“What’s the haps, Lamar?” I said.
He was writing on a clipboard, his brow furrowed with concentration. He looked up and away from me, then huffed air out his nose. “Smell it?” he said.
“Hard not to,” I said.
“We’re still waiting on the coroner. The old black guy over there called it in. How come y’all are down here?”
“We’re looking for a couple of guys who might be missing,” I said.
“If I had to bet, I’d say these guys had been at the casino. Maybe somebody followed them or got in their car and forced them to drive down the levee.”
“To rob them?” I said.
“Yeah, they got no wallet or ID on them. We found four ejected twelve-gauge shells inside.”
“What did you find in the rental?” I asked.
“Nothing. Somebody emptied the glove box. I thought that was strange. Why would the shooter take the paperwork out of the glove box?”
“Probably to make our jobs harder.”
“If you see puke inside, that’s from the old guy. He got sick when he went inside.” He laughed under his breath.
“Mind if we take a look?” Helen said.
“Be my guest,” he replied, finally taking notice of her. His eyes traveled up and down her person. “We got barf bags in one of our cruisers if you need one.”
“Give mine to your wife,” she said.
The door to the cabin had been pried back onto the levee’s incline, allowing the sunlight inside. I took out a handkerchief and held it to my nose. The odor of decomposition was exacerbated by the nature of the wounds. Both men had been shot at close range, in the stomach and in the face. Their viscera were exposed, their facial features hardly recognizable. Their brain matter was splattered all over one wall. Both men wore sports coats, silk shirts, and expensive Italian shoes with tassels on them. Both of them lay on their side, the remnants of their eyes glistening.
I stepped back out in the sunlight and blew out my breath. Helen looked at me.
“I’m pretty sure it’s Charlie Weiss and Marco Scarlotti,” I said.
“Kovick’s gumballs?”
“What’s left of them.”
“You see Bledsoe for this?”
“I see Ronald Bledsoe for anything,” I replied.
Then I looked up on the levee and saw Clete Purcel watching us. He must have used his police radio scanner to find the location of the double homicide. Lamar Fusilier looked up and saw him, too.
“You got no business at this crime scene, Purcel. Haul your fat ass out of here,” he said.
Clete lit a cigarette in the wind and flipped the dead match down the levee, never moving from his position, smoke leaking out of his mouth.
Chapter 30
IF YOU HAVE stacked a little time in the can, or beat your way across the country bucking bales and picking melons, or worked out of a Manpower Inc. day-labor office on skid row, you probably already know that human beings are infinitely complex and not subject to easy categorization. I’m always amazed at how the greatest complexity as well as personal courage is usually found in our most nondescript members. People who look as interesting as a mud wall have the personal histories of classical Greeks. I sometimes think that every person’s experience, if translated into flame, would be enough to melt the flesh from his bones. I guess the word I’m looking for is “Empathy.” We find it in people who have none of the apparent characteristics of light-bearers.
I had gone directly home from the levee in St. Mary Parish, primarily because I feared what Ronald Bledsoe would do next. The lead detective at the crime scene would lift all the prints he could from the shotgun shells and the tarpaper shack, but I doubted if his investigation would come up with anything of value. In my opinion, Bledsoe had been the shooter and Bledsoe wasn’t about to get nailed by a detective who had to pay for a copy of an examination in order to pass a criminal justice course.
At 4:41 p.m. Sidney and Eunice Kovick pulled into my driveway, Sidney behind the wheel, both of them looking like people who had just discovered the enormity of their own miscalculations. Sidney got out of his vehicle and rested one hand on the roof. “I heard two guys got it in the Atchafalaya,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Who were they?”
“They didn’t have any ID on them. I suspect by tonight or tomorrow the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Department will have some definite information.”
“I heard about it on the radio. I went by your office. Nobody would tell me anything. They said you were over here.”
“I’ve told you what I know, Sidney,” I said.
“Dave,” Eunice said softly. She was still belted in the passenger seat, her face turned up toward mine.
“These guys were driving a rental Avalon,” I said.
“You saw the bodies?” Sidney said.
“The shooter used a twelve-gauge shotgun. The features were hard to recognize. But the victims looked like Charlie and Marco,” I said.
Sidney clenched his fist on top of the roof. “Where’s Ronald Bledsoe?”
“I’m supposed to know that? You’ve been jerking me around from the jump, Sidney. Maybe it’s time you develop a little clarity in your life.”
“You don’t understand, Dave. You’ve never understood what’s going on,” Eunice said.
“How can I? You don’t share information. Sidney believes the function of cops is to return property to him that he stole from somebody else.”
“Here’s your news bulletin of the day. I didn’t steal anything from anybody. I made a deal to bring certain goods into the country. I paid for them. Then I found out these goods were being handled by some guys who wipe their ass on their bare hand. So I blew the deal out of the water and confiscated my goods and maybe left a couple of guys with some bad memories to take back to Crap-a-stan.”
“Bo Wiggins was your partner in this?”
“Bo who?” he said.
“We’re done here, Sidney. You want to make your bullshit a matter of record, come into the office tomorrow.”
“You listen to me, Dave. Marco took a shank in the arm for me when we were kids in the project. Charlie Weiss’s daddy fought on five-buck-a-pop fight cards with my old man during the Depression. Charlie did thirty- eight months on Camp J rather than give me up.”
“Why were they following Bledsoe into the Atchafalaya Basin?” I asked.
“I don’t know. They were following him all over. We wanted to find the black kid who looted my house. We figured Bledsoe had a lead on him. I feel to blame.”
Sidney ’s face was covered with shadow, and leaves were drifting out of the trees onto the waxed surface of his car, further obscuring his expression. I believe his eyes were actually glistening.
THAT NIGHT I sat in the kitchen and tried to figure out combinations of letters that would give meaning to the illegible remnant of Bertrand Melancon’s statement of amends to the Baylor family. In reality, I didn’t care if anyone ever found the blood diamonds or not. My only interest in them at this point was to find out who had hired Ronald Bledsoe. I still believed he may have worked for Sidney. But if Sidney wasn’t lying, that left only Bo Diddley Wiggins.
“What are you doing?” Alafair asked, looking over my shoulder.
