Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

“Search me.” He took off his sunglasses, folded them on his knee, yawned, and looked at a dist

ant, moss-hung oak by the fairway. “It was probably just my night for strange memorabilia. Somebody left a dog tag on the windowsill of my bait shop. It belonged to a guy who flew a slick into a hot LZ when I was wounded.”

“That's quite a story,” he said. He gazed down the fairway, seemingly uninterested in my conversation, but for just a moment there had been a brightening of color in his hazel eyes, a hidden thought working behind the iris like a busy insect. “This guy got left behind in Laos,” I said. “You know what, Dave?” he said. “I wish I'd behaved badly toward people of color. Been a member of the Klan or a white citizens council, something like that. Then somehow this conversation would seem more warranted.”

“Dave's not out here for any personal reason, Moleen,” his wife said, smiling. “Are you, Dave?”

“Dave's a serious man. He doesn't expend his workday casually with the idle rich,” Moleen said.

He put a cigar in his mouth and picked a match out of a thin box from the Pontchartrain Hotel. “Police officers ask questions, Moleen,” I said. “I'm sorry we have no answers for you.”

“Thanks for your time.

Say, your man Luke is stand-up, isn't he?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Bertie Fontenot's nephew. He's loyal. I'd swear he was willing to see his sister and aunt and himself evicted rather than have you lose title to a strip of disputed land.” The skin of Moleen's forehead stretched against the bone. The humor and goodwill had gone out of his wife's face. “What's he talking about, Moleen?” she said. “I haven't any idea.”

“What does that black man have to do with this?” she asked. “Who knows? I believe Dave has a talent for manufacturing his own frame of reference.”

“My, you certainly have managed to leave your mark on our morning,” she said to me. “A police investigation isn't preempted by a 'members only' sign at a country club,” I said. “Ah, now we get to it,” Moleen said. “You know a dude named Emile Pogue?” I said. He took his cigar out of his mouth and laughed to himself. “No, I don't,” he said. “Good-bye, Dave. The matinee's over. Give our best to your wife. Let's bust some skeet before duck season.” He put his arm around his wife's waist and walked her toward the club dining room. She waved good-bye over her shoulder with her fingers, smiling like a little girl who did not want to offend. Later that afternoon I went into Helen Soileau's office and sat down while she finished typing a page that was in her typewriter. Outside, the sky was blue, the azaleas and myrtle bushes in full bloom. Finally, she turned and stared at me, waiting for me to speak first. Her pale adversarial eyes, as always, seemed to be weighing the choice between a momentary suspension of her ongoing anger with the world and verbal attack. “I didn't get a chance to tell you yesterday, you'd make a great actress,” I said. She was silent, her expression flat and in abeyance, as though my meaning had not quite swum into her ken. “You had me convinced we were married,” I said.

“What's on your mind?”

“I talked with a couple of guys I know at NOPD.

Tommy Carrol isn't pressing charges. He's got a beef pending on an automatic weapons violation.”

“That's the flash?”

“That's it.” She began leafing through some pages in a file folder as though I were not there. “But I've got a personal problem about yesterday's events,” I said. “What might that be?” she said, not looking up from the folder.

“We need to take it out of overdrive, Helen.”

She swiveled her chair toward me, her eyes as intense and certain as a drill instructor's.

“I've got two rules,” she said. “Shitbags don't get treated like churchgoers, and somebody tries to take me, a civilian, or another cop down, he gets neutralized on the spot.”

“Sometimes people get caught in their own syllogism.”

“What?”

“Why let your own rules lock you in a corner?”

“You don't like working with me, Dave, take it to the old man.”

“You're a good cop. But you're unrelenting. It's a mistake.”

“You got anything else on your mind?”

“Nope.”

“I ran this guy Emile Pogue all kinds of ways,” she said, the door already closed on the previous' subject “There's no record on him.”

“Hang on a minute.” I went down to my office and came back. “Here's the diary and notebook Sonny Boy Marsallus gave me. If this is what Delia Landry's killers were after, its importance is lost on me.”

“What do you want me to do with it?”