“With your permission, I’m going to send someone out there to pick it up,” I said.
“Do whatever you want,” he replied.
I got the exact location of the trash can from him and called the Acadiana Crime Lab. After I got off the phone, I looked at Otis for a long time. “I wish you had told me this before,” I said. “Your lack of cooperation hasn’t been good for any of us, Mr. Baylor, least of all for yourself. If I can share a little bit of police wisdom with you, it’s a fool’s errand to take other people’s weight.”
“I’m not up on police terminology. You want to rephrase that?”
“When we allow others to victimize us in order to prove our own worth, we invite a cancer into our lives.”
“We through here, Mr. Robicheaux?”
I felt my old enemy, anger, flare in my chest. My daughter and wife had almost lost their lives the previous day and I had been forced to shoot and kill their assailant. Regardless of what he had suffered himself, I was tired of Otis Baylor’s recalcitrant attitudes.
He was studying my face, perhaps finally aware that other people have their limits.
“No, we’re not through. And it’s Detective Robicheaux. Why do you think we came down on you with both feet?” I said.
“Bad luck?”
“Because your neighbor gave you up.”
“Tom Claggart?”
“He said the night the looters were shot, you made a statement about ‘hanging black ivory on the wall.’ You remember saying that?”
“Yeah, I do. But I don’t blame Tom for telling you that. He’s a simpleminded man who wants to please authority. He went to the Virginia Military Institute or the Citadel or one of those military colleges. I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”
It has to do with the fact you’re unteachable, sir, I thought. But I kept my feelings to myself.
MY GUESS WAS that Ronald Bledsoe had already left town. Wrong again. Two other detectives went to his motor court early Monday morning and were told by the manager that Mr. Bledsoe could be found at an assisted-care facility next door to Iberia General.
One of the detectives, Lukas Cormier, called me on his cell phone from the parking lot outside the facility. He had a bachelor’s degree in business administration, with a minor in psychology, and was a good investigator. “You want to come over here?” he said.
“I’m supposed to be on the desk till IA cuts me loose,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“When we went inside, this guy who looks like he was squirted out of a toothpaste tube was reading a Harry Potter book aloud to a roomful of Alzheimer patients. He goes, ‘Hi, my name is Ronald. What’s yours?’”
“What’s his alibi for yesterday?”
“He says he was in Barnes and Noble in Lafayette, buying books for his Alzheimer friends.”
“Does he have any purchase receipts?”
“No, I asked him.”
“How about the Humvee? You got anything on it?”
“Zip. We tried all the rentals and talked to a couple of dea
lerships. But without a tag number I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere on the vehicle. You want us to bring him in?”
“No, let him think he’s slid one past us.”
“He’s got no sheet at all? Mental institutions, stuff like that?”
“None. Bledsoe is a blank. Not so much as a traffic violation.”
There was a beat and I knew what was coming.