At 4:26 A.M. the first caller reported in again. “They just drove a SUV t’rew my li’l garden. There’s still one man out there. He’s getting something out of the back of his car. When y’all coming?”
At 4:31 A.M. the second caller made his next report on his cell phone. So far he had not identified himself, but he did not seem to consider that a problem. “This is me,” he said. “I’m in my car and following them guys up the dirt road. I’m gonna fix their ass, me.”
“Disengage from what you’re doing, sir,” the female dispatcher said. “Do not try to stop these men. Help is on the way.”
“What’s gonna happen to that po’ man?” the caller said.
At 4:33 A.M. the woman caller was back on the line. “The man getting something out of the back of his car? What name they got for that? The thing he was getting, I mean. Soldiers wear it on their back. He walked right up to the garage apartment and pointed it just like you do a hose. There ain’t nothing left. Even the trees are burning. The leaves are coming down on my li’l house.”
“You’re not making sense, ma’am. Unless you’re talking about a flamethrower,” the dispatcher said.
The last 911 call on the tape was from the man who had followed the abductors in his car. “They got on a white boat just sout’ of Des Allemands,” he said. “I’m standing here on the dock. They’re headed down toward the Gulf. It was a tennis ball. It’s right here by my foot. A toot’ is stuck in it, and there’s blood on the toot’. Where was y’all?”
I HAD REPORTED my call from Chad Patin ten seconds after the intruders broke into his garage apartment, but my best efforts had not saved him. After Helen and I finished listening to the 911 recordings transmitted to us by the St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Department, she stared out her office window, her thumbs hooked in her belt. Her back looked as hard as iron against her shirt. “The guy running this operation is named Angelle?”
“Or Angel.”
“And living on an island somewhere?”
“That’s what Chad Patin said.”
“And one of his guys has a flamethrower? This stuff is from outer space. What do you think it’s really about?”
“Money. A lot of it. Drugs, prostitutes, maybe stolen or forged paintings. At least those things are part of it.”
“The perps don’t pop cops over drugs and girls and stolen property,” she replied.
“I think it has some connection to neo-Nazis.”
“I don’t believe that for a minute. That’s just crazy, Dave.”
“Okay, let’s look at another angle. What is the one subject around here that nobody brings up in a negative way, that no local journalist goes near? A subject so sensitive that people will walk away from you if they sense the wrong words are about to come out of your mouth? What enterprise could that possibly be?”
“Tell me.”
“No, you tell me,” I said.
She manufactured an expression that was meant to be dismissive. I didn’t like to look at it. It made me feel embarrassed for Helen, and it caused me to think less of her, a person I had always admired.
“You’re too hard on people, bwana,” she said. “This is a poor state with a one-resource economy. Would you really like to go back to the good old days? I don’t think any of us would like living under the old lifestyle of ‘tote that barge and lift that bale.’”
“What’s the word we’re avoiding here? What is the sacred space that none of us track our irreverent shoes into?”
“The country wants cheap gasoline. They don’t care how they get it. So the state of Louisiana is everybody’s fuck. What else do you want me to say?”
“Nothing. You just said it all. You know what this case is about, so stop pretending you don’t.”
“You’re not going to talk to me like that,” she said.
“Ask yourself why this conversation offends you. Because I insulted you or I pissed on the sacred cow.”
“Get out, Dave.”
She had never spoken to me like that, at least not in that tone. I didn’t care. I was angrier than she was. No, that’s the wrong word. I was disappointed in Helen, and I felt let down in a way I couldn’t describe. I couldn’t shake the funk I was in for the rest of the day.
THAT SAME AFTERNOON, Clete Purcel sat in his swivel chair in his office and through the back window watched the rain dimple the bayou and the fog puff in clouds from under the bridge and the lights of cars crossing the steel grid. His office was housed inside a nineteenth-century two-story building constructed of soft brick, with an iron colonnade over the sidewalk and a patio in back that he had decorated with potted banana plants and a bottlebrush tree and a spool table inset with a beach umbrella under which he often ate his lunch or read his mail in the morning.
The drizzle was unrelenting, and he was confined to his office and the endless flow of squalor and chicanery that went across his desk blotter, not to mention the worm’s-eye view of the world that was the operational raison d’être of almost every client who came through his door.