something. I drove over tonight, got out my trusty flashlight, looked in the mailbox, and what do you think I found?”
“That Jiffy bag by your chair,” I said.
“Bingo, my man. That and some junk mail. And you won’t believe what’s in the Jiffy.”
Leonard grabbed the Jiffy bag, took a little notebook out of it and tossed it at me. I grabbed it and looked at it. It was a standard promotional-style notebook for King Arthur Chili, a local business.
“I couldn’t make heads or tails out of that,” Leonard said. “Wait before you look. There’s a couple of videotapes inside as well. I’ve seen one of them. I got it loaded in the VCR. I want you to see it.”
Leonard plucked the remote out of his lap, turned on the set and the VCR. I moved over and stood behind him to watch.
There was static and darkness, then gray shapes. The gray shapes became clearer, but never too clear. One of the shapes was a tanker-style truck. It was parked and a hose was being fed from it into a hole in cement, a hole like a cistern, and you could hear the sound of a pump sucking up the contents of the cistern, running it into the truck. The other gray shapes were two men with the truck. One of them was scrawny, with longish hair and a dark cap of some kind. He had on jeans and a jean jacket with the sleeves cut out. No shirt. Classic TV and movie-biker garb. The other guy wore jeans and a dark T-shirt and jackboots. He had long hair tied back in a ponytail. He looked about fifty-five or so and was about the size of the Green Giant who sells peas on the commercials.
“Bigfoot!” I said.
“Bingo again,” Leonard said. “He’s also Big Man Mountain.”
“Say what?”
“Professional wrestler. One of LaBorde’s claims to fame. He was a villain on the circuit. Retired a year or two ago. Read about it in the paper. Word is they retired him ’cause of some shit he had goin’ down, but I don’t remember what it was. But there was a scandal.”
“I seldom read the papers,” I said.
“Well,” Leonard said, “you should. But that’s him.”
“How can you tell? I can’t see his face worth shit.”
“True, but how many long-haired guys have you heard of weigh about three-fifty and stand well over six foot?”
“I don’t know of any.”
“Well, I know of one. Big Man Mountain. Bigfoot, as you call him. He dressed that same way when he wrestled, as a biker. And it appears that’s his normal attire.”
There was more of this, two guys standing around while the hose sucked the contents of the cistern. Then the two guys got in the truck and the video jumped around in blackness and static. When it started up again, there were more clips of this activity with the tanker, and in some cases I recognized where they were, the back of restaurants in town. A Mexican restaurant where Leonard and I often ate because the food was cheap and good, another restaurant where the food was good, but not cheap, and we didn’t eat there. We wanted to, though.
Besides the work with the tanker truck, there were also some clips of this big truck with sideboards and the same guys and two other guys dressed in similar garb. They were parked behind a building, loading barrels onto the back of the truck. As with all the video, the guys looked nervous and furtive.
“The rest of the tape is just more of this,” Leonard said.
“I don’t get it. Why would Raul mail himself a tape of some bikers sucking crap out of cisterns and putting barrels on trucks?”
Leonard cut off the VCR and the set. “Do you remember that article I read to you a few months back? Out of the paper?”
“No. I hardly remember where I was yesterday.”
“Man, you got to pay more attention to the newspapers,” Leonard said. “Grease nappers.”
“Grease nappers? What grease… Wait a minute… The folks stealing grease from restaurants, selling it to the recycling folks. It was kind of a humorous article. Something about ‘Police Set Grease Trap for Suspects.’”
“That’s it. Except the police didn’t catch anyone. And if you remember, there’s lots of money in grease napping.”
I went back to my spot on the couch. I said, “You tryin’ to tell me Raul was filming grease nappers, and they caught him, tortured and killed him over it?”
“There’s lots of money in grease,” Leonard said. “Silly as it sounds, with just limited facilities, you can make up to a couple thou a day. Better-organized than that, hittin’ LaBorde, Lufkin, Tyler, you could make a hell of a lot more. Maybe ten thousand a day. People have been murdered for a lot less than that. And if they thought the whistle was going to be blown, they could have murdered Raul, and it wouldn’t be for grease. It would be for money.”
“All right,” I said. “Say the grease nappers were filmed by Raul. You got to ask yourself, why? I mean, since when is Raul an investigative reporter?”
“I don’t know he was. I think these tapes belong to Horse Dick, the cop. He’s undercover, acting like one of the guys. That’s why it jumps around. Sometimes he’s helpin’ them do the work. Then, when he’s standin’ over to the side, smokin’ a cigarette, pissin’ or somethin’, he filmed them with a hidden camera. Later he had the stuff put on video, for easy viewing. While he’s doing this investigation, he falls in with Raul and they start swappin’ spit and sperm, and pretty soon it’s pillow talk, and Raul knows everything Horse Dick knows. That could be what led to Raul’s demise.”
“What about the chief? Wouldn’t he have this information? If so, why would Horse or Raul hide it in your mailbox?”
“Maybe Horse Dick didn’t have time to get the stuff to the chief. Maybe he was waiting until he had a full investigation. Maybe the chief has a copy. I don’t know. Thing is, I believe Raul got wrapped up in this business pretty tight, got to thinking he was some kind of hot-shit undercover guy himself. Horse Dick tells him things are getting tight, maybe they ought to get rid of the tapes for a while, so Raul mails them to my old address. That’s his handwriting on the envelope. Then, when Raul gets caught by the bad guys, he doesn’t tell them where they are. How’s that sound?”
“Lots of things wrong with that scenario. Why would Raul and Horse Dick not turn the evidence over to the chief, they thought they were in trouble? Why wouldn’t Raul tell these thugs where the videos are? Torture like that, you’d tell anyone anything they wanted to know. And if you don’t mind me saying so, Raul wasn’t that tough.”
“I don’t really have an answer for that, but things occurred to me. Back when I was burning those crack houses, rumor was the chief was getting a slice of the drug pie, which was why the houses kept being built up. Him and the owner of the houses were supposed to be in cahoots.”
“Never been any proof of that,” I said, “though I don’t doubt it.”
“Chief sent Horse Dick in to investigate drugs through the bikers. Maybe this is law enforcement, and maybe its the chief’s way of getting enough evidence on the bikers to make sure he gets a cut. Horse Dick figures this out, so he doesn’t hand in the videos. He hides them. That kind of explains why the chief isn’t pursuing this business. It could be more than just the gay thing.”
“Problem with that theory, Leonard, is the video is of grease nappers, not drug lords.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Leonard said, and relit his pipe. “But it could all connect.”
“I guess. Sounds thin to me. But if drugs were happening along with the grease napping, wouldn’t there be videos of drug activity?”
“Maybe this was the best Horse Dick could get on them,” Leonard said. “Could be like the way you use income tax fraud to get gangsters for worse business. Nail them for grease, you put the drug business out of business.”
“There’s something in that,” I said. “What about the other video?”
“I was going to give it a look-see, but then you came home. My guess is more of the same.”
We loaded the video. It wasn’t about grease napping. It was two guys walking, and it was easy to recognize the place. It was LaBorde Park. I recognized the bench the guys were walking past. I knew the camera view was being taken through the shrubbery across the way. The lighting was bad, just some of the pole lights in the park, and the camera jumped this way and that, but it was enough to see the two guys. They stopped walking, and one guy put his hands on the other guy’s shoulders. Now that their faces were toward us, code bars appeared,
