“I’ve got an oil leak.”
“I thought you were in New Orleans. Come inside.”
“I think NOPD still wants to hang Frankie Giacano’s murder on me. I’ll be at the motor court. I’ll see you later. I just wanted to tell you I was back in town.”
Through the gloom, I could see someone sitting in the passenger seat, even though the top was up. “Who’s with you?”
“A temp I put on.”
“What kind of temp?”
“The kind that does temporary jobs.”
“A guy tried to take my head off with a cut-down yesterday. He was using double-aught bucks. Lafayette PD thinks it was a guy I helped send away about ten years ago. A retired plainclothes named Jesse Leboeuf may have sicced him on me.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Who’s in the Caddy, Clete?”
“None of your business. Is this guy Leboeuf connected to Pierre Dupree or any of this stuff with Golightly and Grimes and Frankie Gee?”
“Leboeuf is Pierre Dupree’s father-in-law.”
“This guy is like a stopped-up toilet that keeps backing up on the floor. I think maybe we should do a home call.”
“Better listen to the rest of it,” I said.
We sat down on the gallery steps, and I told him about the shooting by Varina Leboeuf’s apartment in Bengal Gardens, the heisted freezer truck that the shooter and his driver had used, the connection between the Leboeufs and Pierre Dupree and a group called Redstone Security, and the key-chain fob cast in the miniature shape of a sawfish carried by Jesse Leboeuf.
“And there was a sawfish on that old wreck that used to drift up and down the continental shelf?” Clete said.
“I’m sure of it.”
“Leboeuf is a crypto-Nazi or something?”
“I doubt if he could spell the word,” I said.
“This isn’t connecting for me, Dave. We’re talking about the emblem on a Chris-Craft that kidnapped the Melton girl and now about a sawfish on a submarine and a key chain? And the guy with the key chain is the father- in-law of a guy who’s part Jewish?”
“That pretty much sums it up.”
“The shooter suspect, this guy Ronnie Earl Patin, is not in custody, right?”
“Right.”
“You make him for the shooter?”
“I saw him for maybe two seconds before he fired into my windshield. The Ronnie Earl Patin I sent up the road was a blimp. The guy in the freezer truck wasn’t. Who’s in the Caddy, Clete?”
“My latest squeeze. She works for the Humane Society and adopts pathetic losers like me.”
I laid my arm across his shoulders. They felt as hard and solid as boulders in a streambed. “Are you getting in over your head, partner?”
“Will you stop that? I’m not the problem here. It’s you that almost caught a faceful of buckshot. Listen to me. This deal has something to do with stolen or forged paintings. They go into private collections owned by guys who want power over the art world. They not only want to own a rare painting, they want to make sure nobody ever sees it except them. They’re like trophy killers who hide the cadavers.”
“How do you know all this?”
“It’s no secret. There’s a criminal subculture that operates in the art world. The clientele are greedy, possessive assholes and are easy to take over the hurdles. Golightly had e-mails from well-known art fences in Los Angeles and New York. I confirmed the names with NYPD and a couple of PIs in L.A.”
“It’s not just stolen artwork. It’s bigger than that,” I said.
“Like what?”
“What do you know about this Redstone Security group?”
“They’re out of Galveston and Fort Worth, I think. They did a lot of government contract work in Iraq. I’ve heard stories about their people indiscriminately killing civilians.”
“Can I meet your temp?”
“No, she’s tired. What’s this obsession over my temp?”
“Jimmy the Dime called me. He told me Count Carbona gave you a lead on your daughter.”
“Jimmy the Dime should keep his mouth shut.”
“What are you up to, Clete? You think you can change the past?”
“You got to ease up on the batter, Streak. In this case, the batter is me.”
“If that’s the way you want it,” I said.
He crunched down on the peppermint stick and chewed a broken piece in his jaw, making sounds like a horse eating a carrot, his eyes never leaving mine. “We almost died out there on the bank of the bayou, where we used to have dinners on your picnic table. Know why? Because we trusted people we shouldn’t. That’s the way it’s always been. We turned the key on the skells while the white-collar crowd kicked a railroad tie up our ass. That’s not the way this one is going down. Got it, big mon?”
Early the next morning Clete and Gretchen ate a breakfast of biscuits and gravy and fried pork chops and scrambled eggs at Victor’s Cafeteria on Main and then drove to Jeanerette down the old two-lane state road that followed Bayou Teche through an idyllic stretch of sugarcane and cattle acreage. Her window was down, and the wind was blowing her hair over her forehead. There was a thin gold chain around her neck, and she was fiddling with the icon attached to it. “It’s beautiful here,” she said.
“The fishing is good, too. So is the food, maybe even better than New Orleans.”
“You sure you want to ’front this guy at his house?”
“Stonewall Jackson used to say ‘Mislead, mystify, and surprise the enemy.’”
“That’s great stuff as long as you have fifty thousand rednecks stomping ass for you.”
“Is that the Star of David?” he asked.
“This?” she said, fingering the gold chain. “My mother is Jewish, so I’m at least half. I don’t know what my father was. He could have been a Mick or a Swede, because neither my mother nor anybody in her family has reddish-blond hair.”
“You go to temple?”
“Why are you asking about the Star of David?”
“Barney Ross and Max Baer both wore it on their trunks. I don’t know if they went to temple or not. Maybe they wore it for good luck. Is that why you wear it? That’s all I was asking.”
“Who are Max Baer and Barney Ross?” she said.
“Never mind. Look, we’re going into St. Mary Parish. Pierre Dupree owns another home in the Garden District in New Orleans. I suspect he’s here. This place looks like the United States, but it’s not. This is Dupree turf. The rest of us are tourists. You don’t want to get pinched here. I have to ask you something.”
“Go ahead.”
“You know what ‘wet work’ is?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“I’ve had people ask me to do it.”
“Did you?”
“No. I run an honest business. I don’t work for dirtbags, and I don’t jam the family of a skip in order to bring him in. What I’m asking you is did you know some bad guys in Little Havana, maybe some guys who got you into the life? Did you maybe do some stuff you don’t feel good about?”
“I didn’t know who Ernest Hemingway was until I moved to Key West and visited his house on Whitehead Street,” she said. “Then I started reading his books, and I saw something in one of them I never forgot. He said the test of all morality is whether you feel good or bad about something the morning after.”
