Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

I leaned forward on my desk and picked up a paper clip from the ink blotter, then dropped it. "Dr. Parks, I'm sorry for your loss. Your daughter had a history. It's one a lot of kids have today. But the fact won't go away that she'd had her license suspended previously and she was on probation for possession of Ecstacy. Was she ever in any kind of treatment program?"

"How dare you?" the wife said.

"How about it, sir?" I said to her husband.

"You're scapegoating my daughter, you sonofabitch," he said.

"We're done here," I said. I folded my hands on my desk blotter and avoided eye contact with them.

"We'll be back," the father said.

"I have no doubt about that," I replied.

At mid-morning I walked down the street, across the railroad tracks, and had coffee and a piece of pastry at Lagniappe Too on Main. When I got back to the department a black woman in blue slacks, a beige shirt, and polished black shoes was waiting for me by the dispatcher's cage. She carried a zippered satchel under her arm.

What was her name? Andrepont? No, Arceneaux. Clotile Arce-neaux. Clete had said she looked like a black swizzle stick with a cherry stuck on the end. He should have been a writer rather than a chaser of bail skips, I thought.

"Got a minute?" she said.

"For you, anytime," I said.

She walked with me to my office. I closed the door behind her. "N.O.P.D. hasn't busted you back to meter maid, have they?" I said.

"Thought I might show you some photos of an interesting guy who just got to town," she said.

"You want to tell me who you are?"

She smiled at me with her eyes and removed a manilla folder from her satchel. "You ever see this guy before?" she asked.

There were four black-and-white photographs inside the folder, three taken with a zoom lens, one taken in the garish light of a Toronto booking room. The man in the photographs made me think of a ring attendant at a boxing gym or a horse groom at the track. "Nope, I don't know him," I said.

"His name is Max Coll. He's been questioned or been a suspect in thirty-two homicides. Not one conviction. Interpol thinks he worked for the IRA but they're not sure. Miami P.D. says he's freelance and jobs out for the Mob. We had a tail on him yesterday, but he shook it. We think he showed up at your friend Father Dolan's."

"Think?" I said.

"A detective talked to Father Dolan. Seems like Father Dolan has got us mixed up with the bad guys," she said.

"Why you showing me this stuff?"

"Hate to see your friend get clipped 'cause he's a poor listener. That goes for you, too, handsome."

"You're with the G?"

"We think the priest was lucky yesterday. What we can't figure is why. Max Coll is a lot of things but fuck-up isn't one of them," she said.

"You're DEA?"

She looked up into my face, her head tilted at an angle, her teeth white behind her grin. "I heard you had a cinder block for a head," she said.

"Have you had lunch yet?" I said.

"Some people are all work and no play. That's me, Robicheaux. Max Coll uses a silencer, sometimes an ice pick. You heard it first from your ex-meter maid friend at N.O.P.D."

"Right," I said.

She stuck a business card in my shirt pocket and hit me on the hip with her satchel. "See you around, darling'," she said.

I walked with her to the front door of the building and watched her get in her automobile and drive away. Helen Soileau was standing behind me.