her eye.'
'Look, Sheriff, there's no easier ID to get than a driver's license and Social Security. But she had no credit cards. That's because credit bureaus run a check on the applicants. She's dirty, I think she's mixed up with Buchalter, and if we let her walk, we lose the only thread we have.'
'I admit, she puts on quite a performance. If I didn't know better, I'd probably let her baby-sit my grandchildren.'
'What explanation did she give you for being in my house?'
'She says she used to be a part-time librarian and now she's trying to become a freelance magazine writer. According to her, she met Bootsie in a lounge and befriended her because she thought she was a sad lady. She's pretty eloquent, Dave.'
He looked at my face and glanced away.
'Librarian where?' I said.
'She got a little vague.'
'I bet.'
He propped his elbow on the desk blotter and scratched at the hollow of his cheek with a pink fingernail.
'She's got a lawyer from Lafayette. He's already raising hell down at the prosecutor's office,' he said.
'You want to talk to Clete Purcel? He saw her outside Sitwell's hospital room.'
'Great witness, Dave. Purcel's got a rap sheet that few mainline cons have. It looks like something a computer virus printed by mistake.'
'I think he was right.'
'About what?'
'He told me to salt the shaft. He knew how it was going to go down.'
The sheriff stuck his pipe in his leather tobacco pouch and began filling the bowl. He didn't look up.
'I didn't hear you say that,' he said.
'It's one man's point of view.'
He didn't answer. I got up to leave the room.
'The Americans won the Revolution because they learned to fight from the Indians,' he said. 'They shot from behind the trees. I guess it sure beat marching across a field in white bandoliers and silver breastplates.'
'I was never fond of allegory.'
'All I said was I didn't hear Purcel's remark. The woman's purse is in Possessions. Who knows what the lab might find?' He raised his eyebrows.
'We've got to hold her as a murder suspect, Sheriff.'
'It's not going to happen, Dave. You going to the arraignment?'
'You'd better believe it.'
He nodded silently, lit his pipe, and looked out the window.
Back inside my office, I looked again at all the paperwork concerning Will Buchalter. What were the common denominators? What had I missed?
Buchalter was perverse and sadistic and possibly an addict.
He was obviously a psychopath.
His followers were recidivists.
He appeared to be con-wise, talked about 'riding the beef,' but had no criminal record that we could find.
Was he a sodomist, was he depraved, were his followers all addicts? Were they men whom he had turned out (raped) and reduced to a form of psychological slavery? Why not? It went on in every prison in the country.
Except Buchalter had never been up the road.
Maybe Clete had come up with the answer. Maybe we had been looking for Buchalter on the wrong side of the equation. Maybe he was a fireman who set fires. Maybe he was one of us.
I talked with Ben Motley at NOPD. The prints lifted from the armored vest that he and Clete had found in the marsh matched those that Buchalter had left all over my house. But there was no serial number on the fabric.
'I wouldn't spend too much time on it,' he said. 'These paramilitary groups come up with shitloads of this stuff. You know what's still the best way to nail this guy? Find one of his lowlifes, then plug his pud into a light socket.'
Then I put in a call to the robbery division of the Toronto Police Department and talked with a lieutenant named Rankin. No, he knew nothing about a stolen armored vest. No, he had no knowledge whether or not the department might have sold off some of its vests; no, he had never heard of a Will Buchalter and, after leaving me on hold for five minutes, he said their computer had no record of a Will Buchalter.
'This man's a Nazi?' he said.
'Among other things.'
'What do you mean?'
'He likes to torture people.'
He cleared his throat.
'About eight or nine years ago I remember a case… no, it wasn't a case, really, it was a bad series of events that happened with a detective named Mervain. We had a recruit who bothered Mervain for some reason. He couldn't get this fellow out of his mind. It seems like the fellow was suspected of stealing some guns from us, who knows, maybe it was some vests, too.'
'What was the recruit's name?'
'I'm sorry, I don't remember everything that happened and I don't want to say the wrong thing and mislead you. Let me check with a couple of other people here and call you back.'
'I'd appreciate it very much, sir.'
Arraignment for the nun impersonator was at 11:00 A.M., and my best throw of the dice kept coming back boxcars, deuces, and treys. Clete called collect from a pay phone in Metairie.
'Dead end,' he said. 'Her address is in an apartment building that a wrecking ball went through six months ago.'
'Did you ask around the neighborhood about her?'
'I'm in a phone booth in front of a liquor store that has bullet holes in the windows. There's garbage all over the sidewalk. As I speak I'm looking at a collection of pukes who are looking back at me like I'm an albino ape. Guess what color these pukes are? Guess what color the whole neighborhood is.'
Judge Robert Dautrieve presided over morning court, that strange, ritualistic theater that features morose and repentant drunks who reek of jailhouse funk, welfare cheats, deranged drifters, game poachers, and wife abusers whose frightened wives, with blackened eyes, dragging strings of children, plead for their husbands' release. Almost all of them are on a first-name basis with the bailiffs, jail escorts, bondsmen, prosecutors, and court- assigned attorneys and social workers, who will remain the most important people they'll ever meet. And no matter what occurs on a particular day in morning court, almost all of them will be back.
Judge Dautrieve had silver hair and the profile of a Roman legionnaire. During World War II he had been a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor for his valor at Sword Beach, and he had also been a Democratic candidate for governor who had lost miserably, largely due to the fact that he was an honorable man.
The woman who called herself Marie Guilbeaux filed into court on the long wrist chain with the other defendants from the parish jail. Her clothes were rumpled and her face white and puffy from lack of sleep. On the back of her beige pullover was a damp, brown stain, as though she had leaned against a wall where someone had spit tobacco juice. When the jail escort unlocked her wrist from the chain, she straightened her shoulders, tilted her chin up, and brushed her reddish gold hair back over her forehead with her fingers. Her face became a study in composure and serenity, as if it had been transformed inside a movie camera's lens.
I sat three feet behind her, staring at the back of her neck. She turned slowly, as though she could feel my eyes on her skin.
'Tell Buchalter we've got his vest,' I said.
But she looked past me toward the rear of the courtroom, as though she had never visited one before, her gaze innocuous, bemused, perhaps a bit fearful of her plight. To any outside observer, it was obvious that this lady
