He supposed he could have hung around some more, drifted among the crowd until he’d observed where Quiros and his lady companion headed once they left the ride. But experience told him it was time to fold. And he was sure they’d be going their separate ways, at any rate.
Enrique had gotten what he came for. As had Lathrop himself.
Thinking he couldn’t be happier with his afternoon’s work, Lathrop turned from the carousel and took the walkway back toward the parking lot.
“Three Dog Night. Jefferson Airplane. The Troggs,” Ricci read aloud, leaning over the selection tabs on the big vintage jukebox in Nimec’s poolroom. “Got to admit, Pete, you’re—”
“A wild thing?” Nimec snapped his fingers.
“Groovy,” Ricci said.
Nimec grinned.
“That’s the same model juke that was in the hall where I spent the whole summer of ’68 with my father. A Wurlitzer 2600.” He patted the machine’s fake wood-grain side panel. “Same songs, too. Three selections for a quarter, ten for fifty cents.”
Ricci looked at him.
“Must’ve been some year.”
“We were on a streak, and flush for a change. Couldn’t miss the sweet spot on a cue ball for anything,” he said. “I don’t think it would’ve mattered if we’d been trussed and blindfolded, which is how I bet some of the mugs considered dealing with us before they paid up. These were some hard, tough sons of bitches, let me tell you.”
“How come they behaved?”
“My old man was harder and tougher.”
Ricci nodded.
Nimec went around the soda bar. It was white with a red Coca-Cola bottle-cap design on the base, chrome trim along the counter’s edge, and a half-dozen white stools. Everything looked a little grubby. The chrome finish was scratched and dulled in places. There were cigarette burns on the countertop. Some crumbled and yellowed padding was pushing through a tear in the leatherette cushion of one of the stools.
“How about something to drink?” Nimec said from behind the pump. “The cola’s got the right proportions of syrup and fizz. And I have frosty mugs. Or there’s beer, if you want.”
Ricci sat on one of the stools, inhaled air thick with the odor of stale cigarettes and cheap cologne.
“Better make it soda,” he said. “I start out hugging a drink, three hours later I wind up wrestling with one. Like that Bible story, when Christ wrestles with Satan in the desert.”
Nimec looked at him.
“Except,” he said, “Jesus, you’re not.”
Ricci gave a vague impression of amusement.
“The truth shall set you free,” he said.
Nimec poured two colas from the fountain, puffs of condensation dispersing from the ice-cold mugs as he filled them and then handed one to Ricci across the countertop.
They drank in silence. Then Ricci lowered the mug from his lips with an ahhh of appreciation.
“Good,” he said. “Not too fizzy, not too syrupy.”
Nimec smiled.
Still holding the mug by the handle, Ricci made a scratch in the thin rime of ice on its outer curvature with his thumbnail.
“You going to tell me why I was invited here?”
Nimec gave him a nod. “Your RDT proposal’s been rubber-stamped on a trial basis,” he said. “I figured you’d be pleased. And I wanted to give you my congratulations in person rather than over the phone.”
Ricci sat there looking at him for a long moment.
“Thanks, Pete,” he said. “And not just for the well wishes.”
Nimec shook his head. “I don’t deserve any credit for this. The idea was yours. You’re the one who sold Gord on it. Sold everybody on it. Some of us just took longer than others to realize they’d been persuaded.”
“And maybe wouldn’t have at all if you didn’t push.”
Nimec shrugged and said nothing.
“The ragin’ Cajun among the enlightened?” Ricci asked after a moment.
“To be honest, he’s not gung ho. But he’s willing to suspend his opposition and give things a fair chance.”
“Didn’t think fairness was one of his capacities.”
Nimec put down his mug and leaned slightly forward over the counter.
“About Thibodeau,” he said. “He’s a little headstrong, maybe going through some difficult personal times, I don’t know. But he’s also a good man, stand up to the bone.”
“And?”
“Your comment on the Pomona about the circumstances that got him shot was a low blow. He may have deserved it from you at the time, and I’m not going to be critical. But between us, his actions in Brazil weren’t careless or foolhardy. They were heroic, expedient, and they saved a lot of lives, very nearly at the cost of his own. I would hope you could acknowledge it.”
Ricci was briefly quiet.
“Say I do,” he said. “Say I even respect him for it. You asking me to admit that to anyone but you?”
Nimec shook his head.
“I know when I’m already running ahead,” he said.
They sat drinking their Cokes in the deliberate shabbiness of a pool parlor generated from thirty-five-year-old memories and impressions “So when can I start putting together the new section?” Ricci said after a while. “Soliciting volunteers for tryouts, that sort of thing?”
Nimec glanced at his watch.
“It’s three o’clock on the button,” he said. “You okay with about five after?”
Ricci gave him the barest smile and lifted his soda to his lips. The frost on the mug had now melted to leave behind glistening beads of moisture.
“Bottoms up,” he said.
On the books, Felix Quiros earned his bread from the family-owned automobile salvage business he managed on the outskirts of San Diego. But his veal was in the money he made shipping various hot American vehicles to countries throughout the world via Mexico.
Sometimes in broad daylight, mostly at night, these were driven into the fourteen-acre yard directly from the streets and garages where they were stolen. The spiffiest models would be rolled into long aluminum vans that would cart them across the border at illegal transit points. The less-desired vehicles were dismantled for parts in Felix’s chop shop.
As he gazed down between stacks of crushed automobile bodies in the dark of this chill, moonless November night, Lathrop could see a shadowy line of maybe five or six cars pass through the chicken-wire fence across the yard toward where the metal vans waited with their extended ramps. A couple of others were moving along a different gravel path toward the lifters, conveyers, and compactors in the recycling and demolition area.
It was almost like watching them roll into an automatic car wash, he thought. Neat.
“So, when I gonna find out why you got me here rattling my stones, instead of us meeting inside where it be nice and warm?” Felix said, standing there with Lathrop amid the rows of gutted and flattened vehicles. He hugged himself for warmth, rubbing his hands briskly over his shoulders. “What the fuck’s this about?”
“Privacy,” Lathrop said.
Felix tipped his head toward the trailer at the far end of the scrapyard.
“That right over there is my private office, comprende?”
Lathrop looked at him.
“You have a fresh mouth, sonny. Ought to consider finishing school,” he said. “It did wonders for Enrique. Who’s the reason I’m here.”
Felix made an unsatisfactory attempt at minimizing how much that piqued his interest.
“Ain’t got to be disrespectful. All I’m saying, we both gentlemen, ought to give ourselves our props,” he said. “And what’s up with my uncle, anyway?”
“Main thing far as you’re concerned is I met with him today, and he happened to mention that he’s upset about you moving on Salazar without his nod.”
Felix struck a posture of bluff rejection lifted straight from some MTV hip-hop video, head pulled back, chest thrust forward.
“How’d he find out I got
anything to do with that?” he asked. “And why he want to talk to you about it?”
Lathrop released a deep breath.
“Okay, time to cut the wiseass bullshit,” he said. “You didn’t hear me say our meeting was about you. Enrique made a comment, and I figured you might want to know what it was. Far as who clued him it’s you did the hijack, I don’t have the foggiest idea. Maybe you opened that big show-off’s mouth of yours to somebody with an even bigger one.”
Felix shook his head rapidly.
“No way, no way,” he said. “Besides, if Enrique’s in a burn about this, how come you didn’t put in a good word? You the man told me when Salazar’s shipment was coming. You the man told me Enrique wouldn’t have faith I could do the job. Told me to keep it under the fucking table till after the product’s turned over, split the earnings with him afterward, finally get him to recognize me. You the man, Lathrop.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m your guru. Or your lawyer. It’s not my place to jump into the middle of a family tiff. I gave you my best advice before, figured I’d give it now. No extra charge. Go talk to Enrique. Tell him the truth, be clear you weren’t intending to hold out on him. Just omit the fact it was me who put you onto the shipment.”
Felix tossed his head and did a kind of petulant shuffle, kicking the toe of his shoe into the dirt.
“Omit, right,” he muttered. “How I know it wasn’t you gave me up to my uncle?”
Lathrop expelled another long breath, glanced quickly around to be sure nobody was lurking amid the walls of the junk-metal canyon into which he’d lured Enrique, wanting to avoid making a mess of the punk’s trailer. A mess that would have to be scrubbed and sanitized before he could be on his way.
“I warned you about talking nasty,” he said. “You should have listened.”
Felix suddenly became still. Swallowed. His expression showing an awareness that he really had opened his mouth too wide this time.
“What’s that supposed to mean, man?” he said.
The silenced Glock nine appeared in Lathrop’s hand as if he’d snatched it out of nowhere.
“Means you’re gone, Felix,” Lathrop said. “Gonzo alonzo.”
He brought up the pistol and squeezed the trigger twice, putting two slugs into the precise center of Felix’s forehead before he knew what hit him.
Cleanup here was easy. Lathrop put on his gloves and disposed of the body in one of the junked cars down the aisle with a rusty but undamaged trunk lid, stuffing it inside the trunk, pushing the lid shut, even getting it to latch.
Then he went back to toss some dirt over the blood and skull fragments.
Lathrop wasn’t looking to be overly thorough concealing the kid’s remains. It really didn’t matter whether Felix was discovered by some Quiros stooge or eaten by foraging rodents. Just as long as nobody could pin anything on him.
Ten minutes later, he slipped out of the salvage yard unnoticed, anxious to get back home. Tired as he was, he meant to take a closer look at the videos he’d taken of Uncle Enrique and Blondie on the carousel.
Not to mention that his cats needed feeding and a little tender loving care before he fell into bed, the three of them having been left alone since very early that morning.
EIGHT
VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 6, 2001
MARGARET RENÉ DOUCETTE LIVED ALONE IN A three-story ancestral townhouse in the heart of New Or-leans, attended by her servant of long years, an aging Creole woman named Elissa, who occupied the detached slave quarters out back. Engaged by Margaret René’s parents when she, their only child, was just nine or ten, Elissa had stayed on as caretaker of the house after it was willed to Margaret René as part of a large inheritance upon their sudden, untimely deaths.
At the time of the automobile collision that killed them in 1990, Margaret René was thirty-two years old, recently married to a financial consultant with a carriage trade brokerage firm, and three months expectant. Though she and her husband had purchased a new riverside home in Jefferson Parish, they decided to put that property up for sale and move into the Vieus Carré residence.
Despite her grief, Margaret René had found solace knowing the family she planned to raise would be embosomed in a place so full of sentimental attachments for her, where the spirits of her forebears seemed still to inhabit the high-ceilinged bedrooms and parlors, the graceful interior courtyard with its terra-cotta tiling and bowers of lush, tropical greenery, imbuing them with a healing and supportive warmth.
Since those days, a decade gone now, the hope of renewal that eased Margaret René’s sorrow had been peeled away from her like bloody strips of skin under a torturer’s flaying knife.
Her son—christened Jean David, after her father—had seemed a normal, if colicky, infant for the first six months of his life. But ominous signs of problems far worse than simple cramping had soon manifested. He’d had difficulty swallowing, and his food often would not stay down. There would be unpredictable spikes and dips of body temperature that could not be associated with common pediatric illnesses. When he was ten months old, Margaret René noticed an odd jerkiness to his movements and a gradual loss of previously acquired physical skills. His balance would fail even when he was holding the bars of his crib, and he would be unable to sit straight in a high chair. Playthings would drop from his straining grasp, his fingers sometimes clenching around his thumb as in a newborn—a fist that would lock tightly shut, the fingernails digging into his palm until it bruised, and on one occasion bled profusely.
In precautionary tones, the child’s doctors had recommended a blood sample be taken and sent to a laboratory specializing in the detection of lysosomal disorders, a term unfamiliar to Margaret René and her husband until then, broadly explained to characterize a range of defects in a type of cellular membrane. When clinicians at the lab noticed an almost total deficiency of galactosylceramide B, a bodily enzyme vital to the development of the brain and nervous system, they hastily forwarded the specimen to yet another medical facility in Philadelphia for further testing. More frightening, alien terms such as leukodystrophy and DNA mutation and myelin sheath were mentioned to the parents during this tensely waitful period. As Margaret René struggled to understand them, she had often felt as if she were listening to the indecipherable chants of the voodoo priests who had been said to wander the narrow streets of the Quarter in her girlhood.
The final diagnosis was devastating. Jean David was found to have globoid cell leukodystrophy, or Krabbe’s disease, a rare genetic disorder transmitted by a pair of carrier parents. The enzymic compound surrounding his nerve fibers was decayed, like insulation that had been eaten away from electrical wiring, causing the nerves themselves to degenerate and die. While the disease’s symptoms could be managed and possibly slowed, there was no cure, no stopping or reversing its progression. It was terminal in virtually all infantile cases. Only the length of its course was uncertain.
For Jean David, the slippage was rapid. As his first birthday approached—a joyous occasion for the parents of healthy children—the breakdown of his motor system led to paralysis and near blindness. There were bed sores that went to the bone. He would burn with fevers for days, growing weaker with each prolonged episode. He soon lost the ability to take solid foods and had to be nourished through entubation.
As the pressures of coping with Jean David’s steady decline had escalated in her, Margaret René had tried reaching out to her husband for support, but his private suffering had plunged him into his own downhill slide. He became uncommunicative and began drinking heavily. Problems at the office led to his having to accept a forced sabbatical. He would rise from bed in the middle of the night, leaving the house without notice, his mysterious departures lasting from a few minutes to several hours. At times he was gone until well after daybreak. When he arrived home after the first such absence, he’d claimed to have taken a long drive to clear his head. Later on, he would not bother with explanations.
Margaret René supposed his affair
s should have been obvious to her, but all her thoughts had been turned toward her waning son. Everything else had seemed peripheral to giving him whatever comfort she could.
Finally Jean David developed a severe case of pneumonia from which he was not expected to recover. By then, Margaret René’s anguished prayers at his crib side were no longer for a miracle to spare him but for God to put an end to his ordeal, to grant him a compassionate surcease.
Her pleas went unanswered. Jean David lingered for weeks.
He was just sixteen months old when he passed away.
Margaret René’s marriage survived him by less than a year.
Was it possible to feel guilt over a flaw in one’s own biology? For that guilt to be transferred to the person with whom you, by chance combination, produced a doomed, tormented offspring? Margaret René did not know how else to explain the resentment and seeming aversion her husband developed toward her. In bed his back would be turned. He had refused to seek marital counseling, and in the heat of an argument confessed to having met another woman. He was in love with her, he said. He wanted a fresh start, he said. A divorce, he said.
And then he had left her.
This was ten years ago.
A decade, gone, since Margaret René had retreated into solitude. Still vigorous at seventy, Elissa maintained an atmosphere of old-world elegance, seeing that the expensive silk upholstery and antimacassars on the chairs and sofa were neatened and mended, the antique rose-wood furniture polished to a rich gloss, the crystal chandeliers, ivory statuettes, and antique china bric-a-brac regularly dusted. When required, professional help was called for servicing and repairs. But for Margaret René, the townhouse had become a cold, somber fortress. After returning from her son’s funeral ceremony, she had placed the urn containing his cremated remains on the fireplace mantle in the grand salon, then draped the gilt framed mirror above it with a heavy cloth, not wishing to see her pain reflected; there at her insistence it hung to the present. And these days, the oil portraits of ancestors that had once given her consolation seemed to gaze severely down from their places on the walls as she wandered the silent rooms and hallways, thinking of poisoned hope, of love turned to ashes.
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