p; His eyes looked at me quizzically.
“If you made a big score at Sidney’s, he’s going to take it back from you,” I said. “He’ll use whatever method that works.”
Eddy tried to speak, then choked on his saliva. I leaned over him, my ear close to his mouth. His breath smelled like the grave, his words breaking damply against my cheek.
“Say that again.”
“We took a boat. That’s all,” he said.
“From Sidney Kovick?”
“In the Lower Nine. We just wanted to stay alive. Ain’t been in no house uptown.”
I placed my business card on his chest. “Good luck to you, partner. I think you’ll need it,” I said.
When I got back home that night, I slept like the dead.
AT SUNRISE I ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and sliced bananas and drank coffee and hot milk on the back steps. The mist was gray in the live oaks and pecan trees, and both Tripod, our three-legged raccoon, and Snuggs, our cat, ate sardines out of a can by my foot. Molly opened the screen door and sat down beside me. She was still wearing her house robe. She ticked her nails on the back of my neck. “Alafair spent the night at the Munsons’,” she said.
“Really?” I said.
She gazed down the slope at the bayou. The gold and red four-o’clocks were still open in the shadows at the base of the tree trunks. Out in the mist I could hear a heavy fish flopping in the lily pads. “Got time to go inside?” I asked.
AT 10:00 A.M. Helen Soileau came into my office. “How’d you make out yesterday?” she said.
“I wrote up everything I found and faxed it to the FBI in Baton Rouge. There’s a copy in your box. I also talked to an NOPD guy on the phone. I don’t think this one has legs on it.”
“You don’t think Otis Baylor shot these guys?”
“His neighbor seemed willing to finger him, but I had the sense the neighbor had some frontal-lobe damage himself. I think bodies are going to be showing up under the rubble and mud for months. Who’s going to be losing sleep over a couple of looters who caught a high-powered round while they were destroying people’s homes?”
“All right, let’s move on. The Rec Center at City Park is full of evacuees. We need to get some of them to Houston if we can. Iberia General and Dauterive Hospital are busting at the seams. It’s worse in Lafayette. I tell you, Streak, I’ve seen some shit in my life, but nothing like this.”
I couldn’t argue with her. In fact, I didn’t even want to comment.
“What did you think of Lyndon Johnson?” she asked.
“Before or after I got to Vietnam?”
“When Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans in ’65, Johnson flew into town and went to a shelter full of people who had been evacuated from Algiers. It was dark inside and people were scared and didn’t know what was going to happen to them. He shined a flashlight in his face and said, ‘My name is Lyndon Baines Johnson. I’m your goddamn president and I’m here to tell you my office and the people of the United States are behind you.’ Not bad, huh?”
But I wasn’t listening. There was a detail about the Otis Baylor investigation I hadn’t mentioned to Helen, because she didn’t like complexities and in particular she didn’t like them when they fell outside our jurisdiction.
“I stopped by Sidney Kovick’s house yesterday and had an informal chat with him. The looters ripped the Sheetrock and lathwork and plaster from most of his walls and ceilings.”
“Score one for the pukes.”
“I think they took Sidney down in a major way. Sidney has never had an IRS beef. It wouldn’t surprise me if his walls had been loaded with cash.”
“So what?”
“He was trying to find out which hospital the quadriplegic looter is in.”
“And?”
“The quadriplegic is at Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge. I tried to warn him, but he’s not a listener.”
Helen pulled at an earlobe. “Bwana?”