“A temp I put on.”
“What kind of temp?”
“The kind that does temporary jobs.”
“A guy tried to take my head off with a cut-down yesterday. He was using double-aught bucks. Lafayette PD thinks it was a guy I helped send away about ten years ago. A retired plainclothes named Jesse Leboeuf may have sicced him on me.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“Who’s in the Caddy, Clete?”
“None of your business. Is this guy Leboeuf connected to Pierre Dupree or any of this stuff with Golightly and Grimes and Frankie Gee?”
“Leboeuf is Pierre Dupree’s father-in-law.”
“This guy is like a stopped-up toilet that keeps backing up on the floor. I think maybe we should do a home call.”
“Better listen to the rest of it,” I said.
We sat down on the gallery steps, and I told him about the shooting by Varina Leboeuf’s apartment in Bengal Gardens, the heisted freezer truck that the shooter and his driver had used, the connection between the Leboeufs and Pierre Dupree and a group called Redstone Security, and the key-chain fob cast in the miniature shape of a sawfish carried by Jesse Leboeuf.
“And there was a sawfish on that old wreck that used to drift up and down the continental shelf?” Clete said.
“I’m sure of it.”
“Leboeuf is a crypto-Nazi or something?”
“I doubt if he could spell the word,” I said.
“This isn’t connecting for me, Dave. We’re talking about the emblem on a Chris-Craft that kidnapped the Melton girl and now about a sawfish on a submarine and a key chain? And the guy with the key chain is the father-in-law of a guy who’s part Jewish?”
“That pretty much sums it up.”
“The shooter suspect, this guy Ronnie Earl Patin, is not in custody, right?”
“Right.”
“You make him for the shooter?”
“I saw him for maybe two seconds before he fired into my windshield. The Ronnie Earl Patin I sent up the road was a blimp. The guy in the freezer truck wasn’t. Who’s in the Caddy, Clete?”
“My latest squeeze. She works for the Humane Society and adopts pathetic losers like me.”
I laid my arm across his shoulders. They felt as hard and solid as boulders in a streambed. “Are you getting in over your head, partner?”
“Will you stop that? I’m not the problem here. It’s you that almost caught a faceful of buckshot. Listen to me. This deal has something to do with stolen or forged paintings. They go into private collections owned by guys who want power over the art world. They not only want to own a rare painting, they want to make sure nobody ever sees it except them. They’re like trophy killers who hide the cadavers.”
“How do you know all this?”
“It’s no secret. There’s a criminal subculture that operates in the art world. The clientele are greedy, possessive assholes and are easy to take over the hurdles. Golightly had e-mails from well-known art fences in Los Angeles and New York. I confirmed the names with NYPD and a couple of PIs in L.A.”
“It’s not just stolen artwork. It’s bigger than that,” I said.
“Like what?”
“What do you know about this Redstone Security group?”
“They’re out of Galveston and Fort Worth, I think. They did a lot of government contract work in Iraq. I’ve heard stories about their people indiscriminately killing civilians.”