“Maximo Soza was a sadist.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“The guy in the ice cream truck,” I said.
“Ask me about Miami, I know all the names. I don’t know all the names around here.”
“I thought you were an expert on New Orleans.”
His cheek, yellow and blue from my knuckles, quivered like jelly. “This is the deal I need. I keep my badge. Nothing goes in my jacket on this. You help me with Helen, I’ll give you some information you can’t get from anybody else.”
How do you react to perps or corrupt cops who try to bargain? As Alafair once said about her dealings with venal people in the film industry: “It’s easy. You hang up on them. They can’t stand it.”
“Did you hear me?” Labiche said.
“Sorry, I drifted off.”
“What is it with you? I want to be friends. I didn’t file charges.”
“I think you wanted me to attack you.”
He adjusted his tie and made a snuffing sound. “Who knows why anybody does anything?”
“Did you ever destroy evidence or steal it from an evidence locker?” I asked.
“Where’d you come up with that one? People are getting killed, and you’re talking about evidence lockers.”
“Everybody dies,” I said.
His face drained as though he were aging before my eyes.
“You all right?” I said.
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be all right? Why’d you say that?”
“No reason, Spade. Have a good one.”
I turned my back on him and resumed washing the boat. Mon Tee Coon jumped from one tree limb to the next, shaking leaves on my head. When I looked up, Labiche was gone.
* * *
JUST OUTSIDE LAFAYETTE, a man someone said looked like an egg with features painted on it turned off the service road in a Mazda and parked in front of a rental storage locker. He fitted a key into the lock and pulled up the door, waving to anyone nearby. He removed a cardboard box overflowing with folded clothes that still had price tags and placed the box into the trunk of the car. He did the same with a large and seemingly heavy rifle case. He was almost hairless and wore red tennis shoes that were caked with mud. While he loaded the car, he sucked on a lollipop.
A little boy wandered next to him. The man in tennis shoes patted him on the head. “What’s your name, little fella?”
Before the child could answer, his mother jerked him away.
“Why’d you do that?” the man said to her.
“He’s not supposed to talk to strangers.”
The man took her measure, his face crumpling. “I don’t think I like you.”
She hurried to her car with the child, looking nervously over her shoulder. The man drove into a trailer court inside an oak grove on the far side of the service road, and ate a sack lunch on a picnic table with people from the trailers. Smoke drifted from barbecue grills into the trees. A ball game was being broadcast from a radio placed on a windowsill. The man in tennis shoes flagged down an ice cream truck and bought Popsicles for any kid who wanted one. Then he walked on his hands and did flips across the grass, filling the children with delight.
* * *
THAT EVENING, JUJU Ladrine and Pookie Domingue stopped at a fruit and watermelon stand located not far from the drawbridge at Nelson’s Canal, a historical site that few cared about and where retreating Confederates tried to stop Nathaniel Banks’s invasion into southwestern Louisiana in the spring of 1863.