Heaven's Prisoners (Dave Robicheaux 2)

"No."

"Which means you have almost nothing. Except me. They were out to kill me, not Annie. Every aspect of the investigation will eventually center around that fact. You'll end up interviewing me every other day."

He lit a cigarette and smoked it with his elbow on the desk blotter. He looked through the door glass at the deputies in the outer office. One of them leaned to the side of his desk and spit tobacco juice into a cuspidor.

"I'll have to run it by a couple of other people, but I don't think there'll be any trouble," he said. "But you don't work on just this one case, Dave. You carry a regular load just like the other detectives and you go by the same rules."

"All right."

He puffed on his cigarette and widened his eyes in the smoke, as though dismissing some private concerns from his mind, then he watched my expression closely and said, "Who do you think did it?"

"I don't know."

"You told me that the day after it happened, and I accepted that. But you've had a lot of time to think in the last ten days. I can't believe you haven't come to some conclusion. I wouldn't want to feel you're being less than honest here, and that maybe you're going to try to operate on your own after all."

"Sheriff, I gave motive to any number or combination of people. The bartender at Smiling Jack's is the kind of vicious punk who could blow out your light and drink a beer while he was doing it. I not only ran his head into a window fan and cocked a .45 between his eyes, I turned Bubba Rocque loose on him and made him get out of New Orleans. I messed up Eddie Keats with a pool cue in front of his whores, and I went into Bubba Rocque's house and told him I was going to put my finger in his eye if I found out he sent Keats and the Haitian after me."

"Maybe it was Toot and a guy I don't know. Maybe it was two contract men Bubba or Keats brought in from out of state. Maybe it's somebody out of the past. Once in a while they get out of Angola and keep their promises."

"New Orleans thinks the bartender went to the Islands."

"Maybe, but I doubt it. He's a rat, and a rat goes into a hole. He's more afraid of Bubba than he is of cops. I don't believe he'll be walking around on a beach anywhere. Besides, he's a mama's boy. He probably won't run far from home."

"I'll be truthful with you, Dave. I don't know where to start on this one. We just don't have this kind of crime around here. I sent two deputies to question Keats, and he picked his nose in front of them and told them to bust him or beat feet. His bartender and one of his hookers said he was in the club when Annie was killed."

"Did they question the bartender and the hooker separately?"

He looked away from me. "I don't know," he said.

"That's all right. We can talk to them again."

"I went out to Bubba Rocque's myself. I don't know what to think about a guy like that. You could scratch a match on those eyes and I don't think they'd blink. I remember thirty years ago when he was a kid and he dropped a fly ball in the city park and lost the game for his side. After the game he was eating a snowcone and his daddy slapped it out of his hand and hit him across the ear. His eyes didn't show any more feeling than a couple of zinc pennies."

"What did he tell you?"

"He was home asleep."

"What'd his wife say?"

"She said she was in New Orleans that night. So Bubba doesn't have an alibi."

"He knows he doesn't need one yet. Bubba's a lot smarter than Eddie Keats."

"He said he was sorry about Annie. I think maybe he meant it, Dave."

"Maybe."

"You think he's bad through and through, don't you?"

"Yep."

"I guess I just don't have your mileage."

I started to tell him that any cop who gave the likes of Bubba Rocque an even break would probably not earn much mileage, but fortunately I kept my own counsel and simply asked when I could get a badge.

"Two or three days," he answered. "In the meantime, take it easy. We'll get these guys sooner or later."

As I said, he was a decent man, but the Rotary Club had a larger claim on his soul than the sheriff's department. The fact is that most criminals are not punished for their crimes. In New York City only around two percent of the crimes are punished, and in Miami the figure is about four percent. If you want to meet a group of people who have a profound distrust of, and hostility toward, our legal system, don't waste your time on political radicals; interview a random selection of crime victims, and you'll probably find that they make the former group look like Utopian idealists by comparison.