I busied myself with my paperwork and did not look back up for almost a minute. When I did, her eyes were still fixed on me.
'I just got some interesting information from the Bureau about Julie Balboni,' she said. She waited, then said, 'Are you listening?'
'Yes.'
'This year N.O.P.D. Vice has closed up a half-dozen of his dirty movie theaters and two of his escort services. His fishing fleet just went into bankruptcy, too.' When I didn't respond, she continued. 'That's where he laundered a lot of his drug money. He'd declare all kinds of legitimate profits to the IRS that never existed.'
'That's how all the wiseguys do it, Rosie. In every city in the United States.'
'Except the auditors at the IRS say he just made a big mistake. He came up with millions of dollars for this Civil War movie and he's going to have a hard time explaining where he got it.'
'Don't count on it.'
'The IRS nails their butts to the wall when nobody else can.'
I sharpened a pencil over the wastebasket with my pocket knife.
'I have the feeling I'm boring you,' she said.
'No, you're just reviving some of my earlier misgivings.'
'What?'
'I think your agency wants Julie's ass in a sling. I think these murders have secondary status.'
'That's what you think, is it?'
'That's the way it looks from here.'
She rose from her chair, closed the office door, then stood by my desk. She wore a white silk blouse with a necklace of black wooden beads. Her fingers were hooked in front of her stomach like an opera singer's.
'Julie's been a longtime embarrassment to the feds,' I continued. 'He's connected to half the crime in New Orleans and so far he's never spent one day in the bag.'
'When I was sixteen something happened to me that I thought I'd never get over.' There was a flush of color in her throat. 'Not just because of what two drunken crew leaders did to me in the back of a migrant farmworkers' bus, either. It was the way the cops treated it. In some ways that was even worse. Have I got your attention, sir?'
'You don't need to do this, Rosie.'
'Like hell I don't. The next day I was sitting with my father in the waiting room outside the sheriff's office. I heard two deputies laughing about it. They not only thought it was funny, one of them said something about pepper-belly poontang. I'll never forget that moment. Not as long as I live.'
I folded up my pocket knife and stared at the tops of my fingers. I brushed the pencil shavings off my fingers into the wastebasket.
'I'm sorry,' I said.
'When I went to work for the Bureau, I swore I'd never see a woman treated the way I was. So I take severe exception to your remarks, Dave. I'd like to bust Julie Balboni, but that has nothing to do with the way I feel about the man who raped and murdered these women.'
'Where'd this happen?'
'In a migrant camp outside of Bakersfield. It's not an unusual story. Ask any woman who's ever been on a crew bus.'
'I think you're a solid cop, Rosie. I think you'll nail any perp you put in your sights.'
'Then change your goddamn attitude.'
'All right.'
She was waiting for me to say something else, but I didn't.
Her shoulders sagged and she started back toward her desk. Then she turned around. Her eyes were wet.
'That's all you've got to say?' she asked.
'No, it's not.'
'What, then?'
'I'm proud to be working with you. I think you're a standup lady.'
She started to take a Kleenex out of her purse, then she snapped the purse shut again and took a breath.
'I'm going down the hall a minute,' she said.
'All right.'
'Are we both clear about the priority in this investigation, Dave?'
'Yeah, I think we are.'
'Good. Because I don't want to have this kind of discussion again.'
'Let me mention just one thing before you go. Several years ago my second wife was murdered by some drug dealers. You know that, don't you?'
'Yes.'
'One way or another, the guys and the woman who killed her went down for it. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and the old anger comes back. Even though these people took a heavy fall, for a couple of them the whole trip, sometimes it still doesn't seem enough. You know the feeling I'm talking about, don't you?'
'Yes.'
'Fair enough.' Then I said, 'You're sure you don't want to come home and have lunch with us today?'
'This isn't the day for it, Dave. Thanks, anyway,' she said, and went out the door with her purse clutched under her arm, her face set as impassively as a soldier's.
Elrod Sykes called the office just after I had returned from lunch. His voice was deep, his accent more pronounced.
'You know where there're some ruins of an old plantation house south of your boat dock?' he asked.
'What about it?'
'Can you meet me there in a half hour?'
'What for?'
'I want to talk to you, that's what for.'
'Talk to me now, Elrod, or come into the office.'
'I get nervous down there. For some reason police uniforms always make me think of a breathalyzer machine. I don't know why that might be.'
'You sound like your boat might have caught the early tide.'
'Who cares? I want to show you something. Can you be there or not?'
'I don't think so.'
'What the fuck is with you? I've got some information about Kelly's death. You want it or not?'
'Maybe you ought to give some thought as to how you talk to people.'
'I left my etiquette in Kelly's family plot up in Kentucky. I'll meet you in thirty minutes. If you're not interested, fuck you, Mr. Robicheaux.'
He hung up the phone. I had the feeling I was beginning to see the side of Elrod's personality that had earned him the attention of the tabloids.
Twenty minutes later I drove my pickup truck down a dirt lane through a canebrake to the ruins of a sugar planter's home that had been built on the bayou in the 1830s. In 1863 General Banks's federal troops had dragged the piano outside and smashed it apart in the coulee, then as an afterthought had torched the slave quarters and the second story of the planter's home. The roof and cypress timbers had collapsed inside the brick shell, the cisterns and outbuildings had decayed into humus, the smithy's forge was an orange smear in the damp earth, and vandals had knocked down most of the stone markers in the family cemetery and, looking for gold and silver coins, had pried up the flagstones in the fireplaces.
Why spend time with a rude drunk, particularly on the drunk's terms?
Because it's difficult to be hard-nosed or righteous toward a man who, for the rest of his life, will probably wake sweating in the middle of the night with a recurring nightmare or whose series of gray dawns will offer no promise of light except that first shuddering razor-edged rush that comes out of a whiskey glass.
I leaned against the fender of my truck and watched Elrod's lavender Cadillac come down the dirt lane and
