“Where are you?” Wilcox asks. “Your voice is breaking up.”
I fill him in on my chat with Coleman, asking for the all clear so I can call Fontenot.
“So you really went up there? I wish you hadn’t.”
“Why not? I told you I was going to.”
He ignores my question. “This thing with Fontenot. . I think it would be best not to have any contact with him.”
“What did you find out?”
“Well. .”
“You did check around, right?”
“March,” he says with an exasperated sigh. “Not everybody works the same hours as you. This might come as a surprise, but I can’t just call somebody at NOPD on a Saturday night and get them to send over everything they’ve got.”
“Did you do anything at all?”
A pause. “I really don’t think you should get in touch with him.”
“You said you were going to help out.”
“And I will,” he says. “But not on your timetable. Give me a chance to get the wheels in motion, then I’ll call you.”
“When will that be?”
“Whenever it happens, okay? That’s the best I can do.”
I’m not sure if he hangs up on me or I hang up on him. We both hit the button so fast it could have been a draw.
I pound the steering wheel a couple of times before pulling onto the shoulder. I should have known better than to trust Wilcox to hold up his end. How many times does a man have to let you down before you learn not to trust him? Of course it cuts both ways. I’ve given him plenty of reason to ask the same question of me.
I’ve driven back and forth between Houston and Huntsville so many times I can do the trip with my eyes closed. But for the idea I’m hatching, I need a map. I take the next exit and circle under the highway, heading back toward town. Passing under Sam Houston’s gaze, I give the old man a wave.
At the next service station I buy an atlas and flip through the pages, working out the quickest route. From Huntsville I can take 190 east to Woodville, heading south on 69 until I connect with Interstate 10 at Beaumont. After that I’ll travel east into Louisiana, hitting Lake Charles, Lafayette, and Baton Rouge in succession, reaching New Orleans sometime between seven and eight in the evening. Seven hours to work out how to find Wayne Bourgeois, and how to break him once I do. Seven hours to decide if what I’m doing is crazy. With luck I can conclude my business by midday tomorrow and get back to Houston early in the evening.
There’s no point in cloak-and-dagger, but seeing the pay phone at the service station, I dig some change out anyway. I take my Filofax, open up to the page where I’ve written Gene Fontenot’s address and phone numbers, dialing him at home.
“Hello?” he says.
“It’s me.”
A pause. “I wondered when I’d hear from you.”
“You still have that spare bedroom?”
“What I have is a spare couch,” he says. “And you’re welcome to it.”
“I’m on my way. And in the meantime, there’s someone I need you to locate.”
Charlotte sounds icy over the phone, indifferent.
“You didn’t pack a bag,” she says.
“I didn’t anticipate making the trip. I’d come back through Houston, but that would add another hour to the drive.”
“I’ve hardly seen you the past week.”
“It’s this case,” I say. “Everything is unraveling on me and I’m not sure what to do.”
“Bridger called the house looking for you.”
“He has my cell number.”
“I guess he thought you’d be home on a Sunday afternoon. He wants you to call him.”
“I’ll do that.” The phone is warm against my ear. “Charlotte, I don’t want you to be mad. I would have said something before, if I knew this would come up.”
“I’m not mad,” she says.
A pause.
“Look,” I say. “It’s this pregnancy thing, isn’t it?” Silence. “It’s been eating at you ever since you found out. I know it’s. .” My voice trails off. Still nothing. “Is it the thought of a baby in the house, or the fact that they’ll probably move out-?”
This time there’s no question who hangs up first.
I decide to give her time, calling Bridger instead. He picks up and I get a blast of wind noise over the line, immediately picturing him on a golf course green. He’s just the sort to play in this weather. But no, he’s in the car, smoking with the window down.
“You should give up,” I say.
“Thanks for the advice. Now, what’s this I hear about Donald Fauk appealing his conviction? There’s no chance of the court entertaining this, is there?”
I start to explain the situation. He makes a series of affirming grunts, prodding the story along. Occasionally I hear him exhale loudly, and I imagine a cloud of smoke swirling around the pathologist’s windblown head.
“I heard about the DNA samples going missing,” he says. “What do you think about that?”
“Is it any wonder? Evidence gets lost even under the best conditions, and these days nobody’s calling HPD’s DNA section the best.”
“You don’t think it’s convenient, though?”
“In what way?”
“This particular set of samples going missing.”
“Fauk must be happy,” I say, puzzled.
“But you think it’s just a coincidence.”
Now I’m really confused. “What are you getting at exactly?”
“Maybe it’s nothing,” he says. “But when the original tests were done, the results were verified by an independent lab. We send a lot of work to this particular lab, and I happened to be talking to one of their doctors earlier this week when the subject came up. He brought it up, by the way, and he had a strange story to tell.
“When the evidence couldn’t be retrieved from HPD, Fauk’s attorney queried the independent lab about whether they had samples in storage. My friend answered that they did-these guys keep everything-but the lawyer insisted on him physically checking to see whether they were there. And when he did, guess what?”
“No samples.”
“Exactly. And it’s not like somebody misplaced them. He checked every test they’d run the same month as the Fauk evidence, and all of it was there. The only thing missing were the Fauk DNA samples.”
“Did he have a theory?”
“He told me they were still looking into it. But off the record he said the only explanation was that someone on staff removed them. He doesn’t know when, but at some point, a lab employee went into storage and took the evidence.”
“So Fauk’s counsel insisted on them checking because he knew already the evidence was no longer there.”
“That’s how it looks to me.”
“If this is true,” I say, “then what are the odds the same thing happened in the HPD crime lab?”
“Pretty good, if you ask me. A lot of heads rolled during that inquiry. Maybe somebody decided to make an extra buck. It might not have seemed too serious to them, knowing there was a confession and those backup samples at the other lab.”
“You’ve given me something to think about. Thanks for passing it along.”
“How are you doing, March? The whole Fauk thing coming back like this has to be taking its toll. .”
“There’s a lot going on,” I say, brushing his concern aside. “If I can keep Fauk in jail, that’ll be one thing I don’t have to worry about at night.”
After I hang up, I remember Carter Robb saying something similar to me last night.
If I could just get clarity. On just one thing.
And what had I told him? Something stupid about the human condition. Speeding through East Texas with New Orleans in my crosshairs, I keep repeating Carter’s words to myself. If I could just get clarity on just one thing. A mantra doubles and redoubles in my head, syncopated by the roar of the road, by the rush of forced air, and the beat of raindrops on the windshield. I hear
the tap, tap, tap of the knifepoint, first on the stainless surface of the autopsy slab and then chipping away at the sheriff’s conference table. It all becomes white noise and then fades to silence, and in the silence a new sound, wet and whispering, fills my ears. It’s the porous sucking hiss of a blade through flesh.
CHAPTER 18
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13 — 9:09 P.M.
When he returned to New Orleans a year after the hurricane, Gene Fontenot found himself a brick one-story in Westwego across the river from Audubon Park, an ugly house with a bare concrete patio, where he could grill steaks and drink beer after-hours, separated from the mud-colored Mississippi by a rusted shipyard. To mark my arrival, he carries a chair from the breakfast table out onto the slab. We sit and listen to the sizzle of cooking meat, and Gene pulls a couple of longnecks from the cooler.
“None for me,” I say.
“Come on, now.” He extends the bottle closer, then sets it aside with a suit-yourself smile. “I don’t recall you being a teetotaler-but whatever. I checked up on that boy you were asking about, Wayne Bourgeois, and if you want, we can pay him a visit later on. He stays up at his stepsister’s place on Desaix Boulevard, over by the fairgrounds. It wouldn’t hurt to know why he’s in your gunsights.”
“Remember Donald Fauk?”
He lifts his hands. “How could I forget?”
“My information is, when Bourgeois got out of Huntsville, he had an errand to run for Fauk. I assume, based on the fact he came back here, that this task of his was local. Now, what would Fauk want done in New Orleans? The only thing I can come up with has to do with you.”
“I’ve never heard of this boy before. What’s his sheet look like?”
“He beat the living daylights out of a prostitute, but I don’t think that’s got anything to do with the situation. Apparently, Fauk’s been paying off newly released cons to do odd jobs he can’t run through his team of lawyers. For example, this trial that just fell apart on you, the one that sparked the internal investigation? Is it possible Bourgeois coached your suspect on what to say, maybe gave him a plausible story that would make the confession sound coerced?”
He laughs at the idea, takes a swig from his bottle, and sets it on the concrete. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“That doesn’t sound too likely.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“What that defense attorney said in the courtroom. . Much as it pains me to concede anything to the man, that’s pretty much what happened.” The words come out light and sarcastic, like this admission is no big deal, only he can’t look me in the eye.
“What are you saying, Gene?”
“The little dirtbag was guilty, make no mistake. But without any physical evidence tying him to the scene, and with my witness coming over with a sudden case of amnesia, there was no sticking it to him without a straight-up admission. Lucky for me when we picked him up he’d collected a few bruises, including a nice one right here on the biceps.” He taps his arm to show me just where. “Before the interrogation, I conducted a little pre-interview, and whenever he lied to me I gave him a punch on the arm. This boy had just smoked a man in cold blood, two shots to the head, and I had him crying like a baby from a few taps.” He chuckles at the memory, still avoiding eye contact. “And don’t tell me you never do things like that in Houston, ’cause I wasn’t born yesterday. In fact, I seem to recall a little talk we had once upon a time, a regular meeting of the minds. .”
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.”
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