'For some reason that doesn't fill me with joy, partner.'
'Lonighan's mixed up with the Caluccis and the dope trade in the projects. Those black kids we bust all the time, they weren't addicts when they came out of their mamas' womb. Believe it or not, even those dead dealers had families, Robicheaux.'
Why argue with charity? I eased the receiver down in the cradle and stared out i the window at the palm trees rattling in the wind. The bottom of the sky looked green over the gulf.
What was Clete Purcel doing?
I went home for lunch. When I came back the sheriff stopped me at the watercooler.
'The FBI just relayed some stuff to us from Interpol. They've got a fix on the woman,' he said.
'What?'
'Read it. It's on your desk. I thought stuff like that only went on in the Barker family.' He walked away and left me staring after him.
The statement from Interpol consisted of four paragraphs. There was nothing statistical or demonstrable about the information in them. As with all the other documents in the case, it was as though the writer were trying to describe an elusive presence that had been mirrored only briefly in the eyes of others.
But the images he used weren't those of the ordinary technical writer; they remained in the memory like splinters under the skin.
Two undercover antiterrorist agents in Berlin believed that the man known as William Buchalter and Willie Schwert and other variations operated inside a half dozen neo-Nazi groups with a half sister named Marie. A skinhead in a beer garden told a story of an initiation into a select inner group known in England and the United States as the Sword. A kidnapped Turkish laborer had knelt trembling on the dirt floor of a potato cellar, his wrists wired behind him, a burlap sack pulled over his face, while the initiates pledged their lives to the new movement. Then the woman named Marie had set the kidnapped man on fire.
I opened and closed my mouth, as though my ears were popping from cabin pressure in an airplane, and continued to read. The details in the last paragraph gave another dimension to the sweaty, hoarse voices that I had heard over the telephone.
The sheriff stood in my doorway with a coffee cup in his hand.
'You think that's our phony nun?' he said.
'Yeah, I do.'
'You believe that stuff at the end of the page?'
'They're perverse people. Why should anything they do be a surprise?'
'Did you know Ma Barker and one of her sons were incestuous? They committed suicide by machine-gunning each other. They were even buried together in the same casket, to keep the tradition intact. That's a fact.'
'Interesting stuff,' I said.
'You've got to have some fun with it or you go crazy. I got to tell you that?'
'No, you're right.'
He walked over and squeezed me on the shoulder. I could smell his leather gunbelt and pipe tobacco in his clothes.
'You sleeping all right at night?' he said.
'You bet.'
He grunted under his breath.
'That's funny, I don't. Well, maybe we'll drop that pair in their own box. Who knows?' he said.
He walked his fingernails across my desk and went back out the door.
The best lead on Buchalter, the only one, really, was still music.
Brother Oswald Flat, I thought.
I got his telephone number from long-distance information.