boarded-up homes and streets lined with people’s possessions. Cars, beds, lamps, bureaus, TV sets, pianos, toys, and so on, every inch of them caked with dried mud. Though I was accustomed to such sights, that night it didn’t look real. My headlights threw up bizarre images that made it appear I was driving through a post-apocalyptic version of Claymation Country. I found the address, parked a couple of blocks away, and walked back to the house. A drowned stink clotted my nostrils. In the distance, I heard sirens and industrial noise, but close at hand, it was so quiet you could hear a bug jump.
Huey answered my knock. He was a tall drink of water. Six-five, six-six, with a bluish polish to his black skin, a lean frame, pointy sideburns, and a modish goatee. He wore charcoal slacks and a high-collared camp shirt. Standing in the door, a nickel-plated .45 in hand, he might have been a bouncer at the Devil’s strip club. He preceded me toward the rear of the house, to a room lit by a kerosene lantern. At its center, one of Pellerin’s bodyguards was tied to a wooden chair. His head was slumped onto his chest, his face and shirt bloody. The air seemed to grow hotter.
I balked at entering and Huey said, “What you scared of, man? Lord Vader there ain’t going to harm you. Truth is, he gave it up quick for being a Jedi.”
“Where’s the other guy?” I asked.
“Man insisted on staying behind,” Huey said.
I had a sinking feeling, a vision of the Red House at Angola, guards strapping me down for the injection. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “You tell Billy I’m not going down for murder.”
Huey caught me by the shoulder as I turned to leave and slammed me up against the wall. He bridged his forearm under my jaw, giving me the full benefit of his lavishly applied cologne, and said, “I didn’t say a goddamn thing about murder, now did I?” When I remained silent, he asked me again and I squeezed out a no.
“I got things to take care of,” he said, stepping back. “Probably take me two, three hours. Here go.” He handed me the .45 and some keys. “You get on upstairs.”
“Who’s up there?”
“The card player and his woman. Some other guy. A doctor, he say.”
“Are they…” I searched for a word that would not excite Huey. “Uninjured?”
“Yeah, they fine.”
“And I’m supposed to keep watch, right? That’s all?”
“Billy say for you to ask some questions.”
“What about?”
“About what they up to.”
“Well, what did he tell you?” I pointed at the bodyguard. “I need something to go on.”
“Lord Vader wasn’t too clear on the subject,” said Huey. “Guess I worked him a little hard. But he did say the card player ain’t a natural man.”
Some rooms on the second floor of the townhouse were filled with stacked cots, folding tables and chairs, and with bottled water, canned food, toilet paper, and other supplies. It seemed that Billy was planning for the end times. In a room furnished with a second-hand sofa and easy chairs, I found Verret, Pellerin, and a man in his fifties with mussed gray hair and a hangdog look about the eyes. I assumed him to be Doctor Crain. He was gagged and bound to a chair. Verret and Pellerin were leg-shackled to the sofa. On seeing me, Crain arched his eyebrows and tried to speak. Pellerin glanced up from his hand of solitaire and Verret, dressed in freshly ironed jeans and a white T-shirt, gave me a sorrowful look, as if to suggest she had expected more of me.