A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“You were a mechanic, Marcel.”

“No, I got caught up in a gang war in Brooklyn. Then there was a li’l trouble in New Orleans. But I never clipped nobody for hire.”

“Why are you in chains?”

“A Mexican got shanked in the chow line. I was in the vicinity.”

“You didn’t do it?”

“I’d joog a guy when I’m about to go home?”

r /> “Yeah, if he got in your face, you would,” I said.

The sun was a dull red in the west, and I could see dust devils spinning out of a cotton field, breaking apart in the wind. Six mounted gun bulls were silhouetted like black cutouts against a horizon that could have been the lip of the Abyss. “Didn’t you work for the Balangie family?”

“Briefly.”

“I ran into Isolde Balangie last night. At an amusement pier. She was there to see Johnny Shondell.”

“Get the fuck outta here.”

“Teenage girls aren’t drawn to guys like Johnny Shondell?”

“The Balangie and the Shondell families get along like shit on ice cream.”

“What if I told you Isolde Balangie was being delivered to Mark Shondell?”

“?‘Delivered,’ like to be deflowered?”

“I don’t think she’ll be working in the kitchen,” I said.

I stood up and rattled the door for the screw. Marcel blew out his breath. “I need a sponsor if I’m gonna get out-of-state parole.”

“I have a serious character defect, Marcel,” I said. “I don’t like people using me.”

“Your mother probably got knocked up by a whiskey bottle, but you’re on the square. You know the people on the parole board.”

“You need to rethink how you talk to other people, Marcel,” I said.

“Come on, Dave. I’m telling you the troot’. I want to go straight.”

“What’s the information?”

“Sit down.”

“No.”

The room was growing hotter. I could smell his odor, the dirt and cotton poison, the sweaty socks that probably hung on a line in his cell and never dried, the fermented pruno that was a constant cause of inmate incontinence.

“I ain’t asking much,” he said.

I haven’t been honest. I wasn’t there out of humanity or duty. I was there because I wanted to believe that evil has an explainable origin, one that has nothing to do with unseen forces or even a cancerous flaw in the midst of Creation, and that even the worst of men could reclaim the light they had banished from their souls. I retook my seat. His eyes resembled hundreds of tiny blue-green chips of glass.

“New Orleans was the staging area for the hit on John Kennedy,” he said.

“Old news,” I said. “No, not just old. Ancient.”

“I knew one of the guys in on it. He was an enforcer for the Mob in Brooklyn. His street name was Chicken Cacciatore. I ain’t putting you on. He got mixed up with the CIA and some blackmail schemes in Miami.”