The Storm Murders (24 page)

“
We
were supposed to go,
É
mile. She’s going on my holiday instead of me. I don’t find that thrilling.”

Point taken.

“Yeah, San, but we might’ve gotten ourselves killed.”

That point was taken as well.

She pressed him on what just transpired. “So, you have the NOPD work with Flores to help us, and then you cajole the FBI into investigating him. One department works with him, one works against him.
É
mile? What’s up with that?”

He wished that he was drinking something other than water, but persevered with his glass. He did feel parched, possibly brought on by the recent changes in climate.

“It’s complicated, and contradictory, I’ll grant you that,” he said. “The right and left hands of this operation won’t know what I’m doing or if I’m progressing. I want people to find it hard to differentiate between up and down or left and right.”

Sandra asked, “And this is important why?”

He decided that he had no good reason to deprive himself. He drank down the last of the water and headed for the liquor cabinet. So what if it was early.

“This is the only case I’ve ever worked or known about,” he told her as he poured a Talisker, “where the only people I’ve interviewed have all been cops. I’m including hotel security in that group, but you know what I mean. Plus, it must be said, I’d know a whole lot more about this case if only half those officers weren’t lying. So if cops want to keep me in the dark, then I’ll give them a taste of their own medicine. Not to be mean, just to be cautious here. I’ve learned the value of caution on this case.”

Sitting, listening, and observing him, Sandra Cinq-Mars hoped that he had.

TWENTY

At slow speed, Sergeant Pascal Dupree drove Everardo Flores away from the Hilton, where they’d met up, to St. Bernard Parish, a neighborhood heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina that in its comeback retained a mere semblance of its former impoverished self. Grace on spindly legs.

He coached him along the way.

“Y’all comprehend that you’re not on the job, right? Don’t ever say so. I can’t emphasize that strongly enough, Everardo. Where your ambitions lie is not a particular concern to me. What
is
a concern is this—y’all will not speak aloud to a single soul about doing police work, because nobody has your back. Not me especially.” With his hands low on the steering wheel where it swung over his belly, Dupree looked across at his new confederate. “I hope y’all are hearing me, Flores, because I’m not seeing the disposition of a man who appears to be listening.”

Flores was happily gazing out the window in the opposite direction. He smiled and turned his head around to answer Dupree’s challenge. “I’m not a cop, but you got to admit, I’m working
for
the cops.”

“Don’t go around saying that out loud! It’s not like we’re popular with folks.”

“Dupree, you’re hated less than you think. Chill. The time the force decked itself out in its powder blues—who can forget that day?—people on the street, they cheered.”

After Katrina, the NOPD underwent a change of uniform. To present a fresh public image, beat cops adopted the dark blues familiar to other cities. A few years later, revamped, wiser now, they returned to their original, distinctive powder blues. They showed them off on the first day of Mardi Gras. People welcomed the reversion. As if the worst of the past was put behind them by bringing back the familiar.

“Don’t anticipate nobody cheering you in the field. The contrary.”

“Airmen don’t throw flowers at the feet of military police neither. Been there. You know I found that out.”

Dupree offered a conciliatory nod, but he wasn’t finished. He had a way of emphasizing his words by squeezing the steering wheel, which highlighted the massive size and considerable strength of his hands. The action felt threatening, whether he meant it that way or not. “In the air force, Everardo, I take it y’all had genuine authority. Not make-believe like now. Some drunken flyboy gave lip, y’all whacked him over the head and took him in. Didn’t you? Admit it now.”

“Or, I whacked him over the head some more and left him where he lay. Depends on what kind of night it was. How much trouble he was worth.”

“There you go. See? That’s no longer a consideration.”

“I don’t aim to pick a fight. Will you let up on me or what, Dupree?”

The detective was not about to do that. Flores had to endure his initiation or have the rug pulled out from under this scheme. His choice. At a red light, the detective stared at the thin, spiffy man in the gray suit and the red tie and squeezed the wheel with his chubby fingers until Flores grimaced and pleaded for mercy. “All right, Dupree. I get you. I got you an hour ago. Chill, man.”

“What I’m telling y’all now,
É
mile Cinq-Mars himself don’t know.”

“What’s that?”

“This is a damn near impossible assignment.”

He detailed why. Situated close to the 9th Ward and the district of Holy Cross, and similarly to those two forlorn neighborhoods, St. Bernard Parish had also been utterly ransacked by the storm. Hundreds of its former residents never came back. Countless others returned, saw that nothing awaited them there except ongoing misery, and decamped for good. For anyone to wander around the neighborhood and ask people to recall a double murder that happened shortly after the worst of that time—to even find someone who’d been through it who cared enough to share a memory—that was asking a lot, more than
É
mile Cinq-Mars realized. The Montreal detective didn’t grasp the factors at play. He thought he could waltz into the parish and
parlez
his
fran
ç
ais
, chat up the neighbors, draw down a few opinions, jumble them together and find out what that concoction brewed. He didn’t know that chatting up a neighbor required luck, for starters, diligence, more time than he’d imagined or allotted for himself, and the good graces of many. He might be diligent, but luck and a good attitude were in failing supply throughout the parish.

“So you’re saying,” Flores countered, “that I’m just here to—”

“To
appease
that Montreal detective, to make it look good for us down here, or, if you’re really lucky, stumble across a miracle. I hope you got miracles stuck up your crack ’cause otherwise this is a major waste of everybody’s time, and I mean by that especially yours. Just so y’all know it.”

Truth was, Dupree held higher hopes than that, but he wanted to douse Everardo Flores with Katrina floodwaters—to impress upon him that this was not an easy gig. If he expected otherwise, he might fold his tent before his first hour was up.

“I’ll drive by to pick up your carcass later. If I see some sign of life, if I detect a pulse, I’ll call for an ambulance. But next time y’all want to come out here, expect to drive your own vehicle in both directions. I’m revoking your limousine privileges.”

“No problem, Detective. It’s a pleasure riding with you though. More than that, it’s an honor. Good times.”

“This is business, you understand that, right? It’s not peaches and cream.”

“Listen, if I enjoy myself, you have to live with that. So brace yourself. I know this operation is not about making me a rich man.”

“Operation. It’s not an
operation
.” He turned to confront Flores again. “Base expenses,” he reminded him. “That’s it.”

“Like I said, life being what it is, wealth is bound to elude me in mine.”

“Keep your head up. Eyes and ears open.”

“That’s my style, Detective. You just said it. I keep my head up and my eyes down and my ears crossed and I get by with all that. You’ll see. Maybe you’ll recommend me to the academy one day soon. Help me get a badge to call my own.”

Dupree stopped the car. A squabble of men already were checking them out from across the street. Under ball caps and sunglasses, they moved their shoulders and limbs with a certain lassitude that claimed this block as indisputably their own. A young, obviously homeless woman checked the litter blown up against a car tire. “This is where I set you free.”

“So no badge today, huh?”

He didn’t know if Flores was deliberately trying to irritate him or was actually that na
ï
ve. Fortunately, the man chuckled happily as he disembarked.

“You have a good day, Detective,” Flores remarked.

“You, too, Everardo. Try to stay alive, all right? I got enough to do.”

He drove off, and Flores looked around the moonscape of St. Bernard Parish. He double-checked the street sign against the address in his notebook. He never looked at the men across the street, who were keeping an eye on him, as that would only invite trouble, and instead went up to a door and knocked. Walking on the porch provoked a nest of ants to march on down through gaps in the floorboards. Flores showed his hotel security badge to the wisp of an old woman who appeared behind the screen. “New Orleans Police, ma’am. Do you mind if I have a word with you on a matter of some dire importance here today?”

“What’s this about, Officer?” the diminutive frail dear inquired. Behind the thick lenses of her glasses she looked all but blind, the eyes magnified to saucer-size. Tiny, she flouted a tall stack of stiff hair dyed auburn and the brown skin of her arms hung loosely over skinny bones. Her shoulders poked up as raw, sharp nubs.

“Murder, ma’am. That plain, that simple, sorry to say. Don’t we live in a hardened old world?”

She opened the screen door to let him inside. “I try my darnedest to keep the flies out, Officer,” she told him.

Flores remarked, “Yes, ma’am. I will try not to admit any in myself.”

“They’re pesky.”

“They are.”

“What murder?” she asked, wide-eyed, trembling, as the door banged shut. She looked all around and above his head for flies.

“The killings next door, ma’am. Were y’all here for Katrina? Those ones. The killings next door.”

É
mile Cinq-Mars did a measure of homework before initiating a few strategic calls. As a result of that he was heading for a farmer’s co-op some twenty kliks away. He telephoned the farmer who put in the actual work on Morris and Adele Lumen’s fields—planting a crop each spring and reaping the harvest while the couple took back a modest percentage for themselves, a sweetheart deal all around. The man sounded cheerful and friendly and indicated that he’d be happy to meet him, but at that moment he was heading to the co-op, partly to shop, mainly to hang out with friends, a weekly confab at a set time, which was why he needed to embark right away. The ex-cop couldn’t believe his luck. He wasn’t planning to set up a meeting that day, but now begged to join the man at his, unable to pass on an opportunity to quiz a gaggle of nearby farmers all at once. So he was off to meet those men, to whittle away at opinions they may have formed over the years about the deceased couple or to hear of anything unusual someone may have noticed around the time of the murders. Typically, men of their background might prove reticent around an official—they were bound to be territorial and wary of an outsider—so as he drove Cinq-Mars devised a plan to help open things up.

The nondescript box store sat on the outskirts of a one-street hamlet, similar to other hardware stores across the continent except that it did not carry the name of a chain and was smaller than most of those that did. A cooperative, anyone was welcome to shop there, but the shareholders were local farmers who participated in the success of the enterprise.

Michel Chaloult was the fellow working the Lumens’ farm, not quite a next-door neighbor to them, but close enough that he could take a back road onto their property on his bouncy tractor in about thirty minutes. “Ten minutes the long way around on the roads by car.” His home was as far from the co-op as
É
mile’s, but each man was traveling from a different direction, one from the east, the other from the southwest. Cinq-Mars frequently shopped at the store for bulk supplies and farm implements, but he could discern upon entering that the place was akin to home for a few patrons. At least in the wintertime. For them it held the ambiance of a local pub, and they made it so with their gentle gab and laughter.

In the corner furthest from the entrance, men pulled up chairs in a widening of the aisle just off the hardware section. A heavy curtain guarded against drafts from the rear storage area where they sat amid a modest collection of basic American Standard toilets, sinks, and tubs. As each farmer arrived he reached behind the curtain to lay claim to his personal chair, a Windsor or a bent metal folding contraption or an old hardback with peeling paint or worn varnish. A man motioned to Cinq-Mars after he introduced himself and selected a chair for him.

“Here, sit on old Henri’s.”

A folding type with a soft seat. Wobbly. “Henri?” Cinq-Mars asked.

“Hospital,” the man murmured.

“Cancer,” another man revealed.

“Terminal,” added a third.

“Oh,” Cinq-Mars said. “I’m sorry to hear that.” He sat. His weight steadied it.

“Prostate,” Michel Chaloult verified for him. Not a loquacious gang, initially. They seemed able to express themselves, and capably, with single words only.

The first farmer who had spoken remarked, “When it’s your time it’s your time,” and the others nodded in philosophical unison.

Sanguine, Cinq-Mars considered, taking note that they kept the chair of the ill man around, perhaps holding out for his miraculous recovery.

Most of the men, including Michel Chaloult, were in their fifties, although any one of them could pass for sixty-five. They possessed the weathered look of farmers, muscled, leathery, a resignation in their facial expressions as well as a brittle tenacity. Stiff wind in the crevices on their cheeks and brows, the dust of the soil around their eyes. Although they readily fell into shared, prolonged silences, and Cinq-Mars followed them into those communal meditations, when they got going they jumped over each other to speak—about cows, snow, acquaintances, politics, hockey—everyone percolating at once so that it seemed to a rank outsider impossible for a single voice to be heard.