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“Not once.”
“Drink a cup of coffee with me.”
“You want to tell me something else?”
“No,” she said. “Look at Tripod. He just climbed up in the tree. He hasn’t done that in weeks. Don’t you love our home? I don’t know any place I would rather wake up in the morning.”
I COULDN’T CATCH Helen Soileau until she came out of an administrative meeting with the mayor after eleven A.M. I followed her into her office, but before I could speak, she gave me the results of her attempt to confirm my account about the shoot-out on the river in Jeff Davis Parish.
“Within the time frame we’re using, no hospital in the state has reported a gunshot wound that matches your description of the one you think you inflicted on the man by the river,” she said. “Nor has there been a report on any dumped bodies that would match those of Vidor Perkins or the guy you think caught a forty-five round through the lungs. No airports anywhere between Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans know anything about a crop duster flying around during the stor
m, either.”
“Crop dusters don’t need airports. They land in farm pastures every day. And I don’t think I shot those guys, Helen. I blew up their shit at almost point-blank range.”
“Does bwana want to be clever, or does bwana want to hear what I’ve found?”
“Sorry.”
“The locals found some bloody rags on the side of the road. There was a piece of flesh with part of a fingernail on it inside one of the rags.”
“Enough to get a print?”
“No. But enough to run a DNA search through the national database. So far we still don’t know who these guys are or where they’re from or who they work for. Timothy Abelard probably did business with the Giacano family in New Orleans. You don’t think they’re part of Didi Gee’s old crowd?”
“No, these guys were too sophisticated.”
“The Mob isn’t up to the challenge? They kidnapped Jimmy Hoffa in broad daylight on a Saturday afternoon in front of a Detroit restaurant, and to this day no one has ever been in custody for it and no one has any idea where his body is. You think the guys who pulled that off were kitchen helpers in an Italian restaurant?”
“These guys were military.”
“You know that?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“How?”
“They never spoke. They didn’t have any visible jewelry. They wore the same hooded raincoats, like a uniform, so their enemy could not distinguish one of them from the other, so their impersonality would make them seem even more dangerous and formidable. ‘Black ops’ isn’t an arbitrary term and has more than one connotation.”
She ticked her nails on her desk blotter. “I hope you’re wrong. We hardly have the resources to send our local morons to Angola. What’d you come in here to tell me?”
“Emma Poche called me up when she was loaded and told me I was in danger.”
“From?”
“I asked her that. She told me how dumb I was.”
“What else?”
“Alafair went to Emma’s house last night and confronted her.”
“To what degree do you mean ‘confronted’?”
“She slapped her. She also caught her with a lover. Maybe the lover is Carolyn Blanchet.”
I saw a glint catch in Helen’s eye like a sliver of flint. Then I remembered that she and Carolyn Blanchet had been at LSU at the same time, that something had happened involving a friend of Helen. Rejection by a sorority because of the friend’s sexual orientation? I couldn’t remember.
“Run that by me again,” Helen said.
