by John Farrow
“I’ve been trying to get that message to him.”
“He knows. But he worries he’s being baited.”
“He should call me, Vira.”
“I’ll let him know. Expect a call. By the way, he’s in Montreal.”
“What?”
“Up there to see you, I think. Once he summons the courage.”
“Thanks for the heads up. And thanks for the word on Flores. That’s nothing if not interesting.”
“Something I thought you should know.”
Before moving on, Émile stood in the winter grove, among the birds and rocks, the trees and the stream. This was what retirement was supposed to have looked like, no? Spending time in beautiful quiet places. He had never developed a clear plan for his senior years, so perhaps that was the problem. Here he was instead, now as ever, crime-fighting.
Everardo Flores worked diligently down one side of his designated street and back up the other, an investigation that took less time than anticipated as most people had nothing to say. No one remembered the Katrina murders in any worthwhile detail. Back then, they were all too busy trying to stay alive themselves, a response he had no reason not to accept at face value. A few folks, including the first woman he talked to, remembered the dead couple, although the principal component of everyone’s collective memory was that they kept to themselves and said little. They rarely had visitors. No family came around that anyone could recall. One woman thought she heard that they were not from New Orleans originally, nor even Louisiana, that they came from somewhere “north of the Mississippi delta,” which in Flores’s view narrowed it down to roughly forty- nine states and the District of Columbia.
Having tramped up and down two blocks, he thought he might call Dupree for a lift back when he noticed that houses on the side of the street where the murder victims once lived backed onto those the next street over. The space between them was composed of yards that bordered one another, separated by fences. The victims might as easily have shared conversation out back as off their front stoop. So he started knocking on doors the next street over.
In the house directly behind the victims’ home, he met a man who remembered the dead couple well. He professed to knowing them, whereas everyone else, if they remembered them at all, did so in passing, as someone might recall a shade tree that once stood on a corner lot. The man took him out to the backyard, cracked open a beer for Everardo Flores, and told him all that popped to mind.
Flores scribbled down that the dead neighbor, the husband, claimed to be a farmer from Nebraska. “He had the calluses on his hands to show for it, too.” But he chose to quit that hardscrabble life. “Don’t know if he was blowin’ smoke up the chimney stack,” the neighbor mused. “‘It’s not like I owned the Ponderosa,’ is what he said to me one time,” and the neighbor mimicked the dead man’s voice. “‘Black dirt farmers, poor like me, work a dry patch of dirt without no promise of rain. If folks paid hard cash for rocks ’n’ stones, I’d do plenty good for myself. Except I raised corn. Most years, it’s dry rock land, hot as cinders at the end of a bonfire.’
“Here’s where my confusion comes into it,” the dead man’s neighbor reported to Flores. “The man had some nostalgia in him for those harder times. He’d tell me how much trouble it been, how poor he been, how cruel his stone fields got to be to him some years not to mention untimely squirts of rain, too much or too little, but he missed those days, I could tell. He had the nostalgia in him for his scorched land.”
“I guess,” Flores opined, “that became more true when somebody stuck a knife into him down here.”
“Sliced across his neck, actually. So the paper said. All the misery in this town in those bad days, you’d think no man would heap no more upon a soul or cause a body to suffer no more. We think that way but he’s a dead man now because that’s not the truth. Always somebody has to go inflict more painfulness. They wanted his head cut off him, but I don’t know why.”
They seemed to be done, and Flores was finishing up the most welcomed of beers, when the wistful neighbor added, “Still now.”
“Hmm?”
“He had a house to live in, didn’t he? And yet he had no, what they call, ‘visible means of support.’ So what was his invisible means? He said the farm. That sale. So it must have been something, not nothing to support him. And then.”
The neighbor shook his head as he reflected upon the vagaries of life.
“And then?” Flores encouraged him.
“I solemnly swear that his was the misfortune to die a sorry death at exactly the time when good luck turned its head to shine its own clear eye on him.”
“What good luck? What eye? Not Katrina’s.”
The man looked at Flores as if he had a screw loose.
“No, okay, not Katrina’s,” Flores corrected himself. “But what good luck?”
“The insurance company’s. That eye. A few of us had the insurance. I did, that poor dead couple did, but I had to wait myself, and most of us around here had to wait months, some years, before any insurance company took any good notice of our plight. Oh, they knew we were here all right, waiting on them, but they said they needed the time and more time to get around to everybody standing with an empty hat in their hand stuck out. Myself, I think they were waiting for us to die off in that meantime it took to get around to see if any of us were staying alive. Gifford was one who died. That’s his name, I remember it now although I never said it often. Gifford, he had an adjustor on his doorstep before nobody could imagine such a thing.”
The hotel security man considered the news. Life seemed unfair so often. Especially, perhaps, down here in St. Bernard Parish. “Too bad he never lived to collect on that insurance.”
“Too bad. Me, I’m still waiting on mine, although they did give me some down on account.”
“Did they?”
“Generous fuckers, hey? But they were expecting me to die sooner, not later.”
Everardo Flores was led back through the musty house and was almost out the front door when a thought occurred. He was about to let it go, but then he supposed that if he was going to be telling people he was a cop he might as well behave like one. “Sir, this insurance claims adjustor who came around. The one on Gifford’s doorstep. What did he look like? Do you remember that?”
“White guy,” the neighbor declared. “That’s about all I recall now. Not nothing about him to distinguish himself. Just another white man looking skittish in a black man’s parish. He never knocked on my door, that much I can tell you for certain, without no word of a lie going on there.”
Cinq-Mars arrived home to learn that Special Agent Rand Dreher finally had telephoned. That the man declined to leave a message maddened him.
“So he just called, said hello, then goodbye?”
“More or less,” Sandra told him. “He asked how I was doing.”
“Sweet of him.”
“I’m sure it was nothing of the kind.” She was amused by her husband’s consternation. “He asked after me, said he was glad that things turned out okay in the end, in New Orleans. I asked him if he wanted to leave you a message—”
“But he just said no. I can’t believe it. Is he going to call me back even?”
“He didn’t say. He said—”
“No. What a twit. I’m going to call the bastard myself.”
“If you will let me finish, Émile.”
Émile looked across at her, realizing that he hadn’t allowed her to complete her thought. He stooped down slightly and ruffled the ears of his dog, Merlin. Trickles, the house cat, who lived a privileged existence when compared to the lives of the barn cats, chose that moment to head upstairs. Nap time, Émile supposed.
“He said it was fine, no message was necessary, but he expected to meet up with you soon. He wished me a nice day. I wished him one also.”
“Bastard.”
“Why is he a bastard?”
“Because he’s trying to get me to call him because he’s
too damn proud—and/or chickenshit—to call me.” He stretched all the way up as he returned fully upright. The dog, satisfied for once, returned to its cushion and curled for a nap.
“But he did call you. And who’s too proud not to call whom?”
“He could’ve called me back on my cell. Why didn’t he? He has the number. What’s the good of these ridiculous things if people don’t use them?”
Sandra laughed out loud this time, briefly. “You could—I know, this is a radical concept for you—but you could call him back on his cell phone. I did tell him, you know, that you were probably on the road. Driving. He may have deduced that it was not the best time to call.”
“Bastard.” He was tempted to call him back, too. Give him a bigger piece of his mind about New Orleans. Not that any of it was the FBI’s fault, but could he not have forewarned him, at least, to leave his wife at home? Rather than make that call, fuming still, Cinq-Mars opted for a Highland Park.
Later, down in his basement, he confronted the easel set up with a large flip chart. He hadn’t managed to put much on it. Today he added notes from his conversation at the co-op that included the general descriptions of the men noticed on the farm when the Lumens moved there. Doing so energized him, and Cinq-Mars flipped pages to inscribe other descriptions, in large print, of everyone associated with the case. Easiest were the facial blotches of Jefferson Grant, less satisfying were his attempts to describe the pickpockets—Latino, small, slick, well-dressed—as were the height and weight of the men on the Lumens’ property: average. Every cop alive hated average. Still, he wrote down the dreaded word. And, although he had to check the spelling, he wrote the word that Michel Chaloult had summoned: rosacea.
Given he was using large print on the poster-sized pages, they were soon adding up. He considered that he was gathering more intelligence than he thought, and when committed to paper it looked more substantial than he previously imagined. In surveying his final effort, flipping the big sheets over, he also determined that he was arriving precisely nowhere in his investigation—he didn’t even want to call it an investigation, for fear of disrespecting both the word and the activity—that nothing here gave him a snowball’s chance in Hades of unravelling the case anytime soon. He was panning for gold and needed another ton of information to sift through to find the nugget worth saving. Mostly, he required suspects. Still, his handsome flowchart seemed to mark, at least, the suggestion of a start, and Cinq-Mars took solace in that.
Done, he could help Noel, their hired man, water the horses, groom one out of habit more than necessity now, then tuck into another afternoon Scotch with a renewed sense of accomplishment. He’d done something with his day. If anybody asked, he’d made headway.
Sergeant Pascal Dupree picked up Everardo Flores after his first foray into St. Bernard Parish and immediately excoriated him for daring to call himself a cop. They hadn’t yet driven a single block. The hotel security officer was dutifully contrite, sheepish, and profusely apologetic for the next four blocks before he spoke up in defiance of his inquisitor. “Hey!”
“Hey, what?” Dupree asked him. “Don’t hey me, you bastard.”
“You never heard me say I was a cop. Who told you?”
Dupree didn’t back down an inch. “I smell it on y’all. Stinking up my car! The one thing I asked y’all not to go do, y’all go do! First words out of your skinny mouth, y’all telling people you’re wearing cop feathers. What did I tell y’all?”
“How do you know that?” Flores bellowed back. “Who said they were my first words? Did you stick a wire on me?”
“Don’t be an idiot. I can’t stick a wire on y’all without y’all knowing. I’d like a device like that. Know what? Good idea. I’m going to invent that device and make my fortune. Anyway, what do y’all care how I know? Y’ already admitted it to me.”
“I only admitted it because you already knew! How did you know?”
“Everardo, get with the program, it’s an old cop trick. Pretend y’all know what is suspected, let the perp imagine that he’s toast, then let him own up to the crime.”
“I’m nobody’s perp!” Everardo protested, sounding petulant now, although no less chagrined. “I didn’t commit a crime!”
“Y’all were tricked. Get over it. Y’all were stupid enough to call yourself a cop. Written all over your face. That’s why I warned y’all. Lot of good it did me.”
“It helped me do the job, all right? If I say, ‘Hey, I’m in security down at the Hilton? What do you know about those murders happened over six years ago? Yeah, yeah, like I said, hotel security. So talk to me about the Katrina murders. Excuse me? What does the Hilton care? That’s a good question, ma’am. Y’see, the dead couple, they were customers of ours one time and we care about our customers, ma’am. Cradle to the grave, we look after you. Doesn’t matter if you never come back to see us. Once a Hilton customer, you’re under our protection for your whole lifetime. Why? Because we consider you family. Now, about those murders.’ Hey, Dupree, you ever stayed at a Hilton?”
“Up yours, Flores.”
“’Cause if you ever stayed at a Hilton, then me and you, we’re like brothers.”
“Okay, so you’re full of shit. What else is new?”
“I’m full of shit? How did you know I told people I was a cop?”
“I had y’all followed.”
“What?”
“You think I’d let y’all go out on your own, first time? Listen, I probably saved your life today. Nobody’s fond of cops in that neighborhood.”
“Now I know why.”
A stony silence ensued. They were merging with rush-hour downtown traffic when Dupree recalled the point of the exercise. “What did you find out—nothing?”
“Like I’d tell you.”
“Y’all never learned diddly-squat.”
“I learned plenty.”
“Then tell me.”
“Suck my dick willingly, Dupree.”
“Will you get off the ramp?” A car was slow to get going.
“What?”
“I’m not talking to you. Come on, Flores, what did you find out?”
“Plenty! Like I said.”
“Nothing, I bet.”
“Think so? Tell Cinq-Mars to call me. I’ll tell him a thing or two.”
Dupree had to stop on a red. “This is how things work here. I debrief you.”
“Does Cinq-Mars know?”
“Know what?”
“That you were following me in my footsteps.”
“Not me personally. I don’t think that much of ya’ll to follow you around. But yeah, actually, he knows.”
“Fuckers. The both of you then.”
“Flores, come on. It’s your first time making the rounds. We have to protect our asses, putting a citizen in harm’s way like that. Don’t take it so personal. We got procedures, man. We got protocol!”
The comment helped him to cool a tad. “I found out they weren’t from here.”
“We knew that,” Dupree commented.
“Do you want to hear this or not?”
“Sorry. We heard they were from St. Louis. Go on.”
“Not St. Lou. Not even Missouri, if you want to know the facts of life. I got close to the only man who got close to the dead couple.”
“Y’all didn’t.” In slow traffic, Dupree almost missed braking for the car in front of him. They lurched forward again.
“Don’t kill us, Dupree.”
“At this speed? A bump on the nose. Where they from?”
“Nebraska. They were poor black farmers. They quit the farm.”
“Yeah?” Dupree asked him. He grabbed a chance to switch lanes and line up for a left turn and took it.
“Yeah,” Flores said. They awaited a flashing green.
“That’s good Flores, that’s good.”
“I can take care of myself, Dupree.”
“Flores, everybody says that until they wind up dead. Then they don’t say a damn thing any
more. Don’t like what I did? Fine. But I don’t like it that y’all went around—”
“Saying I was a cop. Okay, I got that yesterday already.”
“So we’re even, more or less. All right?”
“Fine. But I got more.”
“What else?”
“Tell Cinq-Mars to call me.”
“Flores—”
“I don’t consider us exactly even. We need an even distribution of the overall punishment here. Tell Cinq-Mars to call me. That’s it. That’s all.”
Dupree made the turn and they were in freer traffic now not far from the Hilton. “Cinq-Mars knows protocol, Everardo. I’ll tell him, but he might not call you.”
“Then you better convince him, Dupree. Because he will want to know what I now know. And you don’t get to find that out unless he’s willing to tell you after I tell him. That’s what you get for protecting me, as you call it. That’s the price you got to pay.”
“Fucking civilians,” Dupree muttered under his breath.
“Yeah, well, that’s what you do regularly, isn’t it? That’s if you don’t just shoot us first for walking on a bridge.”
They stopped at the Hilton, where Flores had left his car.
“Will y’all go back there again?” the detective inquired.
“Let Cinq-Mars decide. After I tell him what I found out, he might not see the purpose. Probably he’ll ask me to do something bigger than this. Bump me up the ladder. Put me on a payroll. Don’t bet against it, Dupree. You’ll see.”
Half the time Dupree thought the man was an ass, half the time a decent guy. Overall, he figured that that was a better evaluation than he gave most people.
“I just might help y’all get into the academy, Flores, if that’s really what you’re after,” he said.
Although he remained suspicious, the small man lit up. “Really? They like my credentials they say, but they keep pointing out that I’m on the old side. I guess they’ll keep saying it until it’s true.”
“They’ll keep saying it until you cross a man’s palm.”