The Storm Murders (26 page)

The passionate antipathy took Cinq-Mars by surprise, but the men gathered in the rectangle seemed to have anticipated the volley, as if it was inevitable or at least common. They laughed and those closest to the sadder-eyed man offered him a pat on the shoulder and others in his proximity reached across and lightly tapped his knee. He exchanged a glance with Cinq-Mars, and, ceremoniously, it seemed, rather than apologetically, he shrugged.

The oldest among them, the former policeman offered his thanks and departed. He came away with one more puzzling notation, namely that the murdered man who lived in the farmhouse had been a farmer who had chosen not to engage in his profession despite living on a farm. This case, if anyone could call it that, seemed increasingly strange no matter which way it turned.

TWENTY ONE

The road on which he departed the farmers’ cooperative created an illusion of crossing flat land, yet frequent dips into river bottoms and nasty twists through various geographic contours made the trip a challenge. That he was speeding didn’t help. He was negotiating a tricky section when his cell phone played a jingle in his overcoat.
É
mile slowed down, initially to check the caller ID, then to pull off to the side. By a frozen stream in a winding gulley, he stopped.

“Detective Dupree,” he answered, “how’s it going, sir?”

“I’m seriously pissed off with the universe myself,” the New Orleans cop stated. “You?”

The man had a knack for making him laugh. “I’m in a better mood than you are, Dupree. Who knows why? Mostly I’m spinning my wheels. What’s up down there?”

Listening to his response, Cinq-Mars took time to appreciate his surroundings. Without the call, he might never have noticed this place. A quiet stream meandered through the gulley in the summer, water slipping under the road through twin culverts, the shaded indentation out of sight of farmland on the next level up. In winter the stream was iced over, the trees bare, and at the base of the embankment he found himself situated in his own little world. Cinq-Mars was grateful that the operator of a snowplow had taken the trouble to clear a small, safe parking spot. Skeptical of human impulses, he figured the plow’s driver had wanted a quiet place out of sight where he could enjoy a snack and a smoke without seeing his paycheck docked.

I might come here again,
Cinq-Mars considered, if only to be undisturbed.

Dupree was going on about a number of inconsequential inconveniences before he said, “Our man Everardo Flores. May I remind y’all that he was your idea.”

“My wife’s actually. What’s he been up to?”

“Bugger goes around telling people he’s a cop! I specifically told him, I warned him, ‘Don’t tell people you’re a cop.’ Bugger won’t listen.”

“How do you know?”

“What?”

“Did you debrief him already?”

“Me? What? I haven’t talked to the prick. Y’all think I’d let him run around out there on his own? I got an undercover dolled up as a bag lady tracing his steps, to keep tabs on what damage he does.”

“I hope she’s a woman, your undercover. What damage is he doing?” A small flock of cedar waxwings descended onto a nearby limb. Cinq-Mars leaned over the steering wheel to observe them. Knowing that it wasn’t cold out, he opened the front door with his opposite hand and held the phone in his left, and stepped out into the brisk, clear air. The birds flew up, but settled back down again.

“I won’t call it havoc,” Dupree related. “Not yet. But he’s got no business telling people he’s a cop. That’s way against orders.”

“I hear you, Dupree. But he’s a volunteer, right? He’s not really under orders. If he’s not doing any damage maybe he’s finding something out.”

“Pisses me off, my man.”

Cinq-Mars laughed a little. “I’d have his hide if he was working under me. Look, I appreciate your procedure, Dupree, keeping an eye on him and all that. How did you swing it?”

“Officially? My undercover’s people assigned to drug-check the neighborhood. Won’t be too hard to clock visible hours, bust a few. This way, neither my boss nor the neighborhood knows what’s up. At least, they didn’t until that bonehead Flores told folks he’s a cop. Undermines the whole point of using him, you know?”

“I appreciate what you’re doing.”

“Let’s see what he comes up with before anybody appreciates a damn thing. Sorry to take up your time,
É
mile. Needed to vent.”

“Gotcha. You take good care, Dupree.”

He was rushing the call as another one was coming in. His quiet roadside spot was an information highway. “Agent Sivak, how are you?”

“Fine,
É
mile! How are things up there at the North Pole?”

“So-so. Santa’s grumpy. The elves are dipsomaniacs. Everyone’s depressed, post-Christmas. Up here we believe in Santa Claus, but we have serious doubts about spring. And you, staying clear of crocodiles?”

“Only alligators in our swamps,
É
mile.”

“I have a hard time keeping that straight.”

“Think of Crocodile Dundee. What country?”

Cinq-Mars hesitated. He’d seen that movie. “Australia.”

“There you go.”

“Okay. Got it. So no alligators nibbling at your toes?”

“Oh, I wish,” she said, which he didn’t get for a moment. “So about your Mr. Flores.”

A popular subject today, apparently. “What of him?”

“He never went home.”

“What?”

“On the night of your wife’s abduction—you asked me to check—he never made it home.”

“No, but he was
heading
home, right?”

“Wrong. We ran down the hotel’s call to him, per your request. That wasn’t easy, by the way. We have procedures in the FBI to track the GPS on phone calls and I wasn’t following them. What I’m saying is, you owe me, because this can reach back and bite me. But anyway, he never made it home,
É
mile. He never left a four- block radius of the Hilton.”

“No shit. Excuse my, well, my English.”

“That’s what I said when I found out. No shit. What do you make of them apples?”

“I was thinking to myself this morning, Agent Sivak—”

“Vira is fine with me. We covered this, remember?”

“Sorry. Vira. Nothing in this matter is anything other than strange. Don’t you find that?”

“I’m off to Alabama,” she interjected out of the blue. “Shortly.”

Something in her tone felt consequential. “Great. I appreciate it.”

“No problem. It’s not on my own time. I had a talk with Special Agent Dreher. He thinks I should go but I have to do it on the sly, an officially unofficial type thing. Still. Maybe we can figure something out.”

“It’s a long shot. I know that. But thanks. So what do you make of this Flores thing? I’m still trying to process the news.”

“I know, hey? Isn’t that something? He’s lying through his teeth. But who knows about what or why. Soon as I have a minute, I’ll challenge him on that. I’ll also track down the location where he was really at, see what that gives us.”

Cinq-Mars thought about it and tromped the snow underfoot. “If you don’t mind, Vira, can we hold the first part of that in our hip pocket? I’ll ask him myself when the time seems opportune, or you can, but I’d like to feel him out more before we point out to him that he’s a lying skunk.”

“Fair enough. But only until I get back. After that, I treat him as a person-of-interest in your wife’s kidnapping. You know how it goes,
É
mile. I’m obliged to at least make it look like I’m doing something. I’m even obliged to do something.”

“I understand, Vira. Again, I appreciate the cooperation. It’s splendid.”

“So,
É
mile,” Sivak began, then paused.

“Yeah?” She had given him vital information about Everardo Flores, but her tone suggested that what she said next constituted the real point of her call.

“Like I said, I was talking to Agent Rand Dreher.”

“Right.”

“He was thinking out loud, you know?’

“Not about me,” Cinq-Mars said.

“Yeah, actually, about you. He’s wondering if he can come out from under his desk now, give you a call.”

“I’ve been trying to get that message to him.”

“He knows. But he worries he’s being baited.”

“He should call me, Vira.”

“I’ll let him know. Expect a call. By the way, he’s in Montreal.”

“What?”

“Up there to see you, I think. Once he summons the courage.”

“Thanks for the heads up. And thanks for the word on Flores. That’s nothing if not interesting.”

“Something I thought you should know.”

Before moving on,
É
mile stood in the winter grove, among the birds and rocks, the trees and the stream. This was what retirement was supposed to have looked like, no? Spending time in beautiful quiet places. He had never developed a clear plan for his senior years, so perhaps that was the problem. Here he was instead, now as ever, crime-fighting.

Everardo Flores worked diligently down one side of his designated street and back up the other, an investigation that took less time than anticipated as most people had nothing to say. No one remembered the Katrina murders in any worthwhile detail. Back then, they were all too busy trying to stay alive themselves, a response he had no reason not to accept at face value. A few folks, including the first woman he talked to, remembered the dead couple, although the principal component of everyone’s collective memory was that they kept to themselves and said little. They rarely had visitors. No family came around that anyone could recall. One woman thought she heard that they were not from New Orleans originally, nor even Louisiana, that they came from somewhere “north of the Mississippi delta,” which in Flores’s view narrowed it down to roughly forty- nine states and the District of Columbia.

Having tramped up and down two blocks, he thought he might call Dupree for a lift back when he noticed that houses on the side of the street where the murder victims once lived backed onto those the next street over. The space between them was composed of yards that bordered one another, separated by fences. The victims might as easily have shared conversation out back as off their front stoop. So he started knocking on doors the next street over.

In the house directly behind the victims’ home, he met a man who remembered the dead couple well. He professed to knowing them, whereas everyone else, if they remembered them at all, did so in passing, as someone might recall a shade tree that once stood on a corner lot. The man took him out to the backyard, cracked open a beer for Everardo Flores, and told him all that popped to mind.

Flores scribbled down that the dead neighbor, the husband, claimed to be a farmer from Nebraska. “He had the calluses on his hands to show for it, too.” But he chose to quit that hardscrabble life. “Don’t know if he was blowin’ smoke up the chimney stack,” the neighbor mused. “‘It’s not like I owned the Ponderosa,’ is what he said to me one time,” and the neighbor mimicked the dead man’s voice. “‘Black dirt farmers, poor like me, work a dry patch of dirt without no promise of rain. If folks paid hard cash for rocks ’n’ stones, I’d do plenty good for myself. Except I raised corn. Most years, it’s dry rock land, hot as cinders at the end of a bonfire.’

“Here’s where my confusion comes into it,” the dead man’s neighbor reported to Flores. “The man had some nostalgia in him for those harder times. He’d tell me how much trouble it been, how poor he been, how cruel his stone fields got to be to him some years not to mention untimely squirts of rain, too much or too little, but he missed those days, I could tell. He had the nostalgia in him for his scorched land.”

“I guess,” Flores opined, “that became more true when somebody stuck a knife into him down here.”

“Sliced across his neck, actually. So the paper said. All the misery in this town in those bad days, you’d think no man would heap no more upon a soul or cause a body to suffer no more. We think that way but he’s a dead man now because that’s not the truth. Always somebody has to go inflict more painfulness. They wanted his head cut off him, but I don’t know why.”

They seemed to be done, and Flores was finishing up the most welcomed of beers, when the wistful neighbor added, “Still now.”

“Hmm?”

“He had a house to live in, didn’t he? And yet he had no, what they call, ‘visible means of support.’ So what was his invisible means? He said the farm. That sale. So it must have been something, not nothing to support him. And then.”

The neighbor shook his head as he reflected upon the vagaries of life.

“And then?” Flores encouraged him.

“I solemnly swear that his was the misfortune to die a sorry death at exactly the time when good luck turned its head to shine its own clear eye on him.”

“What good luck? What eye? Not Katrina’s.”

The man looked at Flores as if he had a screw loose.

“No, okay, not Katrina’s,” Flores corrected himself. “But what good luck?”

“The insurance company’s. That eye. A few of us had the insurance. I did, that poor dead couple did, but I had to wait myself, and most of us around here had to wait months, some years, before any insurance company took any good notice of our plight. Oh, they knew we were here all right, waiting on them, but they said they needed the time and more time to get around to everybody standing with an empty hat in their hand stuck out. Myself, I think they were waiting for us to die off in that meantime it took to get around to see if any of us were staying alive. Gifford was one who died. That’s his name, I remember it now although I never said it often. Gifford, he had an adjustor on his doorstep before nobody could imagine such a thing.”

The hotel security man considered the news. Life seemed unfair so often. Especially, perhaps, down here in St. Bernard Parish. “Too bad he never lived to collect on that insurance.”

“Too bad. Me, I’m still waiting on mine, although they did give me some down on account.”

“Did they?”

“Generous fuckers, hey? But they were expecting me to die sooner, not later.”

Everardo Flores was led back through the musty house and was almost out the front door when a thought occurred. He was about to let it go, but then he supposed that if he was going to be telling people he was a cop he might as well behave like one. “Sir, this insurance claims adjustor who came around. The one on Gifford’s doorstep. What did he look like? Do you remember that?”