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Word travels fast among the denizens of the nether regions.
On Tuesday morning Helen Soileau came into my office at the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department and said we had to pick up and hold a New Orleans hoodlum named Mingo Bloomberg, who was wanted as a material witness in the killing of a police officer in the French Quarter.
"You know him?" she asked. She wore a starched white shirt and blue slacks and her badge on her gunbelt. She was a blonde, muscular woman whose posture and bold stare always seemed to anticipate, even relish, challenge or insult.
"He's a button man for the Giacano family," I said.
"We don't have that."
"Bad communications with NOPD, then. Mingo's specialty is disappearing his victims. He's big on fish chum."
"That's terrific. Expidee Chatlin is baby-sitting him for us."
We checked out a cruiser and drove into the south part of the parish on back roads that were lined with sugarcane wagons on their way to the mill. Then we followed a levee through a partially cleared field to a tin-roofed fish camp set back in a grove of persimmon and pecan trees. A cruiser was parked in front of the screened-in gallery, the front doors opened, the radio turned off.
Expidee Chatlin had spent most of his law-enforcement career as a crossing guard or escorting drunks from the jail to guilty-court. He had narrow shoulders and wide hips, a tube of fat around his waist, and a thin mustache that looked like grease pencil. He and another uniformed deputy were eating sandwiches with Mingo Bloomberg at a plank table on the gallery.
"What do you think you're doing, Expidee?" Helen asked.
"Waiting on y'all. What's it look like?" he replied.
"How's it hanging, Robicheaux?" Mingo Bloomberg said.
"No haps, Mingo."
He emptied his beer can and put an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He was a handsome man and wore beltless gray slacks and loafers and a long-sleeve shirt printed with flowers. His hair was copper-colored and combed straight back on his scalp, his eyes ice blue, as invasive as a dirty finger when they locked on yours.
He opened his lighter and began to flick the flint dryly, as though we were not there.
"Get out of that chair and lean against the wall," Helen said.
He lowered the lighter, his mouth screwed into a smile around his cigarette. She pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, threw it over her shoulder, and aimed her nine millimeter into the middle of his face.
"Say something wise, you fuck. Go ahead. I want you to," she said.
I pulled him to his feet, pushed him against the wall, and kicked his ankles apart. When I shook him down I tapped a hard, square object in his left pocket. I removed a .25 caliber automatic, dropped the magazine, pulled the slide back on the empty chamber, then tossed the pistol into Expidee's lap.
"Nobody told me. I thought the guy was suppose to be a witness or something," he said.
Helen cuffed Mingo's wrists behind him and shoved him toward the screen door.
"Hey, Robicheaux, you and the lady take your grits off the stove," he said.
"It's up to you, Mingo," I said.
We were out front now, under a gray sky, in the wind, in leaves that toppled out of the trees on the edge of the clearing. Mingo rolled his eyes. "Up to me? You ought to put a cash register on top of y'all's cruiser," he said.
"You want to explain that?" I said.
He looked at Helen, then back at me.
"Give us a minute," I said to her.
I walked him to the far side of our cruiser, opened the back door and sat him down behind the wire-mesh screen. I leaned one arm on the roof and looked down into his face. An oiled, coppery strand of hair fell down across his eyes.
"You did the right thing with this guy Crown. You do the right thing, you get taken care of. Something wrong with that?" he said.
"Yeah. I'm not getting taken care of."
