"Look, partner, you're my lifeline. Don't be jerking me around."
"How about I go you one better? Did she die in that car, you want to ask me?"
I had learned long ago not to interfere with or challenge Sollie's moods, intentions, or syntax.
"It's gravity," he said. "The earth's always pulling on us, trying to suck us into the ground."
"What?"
"It's what the shooter didn't think about," he said. "Blood's just like anything else. It goes straight down. You stop the heart, in this case the brain and then the heart, and the blood takes the shortest course to the ground. You with me?"
"Not quite."
"The blood settles out in the lowest areas of where the body is lying. The pictures show the woman curled up on her side on the floor of the Buick. Her head was higher than her knees. But the autopsy indicates that she was lying full length on her back at the time of death. She also had high levels of alcohol and cocaine in her blood. I suspect she may have been passed out when she died."
"She was shot somewhere else and moved?"
"Unless the dea
d are walking around on their own these days."
"You've really been a friend, Sollie."
"Do you ever carry anything but a .45? A nine-millimeter or a .357 sometimes?"
"No, I've always carried the same Colt .45 auto I brought back from Vietnam."
"How many people know that?"
"Not many. Mostly cops, I guess."
"That thought would trouble me. So long, Robicheaux."
But the moment was not one for brooding. I walked back to the hot-dog stand and bought snowballs for a half-dozen kids. When a baseball bounced my way from the diamond, I scooped it up in my palms, rubbed the roughness of the horse hide, fitted my fingers on the stitches, and whipped a side-arm slider into the catcher's glove like I was nineteen years old and could blow a hole through the backstop.
That night I called Lou Girard at his home in Lafayette, told him about my conversations with the coroner and the mulatto woman across from the bar, and asked him if anyone had vacuumed the inside of the Buick.
"Dave, I'm afraid this case isn't the first thing on everybody's mind around here," he said.
"Why's that?"
"The detective assigned to it thinks you're a pain in the ass and you should have stayed in your own territory."
"When's the last time anyone saw Amber Martinez?"
"Three or four days ago. She was a bender drinker and user. She was supposed to be getting out of the life, but I think she'd work up a real bad Jones and find a candy man to pick up her tab until she ended up in a tank or a detox center somewhere."
"Who was her pimp?"
"Her husband. But he's been in jail the last three weeks on a check-writing charge. Whoever killed her probably got her out of a bar someplace."
"Yeah, but he knew her before. He used another woman to keep leaving Amber's name on messages at my office."
"If I can get the Buick vacuumed, what are we looking for?"
"I know I saw gun flashes inside the car. But there weren't any holes in the front of the bar. See what you come up with."
"Like what?"