The Tin Roof Blowdown (Dave Robicheaux 16)

“Maybe just flowers. Look, Clete Purcel and I told Sidney we knew he had been stashing counterfeit in his house. He said something to the effect Clete and I were in over our heads.”

“What does Purcel have to do with this?”

“Not a lot.”

“Some counterfeit money showed up in a Morgan City mailbox. The engraving and paper are impressive. Is this the money we’re talking about?”

“It could be.”

“You tell Purcel to stay out of federal business.”

The purpose of my call was slipping away, and I think that’s the way Betsy wanted it. I didn’t take the bait. “Why would Kovick tell us we’re in over our heads?” I asked.

“I think he’s convinced himself he’s a patriot defending his homeland. Personally I think he’s psychotic. An agent in Mississippi believes Kovick’s goons poured the body of Kovick’s neighbor into the foundation of a casino in Biloxi.”

“You’re losing me, Betsy.”

“The Taliban funds al Qaeda with the sale of heroin. You don’t think they’re capable of other criminal enterprises?”

I still didn’t know what she was talking about and I wasn’t going to guess. “I need a favor from you,” I said. “A guy named Ronald Bledsoe may try to harm my daughter. He claims to be a PI out of Key West, but Tallahassee has almost nothing on him, except the fact he got a license through a bail-bonds office about ten years back. Neither does the NCIC. I’m convinced he’s a dangerous and depraved man, the kind who leaves shit-prints somewhere. But so far I haven’t found them.”

“Have you run him through AFIS?”

“Not yet.”

“Give it a try. In the meantime, I’ll do what I can. What did your daughter do to this guy?”

“Busted his nose and lips and knocked out one of his teeth.”

“He’s pissed over that?”

But jokes about Ronald Bledsoe weren’t funny.

THREE DAYS EARLIER a Guatemalan illegal had been stripping cypress planks off a wall inside the entranceway of a historic New Orleans home. The workman made eight dollars an hour and feared civil authority in this country and his own. But he feared losing his job even more. The contractor who had hired him specialized in the restoration of historical properties. The contractor also made a sizable income by salvaging colonial-era brick, heart-pine floors, brass hinges and door knockers, square-head nails, milk-glass doorknobs, claw-foot bathtubs, iron wall hooks for cook pots, and grapeshot and .58-caliber minié balls embedded in housefronts during the White League takeover of New Orleans in 1874. Every item with possible resale value at a teardown or refurbish job went into a pile.

The workman from Guatemala sank his crowbar into a strip of rotten cypress and peeled it and a shower of Formosa termites onto the floor. Amid the sawdust and insects and spongelike wood he saw a blunted and bent metal-jacketed bullet, no bigger than half the size of his little finger. He blew the dust off it and examined its torn surfaces. “Hey, boss, what you wanta do wit’ dis?” he asked.

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HELEN CALLED ME into her office just before quitting time. Raindrops had started to fall on her window and I could see trees bending in the wind by the cemetery. She was leaning forward on her desk, her chin propped on her fist. It was the kind of body English and opaque manner she used when she was preparing to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

“I just got off the phone with Betsy Mossbacher. She’ll be here in an hour and a half,” she said. “She has a federal warrant on Otis Baylor’s house.”

“I talked to her this morning. She didn’t say anything about coming to New Iberia.”

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; “She just got the warrant. Last week some repairmen working across the street from Baylor’s house in New Orleans dug a rifle slug out of a wall. The contractor had heard about the Melancon-Rochon shooting and called NOPD. They passed it on to the FBI. The round is a thirty-aught-six. It came through a ventilated shutter and a glass pane behind it and embedded between two planks. She says it’s in real good shape, considering the fact it may have gone through two people. Anyway, the Feds are jumping on it before word gets back to Baylor.”

“So?”

“You need to be there when they serve the warrant.”

“They don’t need me to serve a search warrant.”

“This is our parish. We cooperate with outside agencies, but we don’t abandon our own jurisdiction to them. Get with the program, Streak.”

I ATE A SANDWICH in my office and met Betsy and another agent in the parking lot at 7:00 p.m. The sky was bright with rain in the west, the live oaks along Main a dark green as we drove out of town toward Jeanerette. I was sitting in the back of their vehicle, feeling like a hangnail, a perfunctory witness to the scapegoating of a man who had been caught up in events that were either beyond his control or his ability to bear them.