Dana started to interrupt, but Clete stopped him. “Hear me out. I deserved to get fired and probably worse. Dave Robicheaux didn’t. Y’all treated him rotten, and you’ve never owned up to it.”
“I didn’t hear Dave complain.”
“That’s because he’s stand-up. And because he’s stand-up doesn’t make y’all right.”
“I want to talk with you about something else,” Dana said. “About the night Waylon Grimes and Bix Golightly got smoked.”
“What about it?”
“I think you called in the shots-fired.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I listened to the tape. Did you have a pencil between your teeth?”
“What did you want to tell me?” Clete asked.
“Maybe there was more than one shooter involved.”
“Say that again.”
“Bix Golightly got it with a .22. So did Waylon Grimes. But the rounds didn’t come from the same gun. Here’s the rest of it. Whoever popped Frankie Giacano in the Baton Rouge bus depot used the same gun that killed Waylon Grimes.”
Clete had been preparing to leave Dana’s office, but he leaned back in his chair and stared out the window at the fronds of the palm trees rattling in the wind, without seeming to see them. “So two killers were working together. What’s the big deal in that?”
“Maybe they were, maybe not. The coroner says Waylon Grimes was dead at least an hour before Golightly died. Grimes got it in his apartment. Golightly got it in his van. Why would two killers be hanging around for an hour to clip Golightly? How would they know he’d be at Grimes’s apartment? I think Golightly was followed.”
“What was the motivation on the Golightly hit?”
“He was in the rackets for forty years. He had a sheet for statutory rape and child molestation in Texas and Florida. He did smash-and-grabs on old people and paid his whores in counterfeit. There’s nothing this guy didn’t do. The real question is how he survived as long as he did. You were at the Golightly hit, weren’t you?”
“I was in the vicinity.”
“Are you going to tell me what you saw?”
“What difference does it make? I’ve got zero credibility with both the department and the DA’s office.”
“What if I could get you back in?”
“In the department, with a shield?”
“It could happen.”
“See you around.”
“That’s all you have to say?”
“No, I owe you one.”
When Clete walked outside into the mix of shadow and sunlight on the buildings, he thought he could hear music from the clubs on Bourbon and smell the salt air off the Gulf and the coffee in Café du Monde and the flowers blooming on the balconies along Royal. Or maybe it was all in his imagination. Either way, it was a grand afternoon, one that presaged an even better evening and access to all the fruits the world had to offer.
CLETE HAD CALLED Gretchen the same afternoon and told her he was in New Orleans and would not be back in New Iberia until Thursday morning.
“Did you find out anything about the Luger?” she asked.
“Yeah, the guy who owned it was SS and stationed in Paris in 1943,” Clete said. “That’s as far as I got. You going to be okay till I get back?”
“Take it to the bank,” she replied.