“Hey, I was born in New Orleans. This used to be a fine city. Remember the music and the amusement park out at Lake Pontchartrain? How about the sno’ball carts on the street corners and families sitting on their porches? When’s the last time you walked down a street at night in New Orleans and felt safe?”
When I didn’t answer, he cocked a finger at me. “Got you,” he said.
On my way out I saw Sidney ’s wife in the yard. She came from a fishing hamlet down in Plaquemines Parish, a geological aberration that extends like an umbilical cord into the Gulf of Mexico. She was as tall as her husband and had a lantern face, cavernous eyes, and shoulders like a man. For decades her family had been the political allies of a notorious racist judge who had run Plaquemines Parish as a personal fiefdom, even padlocking a Catholic church when the bishop appointed a black priest to serve as its pastor.
But she appeared to have little in common with her family, at least that I could see. In fact, Eunice Kovick’s father once said of his daughter, “The poor girl’s face would make a train turn on a dirt road, but she’s got a decent heart and feeds every stray dog and nigra in the parish.”
Why she had married Sidney Kovick was beyond me.
“How you doing, Eunice?” I said.
“Just fine. How are you, Dave?”
“Sorry about your house. Y’all have pretty good insurance?”
“We’ll find out.”
“Do you have any idea why those guys would rip your walls and ceilings out?”
“What did Sidney say?”
“He didn’t speculate.”
“No kidding?”
She had one of the sweetest smiles I ever saw on a woman’s face.
“See you, Eunice,” I said.
“Anytime,” she said.
MY LAST STOP was at the hospital where Bertrand Melancon had dropped his gun-shot brother.
Chapter 12
BUT I DISCOVERED that Eddy Melancon had been moved to a hospital in Baton Rouge. I headed up I-10 into heavy traffic, the cruiser’s emergency bar flashing. By the time I reached the Baton Rouge city limits, the streets were jammed with automobiles, trucks, buses, and utility repair vehicles. Even with the priority status my cruiser allowed me, I didn’t arrive at Our Lady of the Lake Hospital until midafternoon.
I almost wished I hadn’t. I suspected that Eddy Melancon had probably caused irreparable injury to many people in his brief lifespan, but if such a thing as karma exists, it had landed on him with the impact of a spiked wrecking ball.
He looked weightless in the bed, raccoon-eyed, as though the skin around the sockets had been rubbed with coal dust. His body was strung with wires and tubes, his arms dead at his sides. I opened my badge holder and told him who I was. “Do you know who popped you?” I asked.
He focused his gaze on my face but didn’t respond.
“Can you talk, Eddy?”
He pursed his lips but didn’t speak.
“Did the shot come from in front of you?” I said.
His voice made a wet click and a sound that was like air leaking from the ruptured bladder inside a football. “Yeah,” he whispered.
“You saw the muzzle flash?”
“No.”
“You heard the shot but you saw no flash?”
“Yeah. Ain’t seen it.”
“Are you aware you guys ripped off Sidney Kovick’s house?”
“Ain’t been in no house.”
“Right,” I said. I pulled my chair closer to his bed. “Listen to me, Eddy. If people you don’t know come to see you, make sure they’re cops. Don’t let anybody you don’t recognize check you out of this hospital.”
His eyes looked at me quizzically.
“If you made a big score at Sidney ’s, he’s going to take it back from you,” I said. “He’ll use whatever method that works.”
Eddy tried to speak, then choked on his saliva. I leaned over him, my ear close to his mouth. His breath smelled like the grave, his words breaking damply against my cheek.
“Say that again.”
“We took a boat. That’s all,” he said.
“From Sidney Kovick?”
“In the Lower Nine. We just wanted to stay alive. Ain’t been in no house uptown.”
I placed my business card on his chest. “Good luck to you, partner. I think you’ll need it,” I said.
When I got back home that night, I slept like the dead.
AT SUNRISE I ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas and drank coffee and hot milk on the back steps. The mist was gray in the live oaks and pecan trees, and both Tripod, our three-legged raccoon, and Snuggs, our cat, ate sardines out of a can by my foot. Molly opened the screen door and sat down beside me. She was still wearing her house robe. She ticked her nails on the back of my neck. “Alafair spent the night at the Munsons’,” she said.
“Really?” I said.
She gazed down the slope at the bayou. The gold and red four-o’clocks were still open in the shadows at the base of the tree trunks. Out in the mist I could hear a heavy fish flopping in the lily pads. “Got time to go inside?” I asked.
AT 10:00 A.M. Helen Soileau came into my office. “How’d you make out yesterday?” she said.
“I wrote up everything I found and faxed it to the FBI in Baton Rouge. There’s a copy in your box. I also talked to an NOPD guy on the phone. I don’t think this one has legs on it.”
“You don’t think Otis Baylor shot these guys?”
“His neighbor seemed willing to finger him, but I had the sense the neighbor had some frontal-lobe damage himself. I think bodies are going to be showing up under the rubble and mud for months. Who’s going to be losing sleep over a couple of looters who caught a high-powered round while they were destroying people’s homes?”
“All right, let’s move on. The Rec Center at City Park is full of evacuees. We need to get some of them to Houston if we can. Iberia General and Dauterive Hospital are busting at the seams. It’s worse in Lafayette. I tell you, Streak, I’ve seen some shit in my life, but nothing like this.”
I couldn’t argue with her. In fact, I didn’t even want to comment.
“What did you think of Lyndon Johnson?” she asked.
“Before or after I got to Vietnam?”
“When Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans in ’65, Johnson flew into town and went to a shelter full of people who had been evacuated from Algiers. It was dark inside and people were scared and didn’t know what was going to happen to them. He shined a flashlight in his face and said, ‘My name is Lyndon Baines Johnson. I’m your goddamn president and I’m here to tell you my office and the people of the United States are behind you.’ Not bad, huh?”
But I wasn’t listening. There was a detail about the Otis Baylor investigation I hadn’t mentioned to Helen, because she didn’t like complexities and in particular she didn’t like them when they fell outside our jurisdiction.
