House of the Rising Sun Page 7

  “Cancer?”

  Ray nodded. “In his colon.”

  LaGrange looked down at his cup, quiet for a few seconds. “When the indictments came out and you guys got arrested, I was sick to my stomach, too. I mean really sick, vomiting every thirty minutes. But what was I supposed to do, turn myself in? Go tell the feds, hey you forgot about me?”

  “We’ve all got to live with our choices, Jimmy.”

  Neither one said anything for a while. LaGrange took a bite of his muffin to fill the silence. When he finished chewing, he said, “Everything about this case is getting pushed through really fast: follow-up reports, lab results, IBIS—”

  “What’s IBIS,” Ray asked, pronouncing it Eye-Bis, like LaGrange had.

  LaGrange exhaled sharply. “You have been away a long time.”

  “I was in prison.” Ray said. “Which is exactly where you would have been if you hadn’t punched that drunk in the back of the head on Bourbon Street.”

  For Detective Jimmy LaGrange, it must have been like winning the lottery, only better. Through pure dumb luck, he broke his hand at just the right time and was out on a sixty-day injury leave when the FBI started up their wiretap. The only guy in the six-man Vice Squad who didn’t go to prison.

  LaGrange said, “Ray, if there was anything I could’ve done . . . anything. I even talked to a lawyer, told him I wanted to help, but he said there was nothing I could do.” LaGrange took a sip of his espresso. “I waited, expecting any second they were going to come for me. Hardest thing I ever had to go through in my life was seeing you, Sergeant Landry, and the other guys walking out of the federal building in chains, on your way to prison.”

  Ray remembered that day, too. He remembered it like it was yesterday. He pulled a Lucky Strike from his pocket and lit it with his Zippo.

  LaGrange glanced around the coffee shop as a panicked look crossed his face. Then he pointed to Ray’s cigarette. “You can’t do that.”

  Ray took a deep drag, held it for a second, then blew the smoke across the table into LaGrange’s face. “Can’t do what?”

  “Smoke,” LaGrange said as he coughed. “You can’t smoke in here.”

  Ray looked around. “It’s a coffee shop, right?”

  Their waitress stomped over to the table. Not so perky anymore. “Sir, you can’t smoke in here.”

  Ray looked up at her. “Why not?”

  She propped her hands on her hips. “This is a smoke-free environment.” Saying it like Ray was an idiot for not knowing that already.

  He waved her away. “Go get me an ashtray.”

  She stuck her chin out. “We don’t have ashtrays, sir. We don’t allow smoking.”

  “Come on, Ray, put it out,” LaGrange said. “Quit giving her a hard time.”

  The not-so-perky waitress folded her arms across her chest. “If you don’t put that out, I’m going to have to call the manager.”

  “You better find me an ashtray, or when I get done I’ll just stub it out on your floor.”

  The waitress spun on her heel and marched off.

  Ray took another drag on his cigarette. “So what’s IBIS, some kind of new fingerprint machine?”

  LaGrange looked nervous as his eyes followed the waitress across the coffee shop. Finally, he looked back at Ray. “No, not fingerprints, bullet prints. I-B-I-S stands for . . .” He glanced at the ceiling like he was looking for the name to be written up there, but evidently he didn’t find it because after a couple of seconds he said, “I can’t remember exactly, but it’s the something-ballistic-identification system.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It’s a computer database we got from ATF.”

  “And?”

  “It’s at the new crime lab on Tulane. On every homicide involving a firearm, in fact, on every shooting, the lab takes the bullets and the casings and puts them into this machine.”

  Ray pictured some lab guy in a white coat dumping hundreds of shell casings into a big machine.

  LaGrange must have read his mind. “I don’t mean the bullets and cases themselves. The lab photographs them and converts the pictures into some sort of digital code that the computer can understand.”

  Ray was getting impatient. “How does that help me?”

  LaGrange held up his hand. “I’m getting to that. The machine runs comparisons on bullets and casings from every shooting. It can tell you which ones were done with the same gun.” He slapped his palm down on the tabletop. “But here’s the really good part. In addition to every shooting, the department enters a test-fired round from every confiscated firearm. The computer runs the comparisons automatically, so when a gun comes in, we get an automatic hit if it’s been used in a shooting.”

  Ray was impressed. He thought about the gun used to blow Pete Messina’s face off. “What about shotguns?”

  LaGrange shook his head. “They say the next generation of IBIS will do shotguns, but for right now it just works with pistols and rifles.”

  “So why are you telling me about IBIS? They used a shotgun in the House.”

  LaGrange shook his head. “That’s not all they used.”

  “I was there.”

  LaGrange reached under the table and pulled a black leather attaché case onto his lap. From inside he slid out a stack of paper, at least twenty or thirty pages, held together by a clamp.

  “What’s that?” Ray asked.

  LaGrange laid the stack of paper on the table. He flipped through the first couple of pages. “This is the initial report and a few of the follow-ups.” He stopped flipping and stared at one page for a second, then pointed to something about halfway down. “Right here’s where you got lucky.”

  “That’s the second time you said that. I don’t feel lucky, so why don’t you just tell me what you found.”

  LaGrange tapped his finger on the page. “Crime Scene dug a forty-caliber slug out of the floor.”

  Ray shook his head. “Nobody fired a pistol in—” Then an image flashed through his mind.

  The dancer up on stage, a hole in her leg, blood pouring out after a shotgun blast. Seconds later, another blast. Then something else, a pop, barely audible after the big explosion from the shotgun. Feeling the heat searing the back of his head.

  Ray looked at LaGrange and rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “Where’d they find it?”

  The former Vice cop flipped through more pages, skimming each for a few seconds before he found what he was looking for. He turned the stack around so Ray could read it. Ray saw a copy of a neatly drawn diagram he recognized as the first floor of the Rising Sun.

  LaGrange’s finger pointed to a small handwritten “15” between the bottom of the stairs and the front door. “Item fifteen is the bullet,” he said. “They found it buried in the wooden floor, twenty-five feet from the door.”

  Goose bumps broke out on Ray’s arms. “That motherfucker tried to shoot me in the head.”

  “I’ve told you before, you’ve got the luck of the Irish.”

  Ray pictured the skull mask, the pair of eyes, and the bad teeth, but most vivid was the image of the tattoo, the spiderweb wrapped around the back of the hand, reaching all the way to the base of the thumb. Somewhere—he wasn’t sure where—he had seen that tattoo before.

  “What good does it do me that Crime Scene found that slug in the floor,” Ray said, “if they don’t have a gun to match it to?”

  LaGrange pulled a second stack of papers from his attaché case. “Your friend Landry has already run an IBIS check on the bullet and it came back positive.”

  “Positive for what?”

  LaGrange hefted the second report in his hand. “Turns out the same gun was used in a shooting six months ago. They dug the bullet out of a body on Frenchman Street.”

  “Any arrests?”

  The detective nodded. “Two weeks later, Homicide picked up a guy named Cleo Harris, goes by the nickname Winky.”

  “They obviously didn’t find the gun he used, not if the shi
thead with the skull mask tried to kill me with it.”

  LaGrange nodded. “They got the shooter but not the gun.” “Even if I could get into lockup to talk to the guy, what’s his name, Harris, there’s no way he’s going to tell me what he did with that gun.”

  “He’s not in lockup.”

  “He bonded out on a murder charge?”

  The detective shook his head. “The D.A. dropped the case.”

  “Why?”

  “The only witness developed amnesia.”

  “No witness, no case,” Ray said.

  LaGrange nodded.

  “Is Harris white or black?” Ray asked.

  LaGrange slid his index finger down the face sheet of the report. “Cleo Harris. Black male, twenty-three years old. Five eight, one hundred and sixty pounds.”

  “All four stickup men who came in the House were white.”

  “Maybe he sold it.” LaGrange glanced again at the report. “It was a forty-caliber Smith & Wesson, by the way.”

  “How do you know it was a Smith?”

  The detective flipped to a page at the back of the report. After reading for a few seconds, he said, “They got some scientific mumbo jumbo in here about indications of bullet twist per inch and spacing between the lands and grooves, but the bottom line is that the lab determined it was a Smith & Wesson. It even gives some likely model numbers, all of which are stainless steel.”

  Ray reached across the table. “I need that report.”

  LaGrange pulled the sheaf of papers back. “No way.”

  “Why not?”

  The detective tapped a finger on the top margin. “I’m the one who pulled it up, and my name is printed on every page.”

  “So cut off the header.”

  LaGrange shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

  “I need that information, Jimmy.”

  “I gave you the information,” LaGrange said flatly. “I can’t give you the report.”

  There was only so far Ray could push. The bottom line was that Jimmy LaGrange was still a cop, and Ray was a convicted felon just out of prison. “Jimmy, I’m in a real jam here. This is all I’ve got to go on.”

  “Why are you helping those assholes?”

  Ray took a last drag of his cigarette, then dropped the butt into his nearly empty coffee cup. The waitress must have decided not to tell the manager, or maybe she had and the manager had called the police. Ray looked across the table at his old Vice partner. “I don’t have a choice.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “At least write down Harris’s information so I can find him.”

  Jimmy LaGrange stared back at Ray for a few seconds. Then he looked away as he pulled a pen from his shirt pocket.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Pull up right here and let me out,” Tony said as Rocco eased the Lincoln Town Car against the curb in front of the Messina Seafood Company on North Rampart Street. The rain was coming down hard.

  The building was just east of the French Quarter, in a commercial district that was home to a host of small businesses, most of them barely dodging bankruptcy. The tin buildings lining the four-lane avenue sported peeling paint and faded signs. The sidewalks were strewn with waterlogged trash, plastered to the cement by the steady rain.

  Under the nearby eaves and awnings, drug addicts, pushers, and prostitutes waited for a break in the weather so they could get back to work. This was the edge of the Ninth Ward, and Tony knew it well. He grew up here.

  Just like its neighbors, the Messina Seafood Company was housed in an old metal building with peeling paint and a faded sign. The sides and back had once been dark blue, but the years and the sun had faded them to a light, almost baby blue. The brick facade was set back from the street just far enough to leave room for the sidewalk. The front third of the building was a two-story office suite. The rest was a high-ceilinged, single-story refrigerated warehouse for storing the oysters, shrimp, and fish that came in fresh from the Gulf of Mexico every day.

  “You want me to come with you?” Rocco asked.

  With the car door already open, Tony was getting pelted by the rain. He didn’t even glance back. “No, I don’t want you to come with me. Just park the car and wait. When you see me come out, pick me up so I don’t get soaking fucking wet.”

  Tony dashed from the car to the front door, dodging puddles. He stood for a moment under the protection of the overhang above the front entrance and stared at his reflection in the glass double doors. Using an embroidered silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, he dabbed raindrops from his suit, then tugged at the slim knot in his tie. Next, he dragged a comb across his hair, knocking off the water that had beaded on top of his styling gel and making sure each strand was in place.

  The image that stared back at him from the glass was that of a man on his way up, a man about to overcome the few obstacles in his path. Tony pulled open the door and stepped inside.

  The pretty, dark-haired receptionist with the fake boobs waved as Tony passed her desk, making him think again how much he’d like to fuck her. Still, he couldn’t remember her name. Connie, Karen . . . something like that. The only problem with her was the way she talked. She had the same Chalmette accent as his wife.

  If he ever screwed Connie, or Karen, whatever her name was, he wasn’t going to let her talk. He’d make sure her mouth stayed busy doing something else. He probably wouldn’t get to fuck her, though, because the boss had a rule: no screwing the girls in his office. The rule didn’t apply to the Old Man, of course. Rumor was he had some hot piece of tail on the side, and the smart money was on Connie, Karen, what-ever-the-fuck.

  If he wasn’t in such a hurry, Tony would have stopped by her desk and laid on a little charm, just in case the boss wasn’t filling all her needs. Tony thought that maybe he could forget that aggravating accent, at least for a little while. The Old Man couldn’t handle a woman like that, even with the blue pills he was taking. What she needed was a real man, a man in his prime. Not a fossil.

  Tony found Carlos Messina behind his desk, leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling, the telephone stuck to his ear. Carlos waved Tony to a chair in front of his desk. While Carlos talked on the phone, Tony watched him. Like a boxer scrutinizing tape of an upcoming opponent, every chance he got, Tony studied the man.

  Everyone called Carlos the Old Man—never to his face—although it wasn’t a slam on his age so much as a sign of respect for the man. But for Tony it was respect for the position only, not the man. In Tony’s judgment, Carlos Messina was getting weak. His years in power had dulled his edge. A toothless lion, he could still roar but could no longer bite. Meanwhile the young lions circled, watching and waiting for their chance.

  In his late sixties, Carlos was a fat man with a shock of gray hair. His face was round, with thick jowls that hung past his chin, and a bulbous nose pitted with acne scars that stuck out like a doorknob. From somewhere in his roly-poly face, probably from his dark, almost black eyes, Carlos still occasionally managed a look of authority that made Tony nervous, but it wasn’t often, and for the most part, Tony thought the Old Man just looked like a has-been. It was time for a new generation.

  There was one thing Carlos Messina hadn’t lost—his style. Although from the outside the Messina Seafood Company looked like shit, inside, the Old Man’s second-floor office was nice. Positioned at the back of the two-story suite, Carlos’s office had two huge windows: one in the back wall that looked out over the open warehouse, the other looking down on the service drive running alongside the building. The office was also big, with lots of open space, built-in bookshelves, a massive marble-top desk, a sixty-inch flat screen, and plenty of cushioned places to sit.

  The kind of office Tony hoped to have one day.

  Carlos hung up the phone and looked at Tony. “What do you want?” The message was clear: don’t waste my time. The Old Man was gruff, still trying to roar so no one noticed he had no teeth. Knowing that, though, didn’t mean Tony could act s
tupid. The boss’s position was a strong one, even if the man in it was weak. Tony would have to tread carefully.

  Officially, Tony Zello was just a button man, a soldier. While a caporegime—a captain—might talk to Carlos every day, Tony had only spoken directly to the man a dozen times in the five years since he had been made. Because Tony worked directly for Carlos’s brother, he didn’t even have his own crew. Not a real one, just a few steroid cowboys who were more like flunkies. They sure as shit didn’t bring in any money.

  The problem, at least the immediate problem, was Vinnie. He just wasn’t an important member of the family. Because they were brothers, Carlos had put Vinnie in charge of the House. But that was it. And Vinnie was happy with that. He knew enough about his own limitations to stay out of the way. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Tony draped an ankle over his knee, trying to strike a casual pose. “I came to update you on what’s been going on at the House since the robbery.”

  “My brother sent you?”

  Tony shook his head.

  Carlos looked surprised. “Does he know you’re here?”

  A tiny flutter started in Tony’s stomach. “I came on my own.”

  Carlos fixed Tony with a look—almost like he could see inside him—as he leaned forward across the marble desktop and propped his bulk up on his elbows. “You got balls coming to see me like this.”

  Tony didn’t say anything, just looked into Carlos Messina’s cold, dark eyes and felt his confidence start to slip. Maybe the old lion still had a few teeth left after all, maybe he could do more than just roar. A slight quiver started in Tony’s legs. It reminded him of when he was a kid, just before he’d get into a fight, usually trying to keep the black kids from taking over his block, his little patch of the Ninth Ward.

  Carlos said, “You got something to say, say it.”

  Fuck you, old man. You’re nothing but a dinosaur, a throwback to the old days. Carrying around all that Sicilian bullshit. But Tony didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “I don’t think it was a good idea for Vinnie—”