That got a laugh. As an ex-cop, she had the same habit and understood it coming from me. “I don’t think you need to worry about that,” she said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I doubt he’d see you as a big income generator. At all.”
“Did you really need to add the ‘at all’?”
She laughed. “Sorry. But look, Leland, I am deadly serious. He’s a career criminal with the resources to…” She stopped. I sensed she didn’t want to say right out that he could pay someone to attack me. She’d been trying to track down the black pickup that tried to run me down, but I had almost no information for her to go on. I hadn’t even noticed if it had South Carolina plates.
Finally she said, “Lowlife doesn’t work alone. He can give orders, and his guys will listen.” She glanced around like she was checking who was in earshot, then called her dog to make the glance look innocent. He came running, and she threw a tennis ball to send him off again.
No one was close by, but I kept my voice down when I said, “You got some intel on him you haven’t shared?”
“Only because I haven’t confirmed it yet. At least, not to my normal standard. But it’s a little hard to confirm when someone’s part of a major drug cartel.”
“That yahoo? Damn. Really?”
She nodded and said, “It helps to look like a yahoo. People don’t suspect.”
“Yeah. So what the hell cartel is operating around here?”
“The same one your friend talked about on TV.”
“Up in Charleston? Damn.” I remembered Tony Rosa and his third-largest heroin bust in state history. “That’s big.”
“It’s a lot bigger than a monthly poker game.”
“Yeah. I doubt Karl knew what he was getting into.”
“Well, maybe you can ask what he knew,” she said. “Because I found Kitty.”
“Are you kidding me?” She wasn’t. “She resurfaced? What’s she doing?”
“Going by Katie now, and dying her hair brown. She works at a restaurant up in Charleston, in the French Quarter. And if you got time to get there today, you might want to, because she usually works the Sunday brunch shift.”
I whistled and said, “Damn, you’re good.”
She accepted the tribute with lowered eyelashes and a nod. I could see she was proud of herself, and rightly so.
I checked my watch. If brunch extended into the lunch hour, which I figured it did, it was doable.
On the drive up, I thought about how to approach a potential witness scared enough to skip town, dye her hair, and start going by a different name. The fact she’d done all that made me think she must have had at least some idea that Karl was neck-deep in shit. And the fact that, according to her, it was Dunk who’d told her to get out of town made it pretty clear to me that he probably knew that too, or else he knew how Karl died, and either way he didn’t want the information to come out.
Or, of course, he knew both those things.
I parked on a side street near the French Quarter. It was a bright blue, sunny day, but down in the low sixties; there was no escaping fall. I was glad for the tweed jacket I’d grabbed on the way out.
The restaurant was in what had originally been a house, a pink Victorian with double-decker white porches. There was a short line out the door, and I took my spot. The street was lined with tall palm trees, and from the rose bushes and swirly cast-iron fence surrounding Chez Madame, I figured it was the kind of place that sold postcards of itself to out-of-town visitors. I found myself wondering how a strip club waitress like Kitty had managed to get through the job interview.
I didn’t have to wonder long. I’d missed the brunch rush, and there were a few bar seats and a two-top to choose from. I asked the girl seating me, “Do you know which section Katie’s working today? I always like having her.”
She walked me over to the two-top and handed me a menu. I held it a little high so Kitty, or Katie, wouldn’t recognize me from a distance. As I read it, I realized a year-plus of eating in Basking Rock had made me forget just how much an omelet could cost. To pay for this, I was going to be bringing peanut butter sandwiches to work for at least two weeks.
Kitty, when she showed up, played her part well. I saw her flinch when she recognized me, but just for an instant; the smile popped right back into place. She had transformed herself into a full-on southern belle: cute skirt, fluffy hair and all. She had classed up, and it suited her.
I said good morning, called her by her new name, and gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile. She told me the specials and assured me the waffles were good. When she stumbled over a little speech about the crepes and apologized for it, I said, “Don’t worry. Really, don’t worry. I won’t tell nobody.” I looked her in the eye as I said it, hoping she’d understand I wasn’t talking about the crepes.
I had decided to approach this gently. A person who skipped town once could do it again, and the surest way to make her do that would be to try to interrogate her while she was working. I ate my waffles with no coffee to accompany them, which felt like a sin against nature, but the greater sin would have been to spend six dollars for a single cup. If I was making that kind of investment, I figured, better to put it into a tip.
When Kitty came to refill my water, she went into some waitress chitchat about whether I was in town for business or pleasure.
“Oh, I do nothing but
