Chapter 31

LATER, I CALLED Betsy Mossbacher at the FBI office in Baton Rouge. I had left her a message after I had found out Bertrand Melancon was in the Ninth Ward. I had also called her after Bobby Mack Rydel had tried to kill my family. But she had not returned my calls. This time she picked up.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

“All over the state. What’s this about?”

“I left you a message about Bertrand Melancon. Otis Baylor found him. Melancon is at his aunt’s house in the Ninth Ward. I also left you a message about Bobby Mack Rydel.”

“Yeah, I was sorry to hear about that. I’m glad you’re okay.”

I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.

“Y’all been pretty busy?” I said.

“Give me Melancon’s address. I’ll see what we can do.”

I could feel my energies draining. We had been called into a jurisdiction not our own and asked to do scut work that was the responsibility of other agencies. Now I was getting the inference, I had become an annoyance. I gave her the address of Melancon’s aunt in the Ninth Ward.

“Melanie Baylor confessed this morning to shooting the looters. Her husband was covering for her.”

“Sheriff Soileau faxed us that info an hour ago.”

“Melancon wrote a letter of amends to the Baylor family. He gave them directions to the blood diamonds. Except the letter got water-soaked and so far hasn’t been of much value to us. In the meantime, two of Sidney Kovick’s guys got whacked in the Atchafalaya Basin.”

“Yeah, we got that.”

“Betsy, I’m supposed to share information with you. If you don’t want me to do that, tell me to get lost.”

“We’re buried alive in work. Maybe all this will get sorted out one day, but it’s going to be a long time. Do you have any idea how many open homicide cases we have in New Orleans? The city is a giant repository for the dead. I’m not talking about gangbangers, I’m talking about patients who were allowed to drown in nursing homes. Do you realize how many complaints about unjustified police shootings we have to investigate? I can’t even get information about our own people. I think some navy SEALs took out some snipers we don’t know about.”

But I wasn’t concerned with the FBI’s problems. “I’ve got to get a net over Ronald Bledsoe. He’s ruining our lives,” I said.

I heard her breathe air out her nose. But I didn’t allow her to speak and continued to bore in. “Sidney Kovick inasmuch as told me he took the diamonds off some guys from the Mideast. You told me yourself he fancied himself a patriot. Maybe these guys are al Qaeda. You have unlimited electronic access when it comes to Homeland Security matters. Bledsoe is the loose thread on the sweater. We just have to pull on it.”

“Good try, no cigar.”

“So long, Betsy. I think you’re working for the right bunch,” I said, and hung up, coming down hard with the receiver.

WEDNESDAY EVENING was exceptionally beautiful, as though the earth and the heavens had decided to join together and re-create South Louisiana the way it was before Katrina and Rita tore it apart. The sky was a hard blue, the evening star twinkling in the west, a big brown moon rising above the cane fields. The rains had turned the oaks a deeper green and had sent Bayou Teche over its banks, swirling along the edges of our yards. You could smell barbecue fires in the park and the tannic odor of chrysanthemums and a clean, bright odor that perhaps signaled the coming of winter, but not in a bad way. For no demonstrable reason, I felt a sense of peace, as though I had been invited to a war but at the last moment had decided not to attend.

Alafair was returning to the university library to finish the research for her novel and Molly was going to drive her. “You’re sure you won’t come?” Molly said from the doorway.

“I’ll probably just read a bit and take a walk,” I said.

“I think I almost have the words worked out on the bottom of the letter the black guy left at the Baylors’,” Alafair said. “It’s just a matter of finding the right combination, not the letters, but the words themselves, so they form a sensible statement.”

I tried not to show my lack of enthusiasm. “That’s good,” I said.

“Would the word ‘bricks’ mean anything?” she said.

I thought about it. “Yeah, it could.”

“I’ll let you know what I come up with. Actually this is great material. I’d like to use it in my novel.”

They said good-bye and started out the door. Alafair snapped her fingers in the air. “I forgot my purse. I don’t have any money,” she said. “I was going to pick up a dessert.”

“Here,” I said. I took twenty dollars from my wallet and handed it to her. “I’ll put it on your tab.”

“We won’t be late,” she said.

“I’ll still be up,” I replied, and gave her the thumbs-up sign, the one I had always given her when she was little.

A HALF HOUR LATER, I saw Clete’s Caddy pull into the driveway. I went outside and waited for him on the gallery. He tore the tab on a can of beer and sat down on the steps, his porkpie hat slanted forward on his forehead. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it and blew smoke out into the yard. He still had not spoken except to comment negatively on the price of gasoline. I took the cigarette from his mouth, walked out to the curb, and dropped it into the storm drain.

“Dave, being around you is like being married. Will you lay off it?”

“What’s on your mind, Cletus?”

“What’s on my mind is I’ve either been living in my own thoughts too long or I’ve developed shit-for-brains syndrome.”

I sat down next to him. The streetlights had gone on and the canopy of oaks that arched over the street ruffled when the wind blew.

“Remember when we were searching the Baylor property and the neighbor came out and asked us what we were doing?” he said.

“Yeah, his name is Tom Claggart.”

“Remember I told you I thought I’d seen him somewhere?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Last year I took a gal for a boat ride out in the Basin. It was cold as hell and I ran out of gas. There were some hunters in a camp up on an island, about three hundred yards from the Atchafalaya. I walked up on them while they were dressing a deer. The deer was hanging by its feet from a tree. There were guts and strips of hide all over the ground. These guys looked pretty uncomfortable. Then I remembered deer season had closed two or three days earlier.

“One guy goes, ‘We got this six-pointer last week, but it froze up on us.’

“I pretended I didn’t know or care what he was talking about. They gave me two gallons of gas and wouldn’t let me pay them for it. Just as I was leaving, a guy with a bullet head and thick mustache came to the door and looked at me. I think it was that Claggart guy.”

“So maybe Claggart hunts deer or has a camp in the Basin,” I said.

“There was a laptop opened on the table behind him. I could see it through the doorway. The image on the screen was a bunch of playing cards floating into a black hat, you know, the kind magicians use. I think it’s one of those video games for gamblers. Bledsoe is always playing them.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them. “No, he doesn’t just play them. He plays that one,” I said.

“Say again?”

“I saw that program running on Bledsoe’s laptop when I was in his cottage.”

“Oh man, we walked right over it, didn’t we? Where you going?”

“To apologize to the FBI.”

I went into the kitchen and called Betsy Mossbacher’s cell phone.

“Hello, Dave,” she said.

“Can we deep-six that conversation we had this afternoon? I need your help,” I said.

“You push me into corners, then you blow hot and cold. I never know who’s coming out of the jack-in-the-box. It can be a drag, Dave.”

Don’t argue, don’t contend, I heard a voice say.