to put the tiger in the tank. I’ll be a lush right through the bottom of the ninth. Bombs away.”
He drank all four inches of it as though it were Kool-Aid, gin roses flaring in his cheeks, his eyes brightening, the world coming back into focus, becoming an acceptable place again.
“You saved my life, Clete. You’ll always remain the best guy I ever knew,” I said.
“That second shot? The one that flushed his grits?”
“What about it?”
“It was supposed to be my first shot. The one through the neck was five inches below where I aimed. I could have gotten you killed, big mon.”
“You pulled it off, didn’t you? You always pull it off. You’ve never let me down.”
But I was caught in my old vanity-namely, that I could convince Clete Purcel of his own goodness and heroism and the fact that the real angels in our midst always have tarnished wings. He sat down in a straight-back chair and looked wearily out the screen door at the sun setting on the bay. “We can’t keep running on luck, Dave,” he said.
“We’ve done pretty well so far, haven’t we?”
“You don’t understand. It’s like General Giap said. He defeated the French with the shovel, not the gun. We keep playing by the rules while the other guys use a flamethrower.”
“What do you recommend?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling I can’t get rid of. Killing a piece of shit like Thigpin doesn’t change anything. He was just a tool. Right now people out there are planning our death. Maybe the guys in the rain hoods. We don’t know. That’s it,
I sat down across from him. Thigpin’s cell phone was on the table. I picked it up and accessed its call lists. Then I closed it and placed it back on the table.
“What’d you find?” Clete asked.
“Nothing. It’s clean.”
“That’s my point,” he said. “We took a sack of shit off the board that nobody could care less about.”
HELEN NOT ONLY agreed with Clete’s suggestion about tagging Thigpin as a John Doe, DOA, she suppressed all information regarding the shooting and got Koko Hebert, our coroner, to tell an aggressive local reporter, “Yes, the body of a fisherman has been found. We’re trying to determine the cause of death as we speak. We’ll get back to you on that,
The next morning I received a phone call from a plainclothes NOPD detective by the name of Dana Magelli. He was a good cop, as straight as they come, and always a loyal friend. He was also a family man, one who didn’t rattle easily but who walked away when he heard a colleague telling a vulgar joke or using gratuitous profanity. This morning it was obvious he was not happy about the task he had been given.
“You remember No Duh Dolowitz?” he said.
Who could forget No Duh, once known as the Merry Prankster of the New Orleans Mob? He put dog shit in the sandwiches at a Teamsters convention. He tried to cut up a safe with an acetylene torch in Metairie and burned down half of a shopping center. He helped Clete Purcel fill up a mobster’s customized convertible with concrete; he also helped with the deconstruction of a Magazine Avenue snitch by the name of Tommy Fig. The deconstruction involved the freeze-drying and wrapping of Tommy’s parts, which were then hung from the blades of an overhead fan in Tommy’s butcher shop. But No Duh went through a life change when he creeped a house on Lake Pontchartrain owned by one of Didi Gee’s nephews, who put seven dents in No Duh’s head with a ball-peen hammer.
“No Duh is running a pawnshop over in Algiers,” Dana said. “Some of the items in it are a little warm. A guy came in there three days ago and sold No Duh a DVD player for twenty bucks. There was a disk in it. Out of curiosity, No Duh put it on the screen in his store. At first he thought he was watching a
“No Duh called the cops?”
“He’s got his parameters. I recognized the two girls in the film, Dave. I’m sure they’re the same girls in the photos y’all sent us. I’m going to download and e-mail you the DVD. I’ve got the feeling you’re emotionally involved in this one. I’m sorry to do this.”
“What’s in it?” I said.
“See for yourself. I don’t want to talk about it,” he replied.
I went into Helen’s office and told her of Dana Magelli’s call. “I want Clete to see the video with us,” I said.
“What for?”
“This investigation is as much his as it is ours. I’ll put it another way: Outside of you and me, he’s one of the few people who cares about the fate of those girls.”
“Call him,” she said.
It took Clete only ten minutes to drive from his office to the department. We went into Helen’s office and dropped the blinds on the windows and the door. Then she hit the download button on Magelli’s e-mail attachment.
People wonder why cops get on the hooch or pills or become sex addicts or eventually eat their guns. It would be facile and self-serving to say there is one answer to that question. But even among the most degraded of police officers, unless they are sociopaths themselves, there are moments when we witness a manifestation of human evil for which no one is prepared, one that causes us to wonder if some individuals in our midst are diabolically possessed. That is what we wish to believe, because the alternative conclusion robs us forever of our faith in our fellow man.
Whoever held the video camera did not appear in the frame. The setting looked subterranean. The dirt floor was damp and shiny and green with mold. The walls were built of stones that were smooth and rounded, like bread loaves. They were not the kind of stones you would ordinarily find or see in this area. Chains were inset in the walls, the anchor pins driven deep, encrusted with rust.
There was no sound in the video, only images. The light was bad, the lens sliding back and forth over stone surfaces that seemed netted with moisture, as though they were sweating. Bernadette Latiolais and Fern Michot were clearly recognizable; their mouths were moving silently in the strobe, their eyes shuttering in the brilliance of the light.
“Jesus God,” I heard Helen say.
The video was probably not longer than forty seconds. When it was over, Helen got up and opened the blinds and turned off the monitor on her computer. Clete had not moved in his chair. His big hands rested on his knees, his fingers tucked into his palms, like paws on a bear. His mouth was small and tight, his back humped like a whale’s, his eyes fixed on the empty monitor.
Helen sat back down behind her desk, pushing her thoughts out of her eyes. “Who’s the guy who brought the DVD player into the pawnshop?” she said.
“No Duh swears he never saw him. He figures the guy for an addict or a low-rent house creep,” I said.
“What about the paperwork?” Helen asked.
“Magelli says the name and address on the bill of sale were bogus. There were no helpful prints on the player, either.”
“A professional house creep doesn’t unload one item,” Clete said.
“It doesn’t matter. I think No Duh is telling the truth. He reported the disk. He has no reason to lie about the seller,” I said.
“This is what we need to do,” Helen said. “We check all area reports of burglaries and home invasions from the time of the girls’ disappearance to the present. Maybe the thief is local and went to New Orleans to unload the player. Or maybe he’s a friend of the person who stole it.”
We were talking in a procedural fashion, spending time on issues that were perfunctory in nature, a deliberate distraction from the images that we had watched on Helen’s computer screen. But the room felt as though the air had been sucked out of it. The sunlight that fell through the window was brittle and swam with motes of dust. I
