I shake my head.
“You’ve had your eyes opened, too,” he says. “Don’t deny it.”
The steaks are too rare for my taste. I eat mine anyway, chewing in silence, listening for sounds of the river in the distance. The air is stagnant and wet, as thick or thicker than what we breathe in Houston, but not cold. He’s comfortable in shirt-sleeves and I’m almost tempted to strip out of my jacket. Something makes me not want to get too comfortable in Gene’s presence, though.
When we’re done, he goes into the house to retrieve his side arm, wedging the paddle holster into his belt. Then he pulls on a black windbreaker and cocks his thumb at the door.
“Ready to roll?”
We take Gene’s pickup, looping on Highway 90 to cross the river. The bridge takes us into downtown. Gene cuts over to I-10 and exits at St. Bernard Avenue, taking that all the way to Desaix. As he drives, I glance out the passenger window, entertaining a host of second thoughts. Meeting Gene again is like reconnecting with a buddy from high school, someone you had everything in common with at one point, and nothing in common with now. More than awkward, the reacquaintance calls into question all my earlier impressions of the man.
I glance over at him. He seems content, maybe a little excited by the prospect of bashing some heads together. Operating in his element. It dawns on me that Gene Fontenot is bent. He’s the proverbial crooked cop, convinced what he’s doing amounts to greasing the wheels of justice, helping the jammed machinery get itself moving again. In my time I’ve only met a few bad cops, and before now I’ve always worked against them, as committed to the fight in my own way as Wilcox is in his.
But Gene looks at me and sees another version of himself. Another cop who’s had his eyes opened, as he put it. In other words, he sees in me the same thing my ex-partner does, the only difference being that he’s delighted.
We pull up in front of a painted stick shamble overshadowed by a live oak. Small symmetrical windows on either side of the front door, a cracked concrete walk stretching from the door to the sidewalk. Tree roots run straight across the path. In lieu of a driveway, two paved ruts in the grass run alongside the house. An old-fashioned refrigerator lies upended in the yard with a kid’s bicycle propped against the dented metal.
“The woman’s got no husband,” Gene says. “She lives in a dump like this raising her kid, and now she’s got an ex-con half brother bringing the law to her doorstep. How’s that for a life?”
He pushes the driver’s door open and slides down, tucking his windbreaker behind his pistol the way a woman brushes a lock of hair behind her ear. Then he strides up the walkway with me a couple of paces behind, using his flashlight to inspect the surrounding ground.
“Maybe I should do the talking,” I say.
Gene just smiles, rapping a knuckle on the door. “My patch, my lead.”
A kid maybe five or six years old answers, looking up at us with big eyes, his skinny arms poking out of a wife-beater.
“Wha’chall want?” he asks in a surprisingly mature, even world-weary voice, like he’s been manning the door all night and is tired of being disturbed.
“Your mama in there?” Gene asks.
“No, she ain’t.”
“How about your uncle, then?”
The kid looks over his shoulder, then back. “Who wants to know?”
“Who do you think?” Gene pushes the door wide, forcing the kid back and revealing a man frozen on the threshold of the hallway, still holding a finger over his lips. “Don’t make a big deal out of this, son. We only want to talk to you.”
Wayne Bourgeois scratches his chin in thought, eyes darting, and for half a second I expect him to run. But then he sighs and motions us inside, telling his nephew to beat it into a back bedroom. The kid starts to argue until Bourgeois raises the back of his hand.
“Go on,” Gene says. “And you put your hand down before I break it off. Now grab yourself some chair and get your vocal cords ready, because we’re gonna have ourselves a little chat-and by ‘little’ I mean as long as it takes.”
Bourgeois lowers himself onto a plush recliner, the fabric all rubbed to a high shine. He’s barefoot with only his toes sticking out from the hem of his ragged jeans. His body is hidden by an oversized Saints hoodie that leaves the prison tats on his neck in full view. Judging from the stubble on his chin, he hasn’t shaved in days. And there’s a smell coming off him, a bouquet of body odor and marijuana.
“Now, Mr. Bourgeois,” Gene says, “it seems you’ve got yourself a problem. My colleague here is from the state of Texas, and you know how them folks get when us Louisiana boys start running roughshod over their rules.”
“This about my parole?”
“It ain’t about collecting for the Policeman’s Ball.”
He starts to rise. “Now, see, I got a paper somewheres-”
“Park it, brother, or I’ll park it for you.”
“It’s all cool, man. Stay chill.”
“You gotta let me finish. What I was saying was, you got a problem, and me, I’m the solution. I can’t have these cowboys coming over the state line thinking they can snatch up my people without so much as a by-your-leave. Only to make ’em go away, there has to be something in it for them. Am I making myself clear? You answer the nice man’s questions, and the nice man goes away. You don’t answer, and the nice man goes away, but he leaves me here to continue the conversation.” He smiles. “And I ain’t nice.”
Bourgeois glances toward the hallway where the kid disappeared. “I’m an open book, man. No secrets. You fire away and see if I’m lying.”
I walk over to the side of his chair. “Tell me everything you know about Donald Fauk.”
He looks up at me, confused, but all it takes is a shift of Gene’s weight and the knit eyebrows smooth away.
“Oh,” Bourgeois says, “you mean that guy.” Like there’d been some doubt. “What you wanna know about him?”
“Everything,” I say.
“Well, he’s pretty rich, I can tell you that. Doing time for stabbing his wife to death. He’s got a lot of muscle around him, too. You can’t hardly get near the man unless he invites you.”
“What did he want from you?”
“Me? He didn’t want nothing”-another movement from Gene-“although, come to think of it, there was something. When I got out, he needed something done for him on the outside, and as a favor I volunteered.”
“Were you compensated for this favor?” Gene asks.
“Compensated?” He turns the word over in his mind. “I guess you could say that. There was some money in it for me.”
“What did you have to do?”
“Nothing much,” he says. “He gimme some letters, is all. ‘Go to the post office and mail these,’ he told me, ‘and when they arrive you’ll get a letter of your own.’ And I give him my sister’s address to send it to. That’s the only reason I had to come here. I wasn’t breaking parole or anything. I just wasn’t thinking when I give it to him, is all.”
“Tell me more about the letters.”
He shrugs. “There was four or five of ’em. All sealed up and the address written on. Two of ’em was real thick, filled up with papers, and the others seemed like there was just one or two pages inside.”
“Where were they going to?”
“The thick ones went to people in Houston, I think. There was one in Florida. I’m not sure about the rest. All of them but the one were to places in Texas, though. I do remember that.”
“And the letter you got, where is that?”
He smiles. “That one was filled with cash.”
“That wasn’t what the man asked,” Gene says.