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"And you think he was involved with drug smugglers?"
He wadded up the paper airplane on his desk and dropped it into the wastebasket.
"No, I don't," he said, his eyes focused on the clouds outside the window.
"What does Immigration tell you?"
He shrugged his shoulders and clicked his nails on the desk blotter. His fingers were so long and thin and his nails so pink and clean that his hands looked like those of a surgeon rather than of an ex-basketball player.
"According to them, there was no Johnny Dartez on that plane," I said.
"They have their areas of concern, we have ours."
"They're stonewalling you, aren't they?"
"Look, I'm not interested in Immigration's business. I want Bubba Rocque off the board. Johnny Dartez was a guy we spent a lot of money and time on, him and another dimwit from New Orleans named Victor Romero. Does that name mean anything to you?"
"No."
"They both disappeared from their usual haunts about two months ago, just before we were going to pick them up. Since Johnny has done the big gargle out at Southwest Pass, Victor's value has appreciated immensely."
"You won't get Bubba by squeezing his people."
He pushed his large shoe against the wall so that his chair spun around in a complete circle, like a child playing in the barber's chair.
"How is it that you have this omniscient knowledge?" he said.
"In high school he'd put on different kinds of shows for us. Sometimes he'd eat a lightbulb. Or he might open a bottle of RC Cola on his teeth or push thumbtacks into his kneecaps. It was always a memorable exhibition."
"Yeah, we see a lot of that kind of psychotic charisma these days. I think it's in fashion with the wiseguys. That's why we have a special lockdown section in Atlanta where they can yodel to each other."
"Good luck."
"You don't think we can put him away?"
"Who cares what I think? What's the National Transportation Safety Board say about the crash?"
"A fire in the hold. They're not sure. It was murky when their divers went down. The plane slipped down a trench of some kind and it's half covered in mud now."
"You believe it was just a fire?"
"It happens."
"You better send them down again. I dove that wreck twice. I think an explosion blew out the side."
He looked at me carefully.
"I think maybe I ought to caution you about involving yourself in a federal investigation," he said.
"I'm not one of your problems, Mr. Dautrieve. You've got another federal agency trespassing on your turf, maybe tainting your witnesses, maybe stealing bodies. Anyway, they're jerking you around and for some reason you're not doing anything about it. I'd appreciate it if you didn't try to lay off your situation on me."
I saw the bone flex against the clean line of his jaw. Then he began to play with a rubber band on his long fingers.
"You'll have to make allowances for us government employees who have to labor with bureaucratic manacles on," he said. "We've never been able to use the simple, direct methods you people have been so good at. You remember a few years back when a New Orleans cop got killed and some of his friends squared it on their own? I think they went into the guy's house, it was a black guy, of course, and blew him and his wife away in the bathtub. Then there were those black revolutionaries that stuck up an armored car in Boston and killed a guard and hid out in Louisiana and Mississippi. We worked two years preparing that case, then your people grabbed one of them and tortured a statement out of him and flushed everything we'd done right down the shithole. You guys sure knew how to let everybody know you were in town."
"I guess I'll go now. You want to ask me anything else?"
"Not a thing," he said, and fired a paper clip at a file cabinet across the room.
