“Melancon is dead?”

“That would be one way of describing him. He has sensation from the neck up, but there’s no way to know about his brain. There were adhesive traces over his mouth and nose. I suspect he was tortured in some fashion involving air deprivation. My guess is he didn’t have anything to give up and it took a long time for his abductors to accept that.”

She paused to let the implications sink in. “What have you got on your end?”

“Not much. It started as a lend-lease investigation following Katrina,” I said. “I talked with Bertrand Melancon in a bar in Jeanerette last night. I think he’s holding goods he stole from Sidney Kovick’s house and is afraid to keep them and even more afraid to give them back.”

“You were with Bertrand Melancon and didn’t bust him?”

“Our Ritz-carlton is full-up. How about yours?”

I could hear her frustration building. “Listen, Dave, this case would go away except for the fact somebody put a bullet through the brain of a seventeen-year-old black kid with no record. Too many white swinging dicks were having a fine time shooting black ass in uptown New Orleans. Or at least that’s what my boss thinks. Secondly, Sidney Kovick is a person of ongoing great interest to the Bureau. When you interview perps who are in my caseload, I want to know about it.”

“Bertrand told me he’s holding stones of some kind from Kovick’s house. He was talking about stones that have blood on them.”

This time it was my turn to let the implications sink in.

“Blood diamonds?” she said.

“That’s what it sounds like.”

“You mean a street puke may have scored millions on a simple B and E?”

“I think right now Bertrand would trade them for a bus ticket to Saskatoon.”

I WANTED TO forget about the Melancon brothers and the Rochons and Sidney Kovick, but I couldn’t get Father Jude LeBlanc off my mind. Regardless, I hadn’t brought up his name with Betsy Mossbacher. Why? Because the honest-to-God truth is law enforcement is not even law “enforcement.” We deal with problems after the fact. We catch criminals by chance and accident, either during the commission of crimes or through snitches. Because of forensic and evidentiary problems, most of the crimes recidivists commit are not even prosecutable. Most inmates currently in the slams spend lifetimes figuring out ways to come to the attention of the system. Ultimately, jail is the only place they feel safe from their own failure.

Unfortunately, the last people on our minds are the victims of crime. They become an addendum to both the investigation and the prosecution of the case, adverbs instead of nouns. Ask rape victims or people who have been beaten with gun butts or metal pipes or tied to chairs and tortured how they felt toward the system after they learned that their assailants were released on bond without the victims being notified.

I don’t believe in capital punishment, but I don’t argue with the prosecutors who support it. The mouths of the people they represent are stopped with dust. What kind of advocate would not try to give them voice? But what could I possibly do for Jude LeBlanc? He had volunteered for the Garden of Gethsemane, hadn’t he? Everybody takes his own bounce.

Those were the kinds of thoughts I walked around with in the middle of the day.

THAT EVENING, at sunset, the sky directly overhead was absolutely blue, the trees in our yard dark with shadow and pulsing with robins who were returning from the North. As we were clearing the dishes from the kitchen table, Alafair happened to glance out the window. “Clete Purcel is in our backyard,” she said.

He was sitting at the redwood table, watching a tugboat pass on the bayou. Tripod and Snuggs were both on the tabletop, enjoying the evening. Tripod was sniffing the breeze while Snuggs paced up and down, his stiffened tail bouncing off Clete’s face.

Clete lit a cigarette, something I hadn’t seen him do in months. I went outside and sat down next to him. His face was red, but I couldn’t smell booze on his breath or weed on his clothes. He read my eyes. “I drove back to the Big Sleazy with the top down,” he said.

“You in the dumps about something?”

“Courtney and I got a little greedy.”

“Wait a minute, who’s Courtney again?”

“Courtney Degravelle, the gal who lives up the street from Otis Baylor’s house, the one who saw Bertrand Melancon almost side-swipe an NOPD airboat.”

I took the cigarette from Clete’s hand, dropped it on the ground, and mashed it out.

“Dave, cut me some slack, will you?”

“Got greedy how?”

He lifted up Snuggs by his tail and bounced him up and down on his back paws. Snuggs was thick-necked and had short white hair and muscles that rippled when he walked. His ears were chewed and bent, his fur threaded with pink scars. He was profligate in his romantic life and proprietary about his yard. He fought ferocious battles to safeguard Tripod and often slept on the roof at night to make sure no interlopers violated his and Tripod’s turf. Clete was the only person he would allow to take liberties with him, I suspect because Snuggs knew a brother in arms when he saw one.

“Courtney says she saw a young black guy prowling in the alley behind her house a couple of weeks ago. He was pulling something out of a rafter in a garage. She didn’t think a lot about it until I told her I believed Bertrand Melancon stashed Kovick’s goods somewhere in that alley before he took his brother to the hospital.”

“You told her all this?”

“Hey, she’s trying to help. She called me yesterday and says she found some soaked bills in her hedge. Not just a few, bundles of them. I think Bertrand dropped them in the water and they floated down to Courtney’s.”

“How much are we talking about?”

“Seventeen grand and change.”

“You and Courtney were going to keep it?”

“I thought about it. What was I going to do, take it to Sidney? What if it wasn’t his? Think he was going to admit that? ‘Not mine, Purcel. You keep it because you’re a great guy.’”

“So what did you do?”

“I had a funny feeling about the bills. If they were Sidney ’s, why would he keep them in his house? Even if the money was hot, he could launder it through a South American bank. So I took a few bills to Fat Tommy Whalen, remember him, Tommy Orca, used to fence smash-and-grab jewelry and watches for the Carlucci crew? Tommy started going over the bills with a magnifying glass, making all these bubbling sounds of approval, until finally I say, ‘You turning queer for dead presidents?’

“‘Yeah, “queer” is the word, Purcel,’ he says. ‘the work is beautiful, but it’s queer. Who did it?’

“Can you believe that? The street pukes not only had the bad luck to rob and destroy Sidney Kovick’s house, the money they got out of it is counterfeit.”

His account had been long and circuitous, which was always Clete’s method of avoiding an admission of some kind.

“Back to the subject,” I said.

“I want to take a bath in lye water. Ever since Katrina hit, I’ve been hearing the sound of little piggy feet running for the trough. Washington insiders are down here by the shitload. Now I’m as dirty as they are.”

I tapped him between the shoulder blades with the flat of my fist. “You’re the best of the best, cletus. Give the bills back to Courtney Degravelle and tell her to turn them over to the FBI. Stay away from Sidney. End of story.”

Snuggs did a u-turn, bumping his tail across Clete’s face, waiting for Clete to scratch him between the ears.

IN THE MORNING I called Betsy Mossbacher’s extension at the FBI office in Baton Rouge and got her voice mail.

“Sidney Kovick may have had counterfeit money stashed in his house. Some bills washed up in an alley down the street. Again, I’m not sure they’re his. Good luck,” I said.