“Yes. I didn’t know about the boy.”
“I read you loud and clear, partner. Know anything about Kevin Penny, Smiley?”
“He was a bad man.”
“You didn’t help him do the Big Exit, did you?”
“You’re trying to trick me.”
“Not me. I’m not that smart. You’re like a shadow. You come and go, and nobody has a clue. Who was your artist friend?”
“He was my friend for a while. Then he wasn’t my friend anymore.”
“Could we work out a way to communicate when both of us have more time? I’m pretty tied up right now.”
“I can come by your house.”
He had me. I could almost see him grinning. “You’re calling the shots. Did you ever hear Louie Prima and Sam Butera play at the Dream Room on Bourbon?”
“You want to know how old I am? Remember fifteen years ago when a house was torn down on Calliope and a body fell out of the wall? It had been in there long enough not to smell anymore. This man was bad to somebody who trusted him and got walled up with his paintbrushes stuffed in his mouth. He was a very bad boy. Bye-bye.”
The line went dead. I looked blankly at Helen through the glass. I had witnessed two deaths by electrocution in the Red Hat House at Angola. On both occasions I’d felt that I was watching an element in the human gene pool for which there was no remedy, and I mean the desire to kill, either on the part of individuals or the state. I took a Kleenex from a drawer in my desk and cleared my throat and spat in it, then dropped it into the waste can.
* * *
AT NOON, I took Clete to lunch at Bon Creole out on East St. Peter Street. We ordered fried-oyster po’boys and sat at a table under a blue-and-silver marlin mounted on the wall.
“You couldn’t make the trace?” he said.
“The signal was probably relayed off two or three towers,” I said.
“You checked out the story about the artist in the wall?”
“His name was Pierre Louviere. Evidently, he was an eccentric guy who hung out with a weird crowd in the Quarter.”
“How’d he go out?”
“Not easy.”
“You think Smiley did Penny?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He would have said so. He doesn’t have any guilt about the people he kills.”
“Psychopaths lie for the sake of lying,” Clete said.
“He was obviously bothered about putting a bomb in a car that would kill a child.”
The waitress put our food on the table. She looked uncomfortable, obviously having overheard our conversation.
“Don’t pay attention to us,” I said.
She tried to smile but had a hard time with it. She walked away, blinking.
“Go on,” Clete said to me.