Good Junk

by Ed Kovacs

  There was no love lost between me and the FEMA buffoons, but I couldn’t blame them for being unwilling to hand over tens of millions of dollars to the city, carte blanche. Odd how poorly monitored recovery funds could just somehow evaporate.

  As I jogged along dodging the occasional wine bottle and pile of dog droppings, my thoughts shifted from my broken city to Del Breaux and Ty Parks. A double murder meant to look like a murder / suicide was an unusual crime in NOLA, and the killers had done a pretty good job staging it. Even if they realized they’d scuffed Breaux’s shoes, what could they have done short of breaking into his house and getting a different pair? Such sophistication in a crime suggested a fairly high level of criminal mind. Then throw in the facts that both victims worked at a federal facility that held deep secrets, had been living the good life, had all that cash on hand, and that Breaux’s office had been sanitized and an illegal entry into his home thwarted, and—well, it stunk to high heaven.

  As I paused at MLK Boulevard for an old pick truck up to cross St. Charles, I felt a familiar emotion—anger—rise up within me, but this time it had a new source. People were driving around my adopted town in dark SUVs thinking they could get away with a double murder. It didn’t matter who had done it or why. It pissed me off. I realized with a start that this kind of normally toxic anger, focused on the Breaux case, acted more like a badly needed elixir. Tracking those killers down and bringing them to justice, I hoped, would balance the scales of guilt that had been weighing me down.

  “I’m about to meet with those FBI boys in the chief’s office. The counterintelligence guys from D.C.”

  Honey had called my cell just as I stepped into Pravda.

  “Keep us on the case if you can,” I said.

  “I’ll do my best. Meanwhile, try and track down Peter Danforth.”

  “I’ll get right on it. And hey—it was really great seeing you last night.”

  Silence on Honey’s end, then, “So invite me back.” She terminated the call.

  I smiled, feeling better. I settled in at my permanently reserved table in the back corner at Pravda, a funky extrapolation of a Russian revolutionary salon on Decatur Street that, thankfully, the tourists didn’t get. Any bar with a Van Gogh take on a portrait of Rasputin hanging on the wall is a place where I want to spend time. This was my little rented corner of the Quarter and functioned as my office. I removed my laptop from a steel-reinforced faux-neoclassical antique cabinet and logged onto the Internet to do some checking. I exhaled bluish smoke from a Partagas mini-cigarillo, hecho en Habana, Cuba. A Cuban-American woman I’d tried but failed to date had taught me that cigars go best, not with Scotch, but with good strong coffee; hence, I was brewing up a pot of Pakxong Lao Classic Robusta, using beans grown in the mountains of Southeast Asia.

  Pravda didn’t open till 7 PM, but the front door was often unlocked since Michelle, the Goth chick owner or one of her minions usually lurked around to take deliveries and restock, clean up, and, more importantly, fix me a proper cocktail, if need be. Lately there had been a lot of need.

  On my laptop I rechecked the dark video clip from Banks Street Bar, tweaking the zoom and contrast in an effort to try to ID the pay-phone caller. A guy in a baseball cap was as close as I could guess, and I couldn’t be 100 percent sure about the guy part.

  I was just beginning my effort to locate Breaux’s assistant Peter Danforth when a familiar voice interrupted me.

  “Saint James, you got a minute?”

  I’d been so focused I hadn’t seen or heard the pretty brunette in her late twenties enter the bar.

  “Agent Harding, it’s been awhile.” My mind was spinning. Harding? Coming to see me here? I stood.

  “That coffee smells good. Mind if I join you?”

  “Cups are behind the bar. Help yourself.”

  Special Agent Harding operated out of the New Orleans FBI office. She had worked briefly with Honey and me on a high-profile case that had ended well for all concerned. Except the dead bad guy. I watched her as she fixed us each a coffee. The blond dye job I remembered so fondly was gone; actually, Harding looked better in her natural color. She wore a nicely-tailored dark blue business suit—blazer and skirt. This was the first time I’d seen her legs, and it occurred to me I’d like to see more. The fact that she felt secure enough to wear a skirt and not try to hide her femininity in a male-dominated arena impressed me. Smart, ambitious as hell, and very thorough, Harding could be a good ally, as long as it benefited her. But I’d never count on her in the clutch to have my back.

  “Must be nice having your office in a bar,” she said crossing over to join me.

  “Del Breaux and Ty Parks,” I said, taking a cup-and-saucer of java from her. I usually wasn’t much for chit-chat. Harding had never been here before and there could only be one reason why she was here now. I’d said it before she’d even had a chance to sit down, and she looked a little resentful that I had gotten right to the point.

  “Tell me about the agents from Washington about to meet with Chief Pointer.” I said.

  “Please put your recording equipment on the table and turn it off.”

  Now I was intrigued. I removed my mini audio and video digital recorders from a pocket and set them down. “They weren’t turned on.”

  She checked them nonetheless. “Never met those agents. They’re CI-3, counterintelligence folks.” She took a sip of the dark brew and we just looked at each other.

  “You’re obviously working the case, so what can I do for you?”

  “I’m not working the case at all. I’m not even here. You and I aren’t having this conversation. Okay?”

  I nodded slightly. “Fair enough.”

  “I don’t know with certainty who killed Breaux and Parks. I know a little bit about some things they were up to.”

  “Black-project-secret selling?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” she said, somewhat surprised. “You have proof of that?”

  “No, but it seems a logical possibility.”

  “Be careful with those kinds of assumptions.”

  “Good advice. So you are here because—?”

  “I was working an investigation. It’s classified; I can’t discuss it. Breaux came on my radar screen. I was unofficially ordered to cease and desist, so I did. If I had a smoking gun I wouldn’t have backed down so easily. But—” She shrugged.

  “But what?”

  “I came to realize that the original source of my investigation was an unstable individual. He had some kind of personal vendetta. He was obsessed with— let’s just say I heard him say numerous times how he wanted to kill Del Breaux and certain other people.”

  “And you think it’s possible that he did.”

  “That’s why I’m here, in a completely unofficial capacity. If he killed Breaux and Parks, then there’s a long list of other murders just waiting to happen.”

  I didn’t know Harding well, but she looked troubled. For her to come here like this and tell me these things was beyond unusual.

  “So who is this guy? Where can I find him?”

  “I don’t know his real name. He goes by Decon.” She pronounced it “DEE-con.”

  “You started a classified investigation based on information from a source and you didn’t know who the person was?”

  “We’ll start an investigation based on an anonymous tip if the information is good. As far as I know, Decon is homeless. We put in a lot of hours trying to track him down. All I can tell you is he used to work at a place called Scrap Brothers in the Ninth Ward. The owners weren’t too impressed with an FBI badge. Maybe you can get further with them than I could.”

  That was a given.

  “So you dropped in to give me a tip on a murder case?”

  “No. The dead are already dead. It’s the people on the list who are still alive that concern me.”

  Harding looked terribly serious.

  “So why aren’t you sharing this with the CI-3 agents?”

  “M
aybe you’ll figure that out.” She pushed the coffee away from her, stood up and walked out the door.

  As I watched her go I mentally replaced Peter Danforth with some homeless guy named Decon at the top of my to-do list.

  A few scrap yards populate the blighted industrial area in the Ninth Ward over by the Galvez Street Wharf on the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal. Scrap Brothers sits on Kentucky Street. The neighborhood had been seriously swamped in the Storm and hadn’t come back yet, except for a few businesses and residents here and there. The scrap businesses, however, had reopened quickly, because, let’s be honest, when your inventory consists of piles of rusty junk no one wants except some guy with a smelter in Guangdong Province, being flooded with twelve feet of water for a couple of weeks doesn’t exactly kill the resale value of your stock. Maybe a forklift or a welding unit got ruined, maybe a beat-up office computer or two. But the Storm also created a world of new scrap overnight, a tsunami of iron, steel, aluminum, brass, bronze, copper, and more exotic metals like nickel, chromium, cobalt, Monel, and titanium, all still being brought to the scrap dealers almost around the clock by industrious scavengers. Occasionally the goods brought in weren’t even stolen.

  The sun lasered me through a patchy sky as I entered the scrap yard; a couple of thunderheads signaled rain cells drifting in from the Gulf. I noticed that Scrap Brothers had a shredder. A black guy whose name patch on his blue work shirt said “Skip” nudged a heavy steel filing cabinet onto an inclined conveyor belt that carried the four-drawer unit up about ten feet into the throat of a feed hopper. The cabinet then dropped onto 36mm-wide blades spinning on four powerful shafts. The screeching whine as the super-sturdy filing cabinet was torn to pieces didn’t last long at all, and petals of shiny metal snowed out of the grinding compartment and into an open-topped dumpster. The shredder was one of the few machines you could throw a monkey wrench into and the monkey wrench would lose.

  Skip threw more metal junk onto the conveyor belt, so I figured I’d nose around the yard until somebody stopped me. I skirted an overheated Doberman chained to a steel pole in front of two locked forty-foot, ocean-going cargo containers—one painted green, the other silver. The nice doggy made it a point to display his impressive incisors for my consideration as I moved past.

  The place was filthy, like all scrap yards, and piles of haphazardly separated metal stood piled everywhere. I spotted a massive pile of railroad rail partially covered by tarps over in a corner. A guy on a forklift loaded palletized scrap into a COSCO cargo container in an open area where roll-off trucks would back into and then literally winch the containers onto their frames and deliver them to the Port of New Orleans. COSCO stood for China Ocean Shipping Company, and these days, our trash was China’s treasure.

  I was looking for some shade in the already hundred-degree heat, when I saw another guy pour gasoline onto coils of insulated wire, then set them on fire. This was a legal no-no, and I sensed an advantageous opening as I crossed to him. He was stripping copper wires the lazy-man’s way. All kinds of toxins were being released, which is why it’s usually done in China, not the United States.

  “You’re violating about fifteen federal, state, and city statutes there, partner.”

  “No kidding?” he said mock-sweetly, looking up at me. “Well the feds, the state, and the city can go suck on a razor blade. Who the hell you be, anyhow? You with the EPA? Stupid regulations are killin’ small bid’ness in dis here country. So go stick a jagged rubber hose up your ass, douche bag.” He turned back to his illegal work at hand.

  I had to suppress a smile. Potty Mouth used the direct approach, like I usually did. “I’m not a fed; I’m looking for guy named Decon.”

  “Don’t know nobody named Decon.”

  “Yes you do, Pops. Call all your people in. I’m dragging you all down to Broad Street and throw you in the drunk tank for forty-eight hours with a bunch of guys covered in vomit and lice. Maybe that will refresh your memories.”

  I couldn’t help it; I still had the cop look, vibe, and feel. Sometimes you didn’t need to show a badge. The man, whose blue work shirt also had a name patch that said “Skip,” same as the guy on the conveyor belt, whistled a shrill alert that might have been heard in Dallas. The Doberman winced. But the other two guys looked up and we convened a pow-wow in the office.

  The old window air-con unit didn’t look like much, but it put out an icy breeze. Leroy and Jimmy Jefferson, the Scrap Brothers, were the two men wearing “Skip” shirts. I didn’t ask. They were both short and stocky with thick forearms covered with scars from a lifetime of handling sharp metal objects. They made me feel as welcome as a herpes outbreak. Their employee Herbert, who had been running the forklift, practically inhaled a cold can of Coke, then told me he’d only worked there a couple of months and never met anyone named Decon. I gestured that he could go back to work and he went outside as a pickup truck pulled up with a load of tire rims that looked suspiciously new.

  “Who you be?” asked Jimmy. He had a yellowish left eye, was missing any number of teeth, and generally looked like he’d disassembled one old transformer full of PCBs too many.

  “We’re not here to talk about me. We’re going to have a little talk about your future.”

  I glanced around the dirty office which looked like it had been furnished from a military surplus auction—heavy gunmetal-gray desks, creaky uncomfortable office chairs, a grimy old-fashioned steel Rolodex with dog-eared name cards. Since I’m a lock guy, I recognized a steel government-issue file-cabinet safe with a digital combination lock that will lock you out if you get the combo wrong three times in a row. Then the safe can’t be opened without having some higher-up come out and reset it. But there were no higher-ups now, there were only Jimmy and Leroy Jefferson, and they were wasting my time.

  I picked up a length of lead pipe that had been leaning against a desk and slapped one end into my palm a few times.

  “I mean, you’re basically crooks and have been all your life. You’re fences for stolen scrap items, or just plain stolen goods, like those car rims outside. You have an all-cash business, so you report, what, twenty percent of your action to the tax man? You made a small—no, check that—large fortune since the Storm, so now you’re fat, dumb, and happy. And those piece-of-junk vehicles I see parked out there that you drive to work every day, that’s just to play the ‘poor man’ role. You can’t let Herbert out on the forklift or any of your customers see what you really drive. You have new Caddies or Lincolns parked in the driveway at home, right? A nice spread in the burbs out on the West Bank, or maybe a big piece of land in Mississippi, past Slidell. You both rake in a solid six figures a year, probably around a quarter mil, almost all tax free. And you think you’re untouchable because you’ve been doing it so long. You think in a place like Louisiana the gravy train will never stop. Hell, it’s a federal offense to scrap steel rail, but you’ve got tons of it sitting out in the yard.”

  “We storing it, we ain’t scrapping it,” said Leroy.

  Jimmy stood up from a broken office chair and took a step toward me. “You get the hell out. We got friends downtown, too.”

  I slammed the pipe onto the top of the nearest desk, demolishing a dirty beige phone handset. Jimmy stopped in his tracks. “Cockroach,” I said, by way of explanation. “There’s a few in here.” I gently placed the end of the pipe onto Jimmy’s chest and guided him back onto the office chair. “You called me a douche bag, Jimmy.” I said it in a way that suggested Jimmy was in line for some payback.

  Jimmy settled down quick, but Leroy had the look of a man who was thinking about going for a gun. I figured he had one in the desk drawer next to him.

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you.” I gave him a look I used sparingly. It was a look that suggested he had better cooperate. No, actually, it was a look that suggested I was considering ripping out his heart.

  Of course it was all an act on my part. In order to get results, sometimes you have to cajole and sweet-talk, sometim
es you simply have to politely ask, sometimes a bribe is enough, sometimes you need to raise your voice and get angry. Other times, you might threaten legal action, and sometimes you have no choice but to crack some heads. Or threaten to. And sometimes it’s a combination of all of the above.

  I sounded pissed, I looked lethal, but strangely the raw anger that for weeks had been underpinning my every thought, word, and deed was in sleep mode. For some reason, I felt oddly calm with the Jeffersons.

  I placed a call on my phone and put it on speaker. A husky male voice boomed, “Auto theft, Sergeant McCarty.”

  “Dice, it’s Saint James. I’m looking at a truckload of brand new expensive rims that have ‘stolen’ written all over them. Aluminum with some chrome finish. Look top of the line to me. Ring a bell?”

  “Sounds like the rims that got stolen from Kirby Ladue the other night.”

  Leroy and Jimmy glanced out the window at the wheel rims Herbert was unloading from the truck, and then looked at each other.

  “Oh, yeah?” An NOPD detective now in auto theft, Dice McCarty and I were old enemies, but we had settled into an uneasy truce

  “I figure the thief hasn’t been able to fence them, they’re so hot. You don’t steal from Kirby if you have half a brain,” said Dice.

  “Half a brain is what these two guys have between them.”

  “Listen, I can save myself some paperwork and just call Kirby. He’ll send his boys to get the rims and mess up whoever took them. And give you a nice spiff for the info.”

  “Sounds good. The rims are at—”

  Jimmy waved wildly at me. “I rememba’ now. I think I know why you came here.”

  “Dice, I’ll call you back.”

  We stood sweating in an outdoor stall where mostly brass and bronze items were stored. I spotted a long brass staircase railing that I could have sworn I’d seen once-upon-a-time in the public library. Brass fittings that had to have come off ships were piled in a corner. A crack of thunder ripped the sky with an intensity that rattled my bones and vibrated some of the stacked metal.