"Jericho Johnny put you on to me?" he said.
"Your name came up in the conversation," I replied.
"What's that tell you?"
"Excuse me?"
"The number-one button man in New Orleans giving up a made guy to a cop? The old days are gone, Robicheaux. Live wit' it," he said.
When I got home Sunday evening, I called Molly Boyle, but she was not home. I went to bed early, then was awakened by the phone ringing inside the sound of rain. It was Dana Magelli, an old friend at NOPD. "Did you and Clete Purcel question a kid by the name of Holly Blankenship, a runaway from Iowa?" he asked.
"Yesterday?"
"Right. Her pimp says y'all talked to her at a McDonald's."
"She didn't use that last name," I said.
"She's not using any name now," Dana said.
"What?"
"Her body was dumped in a trash pit out by Chalmette in the early a.m. The guy who strangled her used a coat hanger. You working on the Baton Rouge serial killer case?"
"Yeah, but that's not why we were in town," I said, trying to shake the image of a hapless, overweight girl murdered and thrown away like yesterday's coffee grinds.
"You there?" Dana said.
"I was trying to get a lead on a guy I had to shoot. His name was Bob Cobb."
"Yeah, I know all about that. Funny the girl ends up dead right after she talks to you. Must be just coincidence, huh? Why would anyone kill a girl because she talked to a cop? Her pimp gave you permission, didn't he?" he said.
chapter FOURTEEN
Early Monday morning I was in Helen's office. "There was semen in the girl?" she said.
"That's what Dana said," I replied.
"So let's see what their lab says. In the meantime, there's no connection between her homicide and you being in New Orleans, none at least that we can see. You reading me on this?"
"No," I said.
"We're buried in open cases. Our backlog looks like the national debt. Don't stir up things with NOPD. If they want your help, they'll call. That translates into mind your own business."
She stared at me steadily, biting at a hangnail, waiting to see if her words had taken effect.
"The girl got it on with Bad Texas Bob, a guy who contracted to kill me. The girl talks to me, then she's dead. What's the point in saying there's no connection?"
Helen removed a tiny piece of skin from her tongue and dropped it in the wastebasket.
I went home for lunch. My next-door neighbor was Miss Ellen Deschamps. She was eighty-two years old, a graduate of a girls' finishing school in Mississippi, and she lived in the two-story, oak-shaded frame house she had been born in. Miss Ellen had never married, and every afternoon at three served tea on her upstairs veranda for herself and her older sister or friends who were invited by written invitation.
Miss Ellen was devoted to gardening and feeding stray cats. Each spring her flower beds and window boxes were bursting with color; her oaks were surrounded by caladiums that looked individually hand-painted. Cats sat or slept on every stone and wood surface in her yard. But Miss Ellen had another obsession as well. She monitored every aspect of life on East Main and wrote polite notes on expensive stationery to her neighbors when they didn't cut their lawns, take in their empty trash cans in timely fashion, trim their hedges, or paint their houses with colors she considered tasteful.
With Miss Ellen on the job, which was twenty-four hours a day, we didn't have to worry about a Neighborhood Crime Watch program.
When I pulled into the drive, she was weeding a flower bed in the lee of her house. She got to her feet and called out to me: "Mr. Robicheaux, so glad I saw you. Did you find out who that man was?"
"Pardon?" I said.