'My sister's got only one lawyer working on her case now. He's twenty-five years old,' she said.
'I think you helped Letty kill Vachel Carmouche. I don't think you're going to get anywhere until that fact is flopping around on the table,' I said.
She stared back at me with the transfixed expression of an animal caught in a truck's headlights.
She literally ran from the building.
I hated my own words.
I grew UP in the South Louisiana of the 1940s and '50s. I remember the slot and racehorse machines, their chromium and electric glitter among the potted palms in the old Frederic Hotel on Main Street, and the cribs on each side of the train tracks that ran the length of Railroad Avenue. I collected for the newspaper on Saturday afternoons, and the prostitutes would be sitting on their galleries, smoking the new filter-tipped cigarettes and sometimes clipping draft beer out of a bucket a pimp would bring them from Broussard's Bar. They were unattractive and physically dissolute women, and they wore no makeup and their hair was uncombed and looked dirty. Sometimes they laughed like deranged people, a high, cackling sound that climbed emptily, without meaning, into the brassy sky.
None of them had Cajun accents, and I wondered where they came from. I wondered if they had ever gone to church, or if they had parents anywhere, or perhaps children. I saw a pimp strike one of them on the gallery once, the first time I had ever seen a man hit a woman. Her nose bled on her hand. Her pimp had oiled black hair and wore purple slacks that fitted him as tightly as a matador's pants.
'You got your money, kid?' he said to me.
'Yes, sir.'
'Better get on it, then,' he said.
I rode away on my bike. When I passed the crib again, she was sitting on a swing next to him, weeping into a red-spotted dish towel, while he consoled her with one arm around her shoulders.
I also remembered the gambling clubs in St. Martin and St. Landry parishes during the 1950s. Bartenders, bouncers, and blackjack dealers wore the badges of sheriff's deputies. No kid was ever turned away from the bar or a table. The women were brought in by the Giacanos in New Orleans and a Syrian family in Lafayette and worked out of air-conditioned trailers behind the clubs. The head of the state police who tried to enforce the law and shut down gambling and prostitution in Louisiana became the most hated man in the state.
Most of those same clubs stayed in business into the 1960s. Passion was right. People of every stripe visited them. 'Would Connie Deshotel need to hire someone to steal an old photograph showing her in the company of people whom she may have known in only a casual way?
I decided to find out.
'I'm sorry to bother you with a minor situation here,' I said when I got her on the phone.
'I'm happy you called, Dave,' she replied.
'There was a B amp;E at Passion Labiche's house. Somebody stole a box of photographs out of her closet.'
'Yes?'
'Passion says she'd told you about seeing you in an old photo she had. Is there any reason anybody would want to steal something like that? A political enemy, perhaps?'
'You got me.'
'I see. Anyway, I thought I'd ask. How you doin'?'
'Fine. Busy. All that sort of thing,' she said.
'By the way, the thief didn't get the photo. I have it here. It shows you with Passion's parents sometime around Christmas of 1967.'
'Could be. I don't know much about her family. Maybe I met them at one time. Dave, when my political enemies want to do me damage with pictures, they put them on dartboards. Say hello to Bootsie.'
The next afternoon Dana Magelli at NOPD returned a call I had placed earlier in the day.
'Can you pull the jacket of a cop named Axel Jennings?' I said.
'Why?'
'He and Don Ritter and another guy worked over Clete Purcel down by Cocodrie. I also think this Jennings character is a good guy to look at for the Burgoyne shooting.'
' Jennings shot his own partner on the Atchafalaya? You come up with some novel ideas, Dave.'
'Can you get his jacket?'
'I have it sitting in front of me. I was just going to call you about Purcel. Where is he?'
I had put my foot in it.
Axel Jennings lived uptown in the small yellow bungalow on Baronne in which he had grown up. It had a neat green yard, a stone porch, and an alleyway with palm trees that grew between the garages. The neighborhood was like neighborhoods had been during World War II, places where people cut the grass on Saturday evening and listened to the ball game on radios that sat in open windows. At least that's what his father had said.
Axel's father had flown with General Curtis LeMay on incendiary raids against Japanese targets between the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LeMay 's raids didn't do any good. It took a second atom bomb to vaporize another city to bring the war to an end. Most civilians, particularly these peace types, didn't know squat about what went on over there. That's what Axel's father had said.
Axel had three loves: firearms, model railroading, and the memory of his father, whose picture in uniform he kept on the mantel.
He was a member at a gun range in St. Charles Parish, and almost every weekend he packed up his boxes of hand-loaded ammunition and his three favorite weapons-his.45 auto, a scoped '03 Springfield, and the civilian equivalent of the M-14 rifle-and fired them from under a wood shed at paper targets clipped to wires in front of a dirt embankment.
His father used to say marksmanship was simply the coordination of angles with the beat of your heart and the rise and fall of your lungs. The bullet's behavior was mathematically predictable and was governed by no rules other than physical principles. You simply had to make the weapon an extension of blood and sinew and thought so that the squeeze of your finger created a geometric certainty for your target.
It was all about control and order.
The same way with life, his father had said. People didn't respect authority anymore. You had to find a leader, a man you could respect, and put your faith in him, just as he placed his faith in you. His father called it a reciprocity of personal honor.
Axel's sunporch and guest room were covered with electric trains. The tracks ran across floors and tables and sections of plywood screwed down on sawhorses. The tracks wound through papier-mache mountains and tiny forests, past water towers and freight depots and miniature communities; there were toy brakemen and gandy walkers along the tracks and switches that diverted locomotives past each other at the last possible moment, and warning bells and flashing lights at the crossings.
When Axel cranked up all his trains at once, the smells of warm metal and oil and overheated electrical circuits reminded him of the clean acrid smell of gunpowder at the range.
Two kills with a department-issue M- 16, a third kill shared with Burgoyne.
He thought he might feel bad about the first barricaded suspect he popped.
He didn't. The guy had every opportunity to come out of the building. Instead, he turned on the gas jets and was going to take his child out with him. Just as the guy was about to light the match, Axel, in a prone position on a rooftop, sucked in his breath, exhaled slowly, and drilled a round through a glass pane and nailed him through both temples.
You believed in what you did. You trusted the man you took orders from. And you didn't look back. That's what his father had said.
It must have been grand to be around during World War II. Working people made good money and for fun went bowling and played shuffleboard in a tavern and didn't snort lines off toilet tanks; you walked a girl home from a cafe without gang bangers yelling at her from a car; blacks lived in their own part of town. Kids collected old newspapers and coat hangers and automobile tires and hauled them on their wagons down to the fire-house
