14

“Come on!” Baxter shouts from the open door of the surveillance van. “Get in!”

Kaiser and Lenz are lost in thoughts of Thalia Laveau and her nudes, but something in Baxter’s voice brings them out of it. We scrunch into the cramped van and squat in the heat, our faces inches apart.

“Ten minutes ago,” says Baxter, “a finance company repossessed Leon Gaines’s van.”

“Damn it,” snaps Kaiser. “Murphy’s Law.”

“The repo guy had apparently tried to get it before, and Gaines ran him off. Today he just walked up to the house, popped the lock, and drove off before the NOPD surveillance team could do anything.”

“Where’s the van now?”

“Jefferson Parish deputies stopped it on Veterans Highway. They’re going to take it to their impound lot and seal it for our evidence team.”

“Does Gaines know the van is gone?” Lenz asks.

“Oh, yeah. He’s fighting with his girlfriend right now. They can hear him yelling out in the street, and parabolics have picked up the sound of slaps and blows.”

Lenz shakes his head. “Do we know if he has a gun in there?”

“This is Louisiana,” says Kaiser. “Assume he does. What do we know about the girlfriend?”

“Name’s Linda Knapp,” Baxter replies. “She’s twenty-nine, a barmaid. He’s been with her on and off for a little over a year. So. Do we talk to him now or do we wait?”

“Now,” says Kaiser. “While he’s pissed. Go in hard, settle him down, then bring Jordan in.”

Baxter turns to me, and when he speaks I smell coffee on his breath. “This isn’t like talking to Roger Wheaton. Gaines is a violent felon.”

“I signed your release this morning. Kaiser’s armed, and there’ll be cops outside. I’m ready.”

Baxter hesitates a moment longer, then slaps the panel separating us from the van’s driver. The motor roars, and we lurch backward, then forward. As we roll off of the campus, Kaiser catches my eye and gives me a nod of gratitude.

Leon Gaines lives in a shotgun house on Freret Street, beyond the terminus of St. Charles and Carrollton, very near the river. It’s a mostly black neighborhood behind an old shopping center, where people mind their own business and a prison record carries no stigma. Old people sit on screened porches, some drinking from paper bags, others rocking slowly and watching the cars go past. Kids too young for school play in tiny yards or the street, and knots of school-age kids stand on the corners. Our driver circles the block once for us to get a look, then stops a couple of driveways up from Gaines’s place.

Baxter opens the door. “Remember what’s at stake, John. This is our only clean shot at him.”

Kaiser nods, then gets out and starts up the cracked sidewalk, Dr. Lenz working hard to keep pace with him. After a few seconds, Kaiser’s voice comes from the speakers.

“Don’t react to anything I do. Act like you expect it, even if you’re shocked.”

“What are you going to do?” Lenz asks.

“Whatever feels right. And don’t let me forget to ask if he knows Marcel de Becque. We forgot to ask Wheaton.”

“You’re right,” huffs Lenz.

Beside me, Baxter says, “You missed most of the meeting this morning. We confirmed that there was bad blood between de Becque and Christopher Wingate. Most of the art community knew about it. When Wingate sold those paintings he’d promised de Becque, de Becque retaliated by spiking some big investment deal Wingate was involved in. We don’t have the details yet.”

“I can hear Gaines yelling from here,” says Lenz, sounding nervous.

“Here we go,” says Kaiser.

Their shoes bang on plank steps; then a screen door slaps against its frame and a hard knocking echoes through the van.

“Leon Gaines!” shouts Kaiser. “Open up! FBI!”

There’s a pause, then a muffled shout of challenge.

Baxter says, “This is going to be tricky.”

The unmistakable sound of a door being jerked open comes from the speakers. Then a New York accent laced with alcohol booms, “Who the fuck are you? Pencil-dicks from the finance company? If you are, I got something for you.”

“I’m Special Agent John Kaiser, FBI. And I’ve got something for you, Leon. A search warrant. Step back from the door.”

“FBI?” A puzzled silence. “Search warrant? For what?”

“Step back from the door, Leon.”

“What is this, man? This is my house.”

A faint female voice says something unintelligible.

“Get back in the bedroom!” Gaines yells.

“I told you twice to clear the door,” says Kaiser. “Do it now or I move you out.”

“Hey, no problem. But I need to see that warrant first.”

A scuffling noise is drowned by a grunt of shock by Lenz, and vocal complaint by Gaines.

“What did Kaiser do?” I ask, gripping a metal rack rail.

“Moved him out of the door,” says Baxter. “Like he said he would. With a con, you have to establish dominance quickly.”

“We’ve got two choices here, Leon,” Kaiser says in a voice I hardly recognize. “We can talk to you, or we can search this dump. Right now I want to talk. If I like what I hear, we might not have to search. If I don’t like what I hear, we’ll have to search, and we might conceivably stumble across some drugs. Or a gun. Either beef would put you right into Angola-”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Art.”

“Art who?”

“Art, Leon. Your paintings.”

“Oh.”

“Eleven women have disappeared from New Orleans over the past year and a half. You know about that?”

“Yeah. So?”

“What do you know about it?”

“What I see on TV.”

“We found a series of paintings that show these missing women. In the paintings, the women are nude and posed like they’re asleep or dead. Eyes closed, skin pale, like that.”

“So?”

“The last sold for over a million bucks.”

“Do I look like I just made a million bucks to you?”

“Your paintings reveal a predilection for violence,” says Lenz.

“Who the hell are you?”

“This is Doctor Lenz, Leon,” says Kaiser. “You speak to him with respect, or you’ll be funding the Vaseline concession at Angola. That’s the only real self-help program that means anything there.”

Gaines says nothing.

“The artist painting these pictures doesn’t sign his work. But we’ve found some rare sable brush hairs in the paint on some of them. Sound familiar?”

There’s a pause as Gaines works it out. “It’s those expensive brushes Wheaton got us. Right?”

“Right.”

“You tracked brush hairs from Hong Kong to Tulane?”

“That’s what we do, Leon. We can track pubic hairs from an Algiers whorehouse to your ass if we need to. I want some answers. You waste five seconds of my time, you’re on your way up Highway Sixty-one.”

Gaines says nothing.

“Where were you three nights ago, after the opening at the museum?”

“Right here.”

“Can anybody verify that?”

“Linda!” Gaines yells, clipping the mike Lenz is wearing.

There’s a pause; then Kaiser says, “Ms. Knapp?”

“Who’s asking?” says a scratchy female voice.

“I’m with the FBI. Could you tell us-”

“Tell these guys we were here after the NOMA thing,” Gaines cuts in. “They don’t believe me.”

“Shit,” mutters Baxter.

“That’s right,” the woman says. “We came straight home. I was bored. Everybody thinks they’re hot shit at those art things. We were here all night.”

“Can anyone else confirm that?” asks Kaiser.

“No,” says Gaines. “We were having some quality time, you know?”

“Right,” Kaiser says wearily.

“That’s all,” Gaines says, dismissing his girlfriend as he would a waitress.

“She your steady alibi, Leon?” asks Kaiser.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Tell me about Roger Wheaton.”