Last Car to Elysian Fields (Dave Robicheaux 13)

"No maybe about it, Streak. Every ounce of meth going into the projects has Sammy's greasy prints all over it. He makes me think of a giant snail trailing slime all over the city."

"You're one in a million, Cletus."

He looked at me uncertainly, a pocket of air in one cheek, then roared up the ramp onto I-10. We poured it on all the way back to New Iberia, like two over-the-hill low riders who no longer look at calendars or watch the faces of clocks.

On Monday morning Mack Bertrand called me from the lab and said the shoes we had removed from Dr. Parks's house were not the source of the leather scrapings found under the fingernails of the dead daiquiri vendor, Leon Hebert. A few minutes later Helen came into my office and I told her of the lab's findings.

"So where does that leave us?" she said.

"A revenge killing of some kind. The daiquiri cup stuffed down the victim's throat indicates a high level of rage. Dr. Parks had motivation."

"You don't sound convinced," she said.

"Parks has so much anger I doubt he'd deny killing the man if he did it."

"How about this guy Guillot?"

"He's a poster child for obnoxiousness. But why would he shoot someone and throw the weapon, registered in his name, on the side of the road?"

"We're talking about middle-class people, Streak. Career perps are predictable. Dagwood and Blondie aren't."

Beautiful.

But I believed there were other factors at work in this case that were more complex than a simple act of vengeance. It was too much for coincidence that Castille Lejeune's corporation owned the daiquiri store where Leon Hebert had been murdered and that the murder weapon belonged to Will Guillot, one of his employees.

But Helen was right. We were dealing with middle-class people who didn't have the proclivities and personal associations of career criminals, most of whom were basket cases who left a paper trail through the system from birth to the grave.

Why had Theodosha Flannigan been afraid to climb through the fence surrounding the fish pond on her father's property? Why did Castille Lejeune say he had no memory of using his influence to get Junior Crudup off the levee gang at Angola? People denied evil deeds, not good ones.

And how about the suicide of Theodosha's psychiatrist? If she was his regular patient, why wasn't her case file in his records?

I long ago became convinced that the most reliable source for arcane and obscure and seemingly unobtainable information does not lie with government or law enforcement agencies. Apparently neither the CIA nor the military intelligence apparatus inside the Pentagon had even a slight inkling of the Soviet Union's impending collapse, right up to the moment the Kremlin's leaders were trying to cut deals for their memoirs with New York publishers. Or if a person really wishes a lesson in the subjective nature of official information, he can always call the IRS and ask for help with his tax forms, then call back a half hour later and ask the same questions to a different representative.

So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history, and literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing?

After lunch I drove to the city library on Main and asked the reference librarian to find what she could on Junior Crudup.

She looked thoughtfully into space. She had a round face and wore glasses with pink frames and parted her hair down the middle. "I have a history of blues and swamp pop here. That might be helpful," she said.

"I've already used that. This guy disappeared from Angola about 1951. There's no record anywhere of what happened to him."

"Wait here a minute," she said.

I watched her moving around in the stacks, sliding a book off a shelf here and there, then clicking on a computer keyboard. A few minutes later she waved for me to join her at a back table, where she had spread open several books that contained mention of Junior Crudup.

"I looked at those already, I'm afraid," I said.

"Well, there's a photographic collection in Washington, D.C." that might be worth looking at," she said.

"Pardon?"

"In the forties and fifties a photographer who once worked with Walker Evans photographed convicts all over the South. He had a penchant for black musicians. He tracked some of their careers for decades. There are hundreds of photographs in his collection."

"Is he still alive?"

"No, he died twenty years or so ago."

"How do we get a hold of the collection?"