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"I'm serious. Don't mess with them."
He grinned at me again and went back to cleaning his fish.
I told Annie where I was going, and a half-hour later I parked in front of the federal building in downtown Lafayette where the DEA kept its office. It was a big, modern building, constructed during the Kennedy-Johnson era, filled with big glass doors and tinted windows and marble floors; but right down the street was the old Lafayette police station and jail, a squat, gray cement building with barred windows on the second floor, an ugly sentinel out of the past, a reminder that yesterday was only a flick of the eye away from the seeming tranquillity of the present. My point is that I remember an execution that took place in the jail in the early 1950s. The electric chair was brought in from Angola; two big generators on a flatbed truck hummed on a side street behind the building; thick, black cables ran from the generators through a barred window on the second story. At nine o'clock on a balmy summer night, people in the restaurant across the street heard a man scream once just before an arc light seemed to jump off the bars of the window. Later, townspeople did not like to talk about it. Eventually that part of the jail was closed off and was used to house a civil defense siren. Finally, few people even remembered that an execution had taken place there.
But on this hazy May afternoon that smelled of flowers and rain, I was looking up at an open window on the second story of the federal building, through which flew a paper airplane. It slid in a long glide across the street and bounced off the windshield of a moving car. I had a strong feeling about where it had come from.
Sure enough, when I walked through the open door of Minos P. Dautrieve's office I saw a tall, crewcut man tilted back in his chair, his knit tie pulled loose, his collar unbuttoned, one foot on the desk, the other in the wastebasket, one huge hand poised in the air, about to sail another paper plane out the window. His blond hair was cut so short that light reflected off his scalp; in fact, lights seemed to reflect all over his lean, close-shaved, scrubbed, smiling face. On his desk blotter was an open manila folder with several telex sheets clipped inside. He dropped the airplane on the desk, clanged his foot out of the wastebasket, and shook hands with such energy that he almost pulled me off balance. I thought I had seen him somewhere before.
"I'm sorry to drag you in here," he said, "but that's the breaks, right? Hey, I've been reading your history. It's fascinating stuff. Sit down. Did you really do all this bullshit?"
"I'm not sure what you mean."
"Come on, anybody with a sheet like this is genuinely into rock'n'roll. Wounded twice in Vietnam, the second time on a mine. Then fourteen years with the New Orleans police department, where you did some very serious things to a few people. Why's a guy with a teacher's certificate in English go into police work?"
"Is this a shake?"
"Be serious. We don't get to have that kind of fun. Most of the time we just run around and prepare cases for the U.S. attorney. You know that. But your file's intriguing, you've got to admit. It says here you blew away three people, one of whom was the numero uno greaseball, drug pusher, and pimp in New Orleans. But he was also on tap as a federal witness, at least until you scrambled his eggs for him." He laughed out loud. "How'd you manage to snuff a government witness? That's hard to pull off. We usually keep them on the game reserve."
"You really want to know?"
"Hell, yes. This is socko stuff."
"His bodyguard pulled a gun on my partner and took a shot at him. It was a routine possession bust, and the pair of them would have been out on bond in an hour. So it was a dumb thing for the bodyguard to do. It was dumb because it was unnecessary and it provoked a bad situation. A professional doesn't do dumb things like that and provoke people unnecessarily. You get my drift?"
"Oh, I get it. We federal agents shouldn't act like dumb guys and provoke you, huh? Let me try this one on you, Mr. Robicheaux. What are the odds of anybody being out on the Gulf of Mexico and witnessing a plane crash? Come on, your file says you've spent lots of time at racetracks. Figure the odds for me."
"What are you saying, podna?"
"We know a guy named Johnny Dartez was on that plane. Johnny Dartez's name means one thing—narcotics. He was a transporter for Bubba Rocque. His specialty was throwing it out in big rubber balloons over water."
"And you figure maybe I was the pickup man."
"You tell me."
"I think you spend too much time folding paper airplanes."
"Oh, I should be out developing some better leads? Is that it? Some of us are hotdog ball handlers, some of us are meant for the bench. I got it."
"I remember now. Forward for LSU, fifteen years or so ago. Dr. Dunkenstein. You were All-American."
"Honorable Mention. Answer my question, Mr. Robicheaux. What are the odds of a guy like you being out on the salt when a plane goes down right by his boat? A guy who happened to have a scuba tank so he could be the first one down on the wreck?"
"Listen, the pilot was a priest. Use your head a minute."
"Yeah, a priest who did time in Danbury," he said.
"Danbury?"
"Yeah, that's right."
"What for?"
"Breaking and entering."
"I think I'm getting the abridged version here."
"He and some nuns and other priests broke into a General Electric plant and vandalised some missile components."
