“You mean on the lake, at the old Texronco refinery? Seriously? And anyway, which is it? First you’re talking about Nazis, then aliens.” Geoff rolled his eyes and turned as if to make his way back to the SUV. “I think you’re a nut job and I think you’re full of shit.”
The Prince smirked. “You’ve dipped your toe into a rather interesting conspiracy, Mr. Waltz.” The Prince chuckled and Geoff’s skin crawled. “And like any worthwhile conspiracy, its operations are centered here in Dallas.”
Marisol said, “So what do you want from us?”
“Many answers will follow when you retrieve what Ms. Bordelon collected from the facility.” He raised his voice toward Geoff’s back. “I suggest you begin your search.”
Geoff half-turned back around. Marisol had stayed put and watched him with arms crossed over her chest. The Prince stared back, impassive.
“Hold on, Prince. We still don’t know who the hell you are. And we don’t know what in the hell we’re supposed to be looking for.”
“Who I am is not pertinent. What you are looking for is biological material. Inert now. Harmless. But extremely valuable. Evidence of a scientific enterprise stretching the limits of our understanding of life itself. This enterprise has a name—Operation Moth Wing.”
Moth Wing. It sounded absurd. But then a vision of that East Texas bayou came to Geoff—the odors, the sense of strange life breeding in the murk. Joey Kincaid’s eyes. He pushed the image away.
The Prince gave them a sharp nod. “I may or may not be in touch, as necessities dictate. Good night.”
The Town Car pulled up and the Prince made to get in the back seat.
Marisol said, “Hey. What does any of this have to do with Robert Duchamp?”
For the first time, the Prince looked flustered. Just for an instant. He faced them with his hand on the car door handle. “I can only take you so far, Ms. Solis. Now, I beseech you: find that biological sample.”
•
In the bar, in his Corner, Tony laughed and coughed, his belly jiggling the table and threatening to overturn their drinks. “Nazis? Fucking space aliens? You shitting me?”
“My reaction exactly.”
“Don’t that just beat all.”
Marisol said, “I don’t know about the so-called Prince’s Nazi spiel, but obviously, something’s up.”
Geoff sipped his beer. “Dalia was onto something. Something worth killing two people for.”
“And you guys are in touch with the New Orleans P.D.?”
“I am,” Marisol said. “The department’s understaffed and swamped, half their stations still inoperable with the officers working out of field camps and trailers. To them, Eileen was a victim of a botched robbery, probably drug related. They have no expectation of solving it.”
Geoff had also called Sheriff Seastrunk to tip him off to Eileen’s murder, to let him know it might be related to Dalia’s lynching. That something bigger than a couple of reprobate rednecks out for a deadly joyride might be at work. He thought he piqued the old man’s interest. Hoped he had. Geoff had kept this phone call from Marisol, figuring the P.I. didn’t trust Seastrunk. As he thought of this he felt an urge to guzzle the beer and order something stronger. He tamped the feelings down and obeyed his vow to stay off the hard stuff.
“Nazi scientists or no, I need to find out what Eileen died for. I owe it to her. And Dalia. They both died on my watch.”
“That’s not true, Geoffy,” Tony said, his small eyes softening as they met Geoff’s own. “Eileen wouldn’t talk to you—you had no idea what they were into.”
“They wouldn’t have been into it if not for me. But that doesn’t matter now. We’ve just got to figure out what happened. Who’s behind all this.”
Nodding, thoughtful, Marisol said, “I’m working the Prince angle. That number we called, that somehow put us in touch with him? Doesn’t exist. Shouldn’t exist. The club we went to last night is owned by a multi-national corporation with tentacles in everything from oilfield services to fast food joints. Some holding company owns the scrap yard where we met the Prince. I can try to follow the chain, see if they’re linked somehow. But it’ll take time.”
“Good. Look especially for any tie to Texronco or its subsidiaries.”
“Right. And to Robert Duchamp.”
Tony stubbed out his cigarette. “Duchamp? The ex-congressman?”
“Yeah, about that,” Geoff said. “What caused you to ask the Prince about him?”
“He just keeps coming up—T-Jacques thought he had something to do with Dalia’s murder, and his family had something to do with Texronco, going way back. So I asked the Prince about him on a hunch. And did you see the guy’s reaction? Duchamp’s connected to this somehow.”
Tony lit a cigarette. “And what about this T-Jacques?”
“He’s not answering his phone.”
“Well, don’t you still have access to that refinery through your lawsuit?”
“Sure. For now. I spent the morning on the phone about that.”
He summarized for them the status of the lawsuit that started this mess. First, his phone call with Willie, staying at his daughter’s house most nights now, as if he wanted to stay accessible, knowing all that churned around him.
Willie had said: “So now you’re advising against taking the settlement?”
“I’m saying you were right. There’s something going on at the lake, Willie, something somebody found worth killing for. If you’re up for it, I don’t think we should walk away now. But Lord knows, it could be dangerous.”
“We’re not going to let those bastards scare us off now, counselor.”
That was the easy phone call. Next, Geoff called Texronco’s lawyer, Rick White.
“Another expert consultant dead, Geoff? My condolences, but really—you’re going to get a bad rep around the enviro law world. Your cases should come with a warning: ‘Working with Geoff Waltz may be hazardous to your health.’”
If I could climb through this phone, I’d strangle your pale, beefy, country club neck, you arrogant son-of-a-bitch. He closed his eyes and put his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. “Rick, please. Eileen and I went way back. I’m calling because I’m going to need another extension.”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry—that was callous. But if I remember correctly, we have a settlement offer on the table.”
“That’s correct. My client’s not ready to accept.”
There was a pause on the line. Geoff kept his eyes closed. Then White said, “That’s disappointing. It’s a generous offer, Geoff. And you without a testifying expert. If I were an asshole, I’d get my client to withdraw the offer and we’d go to trial.”
If? If you were any bigger an asshole, sunlight wouldn’t escape. “Rick, we just need more time. Give me sixty days to retain a consultant and submit a report.”
“Forget it. We’re not extending the discovery deadline again. You have our offer. It’s our only offer. And let me make you aware of something—as a professional courtesy. We’ve got our motion for summary judgment drafted and ready to file as soon as you miss that deadline. You and your swamp trash clients didn’t have much before, and now you have nada. The judge is going to throw you out of court so hard, your ass will dent the courthouse steps. They’ll put up a plaque: ‘Here sat a fool of the bar, whose self righteousness led him straight to the poorhouse.’”
“Okay, Rick. Let me tell you something. Something simple—as a professional courtesy: you and the people you work can suck your goddamn ten million dollars. My client’s aren’t intimidated. And they’re not settling.”
•
“So it wasn’t the best rejoinder, but I was too pissed to be clever.”
Tony patted his knee, his gut bulging as he leaned across the cheap, barroom coffee table. “You did fine, my friend. But don’t you think if you went to the judge with your sob story, she’d grant you the extension?”
“Probably. But not for sure. This case has mo
ved slowly as it is, and she’s not one to let her docket get stacked up. Plus, she hates environmental plaintiffs—used to work in-house for a logging company. And anyway, I’d have to write a brief and go down there and argue it. I don’t have that much time, and I don’t have associates to pass that kind of work on to.”
Marisol said, “Okay. Enough with the legal beagle stuff. What does all this mean as far as us having access to the refinery?”
“Well, we have access now to allow our own experts to do an investigation as part of the discovery process. When the discovery period ends, we lose our access.” Geoff paused, sipped his beer. “But I don’t think that access gets us much yet. We don’t know what this secret facility is, how Dalia found her way there. We can poke around the refinery, but with Texronco employees escorting us every step …”
“We need to know what we’re looking for,” Marisol said.
“Right. Which means finding out what Dalia gave to Eileen.”
“So we need to search anything of Eileen’s that may have survived. And to find T-Jacques.”
Tony smiled through a cloud of smoke. “You guys need to go back to New Orleans.”
Chapter 19
Jimmy Lee sat on a bench in Jackson Square in the warm post-Lenten New Orleans sun and worked, through the haze of a three-day binge, on a way out. Drunk and hurting. No amount of cheap booze could relieve the throbbing in the middle of his face—his nose, crooked and swollen and taped with clumsy ineptitude. He wanted an escape from the Speaker. An escape from his crimes. He had blown through his wad of cash. He ignored the beeps and buzzes from his pocket.
He walked out past the ancient Pontalba Apartments and the tarot card readers and down to the river and up the levee, where kids played music and women sunbathed and couples made out and somebody flew a kite. All parkland here. But he could see freighters docked downriver at the Governor Nichols Street Wharf, and he knew container ships waited at Napoleon Avenue. I could board one of them. They still use deck hands, don’t they? Just go to work on one and earn my keep and maybe get off somewhere in the south seas, like in that movie—paradise where the women wear nothing but grass skirts and coconuts on their tits.
His pocket beeped again and he took out the fancy new phone the Speaker gave him when he left Dallas and held it tight and in a rage he made to hurl it out into the river. But he stopped himself and looked at the screen. Another text from an impossible number—a combination of sixes and zeroes and eights that no honest phone line could ever bear. He hadn’t talked to the Speaker in three days, since the last phone call in the motel parking lot.
He did everything he was supposed to put things right. He searched the scientist’s house—snuck in through the police tape and tore it apart that Sunday night. He didn’t find anything meeting the Speaker’s description. Then he worried about his tracks, so he burned it to the ground.
Now the Speaker wanted more killing. As if every mistake he made compounded the need for more blood. A text with instructions, an e-mailed picture of the targets. Blondie and Chica, as he thought of them. Long tall and ugly blond-headed piece of shit and a hot little Mexican chick—and all I want is a ticket out of here. Damn it Jimmy Lee, it’s time to run.
He walked down from the riverfront and through the French Market where Vietnamese women hawked cheap trinkets and out to Esplanade and his truck. He drove away from the river and turned into a neighborhood like none he’d ever seen—funky-colored cottages stacked almost on top of each other, crazy curlicue wood carvings along the porch eaves, shutters covering windows that stretched from floor to ceiling. He drove through town thinking he would take one last look at his act of destruction before hitting the highway and leaving this place—forget the Speaker, forget the money—he could get by in Mexico on his wits alone, or else die young and free.
But when he came to the burned out husk of the dead scientist’s cottage, he had to look twice and at his phone and back again. Because he saw them there, poking through the charred ruins. Blondie and Chica, plain as day.
Chapter 20
Geoff watched Marisol kneel and sift through the charred remains of Eileen’s rented house on Constance Street as if divining some large truth.
“What do you expect to find here?”
“Nothing, to be honest,” Marisol said, standing. “This thing burned hot. I’d bet arson, but it would take a real fire investigator to say for sure. Anyway, we’re too late. To find anything, I mean.”
The lab destroyed, the house burned. Whatever Dalia had found, the biological sample, most likely lost. Geoff had retained hope even in light of the lab explosion; Eileen was cautious to a fault. She would not leave the entirety of something so valuable in a university lab. She would have taken a slide or test tube to study, and the stashed original sample away.
Geoff sighed and looked down the street, resigned to the idea that the sample, or at least any clue to its whereabouts, was lost in the ashes beneath his feet. He gazed at the row of cottages and shotgun houses, many painted in oranges and purples and greens, spruced up with flower boxes overflowing with blooms this first spring after the storm. “You know, it’s a damn shame about this cottage, even putting aside our case. Every one of these houses is a masterpiece. Unique. The cypress, the detailed carvings. The plasterwork. The architecture here’s like no place else on Earth. And those skills are mostly lost.”
“Whatever you say, Waltz.” Marisol seemed distracted, almost annoyed. As if she wanted to focus only on the job, and any extraneous conversation, any softness beyond professional cordiality, might threaten a reprise of last night’s passion.
•
He had awoken that morning with her legs entangled around him at such impossible angles that he started, certain they must be broken. But she stirred and her legs straightened to their natural amazing length, and he remembered. Remembered her crazy tantric moves the night before—positions he could never have dreamed of even in his most lascivious moods. He recalled one point when she seemed both beneath and atop him, their bodies forming an arch of such perfection as to make Brunelleschi grin. Her lips found the nape of his neck, and he breathed, How do you do this? She chuckled low and bit his ear: Let’s say yoga.
Their flight from Love Field had been delayed and they did not arrive in New Orleans until after 10:00—too late to begin a proper search of Eileen’s house. They meant to have only a nightcap at the little corner bar near their hotel but then started talking about music and he remembered a bar from his law school days, all the way up on Oak Street in Carrollton, and he wondered if it had survived the storm. A perfect spring night with bougainvillea in the air—she suggested he take her on a ride to check it out. They whizzed up St. Charles Avenue, lovely as ever, in the rented sedan and found the bar open with a brass band set just getting underway at half past midnight. They stayed an hour or two and had a few Dixie beers among the writhing college kids and the intense, grizzled die hards of the local music scene and even a few couples with children out too late for any other city but somehow just fine for that night in that place, where a whisper of resurrection floated through the ruin. Marisol danced as if to part the waves.
They didn’t drink much—something more than alcohol intoxicated them: the air, the music, the rhythm of that sensual old city struggling to be reborn. They found his bed and fell together with hardly any words and she took him to other planes, to those realms of Eastern lore that Geoff did not believe yoga alone could achieve. At least not in its debased, American form.
•
This morning, a distance. Geoff let it be, figured he had no choice. “So what now, private eye?”
“We meet T-Jacques this afternoon—now that we know more, know the right questions to ask, I’m hoping we can learn more from him.”
It had not taken Marisol long to track down the trombone player. He still played around the clubs of the city most every night, would be marching in a second line parade that very afternoon. Though he had avoided their calls, the
y knew where to find him.
“And see what the sheriff comes up with.” Last night, he had at last filled Marisol in on his call to Seastrunk.
Marisol looked at him and almost seemed to roll her eyes. “Right.”
“I still think I was right to call him. God knows, I didn’t tell him anything about our Prince character—not like he would have believed it anyway. Just to let him know his people need to dig a little deeper.” He paused. “I trust him. I think he’s honest. Maybe the last of a breed.”
She walked toward their rented Chevy. “I just wouldn’t ordinarily advise getting small town officials too involved, particularly when one such official may be behind the whole mess.”
“Duchamp? All the more reason to keep the sheriff in the loop. They hate each other. Or at least, Seastrunk can’t stand Duchamp. You heard him at Willie’s. He thinks Duchamp represents everything that’s wrong with politics today.”
When Marisol didn’t answer, Geoff got in the car. And as he pulled away from the curb, he noticed a black pickup parked down the block with Texas plates—almost familiar. It gave him an uneasy feeling.
About an hour to kill before T-Jacques’s club paraded. He drove to the hotel in silence, planning to grab a po-boy and retreat to his room to get some work done implementing his solution to Texronco’s refusal to move the discovery deadline. He had looked over Dalia’s notes about the site himself, impressed with her diligence. Using his own bit of scientific training, he cobbled together a report documenting the refinery’s toxic discharges. But he needed a real expert to bless the report if he expected it to survive a challenge from Texronco’s lawyer; on a Daubert motion, the judge would throw it out whole hog (and might even slap him with sanctions) if he submitted it on his word alone. So he went to one of Eileen’s university colleagues, one of her closest friends in the department, whom he knew to be a real greeny. After some begging, the professor agreed to spend a day looking over the report and then agreed to sign it. Only as Eileen’s representative in the department, and along with a carefully worded affidavit glossing over the fact that Eileen’s work on the case had been free-lance, not university-sanctioned. Good enough to survive a Daubert challenge? Maybe—and, if so, maybe he could eke out a decent victory for Willie’s group. A victory that could include an injunction granting the group power to monitor the refinery for future violations. And with that would come access—access that, with time and knowledge, he could use to get to the truth about what really went on there. A Plan B of sorts, in case—as seemed increasingly likely—the hunt for Dalia’s sample led to a dead end.
All the Devil's Creatures Page 14