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“He’s making overtures to my daughter.”
There was no response.
“Are you there?” I asked.
“You’re asking me to tell you his future? My bet is Johnny will do himself in one day. But he’ll probably take others with him,” the psychologist said.
The next morning I drove to Baton Rouge and went to Connie Deshotel’s office. The secretary told me Connie used her lunch hour on Thursdays to play racquetball at a nearby club.
The club was dazzling white, surrounded with palm trees that were planted in white gravel; the swimming pool in back was an electric blue under the noon sun. Inside the building, I looked down through a viewing glass onto the hardwood floor of a racquetball court and watched Connie take apart her male opponent. She wore tennis shoes with green tubes of compressed air molded into the rubber soles, a pleated tennis skirt, and a sleeveless yellow jersey that was ringed under the neck and arms with sweat. Her tanned calves hardened with muscle when she bent to make a kill shot.
Her opponent, a tall, graying, athletic man, gave it up, shook hands good-naturedly, and left. She bounced the rubber ball once, served the ball to herself off the wall, then fired it into a low ricochet that sent it arching over her head, as though she were involved in a private celebration of her victory. Her eyes followed the ball’s trajectory until they met mine. Then her face tightened, and she pushed her hair out of her eyes and left the court through a door in the back wall, slamming it behind her.
I went down the stairs and intercepted her in the lounge area.
“I have some information about my mother’s death,” I said.
“Not here.”
“You’re not going to put me off, Connie.”
“What is it?”
I gestured at a table.
“I’m leaving here in two minutes. But I’ll make you a promise. You follow me anywhere again and I’ll have you arrested,” she said.
“I have a witness.”
“To what?”
“My mother’s murder. Two cops in uniform did it. In front of a cabin a few miles off Purple Cane Road in Lafourche Parish. One of them called her an ignorant bitch before he knocked her down.”
Her eyes stared into mine, unblinking, her lashes like black wire. Then they broke and she looked at nothing and pulled the dampness of her jersey off the tops of her breasts.
“Bring your witness forward,” she said.
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“I think the individual would end up dead,” I said.
“You don’t want to indicate the person’s gender to me? I’m the attorney general of the state. What’s the matter with you?”
“You trust Don Ritter. I don’t. I think he tried to have both me and Johnny Remeta killed.”
She motioned at a black waiter in a white jacket. He nodded and began pouring a club soda into a glass of ice for her. She touched the sweat off her eyes with a towel and hung the towel around her neck.
“I’ll say it again. My office is at your disposal. But a lot of this sounds like paranoia and conspiratorial obsession,” she said.
“The cops were NOPD.”
“How do you know this?”
“They killed a Lafourche Parish nightclub owner named Ladrine Theriot and made a local constable take the weight. They weren’t backwoods coon-asses, either. They were enforcers and bagmen for the Giacanos. So if they weren’t New Orleans cops, where did they come from?”
She took the club soda from the waiter’s hand and drank it half-empty. The heat seemed to go out of her face but not her eyes.
