by Ed Kovacs
“Not sure I see this as a double murder,” she said. “You saw the temple entry wound? Triangular tears to the skin. Soot. Seared skin. He shoved the barrel right against his head.”
“To me it means the killers were smart enough to fake the suicide right.”
“That’s pretty up close and personal.”
“Exactly. But have you studied our victims, the way they’re put together?”
“They’re well-dressed.”
“It’s a little bit more than that. They’re meticulous about their looks. A guy with a two-hundred-dollar dye job, monogrammed custom-made shirt, silver cigarette case, and designer socks is not going to leave the homestead wearing badly scuffed Swiss loafers. Freshly scuffed, I might add. On the heels. I’ll bet you forensics will find microscopic pieces of black asphalt from this parking lot embedded in the abrasions.”
Honey bent down and checked out the heels of his shoes. “How did I miss that?”
“You would have caught it. I’m just a second brain, that’s all. Breaux died right on this spot. He either stepped out of the car or they pulled him out. Then they dragged him over here, scraping his shoes along the way. The shooters wanted to separate him and Ty Parks.”
“More than one shooter, huh?”
“Got to be. Breaux has soft hands, but he’s a big guy. And buff. Probably a workout fanatic. Got to look good for the young lover.”
“So you think two, maybe three killers?”
“Probably.”
“Breaux’s house is over in Broadmoor. But something tells me we should check his office first, after I finish up with the coroner.”
“This is your case,” I said, pulling off the latex gloves that made my hands sweat even worse than the rest of me, “so you have to attend the autopsies. But do you want me to beat the bushes in the meantime?”
She ripped a page from her pocket spiral notebook and handed it to me.
“Your to-do list. Check in at the main gate at Michoud. You’ll be meeting with the head of security and Breaux’s supervisor.”
I raised my eyebrows. “They work on the weekend?”
“Government types? Hardly. They’re coming in because they’re worried about something.”
“Maybe Mister Del knew some big secrets. What’s this phone number written here?”
“Somebody at that number called Breaux’s cell at twelve-fifteen this morning. The last call he ever got.”
I studied the number with interest.
“I’ll call you when the coroner has finished filleting our victims. And don’t forget to call Kendall.”
I flashed a look of complete confusion.
“We were supposed to go to his birthday party,” she said.
“Right.” Kendall Bullard had worked for me on a few cases and had proven to be a shrewd operator and a great street source. An MMA fighter I had coached for many years, Kendall had successfully made the jump to the UFC, the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Partly because Kendall had become one of the most popular athletes in the city, a number of other serious fighters had asked me to coach them and the mixed-martial-arts classes I’d been teaching for years at my dojo in the Lower Garden District were now all waitlisted.
“What’s he doing having a brunch party, anyway? Why not have it at night, when people get off work, so it’s easier for them to come?”
Honey gave me a pitying look. “Today is Sunday.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“You would have caught it. I’m just a second brain, that’s all.”
Honey turned away and went back to work.
She was right to worry about me.
CHAPTER TWO
I’d forgotten Kendall’s birthday party because I hadn’t intended to go. Kendall was a good friend and under normal circumstances, you couldn’t have kept me away. But I felt far from normal. I could fake it, like I’d just done with Honey. I could mouth off, crack jokes, deduce a scenario from a collection of facts, and generally stand around looking like I was okay. But I wasn’t.
The emotional roller coaster was a rough one, especially at night. And especially when I was alone, which was most of the time, since I didn’t hold a regular job. I’d stopped working out, arranged for others to teach my classes at the dojo, taken a hiatus from coaching, turned down any new PI work, started hitting the sauce pretty hard, and virtually abandoned my daily run. People might call it “re-evaluating” or “taking stock of one’s life,” but I knew it to be a cancerous malaise that nibbled all around my edges.
Since unintentionally killing Bobby Perdue I’d withdrawn from most social intercourse and become the Frozen Man. I’d just sit in my loft for hours upon hours feeling like a heavy gray mass weighed upon me. I knew I needed to do something to help myself, but I’m not a guy who will pop a Prozac or start seeing a shrink. I’d tough it out somehow, because that’s the way I operated.
My main form of therapy was telling myself repeatedly that I hadn’t meant to kill the kid. It was a horribly tragic accident and I felt awful for twenty-year-old Bobby Perdue and his family. The whole thing had messed with me in a way nothing else ever had before, not even the deaths of my father and brother. Plenty of fighters have died in the ring, but damn it, he died in my ring. I couldn’t stop thinking about why this had to happen. What had I done to deserve being drafted against my will as the kid’s executioner? As a result, I not only felt depressed, I also brimmed with anger. Righteously pissed off didn’t come close to describing my prime sentiment. An undirected rage that I barely controlled ran right below my surface interactions, one reason I had largely avoided people for the last month. I was running a super-short fuse as I feigned normalcy, and that might mean trouble.
I tried to blink thoughts of the kid from my consciousness as I sat in my 1986 Bronco and gave Kendall a quick call, apologizing for missing his birthday party. I had a different party in mind, so I drove the Bronco around the corner from the murder scene and jacked up two crack dealers.
New Orleans thugs were universally amoral parasites who weren’t worth the powder it would take to blow them to hell. They absolutely hated the NOPD. They would never help us, ever. After stealing a car, trashing it for no reason, and then abandoning it, they would often use indelible markers to scrawl obscene messages on the dashboard—not that they could spell or construct a grammatical sentence—directed at NOPD. Of course, if you ever read a police report you’d know that not all coppers graduated at the top of their English class, either. But our hoodlums were absolute scum. On the West Bank, in the days after the Storm, thugs had tried to shoot repairmen off of cell phone towers in Algiers. People who had come in to help fix the city, they tried to kill. You would think the hoods would have wanted their cell phones working to aid their larceny back then, but no one ever accused them of being anything approaching smart. In the chaos of the Storm, after looting scores of restaurants and bars (note to the apologists: a big-screen TV is not a necessary item for survival), the grateful thugs would leave their calling card by defecating into a cash register. That’s the kind of human garbage I now stared at.
Sharp, powerful thunderclaps from a storm cell rolling in from the Gulf punctuated the tension between me and the two men in their late teens standing near me. They wore the gangsta regalia of sagging jeans, oversized white T-shirts, and askew baseball caps.
I had no street cred with these guys and didn’t feel like wasting time trying to establish any; I had too much to do.
“You guys can make it easy or hard on yourselves: your choice. What do you know about the murders of the two men in the Benz over in that parking lot? What do you know, what have you heard? Sooner you help me out, sooner PD is out of here and you can get back to your dope deals.”
They both had longish chee-wee type dreads. Neither would make eye contact. One just scratched his chin looking bored, using his other hand to hold up his five-times-too-big-sized pants; the second dealer shot a quick glance in my direction, then turned to the side and spit.
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br /> “Don’t know nuthin’,” said the spitter.
I lunged forward, yanked the pants down on Mr. Chin Scratcher so they fell around his knees, and then knocked him on his ass. I spun the spitter around and slammed him against the side of the Bronco.
“Don’t you look at me and spit, you piece of crap.”
I wrenched the spitter’s arm up behind him and he yelled in pain. I looked down at the chin scratcher. “Hands behind your head or I will break your frigging face.” The chin scratcher stoically complied.
I wore an Alpha Hornet loosely on my right hand. The super-lightweight Hornet, made of a reinforced polymer, looked like an elongated, visionary take on a set of brass knuckles, but it wasn’t used for straight punches. It was a compliance tool. Not authorized NOPD carry, but then again, I wasn’t NOPD. A blunt tang protruded from each end; I now turned my right hand so a tang pressed down on a pressure point on the spitter’s wrist and he screamed.
“You got a name, dirtbag?”
“Yeah.” He pronounced it “yeh-ya,” with two syllables.
“Well what is it?”
“Marvonne.”
“What’s taking you so long to apologize to me, Marvonne?”
He didn’t speak quickly enough, so I pressed down with the Hornet. He screamed, and then blurted out, “I sorry!”
I didn’t have any particular ax to grind against these two leeches, or drug dealers in general as long as they were non-violent, because without users, there wouldn’t be suppliers. But our local crack dealers sold to kids. I’d seen it dozens of times when I worked patrol. That’s where I drew the line, so to hell with these two.
“What do you know about those dead boys?”
I started with the pressure, but he talked quick. “We work ‘dis corner daytime. Umm, night we be at, umm, Earhart and Galvez.”
“Did I ask about your work habits or did I ask you about some murders?”
I dug the tang into his wrist. His knees buckled and he yelped like a scalded Chihuahua.
“Two SUVs I hear.” The words shot out fast; he wanted this over. “Dark color. Pull out ‘da lot after couple three gunshots. ‘Bout two dis mornin’.”
I made a mental note: Two SUVs, 2:00 A.M.
Then I released Marvonne with a shove and let him fall hard to the ground. For a long moment I stood over both men, silently begging them to mouth off or make a move. The rage that had been below the surface since accidentally killing Bobby Perdue now coursed through my system with a vengeance.
The thugs were smart enough not to look at me or make a sound, and I was smart enough to let it go, take a silent deep breath, get into the Bronco, and drive off.
The phone number Honey had scribbled down for me had to be a land line because it would ring and ring and not go to cell phone voicemail. I didn’t want to call my inside guy at Bell South so early on a Sunday morning, so I kept calling the number, and the fifth time I called and after the thirtieth ring a very polite female answered, screaming, “What do you want, asshole? You’re driving me crazy!”
Whiskey-and-cigarettes voice, funky blues playing in the background, what sounded like baseball on TV, and the ping ping ping of a video poker machine. Had to be a bar.
“I think I left my keys there. What’s your address?”
“Banks and South Alexander.”
“You the bartender?”
“Who wants to know?”
“A very big tipper.”
“Sandi’s the name. Come by for a drink and I’ll look for your keys.”
She hung up. It wasn’t much of an invitation, but a Bloody might take a little of my edge off.
It was easy to spot Sandi since she had her name tattooed on her neck in one-inch Algerian-font script. I wondered what she’d think of that tattoo once she hit her sixties, or once she sobered up, whichever came first. She’d been pretty maybe ten years ago, needed to see a dentist, and a couple of hundred sit-ups a day would nicely tighten up her slight beer pouch.
A half dozen beer-swilling guys and one old black lady with a cocktail in a plastic cup and glued to a poker machine were sitting around getting hammered in the cool, colorful confines of Banks Street Bar. I spotted one security cam above the bar pointed at the cash register, reminding me that, damn it, it’s your employees that you have to watch more than your customers. The pay phone was in a corner and maybe not covered by a security cam.
The sandwich-type chalkboard on the sidewalk next to the front door hadn’t been changed yet, so I knew that Walter “Wolfman” Washington had played last night, meaning they probably had 200 people crammed in here, even though city code for the joint was 110 bodies. So I doubted any employee would remember someone using the pay phone at 12:15 A.M. It would come down to video.
I told Sandi I found my keys, bought us both a Bloody Mary, and tipped her twenty bucks. She really liked that, and warmed right up to me. I gave her my PI business card.
“Sandi, I’m working with NOPD on a homicide. I need to check your security video from last night. How many cams you got in this place?”
“Two outside, two inside, but you need to come back when Junior is here, maybe seven tonight.”
“Can we make it happen now, sweetie?”
I showed her the letter from Chief Pointer and put two more twenties on the bar. She reached for the bills as she read the letter, but I held them in place.
“The two dead guys aren’t in a hurry anymore, but I am.”
She sized me up. A gal who has been around the block a few times can get good at that.
“Follow me,” she said and winked, scooping up the money.
The video results were not as accommodating to the investigation as Sandi had been. The dark footage looked inconclusive at best, but still, I copied the video onto a thumb drive. As I sped toward New Orleans East and the NASA Michoud Assembly Facility, I sucked on a couple of menthol lozenges, lest the suits I was about meet object to the notion of an investigator imbibing while on duty.
“I can’t stress enough how important it is that Del Breaux’s Department of Defense-issued laptop computer be located immediately and returned to us here.”
Ralph Salerno was ex-FBI and Chief of Security at Michoud. Short, beer gut straining at his belt, crew-cut brown hair going gray, and the wrinkles around his mouth didn’t suggest he smiled a lot. This was the third time he had mentioned the laptop.
“I understand your concern. You’ll be the first to hear about it when we find it,” I said. That was bunk and Salerno probably knew it.
“I still can’t believe Del is dead. And Ty Parks, too.” Harold Klenis, a silver-haired man in his seventies, sat erect behind his desk in his third-floor office. Salerno had made a big deal out of keeping me in the hallway outside while he insured that Klenis had left no sensitive documents out in the open for prying eyes to see before letting me enter. If he’d known I was wired for video and audio, we’d probably be having this meeting out in the parking lot.
I’d already seen Breaux’s desk here at Michoud, set up in a project room with about seven other desks. I’d found little at his workstation and nothing of a personal nature at all. He must have kept everything he needed in his missing laptop.
I’d also seen the small office of Ty Parks, just off the shipping docks. Parks’s office had been heavily decorated with framed family photos, whimsical mementos, tchotchkes, and Post-it notes. Salerno refused to let me check Park’s computer, but said he’d provide NOPD copies of any files not of a proprietary nature. I spent thirty minutes carefully going over the place before we went up to Klenis’s office.
“How did Breaux get along with the other members of his team?” I asked Klenis.
“Just fine. Del was meticulous and held himself and everyone else to the highest standards. He was a highly experienced metallurgical engineer. A respected figure. People knew he had worked at Skunk Works on the Stealth—”
“Harold, let’s don’t go there,” interrupted Salerno, acting like he was
running the interview. He was one of those ex-FBI types who had put in his twenty years and now earned a healthy six figures in his second career pretending he knew everything there was to know about securing a sensitive facility and the secrets therein. I didn’t like him and I figured the feeling was mutual.
I stared at Salerno. “The thing is, while you kept me waiting in the lobby for twenty-five minutes after I signed in, I used my cell phone to do a simple Internet search, and what do I find but a Who’s Who in Science and Engineering article stating that Del Breaux worked on the Stealth program. That means, Mister Salerno, that we definitely can and will ‘go there.’ If either of you gentlemen hold back on me here’s what’s going to happen: NOPD units with lights flashing will roll up in front of your homes and you will be paraded out past your wives and kids and neighbors for a ride down to Broad Street and an unfriendly interrogation in a murder investigation.”
I let that hang in the air as I stared down both men.
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary, Mister Saint James. Please excuse my colleague, but as you can imagine, his job is to be obsessed with security.”
I ignored Klenis and stared hard at Salerno. “His job today is to cooperate.” That’s right, Fido, you’re not the biggest dog in the room anymore.
Salerno met my gaze but not in a challenging way. He tried to use a look that I had perfected; he tried to look at me like I wasn’t important but he couldn’t pull it off, and finally looked away.
“Just to clarify, yes, Del Breaux worked at Skunk Works back in the late eighties. He worked on many other black projects which, I’m sorry, but I’m not cleared to discus with you,” said Klenis.