CATIN WENT IN to see Helen first, then I did. “Catin says you wouldn’t back her up,” Helen said.
“Call it what you want,” I replied. “I didn’t see too many alternatives at the time.”
“Nobody is going to knock my deputies around.”
“What would you have done?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“You’d bust up an old man and involve one of your deputies in a liability suit? That’s what you’re saying?”
She picked a pen up from her desk blotter and dropped it in a can full of other pens. “Talk to her. She thinks highly of you.”
“I will.”
“While you were gone, I pulled Leboeuf’s phone records,” she said. “I haven’t charged him so far because I don’t want him lawyered up.”
“What did you find?”
“He’s made some suspicious calls, put it that way. You think he’s capable of putting a hit on a cop?”
“Jesse Leboeuf is capable of anything.”
“Get him in here,” she said.
On the way to the holding cell, I saw Catin in the corridor. “Walk with me,” I said.
“Why should I?”
I rested my hand on her shoulder. “When I was a young second lieutenant in the United States Army, I reported a major who was drunk on duty. Nothing was done about it. Later, this same major sent us down a night trail strung with Bouncing Betties and Chinese toe-poppers. We lost two men that night. I know how it feels when somebody doesn’t back your play. That wasn’t my intention when I stepped in front of Jesse Leboeuf. The real problem was not you but me. The truth is, I hate men like Jesse Leboeuf, and when I deal with them, I sometimes go across lines I shouldn’t.”
She stopped walking and turned toward me, forcing me to drop my hand from her shoulder. She looked up at me, her eyes searching mine. “Forget it,” she said.
“Sheriff Soileau wants Leboeuf in her office in a few minutes. I think he’s dirty on some level, but right now we’re not sure what. I wonder if you can do a favor for me.”
After she and I talked, she walked by herself down to the holding cell while I took a seat in a chair around the corner.
“I have to clear up something between us, Mr. Leboeuf,” she said through the bars. “I don’t like you or what you represent. You’re a racist and a misogynist, and the world would be better off without you. But as a Christian, I have to forgive you. The reason I’m able to do that is I think you’re a victim yourself. It appears you were loyal to people who are now ratting you out. That must be a terrible fate to live with. Anyway, that’s your business, not mine. Good-bye, and I hope I never see you again.”
It was a masterpiece. I waited five minutes, then unlocked Leboeuf’s cell door. “The sheriff wants to see you,” I said.
“I’m getting out?” he said, rising from the wood bench where he had been sitting.
“Are you kidding?” I said. I cuffed his wrists behind him and made sure as many people as possible witnessed his humiliation while I escorted him to Helen’s office.
“Y’all don’t have the right to do this to me,” he said.
“I don’t want to tell you how to think, but if I were you, I wouldn’t be the fall guy on this one,” I replied.
“Fall guy on what?”
“Suit yourself,” I said. I opened the door to Helen’s office and sat him down in a chair.
Helen was standing by the window, backlit by the sun’s glare off Bayou Teche. She smiled pleasantly at him. She was holding half a dozen printouts from the phone company. “Did you know that prior to Dave Robicheaux’s visit to your home yesterday, you hadn’t used your landline or your cell phone in two days?”
“I wasn’t aware of that,” he replied, his hands still cuffed behind him, the strain starting to show.
“Immediately after Detective Robicheaux left your house, you made three calls: one to the home of Pierre Dupree, one to a boat dock south of New Orleans, and one to a company called Redstone Security. Forty-five minutes later, someone tried to kill Detective Robicheaux.”