He coughed and spat in a wastebasket. “See for yourself.”
I went inside the bedroom. The body was hanging from an electrical cord tied to a ceiling beam that someone had exposed by ripping out the Sheetrock. The cord was probably taken from a ceramic lamp that had been smashed on the floor. The back of the victim was turned toward me, the wrists wrapped behind with electrical tape and the roll still hanging from the skin, the body stretched as lean as an exclamation mark. A chair lay on its side against one wall. One loafer was on the floor, one on a foot. I cupped my hand over my nose and mouth and walked to the other side of the body and looked up into the face of Frenchie Lautrec. A cloth canary protruded from his mouth.
This was the same man I had detested, even the way his face looked, like a bleached football with a trimmed goatee and mustache glued on it. I had not only torn him apart with my bare hands, I had jammed the broken parts of his camera down his throat. He was a pimp, a predator, a misogynist, a degenerate, a sadist, and a cop on a pad, but no one could look at his face now and not feel sorry for him. His neck was not broken. He had gone out the hard way. His eyes were open and contained an expression like a lost child’s.
I went outside and punched in a 911 on my cell. Desmond was standing a few feet away on the lawn, like a casual spectator. “What’s the cloth canary mean?”
“It’s Sicilian for ‘Death to snitches.’ ”
“The Mob got him?”
“The canary was in an ornamental birdcage in the living room. I saw it when I was here before. The Mob didn’t do this, and you know it.”
“I don’t know anything,” he said.
“Why did you come here, Des?”
“I heard he might know something about Lucinda Arceneaux’s death.”
“Lucinda was your half sister, you lying son of a bitch. I followed you to her grave. Less than an hour ago.”
His face drained. “You have no right.”
“I thought you were stand-up, but you’re a bum,” I said. “Somebody you know killed her, and one way or another, you’ve been covering for him. I think it’s because you didn’t want to interrupt the flow of money into your picture.”
“That’s not true.”
“Go sit in your truck until the meat wagon gets here. I don’t want to be around you.”
I don’t think I ever saw greater shame in a man’s face. I knew I would later regret the harshness of my words, but at the moment I did not, I suspect because I still wanted to believe George Orwell’s admonition that people are always better than we think they are.
After the paramedics and three cruisers and a fire truck and Bailey and Cormac Watts had arrived, I told Desmond to get out of his pickup and lean against the fender.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“You’re under arrest.”
“What for?”
“I’ll let you know.” I ran my hands under his armpits and down his sides and inside his legs and over his ankles. Then I hooked him up and led him to the back of a cruiser.
“This is bogus,” he said. “Quit acting like a jerk. I can sue you for this.”
“You’ve been gone from Louisiana too long,” I replied.
I put him in the cruiser and shut the door. I looked back at Lautrec’s house. All the lights were on. Through a side window I could see Cormac walking around Lautrec’s body, studying it.
I followed the cruiser to the parish prison and locked Desmond in a part of the jail that was particularly spartan and depressing — in fact, it was little more than a narrow corridor between two rows of barred cells that resembled zoo cages, all of them empty.
“Why are you taking out your anger on me?” he said.
When you place someone in custody, you don’t answer questions, nor do you negotiate. If you do it right, the routine is a bit like the army: You speak in terms of rank and principle and always in the third person, never the second. I scratched at my face as though I had not heard the question. “A bondsman will be available in the morning. Any inmate at the jail is entitled to at least one phone call.”
“Come on, Dave,” he said. “What’s going on?”
I threw the protocol away. “You knelt at your sister’s crypt.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Your posture made me think of a Crusader knight.”
“My posture?” he said. “You talk like you’re out of your mind.”
“You’ve got a Maltese cross tattooed on your ankle.”
“From my biker days.”
“My ass.”
He leaned his forehead between two bars, his eyes downcast. I could hear a toilet flushing in another part of the building. “Those things you said back there?”
“What about them?” I said.
“You meant them? I’m a bum?”
“I think you don’t let your right hand know what your left is doing.”
“You don’t understand, Dave. Production money comes from all kinds of places. The studio doesn’t back up an armored truck on your lawn and dump it on the grass. Some of it is casino money out of Jersey. Some of it is from a group building nuclear reactors. There might be a little Russian or Saudi money involved. It’s a consortium.”
“So?”
“I don’t know how all these killings happened. The Jersey guys were worried about their investment. Maybe they’re involved.”
“The Mob is a bunch of tarot fans? When did you discover Lucinda Arceneaux was your half sister?”
“Just a little while back,” he replied, his eyes on mine.
“How far back?”
“A few weeks, maybe.”
“Who told you?”
“My old man. Ennis Patout.”
“A few weeks, huh?”
“Yes,” he said. He blinked and let out his breath without seeming to, his expression benign.
“Lesson in lying, Des,” I said. “Don’t try to control your mannerisms. People who tell the truth are bored by what they’re saying and show it.”
“You know why it’s so hard to talk to you, Dave? It’s because you cloak yourself in AA bromides and try to pass them off as the wisdom of the ages.”
“Who paid for your half sister’s crypt? Her father is a preacher with a few dozen poor people in his congregation. I bet you spent five grand on the crypt and at least half that on the coffin.”
“All right, I paid for it,” he said. “I didn’t want to acknowledge my father or the world in which I grew up. I hate my father, and I hate what he did to my mother.”
“Your mother dumped you, bub. Get your facts straight.”
“If these bars weren’t between us, I’d break your jaw, old man or not.”
“You looked the other way when your sister was murdered,” I said. “Who’s got the problem?”
He tried to grab my shirt. I walked down the corridor, my footsteps ringing like hammers inside a submarine.
It was almost three in the morning as I drove down East Main. My eyes felt seared, like there was sand in them, as though I had looked into the pure white fire of an arc welder’s rod touching metal. My throat was dry, a pressure band forming on the right side of my head, my heart constricting whenever I took a deep breath.
Why the agitation? Why my unrelieved anger toward Desmond? I was entering a dry drunk. But this one was different. I had taken a hit of Jack at the blues club, and booze stays in the metabolism for as long as thirty days. For an alcoholic, having thirty days of the enemy at work in the heart and blood and brain while not being allowed to drink could probably be compared with practicing celibacy for the same amount of time in a harem.