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“Magelli says the name and address on the bill of sale were bogus. There were no helpful prints on the player, either.”
“A professional house creep doesn’t unload one item,” Clete said.
“It doesn’t matter. I think No Duh is telling the truth. He reported the disk. He has no reason to lie about the seller,” I said.
“This is what we need to do,” Helen said. “We check all area reports of burglaries and home invasions from the time of the girls’ disappearance to the present. Maybe the thief is local and went to New Orleans to unload the player. Or maybe he’s a friend of the person who stole it.”
We were talking in a procedural fashion, spending time on issues that were perfunctory in nature, a deliberate distraction from the images that we had watched on Helen’s computer screen. But the room felt as though the air had been sucked out of it. The sunlight that fell through the window was brittle and swam with motes of dust. I could hear Clete clenching and rubbing his hands together between his thighs, the calluses on his palms as rough as horn, his face bloodless and poached-looking.
When I went outside into the coolness of the morning, I sat on a stone bench by the city library, in front of the grotto that had been built as a shrine to the mother of Jesus. The wind was blowing through the bamboo and the oak trees and the Spanish moss, and rose petals from a nearby flower bed were scattered across the St. Augustine grass. Clete sat down beside me and lit a cigarette, not speaking, the cigarette tiny inside his hand. The smoke drifted in my face, but I didn’t mind.
“When are you going to stop smoking those?” I asked.
“Never. I’m tucking away a pack of Luckies in the casket. With no filters.”
“Don’t drink today.”
“Who said I am?”
“Some days aren’t any good for drinking. That’s all I’m saying.”
“I’m going to get the guys who did this, Dave. They’re going out in pieces, too.”
“You’ll get them. But not like you say.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
“You’re not like them. Neither am I. And neither is Helen. You’re not capable of being like them.”
We sat there for a long time, neither of us saying anything, Clete puffing on his Lucky Strike, flicking his ashes so they didn’t hit my clothes, the mother of Jesus looking silently at the bayou.
COMPUTERS WORK WONDERS. By late that afternoon we got a hit on a home invasion in which silverware, the entire contents of a liquor cabinet, a flat-screen television, a frozen ham, a case of beer, an Armani suit, and a DVD player had been reported stolen. The home invasion had taken place in an upscale subdivision on the bayou, just outside the New Iberia city limits. The owner of the house was a local black attorney. His name was Monroe Stanga, the cousin of Herman Stanga.
We found him in his office, a two-story white stucco building down by the courthouse square, a building with faux balconies that had Spanish grillework overlooking the Southern Pacific railway tracks.
“Y’all found the stuff somebody stole from my house? That’s what y’all saying?” Monroe asked, his eyes going from me to Helen. It was obvious he did not comprehend why the sheriff was personally involving herself in the investigation of a comparatively minor crime.
“You listed a DVD player as one of the items stolen from your house, correct?” I said.
“Yeah, right, plus all my silverware and my flat-screen and my Armani—”
“We think somebody might have sold your DVD player at a pawnshop in New Orleans,” I said. “What was the brand?”
He told me, then waited.
“I think we’ve found your property,” I said.
Monroe was in his thirties but had his head shaved at a barbershop every two days, as an older man might. He had gotten his law degree from Southern University and specialized in liability suits that involved chemical spills along railroad tracks, pipeline ruptures, oil-well blowouts, or any kind of industrial accident that could provide large numbers of claimants. He wore a pleated white shirt with a rolled collar and a lavender tie and a gray vest. His coat hung on the back of his chair, and when he hunched forward on his elbows, his eyes darting back and forth, his arms and shoulders poking like sticks against his shirt, he made me think of a ferret being worked into a corner with a broom.
“So how about my silverware and the other stuff that was stole?” he asked.
“Do you have a receipt for the DVD player, something that would have a serial number on it or help identify it?”
“No, I don’t have anything like that.”
“That’s too bad. Did you file an insurance claim?”
“Yeah, of course.”
