TODAY I’M A DETECTIVE with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. I make a modest salary and live on Bayou Teche with my wife, Molly, who is a former nun, in a shotgun house shaded by oak trees that are at least two hundred years old. With a few exceptions, the cases I work are not spectacular ones. But in the spring of last year, on a lazy afternoon, just about the time the azaleas burst into bloom, I caught an unusual case that at first seemed inconsequential, the kind that gets buried in a file drawer or hopefully absorbed by a federal agency. Later, I would remember the pro forma beginnings of the investigation like the tremolo you might experience through the structure of an airplane just before oil from an engine streaks across your window.
A call came in from the operator of a truck stop on the parish line. A woman who was waiting on a tire repair had gone into the casino and removed a one-hundred-dollar bill from her purse, then had changed her mind and taken out a fifty and given it to the clerk.
“Sorry, I didn’t realize I had a smaller denomination,” she said.
“The hundred is no problem,” the clerk said, waiting.
“No, that’s okay,” she replied.
He noticed she had two one-hundred bills tucked in her wallet, both of them stained along the edges with a red dye.
I parked the cruiser in front of the truck stop and entered through the side door, into the casino section, and saw a blond woman seated at a stool in front of a video poker machine, feeding a five-dollar bill into the slot. She was dressed in jeans and a yellow cowboy shirt. She sipped at her coffee, her face reflective as she studied the row of electronic playing cards on the screen.
“I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Sheriff’s Department,” I said.
“Hi,” she said, turning her eyes on me. They were blue and full of light, without any sense of apprehension that I could see.
“You have some currency in your wallet that perhaps we need to take a look at,” I said.
“Pardon me?”
“You were going to give the clerk a hundred-dollar bill. Could I see it?”
She smiled. “Sure,” she said, and took her wallet from her purse. “Actually I have two of them. Are you looking for counterfeit money or something?”
“We let the Feds worry about stuff like that,” I said, taking the bills from her hand. “Where’d you get these?”
“At a casino in Biloxi,” she replied.
“You mind if I write down the serial numbers?” I said. “While we’re at this, can you give me some identification?”
She handed me a Florida driver’s license. “I’m living in Lafayette now. I’m not in trouble, am I?” she said. Her face was tilted up into mine, her eyes radiantly blue, sincere, not blinking.
“Can you show me something with your Lafayette address on it? I’d also like a phone number in case we have to reach you.”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said.
“Sometimes a low-yield explosive device containing marker dye is placed among bundles of currency that are stolen from banks or armored cars. When the device goes off, the currency is stained so the robbers can’t use it.”
“So maybe my hundreds are stolen?” she said, handing me a receipt for a twenty-three-hundred deposit on an apartment in Lafayette.
“Probably not. Dye ends up on money all the time. Your name is Trish Klein?”
“Yes, I just moved here from Miami.”
“Ever hear of a guy named Dallas Klein?”
Her eyes held on mine, her thoughts, whatever they were, impossible to read. “Why do you ask?” she said.
“I knew a guy by that name who flew a chopper in Vietnam. He was from Miami.”
“That was my father,” she said.
I finished copying her address and phone number off her deposit receipt and handed it back to her. “It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Klein. Your dad was a stand-up guy,” I said.
“You knew him in Vietnam?”
“I knew him,” I said. I glanced past her shoulder at the video screen. “You’ve got four kings. Welcome to Louisiana.”