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man who loves a vice so dearly he fears his appetite for it will one day force
him to give it up.
"The heavyweight champion of the Shrimp Festival," he said.
I sat down next to him and took a peanut out of a plastic bowl on the
bar and cracked the shell and put the nut in my mouth.
"You ever see a guy by the name of Johnny Remeta in here?" I asked.
"What would you give to find out?"
"Not much."
He lifted the shot glass again and tipped it into his mouth.
"I might buy half of a carnival. What do you think of that?" he said.
"Maybe you can give me a job. I got bumped from the department after I
punched out Jim Gable."
He watched an overweight, topless girl in heels and a sequined G-string
walk out on a tiny stage behind the bar.
"Miss Cora give you a severance package?" I said.
"The smart man squeezes the man who milks the cow. That don't mean
anything to you. But maybe one day it will," he said.
"Really?" I said.
"You're an ignorant man."
"You're probably right," I said, and slapped him on the back and caused
him to spill his drink on his wrist.
I went outside and walked down to the old docks and pilings on the
waterfront. It was dark now, and rain was falling on the river and I could see
the nightglow of New Orleans on the far bank and, to the south, green trees
flattening in the wind and the brown swirl of the current as it flowed around
a wide bend toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Somewhere down on that southern horizon my father's rig had blown out
and he had hooked his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and bailed off the
top of the derrick into the darkness. His bones and hard hat and steel-toed
boots were still out there, shifting in the tidal currents, and I truly
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believed that in one way or another his brave spirit was out there as well.
The cops who had murdered my mother had rolled her body into a bayou, as
contemptuous of her in death as they were of her in life. But eventually her
body must have drifted southward into the salt water, and now I wanted to
believe she and Big Al were together under the long, green roll of the Gulf,
all their inadequacies washed away, their souls just beginning the journey
they could not take together on earth.
The rain was blowing hard in the streets when I walked back to my truck,
and the neon above the bars looked like blue and red smoke in the mist. I
heard men fighting in a poolroom and I thought of Big Aldous Robicheaux and
Mae Guillory and the innocence of a world in which inarticulate people could
not tell one another adequately of either their pain or the yearnings of their
hearts.
29
THAT NIGHT I DREAMED of roses. I saw the sheriff trimming them in his garden
and I saw them tattooed on Maggie Glick's breasts. I saw them painted in
miniature on the vase Johnny Remeta had given Alafair. I also saw the rose
with green leaves that was tattooed on the neck of Letty Labiche.
But just as I woke and was momentarily between all the bright corridors
of sleep and the grayness of the dawn, the flowers disappeared from the dream
and I saw a collection of Civil War photographs on a library table, the pages
flipping in the wind that blew through the open window.
I wanted to dismiss the dream and its confused images, but it lingered
with me through the day. And maybe because the change of the season was at
hand, I could almost hear a clock ticking for a sexually abused woman waiting
to die in St. Gabriel Prison.
On Monday morning I was out at the firing range with Helen Soileau. I
watched her empty her nine-millimeter at a paper target, her ear protectors
clamped on her head. When the breech locked open, she pulled off her ear
protectors and slipped a fresh magazine into the butt of her automatic and
replaced it in her holster and began picking up her brass.
"You're dead-on this morning," I said.
"I'm glad somebody is."
"Excuse me?"
"You're off-planet. I have to say everything twice to you before you
hear me," she said, chewing gum.
"Where'd you see Passion Labiche?"
"I told you. Going into that fortune-telling and tattoo place in
Lafayette."
"What for?"
"Ask her."
"You brought up the subject, Helen."
"Yeah. And I dropped it. Two days ago," she said. I went back to the
office and called Dana Magelli at NOPD.
"I've got a lead for you," I said.
"I see. You're doing general oversight on our cases now?" he replied.
"Hear me out, Dana. Johnny Remeta told me he was going to squeeze the
people who killed my mother."
"Are you kidding me? You're in personal contact with I an escaped felon
who's murdered two police officers?"
"Saturday night I was in Maggie Glick's bar over in Algiers. I ran into
Jim Gable's ex-chauffeur, a guy named Micah something or another. He said he
was going to come into some money by squeezing the man who was milking the
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cow."
"What?"
"Those were his words. I think he was saying Remeta is shaking
down Jim Gable."
"You're saying Jim Gable killed your mother?" he said.
"Remeta forced Don Ritter to give up the names of my mother's killers
before he executed him. At least that's what he says."
"What am I supposed to do with information like this? I can't believe
I'm having this conversation," Magelli said.
"Put Micah under surveillance."
"Shake loose three or four detectives and follow a guy around who has no
last name? This sounds like something Purcel thought up, maybe to get even
with the department."
"I'm serious, Dana."
"No, you're obsessed. You're a good guy. I love you. But you're stone
nuts. That's not a joke. Stay out of town."
The next DAY I drove to the City Library and found the collection of Civil
War-era photographs that Johnny Remeta had been looking at just before he
jumped out of the reading room window. I used the index, then flipped to the
grainy black-and-white pictures taken at the Bloody Angle and Dunker Church.
The images in the pictures told me nothing new about Remeta. He was
simply a necromancer with broken glass in his head trying to find a historical
context for the rage and pain his mother had bequeathed him. But if that was
true, why had the image of the book, its pages turning in the wind, disturbed
me in my dream?
Because I hadn't considered he was looking at something else in the
collection, not just at the photos of Union and Confederate dead at Sharpsburg
and Spotsylvania?
I flipped back two pages and was suddenly looking at a photograph of a
two-story, narrow, columned house, surrounded by a piked iron fence. The
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