Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux 21)

“You know Babette Latiolais? She works at the bar-and-grill.”

“What about her?”

“She call you?”

He set the mug down. “Yeah, she did. What do you want to know?”

“She’s a nice lady, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. Nice. Good-looking tits. Probably a sweet piece of barbecue. What else you want to know?”

“Why don’t you show some respect?”

“I don’t know what it is with you, Robicheaux. You’ve got a two-by-four with nails in it shoved up your ass every time I see you.”

“She saw you with a guy who sounds a lot like Kevin Penny. She doesn’t know Penny. She has no connection with Penny. She didn’t dime you about Penny. She simply described a man who looks like him. You were talking to him in the parking lot outside the bar-and-grill where she works. What about it? Is Penny a confidential informant?”

“Number one, I never heard of this guy. Number two, if he was my snitch, I wouldn’t meet him in a public place.”

“I’m glad you’ve cleared all that up, Spade. I heard you were undercover in Liberty City. How’d you get along with the Jamaicans?”

“Fine. They love the color green.”

“You ever see their transporters land in the Glades?”

“A few times.”

“Did you know the guys transporting coke on I-10?”

“Most of them were blacks the Colombians used like Kleenex.”

“They sure did a number on us. In three years this whole area was full of

dope. New Orleans became the murder capital of America.”

“What’s your point?”

“I was just thinking about the systemic nature of the problem. It’s like a virus. Those women who were killed in Jeff Parish all had some relationship to the drug culture. The sales are five-and-dime stuff. All those lives were snuffed out for chump change.”

He toasted me with his cup before he drank, his fingers spread across Wonder Woman’s patriotically dressed body. “Close the door on your way out, will you?”

Be seeing you later, you lying motherfucker, I thought.

* * *

BUT LABICHE HAD little to do with the origins of my anger. Maybe he was on a pad, maybe not. I suspected he was a sociopath. Every organization or institution has sociopaths. The objective is always power. People like Labiche function because they’re useful idiots.

Prostitution and drug trafficking cannot exist in a community without sanction. Vice is symbiotic and, like a leech, must attach itself to a cooperative host. That’s not hard to do. Once it’s established, digging it out of the tissue takes years, maybe generations. The majority of victims are people no one cares about. Even though the street sales seem nickel-and-dime in nature, the aggregate can be enormous. The coke is stepped on half a dozen times before it reaches the projects; the skag might have roach powder in it; the speed comes out of labs at Motel 6. But the number of addicts always grows; it never declines. The health and psychiatric problems of the afflicted are pushed off on social services. The big bonus for the dealers is the female trade. They’re compliant and easily managed; they provide freebies for corrupt cops; they’re never more than one day away.

Since Prohibition, vice on America’s southern rim has been run by individuals and families in Tampa, Miami, New Orleans, and Galveston. When Huey Long gave the state of Louisiana to Frank Costello, slot and racehorse machines appeared in every hotel lobby, drugstore, and saloon in the state, followed by an invasion of pimps, hookers, and even commercial fishers (they worked for the Mob in New Orleans and drained the lakes of crappie and sold them by the hundreds of thousands in Chicago). The system was like a pyramid. Everything at the bottom contributed to the top of the structure. In the life, it’s called piecing off the action. A working girl who didn’t understand that could get a cupful of acid in the face. I knew a black girl who was soaked with gasoline by two pimps and set on fire.

The minions at the bottom of the organization are myriad and need lead shoes on a windy day. But there is always one person at the top, and only one. In this case, the head guy was a steaming pile of gorilla shit known as Tony Nine Ball. All the elements in this story started with Fat Tony and the Civil War sword he planned to give to Levon Broussard, probably to involve Levon in one of Tony’s movie productions.

I told Helen I was checking out a cruiser and also where I was going with it.

“What for?” she said, hardly able to conceal the ennui in her voice.

“I think the deaths of the Jeff Davis Eight are indirectly on Nemo. I think the dope in Iberia Parish is, too.”