The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux 16)

“You mean a street puke may have scored millions on a simple B and E?”

“I think right now Bertrand would trade them for a bus ticket to Saskatoon.”

I WANTED TO forget about the Melancon brothers and the Rochons and Sidney Kovick, but I couldn’t get Father Jude LeBlanc off my mind. Regardless, I hadn’t brought up his name with Betsy Mossbacher. Why? Because the honest-to-God truth is law enforcement is not even law “enforcement.” We deal with problems after the fact. We catch criminals by chance and accident, either during the commission of crimes or through snitches. Because of forensic and evidentiary problems, most of the crimes recidivists commit are not even prosecutable. Most inmates currently in the slams spend lifetimes figuring out ways to come to the attention of the system. Ultimately, jail is the only place they feel safe from their own failure.

Unfortunately, the last people on our minds are the victims of crime. They become an addendum to both the investigation and the prosecution of the case, adverbs instead of nouns. Ask rape victims or people who have been beaten with gun butts or metal pipes or tied to chairs and tortured how they felt toward the system after they learned that their assailants were released on bond without the victims being notified.

I don’t believe in capital punishment, but I don’t argue with the prosecutors who support it. The mouths of the people they represent are stopped with dust. What kind of advocate would not try to give them voice? But what could I possibly do for Jude LeBlanc? He had volunteered for the Garden of Gethsemane, hadn’t he? Everybody takes his own bounce.

Those were the kinds of thoughts I walked around with in the middle of the day.

THAT EVENING, at sunset, the sky directly overhead was absolutely blue, the trees in our yard dark with shadow and pulsing with robins who were returning from the North. As we were clearing the dishes from the kitchen table, Alafair happened to glance out the window. “Clete Purcel is in our backyard,” she said.

He was sitting at the redwood table, watching a tugboat pass on the bayou. Tripod and Snuggs were both on the tabletop, enjoying the evening. Tripod was sniffing the breeze while Snuggs paced up and down, his stiffened tail bouncing off Clete’s face.

Clete lit a cigarette, something I hadn’t seen him do in months. I went outside and sat down next to him. His face was red, but I couldn’t smell booze on his breath or weed on his clothes. He read my eyes. “I drove back to the Big Sleazy with the top down,” he said.

“You in the dumps about something?”

“Courtney and I got a little greedy.”

“Wait a minute, who’s Courtney again?”

“Courtney Degravelle, the gal who lives up the street from Otis Baylor’s house, the one who saw Bertrand Melancon almost side-swipe an NOPD airboat.”

I took the cigarette from Clete’s hand, dropped it on the ground, and mashed it out.

“Dave, cut me some slack, will you?”

“Got greedy how?”

He lifted up Snuggs by his tail and bounced him up and down on his back paws. Snuggs was thick-necked and had short white hair and muscles that rippled when he walked. His ears were chewed and bent, his fur threaded with pink scars. He was profligate in his romantic life and proprietary about his yard. He fought ferocious battles to safeguard Tripod and often slept on the roof at night to make sure no interlopers violated his and Tripod’s turf. Clete was the only person he would allow to take liberties with him, I suspect because Snuggs knew a brother in arms when he saw one.

“Courtney says she saw a young black guy prowling in the alley behind her house a couple of weeks ago. He was pulling something out of a rafter in a garage. She didn’t think a lot about it until I told her I believed Bertrand Melancon stashed Kovick’s goods somewhere in that alley before he took his brother to the hospital.”

“You told her all this?”

“Hey, she’s trying to help. She called me yesterday and says she found some soaked bills in her hedge. Not just a few, bundles of them. I think Bertrand dropped them in the water and they floated down to Courtney’s.”

“How much are we talking about?”

“Seventeen grand and change.”

“You and Courtney were going to keep it?”

“I thought about it. What was I going to do, take it to Sidney? What if it wasn’t his? Think he was going to admit that? ‘Not mine, Purcel. You keep it because you’re a great guy.’”

“So what did you do?”

“I had a funny feeling about the bills. If they were Sidney’s, why would he keep them in his house? Even if the money was hot, he could launder it through a South American bank. So I took a few bills to Fat Tommy Whalen, remember him, Tommy Orca, used to fence smash-and-grab jewelry and watches for the Carlucci crew? Tommy started going over the bills with a magnifying glass, making all these bubbling sounds of approval, until finally I say, ‘You turning queer for dead presidents?’

“‘Yeah, “queer” is the word, Purcel,’ he says. ‘the work is beautiful, but it’s queer. Who did it?’

“Can you believe that? The street pukes not only had the bad luck to rob and destroy Sidney Kovick’s house, the money they got out of it is counterfeit.”

His account had been long and circuitous, which was always Clete’s method of avoiding an admission of some kind.

“Back to the subject,” I said.