I waited, keeping my eyes on the front door. Katherine had a night class, so she wasn’t expecting me until late. Darkness fell. A snort of nose candy and a quickie, I told myself; Herman Villiere wasn’t the kind to stay at home, even on a Wednesday night. Sure enough, at eight the door opened again and the pair emerged, the girl leaning heavily on Villiere as he steered her to the car. He let her open her own door like an old married, and a moment later the engine roared and the headlights stabbed the blackness. The car slid backwards into the street and headed away from me. I pulled out, did a U-turn, and started after them.
He took Robert E. Lee west, then headed south on West End to Vets Boulevard. We passed Causeway and he opened up, his taillights barely visible as he wove through the traffic. I gunned my engine and tried to follow and just as I was beginning to think I’d lost him I almost shot past him, plodding along in the right lane, almost as if he’d waited for me to catch up. I settled in four cars back and watched him slide right onto Clearview. On Clearview I started to catch up again, then saw a light change to yellow ahead of him and hit my own brakes as his taillights went bright. The signal went green and he drove another block, and turned right into a shopping center. I followed, and when they parked I slid into a space in the parking area a hundred yards away. They got out and headed for a flashing neon sign that said PLAYTIME. I waited before walking across the blacktop after them, passing through several knots of people in the parking lot. Everybody seemed to be waiting for something and I wondered what.
When I got to the door, they’d already been inside half a minute. I let a foursome precede me and then followed.
My ears were assaulted by loud music, if you could call it that, and flashing lights strobed my vision. An outline of moving shapes mingled and diverged on the dance floor.
A shape came out of nowhere and a hand grabbed my arm.
“Five,” the owner of the hand said.
I fished out five dollars and the voice said, “Hold out your hand.”
I did and the doorman stamped something on the back of it in fluorescent ink. I started through the doorway and felt the hand grab me again.
“You carrying?”
That should have been the tip-off, but I let it slide. “No,” I told him, wondering how he’d picked me out.
“Better not be,” he said. “This is a clean place.”
“I’d never have guessed,” I mumbled, and slipped into the cluster of black forms.
Villiere and his woman were nowhere to be seen, but now I knew what the people outside were waiting for: it didn’t take too long to spot the dope deals going down. Nothing spectacular, just money changing hands, a little envelope palmed here and there.
I threaded my way through the crowd and hit the men’s room, interrupting a furtive conversation between a man in a leather jacket and a yuppie in a silk shirt. They eyed me suspiciously as I used the urinal, and I felt their eyes on the back of my neck as I went out.
I seldom carry a gun. Except when you’re in a project or on the streets at night, there’s no need for one, and the cops don’t take kindly to citizens packing firearms, even if they have the obligatory honorary sheriff’s commission, as I do. Without a pistol, you’re betting the worst that will happen is a punch or two in the gut, or a broken nose. When you carry a pistol you’ve already drawn the line. Right now, though, I was half-wishing I’d stuck my .38 into my belt. The place had that kind of feel.
Another slow pass around the room and along the bar, and I knew Villiere and the woman had slipped out. I went back, past the doorman. They’d gone out the back, which meant they knew the layout. And Villiere had told him who I was, or he wouldn’t have asked about the gun.
I headed back to my car. The parking lot was more crowded now, and none of the people standing around outside smoking paid any attention to me. I passed the first row of cars and stopped, trying to orient myself.
The Ferrari was gone.
Swearing under my breath, I hurried the rest of the way to my car. I got in quickly, checking the back seat out of habit even though the doors had been locked, and started the engine.
They’d slipped me, damn it. But was it intentional, or just dumb luck? I put the car in gear and a second later had the answer.
My tire was flat.
Twenty minutes later I’d managed to replace it with the spare, not the easiest of jobs when you only have one arm that works. I found a filling station on Causeway with an attendant who said he could fix it, but when the man rolled the tire into the light of the arc lamps he only shook his head.
“Looks like it’s been cut to me,” he said. “This tire ain’t no good.”
I looked at the slash marks, sucking in my breath. He sold me another one for sixty bucks, and half an hour later I was on my way again.
I had part of the answer, and the answer was white and came from a country far to the south. The question that remained was whether Villiere was only using or dealing. And what, if anything, that had to do with a mechanic who rented a building from him on Esplanade.
After a quick shower I called Katherine, but she wasn’t home yet. Probably, I thought, she was holed up in the Tulane library doing research. I lay down on the bed with my hand behind my head, determined to blank my mind and let the thoughts flow on their own, like a stream, until I was asleep. It must have worked, because sometime during the night I heard a phone jangling from nearby and I fought my way back from oblivion to pick it up.
I started to tell her I couldn’t make it tonight but it wasn’t Katherine’s voice, it was Mancuso’s.
“Micah, are you asleep?”
“I was trying,” I said, forcing myself awake. Surely he hadn’t called just to tell me about the results of the record checks. I glanced over at the dial of the clock radio. It was ten-fifty.
“Sorry to bust in, man, but I thought you’d want to know this as soon as possible.”
“Know what?” I asked him, awake now to the tone in his voice. “What happened?”
“That boy, Augustine?” he said. “The one who accused your friend?”
“Yeah?” I asked, my belly doing a flip-flop.
“Well, they just found him on the batture in Algiers, near the naval station. Somebody beat his head in, Micah. He’s dead.”
Five
It was eleven thirty at night when I crossed the river on the Greater New Orleans Bridge. The lights of Algiers twinkled ahead of me like so many luminescent fish in a dark sea. Even this late, life went on unabated, and I slid through the traffic on the four-lane, past the short-order joints and shopping centers. I went left off General de Gaulle onto MacArthur and a few blocks later came to Holiday, where I turned left again.
What the hell was the Augustine boy doing on this side of the river? Somebody must have taken him there and dumped him. But he hadn’t been missing when Sandy had questioned his family a few hours earlier, so he must have been taken that afternoon, after school.
When had I seen Cal? Four o’clock, when school was already out. The boy hadn’t been around while I was there. Then I remembered the kid on the bike. I didn’t know the Augustine boy, and I hadn’t paid much attention to the boy in the street. Surely Arthur Augustine wouldn’t have gone back to Cal’s after lodging a complaint?
I crossed General Meyer. Two blocks on, in a neighborhood of quiet, middle-class houses, was the levee, a twenty-foot-high embankment of grass-grown earth that snaked along the river from its mouth at Head of Passes to above St. Louis. Levees were one of the first things the flood-conscious French built when they founded New Orleans in 1717. They were constructed by Bienville’s engineer, de La Tour. I suspect the first body was found on a levee shortly thereafter.
I stopped at Patterson, which was the name given to the river road at this point, and looked left. I was about a mile below the naval facility, but Mancuso hadn’t been precise, and there was a lot of levee. About a half mile away I saw a blink of blue light, up near the top of the levee, and then a pale str
eak, as from a flashlight. I drove toward the activity, and as I approached, the lights defined themselves as a couple of police flashers and some men with flashlights. I pulled into the quiet neighborhood, parked on a side street, and walked across the river road and up the slope.
The heavy mud smell of the river hugged the air. When I reached the top a stiff breeze from the water slapped me in the face. A flashlight beam picked out my face and held it.
“Who are you?” somebody asked.
“I know him.” It was Mancuso’s voice. “I asked him to come.”
The light held me for a second longer, to let me know I didn’t carry any particular weight, and then dipped away.
Mancuso guided me away from the others, who seemed engaged mainly in a game of standing around while the essential personnnel worked down by the water’s edge.
“So what is it?” I asked. “Are you sure it’s the boy?”
The policeman nodded. “He had a school ID on him. The mouth over there, who splashed the light on you, that’s Fox. He’s the detective in charge of the case; he talked to the boy when he filed the complaint. He gave a positive ID.”
“I know Fox,” I said. “He tried to get my license lifted once.”
I felt cold all over and knew only part of it was from the wind. We started down the batture toward the water. The willows waved back and forth in front of us like warning fingers, and the lap-lap of the waves on the mud flats sounded like some night beast licking its chops. Out in the stream a huge tanker lay anchored, dominating the blackness. As we walked I heard voices, distant yet clear, and recognized them as the sound of seamen talking on the ship a quarter mile away.
The men at the water’s edge were measuring and taking photos, and I realized the body had already been removed.
Mancuso shoved his hands in his pockets. “A guard at the station saw somebody up on the levee a couple of hours ago and walked down to investigate. When he got close, whoever it was ran away and got into a vehicle that was parked right about where you are, in that side street. He flashed his light around and found the boy down by the water.”
I looked at the debris of bottles and other trash nibbling at the shore. The mud smell was mixed now with the odor of human feces and the chemicals dumped by the ships. I wondered what kind of mutant fish must swim in the river’s depths and then I wondered if they could be any worse than the ones you found breathing air, in the city streets. I turned away.
“Any idea how long he’d been dead?”
“He was still warm. Probably been killed less than an hour before.”
“Anything else?”
Mancuso’s simian face screwed into a grimace. “Yeah. He’d been hit in the head, it looked like. We figure it was to subdue him, probably when the killer approached him first. Then he tied the kid’s hands behind him with wire, took him out, and finished the job.”
I flinched inwardly. We trudged back to the top of the levee, and I felt the eyes of the other men on me. Fox detached himself and put his face in mine.
“Listen, Dunn, I don’t know what stake you got in this case, but I’m warning you not to fuck up my investigation.” He had short graying hair and pig eyes, and his breath smelt of garlic. “Mancuso here says you’ve helped him before. That’s his business. But if you try to screw with my investigation—”
Sal tried to get between us, but Fox slapped away his hand and stepped around him.
“You go for the bright lights and the TV cameras. You play that one-arm shit for all it’s worth, and you get a lot of free advertising for your transom-peeking.”
“Jake,” Mancuso protested, embarrassed that the others were looking on, “let’s save it for the bureau.”
“Bullshit,” Fox snorted. “I just want it on record that I don’t want this civilian fucking things up. And if he tries,” he said bringing his face as close to mine as he could, “his dick will end up in a wringer.”
There was a time when I might have slugged him, but there was also a time when I drank too much, and smoked. He’d had his say, and he knew I was too careful to punch a cop. I turned away from him and started back down the slope toward my car.
Mancuso hurried after me. “Micah, listen, don’t pay any attention to him. He’s like that with everybody.”
“I doubt it,” I said, reaching the paved roadway. “He’s got a hard-on because I messed up a case for him once. I had to go to the newspapers and TV stations.”
“Oh, yeah,” Mancuso said. “I remember: the guy wasn’t guilty.”
I nodded, turning to the detective. “Tell me something, Sal. You say this guard saw somebody drive away; did he get a look at the car?”
Mancuso nodded. “Just a glimpse. No plates. All he could see was that it was a light-colored van.”
I thanked him and shook his hand. I tried to tell myself that it could be a coincidence, or that somebody was setting Cal up, that when I talked to him he’d have an alibi for the time after I’d seen him. But there was one thing I couldn’t ignore, which I knew the cops would seize on immediately.
Calvin Autry owned a white Ford van.
I came onto de Gaulle, heading back toward the bridge, but I stopped at the first convenience store to use a pay phone. I tried Cal’s home and on the second ring someone lifted the receiver, but there was no response to my “hello.” I hung up, not liking the feel of it, and got back into my car. I crossed the bridge and stayed on the freeway, curving past the bald cupola of the Superdome on my right and then heading north, toward the lake.
The question was whether Herman Villiere would have had enough time to snatch the kid and bring him over here while he was playing games with me. It was a nice thought, but I had to face up to the fact that the killer had not used a red Ferrari.
I got off at Causeway and headed south, toward the river.
My gut told me I was going to be too late, but I had to try.
When I reached Calvin’s house all the lights were on, and there was a DA’s evidence van parked in front. They’d gotten a warrant in record time. So it hadn’t been Cal who’d picked up the phone when I’d called; it was a cop.
There was a trio of people on the sidewalk watching, two men and a woman with her hair in curlers. I got out to talk to them. One was the plumber, Bonchaud, in his bathrobe.
“What’s going on at Cal’s?” I asked. “Is something the matter?”
“You tell us,” Bonchaud said. “We got woke up.” He nodded toward the woman with her hair in curlers. “All them damn radios and doors slamming.”
“Not to mention that dog barking in the back yard,” the woman said.
The other man, who was leaning on a cane, shook his head. “I asked ’em if something happened to him, but they just wanted to know had I seen him.”
“He isn’t there?” I asked.
It was the plumber’s turn to shake his head. “I think I heard him in the driveway right before I went to bed, but who pays attention?”
“Any idea where he is?” I asked.
Bonchaud shrugged. “Beats me. You know, oughta be the cops could do this quieter.” He squinted in my direction. “Hey, don’t I know you?”
“Maybe,” I said noncommitally. “I meet a lot of people in my work.”
His eyes went to my left arm and then his mind made the connection. “You’re the credit card guy.”
“That’s right.”
“What the hell are you doing out here this time of night?”
“Part of the job,” I said. “We like to know we’re dealing with reliable people.”
“Goddamn if that don’t beat all.” The plumber spat on the sidewalk. “Damn credit people know everything nowadays.”
I left him ruminating over the wonders of the information society and drove away. I had a hunch; it was only that, but it was worth playing.
I pulled into an all-night convenience store and took my packet of maps from the holder on the seat. I had road maps, tourist maps, parish maps and even some topographic shee
ts for New Orleans and the surrounding parishes. What I was looking for now was the tourist commission map of Tangipahoa Parish. I found it and tried to remember what Cal had told me. The problem was that I’d only been half listening, and the name of the place hadn’t really sunk in. Pinewood Estates? No, Pine Hills Estates. I traced my finger along Highway 22, which runs from Madisonville to Ponchatoula, and there it was, just on the west side of the Tickfaw River. I knew it would be easier to find the place in the morning, but I wanted to talk to Cal before the law found him. So if I was going to have a chance, I knew I had to go now, because sooner or later the investigators would ask the plumber or one of the other neighbors, or find a marked map or a bill of sale, and send a local deputy to check it out.
Two minutes later I was back on 1-10, headed west across the swamps, the black expanse of the lake to my right, a cup of coffee in the plastic holder on the seat. I was tired, but the adrenaline was keeping me awake, so far. I knew that wouldn’t last, though, and I was counting on the coffee to help.
Ten miles after civilization ended was the sign for 1-55. I turned right, alone now except for the trucks.
Twenty-odd years ago, when they’d built the interstate system in Louisiana, it had been a modern miracle: four lanes of elevated concrete arrowing across a state that had once been a disconnected series of communities, with New Orleans sitting in proud isolation at the far end. They’d sunk pilings into gumbo mud and carved rights-of-way through sucking swamp. It had cut almost half an hour off the time it took to get from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. It had also made it easier to kill somebody and be miles away before the deed was discovered. The stretch I was driving, running north for thirty deserted miles between Lakes Maurepas and Pontchartrain, is the dumping ground of the state. Some of the crimes are drug related, but it’s also a convienient place to leave a wife, a mother-in-law, or a girl who won’t say yes.
What if Cal wasn’t there? Then I’d have made a long trip for nothing, and I’d end up paying a motel bill. But after a while in this business, you tend to pick up on things: nuances of meaning, comments made in unguarded moments. Cal had described his cabin in the woods as the place he went when he wanted to lower his blood pressure.
Deep Kill (The Micah Dunn Mysteries) Page 5