by Ed Kovacs
“Read him his rights,” I said to Honey. “We got him on contributing to the delinquency of a minor, possession of narcotics, resisting arrest, plus whatever we find on his garbage scow.”
Honey stood and pulled Haddad to his feet. “You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent—”
“Wait!” His small eyes shifted back and forth as he blinked faster. “What is it you really want? I know who you are. You want to talk about Del Breaux’s murder. And arms dealing, yes? So let’s talk, I have nothing to hide.”
“Brother, you’re in big trouble right now. You don’t have diplomatic immunity. This heroin is no joke.” I turned to Honey. “Let’s just take him to the station and book him. And call the TV stations.”
“Please! What do you want to know?”
“You had dinner with Del Breaux and Ty Parks the night they were murdered, didn’t you?”
Haddad paused a moment. “Yes.”
“And you saw them later that same night.”
“I did but so did many others. We were in a group together.”
“Where? Doing what?”
“What do you think? Buying weapons!”
“Where?” I practically yelled.
“Within fifteen minutes of here. Del and Ty left the group to go home. I didn’t see them after that.”
“What group? The Buyer’s Club?”
“Not just the Buyer’s Club; there were many others there. But Del and Ty left and I never saw them again. I should have killed Breaux, that son of a whore, that yabn el wiskha! Do you know what he did?” The veins on Haddad’s face pulsed, engorged with blood. “He raped me! The thieving yabn el mara el mitnaka raped me! I’m not gay. Okay, maybe I take a young boy once in a while, but I’m not gay! I don’t take it up the ass!”
“Interesting distinction,” I remarked, trying not to sound too sarcastic.
“I’m glad he’s dead. But I didn’t kill him. And his lover Ty was a good person, though why he was with Del, I don’t know. I swear to you, I would have killed Del if given a little time. Please find the killer so I can give him a bonus.”
“Who sells the arms? Global Solutions?”
“Yes.”
“And who are they? Who runs the sales? Who are the owners?”
“Are you trying to get me killed? Do you realize what you are asking?” Haddad was shaking.
“Answer the question!” said Honey, getting into his face. “If you hold back? If I think you’re lying? You go to jail, and your ship gets raided. Tonight. The FBI can’t stop me.”
“It’s your funeral, detective.”
I grabbed Haddad by his shirt and lifted him off the couch. “Don’t you threaten her. Sometimes prisoners have accidents on the way to booking. Fatal accidents.”
“I’m not threatening her. Nor would I hurt her. There are forces in play that will kill you both.”
“What forces? Chinese intelligence? The Russian GRU?”
“And they will kill me too, if I say much more.”
“Keep stalling me and they won’t have to kill you because I might do I for them,” I said, pushing him back down onto the couch. “Breaux sold secrets to the Chinese. We traced the cash. Was he double-crossed? Were you in on it? Was Pelkov going to buy something from Breaux?”
“You have a crossed a line that’s—just arrest me for the drugs. You won’t be alive to testify against me, and I have nothing to do with that, one way or the other. I didn’t kill Del Breaux. I have an alibi. I can provide twenty witnesses to prove I was on my ship when he was killed. But as for these other questions, no, I won’t answer. So either arrest me or get out of my room.”
I lifted him to his feet then slapped him hard with an open palm. He fell back on the couch and started to quietly whimper. He was terrified and that was too damned bad. I had no business hitting him, even if he was getting teens hooked on No. 4 Thai heroin, but I didn’t care. And I didn’t care that Honey was watching. My rage was taking over and I quite simply was going to start beating answers out of him.
“Where did you and Chu and Pelkov stay when you came to New Orleans one year ago? Right after the hurricane hit. How could you even do business then?”
I lifted him back up. His eyes blinked so fast he could have sent an epileptic into a fit. I slapped him again. I wasn’t seriously hurting him—yet. But I was getting his attention.
“Answer my question!”
“On board.” It came out in a husky whisper.
“On board your ship?”
“No. A ship docked at Violet.”
Then he did something odd. He fainted. I caught him and then gently laid him on the couch.
Honey was tugging at my shoulder. “Saint James—the ships that docked at Violet after the Storm? They were U.S. Navy.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Honey, how could the Buyer’s Club have been living on a navy ship after the Storm? Haddad is a lying weasel.” I looked down at him, still passed out on the sofa. “You see the way his eyes were blinking? He lied through his teeth, trying to scare us off. If the FBI wanted us to go away, they would have yanked the case from you. Claimed ‘national security’ and all that crap. And as I think about it, I don’t think foreign spies are going to kill American cops with FBI counterintelligence agents running all over town. That’s ludicrous.”
“Haddad could be our guy. For the murders of Breaux and Parks anyway. He had the motive. He’s not shy about admitting it,” said Honey.
“Any alibi would be phony, provided by his cronies. He could have used crewmembers from his ship to carry out the hit,” I added.
Honey thought about that. “So what do you want to do?”
“Take a look at the girl on the bed in there and tell me you don’t want to book him.”
“This wasn’t a perfectly clean bust. The way we let ourselves in, I mean.”
“What are you talking about? We knocked on the door and some drunk kid let us in thinking we were here to party. Anyway, who needs a conviction? We just need the arrest, the print reporters, and the TV cameras.”
“And the search warrant for his ship? Who is Judge Grenadine?”
“You know grenadine—it goes well with tequila, lime juice, and club soda.”
She gave me one of her looks, and then radioed dispatch as I headed for the door.
“But try for a search warrant anyway. And make sure those lazy reporters get footage of the girl getting loaded into an ambulance. At least it’s a poke in the eye of the Buyer’s Club.”
Picture perfect choreography and timing is a beautiful thing. First came the nodding-off blonde on a gurney getting loaded into the back of an EMS unit. Then the pack of reporters scurried like rodents to document the perp walk. Honey escorted Haddad as he delivered one of the guiltiest slinks I’d ever seen a felon perform. The Fourth Estate had been frontloaded that he was a high-living international arms dealer, so the unanswered questions got shouted fast and furious. He was our very own Adnan Khashoggi.
I watched the spectacle from the shadows on South Peters Street. I decided to leave the Bronco sit tight for now in the Omni parking garage, tying up my tail, I hoped. I hailed a cab. My first stop would be the loft to retrieve a night-vision monocular in case I needed it, and then I’d head on to a place where some people chased the green fairy.
Decon wasn’t at Millie’s Lounge and hadn’t been lately. He was nowhere to be found in the bars. I remembered that a bar patron had told Honey and I that he slept in a crypt at Greenwood Cemetery, and although I’d written it off at the time, I now scanned the cemetery with a Bushnell night-vision monocular. I’d taken a cab to Greenwood. The cabbie was spooked to sit and wait for me in the dark, but the hundred bucks I gave him ameliorated his fear, like a talisman against the evil eye.
I scaled the wall, dropped into the cemetery, and waited. Probably just my imagination, but the night seemed to go incredibly still. I stopped to listen. I heard no barking dogs, just the muted rumble of occasional late-nigh
t traffic streaming along the I-10 only a block away, or a passing carload of drunken college kids, contractors, or thugs puttering along Canal. But those sounds were anomalies; the silent humid warm air hung like a dead physical thing that weighted me. With my vision adjusted to the absence of light, I carefully moved forward.
I stopped when I caught movement at the edge of a tomb to my right. I’d seen a momentary blur. Or had I? I rechecked the area with the night-vision monocular, but there was no sign of anything. Damn, I hated cemeteries at night, remembering a killer who had stalked me in those hellish days right after the Storm hit.
I cursed my luck and silently approached the crypt in question. I stopped when I heard low grunts, like someone being beaten was muffled, so I pounced around the tomb and shined my Surefire onto—
—some fat guy being ridden by a long-haired fake redhead with her breasts, also fake, hanging out.
“Hey!” she said in complaint, covering up.
I killed the light, and the fat guy rolled clear and scampered off as he pulled up his pants.
I’d seen crazier things in cemeteries. Back when I was still in patrol, I spent three months working a “cemetery detail” to earn extra money. “Details” were essentially private security work that police officers did while off duty, but in uniform, to supplement their meager pay. I’d chased off dopers, drunks, Goths wanting to drink beer and howl at the moon, pseudo-voodoo practitioners who had shown up to attempt some kind of black rites, vandals, thieves, guys in Star Wars costumes dueling with light sabers, and teens who didn’t have any place else to screw.
But “Scarlet” here was a professional lady of the evening, for sure.
“Turning tricks on a crypt?”
“Why not?” she said standing as she adjusted her bustier. “It’s frigging hot. The stone feels cool to lay on. And the dead are the only people in town who ain’t overcharging. These are the dog days of summer, off season, but the cheapest motel in town is still eighty-five bucks for a room. So I put an ad on the Internet. Figured there would be some freaks who would want to do it in a cemetery. I was right.”
“How much?”
She gave me look, thinking I might be soliciting. “One-fifty, short-time.”
“You’re right about everybody overcharging.” Before she could figure out if that was an insult or not, I asked, “Know a guy named Decon?”
I peeled off a fifty-dollar bill, and she snatched it.
“Normally I wouldn’t rat him out, but—he owes me one-fifty.”
The tomb door didn’t creak at all. Decon lay sprawled on a sleeping bag on the marble floor. A stone sepulcher took up the center of the room, but the rest of the place was furnished in homeless chic. Folding lawn chair, pop-top canned goods, empty liquor bottles, dozens of books, a boom box, candles everywhere, an out-of-date calendar, and an old cover of Maxim magazine stuck somehow to the stone wall. Clothes were stuffed into paper shopping bags and black plastic garbage bags.
I kicked his foot. “Wake up.”
He only stirred. So I kicked harder.
Decon screamed like a wedding-night virgin. I had killed the light so he only saw a dark form looming over him. He scampered against the wall screaming and blabbering, then yelled, “Don’t, I’m sorry, please forgive me!” He was so scared he started to sob and had a hard time catching his breath.
I turned on my flashlight. “Decon, get a grip. The Grim Reaper hasn’t come for you just yet.”
Two cigarettes later, his hands weren’t shaking so bad.
“You bugged out the other night before giving me the rest of the names on your list.”
“You cuffed me to your truck. I can’t stand being restrained. That’s why I can’t go to jail, if you can appreciate that.”
“You took apart my truck door. I see why they call you Decon.”
“But see, I gave that name to myself, so it doesn’t count. I’d like to have a real moniker.”
“You mean, like, The Scrapyard Bandit?”
He motioned with his hand as if to say, Something like that. He didn’t want to demean my suggestion. “It’s not easy for a criminal to earn a title. You have to work hard, be original. It’s a mark of distinction, if you know what I’m saying.”
“Like Tony ‘the Ice Pick’ Sorbello, or ‘Jimmy the Fist’—”
“No, those guys named themselves, or their buddies did. It’s gotta be a name the press or the cops give you, like John Gotti, ‘the Dapper Don.’”
“So like the Night Stalker, the Freeway Rapist, the Nylon Stocking Rapist, the Zodiac Killer—”
“Those are unfortunate examples, if you understand what I’m saying.”
“Decon—what are you doing sleeping in a tomb?”
“This is a rent-controlled unit adjusted to zero. I like that price. Sometimes I sleep outside, on top. Fresh air, moonshine, nobody kicking me in the side telling me to move on. And let’s face it: it’s quiet, except when the weirdoes show up.”
“Where were you at about seven in the morning yesterday?” I asked.
“Thanks to the gods, I wasn’t at Scrap Brothers. Saddam Hussein’s sons put people though a shredder in Iraq, did you know that? If they really didn’t like you, you went in feet first; more painful and took longer to die.”
“Leroy went in feet first.”
“I have to agree, Leroy was a prick. You think I killed them?”
“You talked about it.”
“I talk about having sex with Miss Universe, too; but if she gets laid, I unfortunately wouldn’t be at the top of the suspect list.”
“So no alibi.”
“I was here, asleep. Don’t think the ghosts are much for giving depositions to support that fact.”
“Were Leroy’s and Jimmy’s names on the list you gave to Harding?”
“They were. But not the worker Herbert.”
“Who else was on the list?”
“Clayton Brandt, Tan Chu, Grigory Pelkov, Nassir Haddad.”
I nodded. “Our information seems to match. Where exactly are the arms coming from? Where’s the operation located?”
“I don’t have the whole picture. I only know that the weapons and fancy gear always came in from Michoud.”
Michoud. “You sure about that?”
“Yeah.”
“And that was always on a Saturday night.”
“The weapons? Yeah. Other stuff—junk, mostly—came in the daytime from military or government surplus auctions from all over the state, but the weapons always came from Michoud. It’s a NASA facility; they use special pallets, easy to identify.”
“So weapons in crates would come in from Michoud to the scrapyard on Saturday night. And they’d get locked in a cargo container.”
“Right.”
“When did the stuff go out?”
“Within a couple of days usually.”
“Were the Jefferson boys the buyers of the weapons, or just trans-shippers?”
“I asked myself that same question, seeing as how I’m so naturally curious. Leroy and Jimmy didn’t know much about guns or weapons systems; they only knew about scrap. Seems to me they had to be working for somebody, or fronting, if you know what I mean.”
I knew that the brothers paid for their legitimate auction purchases using the business bank account. So how to explain all the cash in their safe, unless it was from years of skimming off of the daily business take? Maybe the money acted as the off-the-books slush fund to pay for illicit scrap purchases—like the stolen car rims. But five hundred thousand dollars was a lot to keep on hand for such purposes. Would Chu be paying such large amounts for the brothers’ services?
“Sometimes weapons got mixed in with scrap going to China, sometimes not,” said Decon. “I know because I ran the forklift and Jimmy had told me to do it. I say ‘weapons,’ but it was, like I said before, if you recall our earlier conversation, maybe sophisticated electronics, communications gear—”
“But not obsolete stuff.”
“I don’t think so. Even if it was, it’s illegal to send it to China, even as scrap. Anything with a motherboard or circuit board, and Customs will spank your monkey, if you get my drift. I heard a few scrappers in California got popped and sent to Terminal Island.”
“The freight forwarder was TDF, right?”
He nodded. “Three Dumb Fucks.”
“What?”
“That’s what TDF stands for. ‘Three Dumb Fucks.’ Except only one dumb fuck is still living, and he’s not so dumb.”
“Who would that be?” I asked.
“Eddie Liu.”
“Chinese.”
“Yeah. The drivers, too. Eddie’s partners were a couple of Cajun boys. They both died in traffic accidents.”
“How convenient for Eddie.”
The NASA Michoud Assembly Facility was a huge place covering over eight hundred acres and comprised of hundreds of structures. Haddad said that after their final dinner he’d gone with the group to buy weapons. Had he gone to Michoud? And since Ty Parks had been the shipping manager at Michoud, had he somehow been covertly handling the outbound shipping? How could he have done that under the nose of Ralph Salerno and Michoud security?
“The TDF truck drivers would know exactly where they picked the stuff up,” I mused aloud.
“I know some of those boys. Trust me, they won’t tell you nothing about that,” said Decon, emphatically. “Compared to them, the Sphinx is chatty.”
“Could be,” I said with a smile. “But the paperwork in the TDF office might tell us everything.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Seen one trucking company lot and you’ve seen them all: rows of tractors and trailers lined up on flat open land and a crummy-looking office with a radio tower. This land on Almonaster had been under twenty-five feet of water from the Storm; the office now was in a double-wide trailer. TDF had no fence and no guard dog, but it had something worse: a Chinese security guard patrolling the lot in an electric golf cart.
Decon and I reconnoitered the place from behind a clump of shrubby rosemary bushes.
