But in truth the caller had made one slip which I suspected he sorely regretted. He had spoken of Ida in the present tense. I also had a feeling I would hear from him again.
Much is written about contract killers. Much of it is accurate. If they're Mobbed-up, they tend to be ethnic, with tribal loyalties. But in the final analysis their race or nationality is coincidental. A button man is a sociopath first and an Italian, Jew, Latino, or Irishman second.
Jericho Johnny Wineburger was a Jew who graduated from a Catholic high school and did hits for a Neapolitan crime family.
The common denominators among professional assassins, at least in my experience, are greed, sometimes desperation, and total indifference to the fate of their victims and the pain visited upon their families. They possess neither anger nor curiosity and struggle with no problems of conscience whatsoever.
Years ago, when Clete Purcel and I were at NOPD, we had to fly to New York and interview a man being held in the West Street Jail. He had admitted to murdering over thirty people for one of the major crime families, one based in both Queens and Hallandale, Florida. The only emotion he showed was concern about his own situation. He maintained he had cut a deal that should have allowed him to enter the federal Witness Protection Program but the United States Attorney had betrayed him.
He droned on about governmental treachery and a life sentence without possibility of parole that had just been dropped on his head. I finally reached the point where I had to ask the question that lingers in the mind of every homicide cop who finds himself in a small room with a man whose handiwork he has seen up close, before the odors and the body fluids have been scrubbed out of the environment. "Did you ever have any regrets about the families of the guys you popped?" I said.
"Who?" he said.
"The families – their parents, their wives and kids."
"I didn't know them," he said. He shook his head and thought hard to make sure he was being honest. "No, I'm certain I didn't know none of them. Why?"
When I didn't reply, he snuffed down in his nose, complained about the coolness of the room, and asked if I could get the screw to bring him a box of Kleenex.
The week passed and I made no progress on the case of Fontaine Belloc, the woman the Baton Rouge serial killer had raped, bludgeoned, strangled, and dumped in a pond inside the Iberia Parish line. Sometimes in my dreams I thought I saw her ruined face speak to me. I had long ago learned the dead have their ways, and I was sure that a lady who was so brave that she would swallow her own wedding ring to keep it from the hands of her killer would find a way to tell me who he was.
But on Friday night I decided to put away my cares and go fishing with Clete for two days out on the salt. At false dawn on Saturday morning, just as the trees were turning gray inside the fog, I hitched my boat to my truck, loaded my tackle and an ice chest in the bed, and was about to pull out of the backyard onto the street when I heard the phone ring inside.
Ignore it, I told myself.
But my daughter, Alafair, was attending the summer session at Reed College in Portland, and no father who loves his daughter ever ignores a call that might be related to her welfare. I cut the engine and went back inside the house.
"Wake you up?" the voice said, one that sounded like that of a man with infected membrane on his vocal cords.
"Jericho?" I said.
"I know it's early, but I let Jigger Babineau sleep it off in the back of my saloon. Then he goes crazy about an hour ago and starts breaking out my windows with pool balls. Remember Jigger? He used to wash money for the Giacanos? So I'm sticking his head in a bucket of ice water when he tells me he saw you coming out of my saloon and you're gonna get clipped by a cop. I say, 'Why tell me, Jigger?' He goes, 'Because Robicheaux is a prick and so are you.'"
"So I ask him if the hitter is a guy name of Billy Joe Pitts, since Pitts ain't a player anymore. He says no, that ain't the name, it's a cop on a pad who's also a gash-hound and likes to nail young girls but he don't know the name. In fact, he don't know nothing except that Dave Robicheaux, who he called a self-righteous lush, is about to get his wick snuffed. So I thought I ought to pass it on."
"Anything about Purcel?" I said.
"You're the hit, my man. You know a dirty cop who'd go so far he'd smoke another cop?"
"Pitts's partner, a dude named J. W. Shockly," I replied.
"If I was you, I'd start hanging around with a better class of people," he said.
Clete and I fished for speckled trout and gafftop catfish in Atchafalaya Bay, just south of Point au Fer. The trout were not running, but we loaded the ice chest with big, hard-bodied gafftop and that evening put ashore at a camp built on stilts in the sawgrass that Clete leased by the year. We cleaned and filleted the fish on the dock and deep-fried them in a huge skillet, while the sun went down like a red wafer in the Gulf of Mexico.
That night the wind came up and blew the mosquitoes back into the marsh. Then at sunrise it rained hard for thirty minutes and the air was sweet and cool as we headed south through groundswells that burst on the bow in ropes of green and white foam. Clete had not had any alcohol in two days, and his face looked youthful and handsome inside the boat cabin, where he was tying fresh leaders and feathered spoons onto the rods we were about to set in the outriggers. The mist-covered Louisiana coastline fell away behind us, and we left the westward alluvial flow of the Mississippi and entered the smoky green, rain-dimpled roll of the Gulf, flying fish sailing across our bow like sleek, salmon-colored birds.
I could have stayed on that stretch of water the rest of my life.
But a storm broke in the early afternoon, and we headed back for land, eating fried-oyster po'boys, our skin stiff with salt and sunburn, a good thirty pounds of gutted fish in the ice chest.
The problems of the workweek had completely disappeared from my mind. We winched the boat up on the trailer and washed it down, then started to clean up the cabin. The rain was hitting hard on the tin roof now, and the gum trees and saw-grass in the marsh were turning gray inside the mist. Without explanation, Clete seemed to be growing agitated, faintly irritable, looking at his watch as though he were late for an appointment.
"Give me the keys and I'll gas up and buy some groceries to replace what we used," he said.
"We can buy gas on the way out," I said.
"I know that. But I want to restock my canned goods. That's why I just said I wanted to buy groceries," he replied.
Clete's duration of abstinence from booze was always short-lived. After a maximum of forty-eight hours, a physiological change would take place in him. He would perspire and constantly clear his throat, as though his mouth had turned to cotton, then light up a cigarette and take a deep hit on it, holding it inside, just as if he were toking on a joint. In a short while he would be back on the dirty boogie, tossing back Beam with the happy abandon of a hog rolling in slop.
But who was I to be the expert on somebody else's alcoholic chemistry? I tossed him the truck keys and watched through the back window as he drove down the road through the sawgrass and sheets of rain, the northern sky forked with lightning.
He should have been gone no longer than a half hour. I finished washing the dishes and making our beds, but still no Clete. I tried his cell phone and got no answer. I lay down on top of one of the bunks and by the light of a Coleman lantern read a fine novel titled The Black Echo by Michael Connelly. The wind outside made a humming sound in the sawgrass, and when I glanced through the window I could see whitecaps on the bay, like tiny bird wings, all the way out to the horizon.