house. One night she walked all the way home from the bowling alley, wit’ cars going by her at sixty miles an hour. I couldn’t find work, me. I farmed t’irty acres of cane for forty years, but now I cain’t find no work.”
Before we left, we spoke to the neighbor who had made the “shots fired” call. She was in her late-middle years and was a member of that ill-defined racial group sometimes called “Creoles” or sometimes “people of color.” The term “Creole” originally meant a second-generation colonial whose parentage was either French or Spanish or both. Today, the term indicates someone whose bloodline is probably French, Indian, and Afro-American. This lady’s name was Narcisse Ladrine and she insisted she had not witnessed the shooting or a car or person leaving the scene.
“But you heard a vehicle driving away?” I said.
“I ain’t sure,” she said. She wore a print dress that fit her like a potato sack and was so wash-faded you could see the outline of her undergarments through the fabric.
“Try to remember,” I said. “Was it a sound like a truck? Did it make a lot of noise? Maybe the muffler was rusted out?”
“When you hear a gunshot, you ain’t listening for other t’ings.”
She had a point. “Did you see anyone else on the street?” I asked.
“There was a black man on a bicycle picking up bottles and cans out of the ditch.” Then she thought about what she had just said. “Except that was a lot earlier. No, I ain’t seen nobody else out there.”
We went back up the road and checked with the security office at the sugar mill. No one there had seen any unusual activity near the mill or in the community of frame houses by the bayou. In fact, no one at the security office even knew a homicide had occurred there.
A S WE DROVE BACK toward the department, a rainstorm swept across the wetlands and pounded the cruiser and scattered hailstones like pieces of smoking dry ice on the road. Back at the office, I began the paperwork on the death of Yvonne Darbonne. I had completely forgotten the matter of the dye-marked one-hundred bills in the possession of Trish Klein, the daughter of my murdered gambling friend in Miami. Just before quitting time, Helen opened my door. “We got a hit on those serial numbers,” she said. “The bills came from the robbery of a savings and loan company in Mobile.”
Helen’s announcement wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “I’ll get ahold of the woman tomorrow,” I said.
“It gets better. The bills from the robbery have been showing up in casinos and at racetracks all along the Gulf Coast,” she said.
“The Klein woman says she got hers at a casino in Biloxi.”
“Here’s an interesting footnote. The Treasury guys think the savings and loan company may be a laundry for the Mob. The wiseguys got ripped off by some bank thieves who didn’t get the word. What’s the background on this Klein woman?”
I told her about the shotgun slaying of Dallas Klein in Opa-Locka, Florida, years ago. Through my second-story window I could see rain hitting on the tops of the crypts in St. Peter’s Cemetery.
“You were there when he died?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice catching slightly.
“Wrap up our end on this and give it to the Feds. You copy on that?”
“Absolutely,” I replied.
I DROVE HOME at 5 p.m. and parked my pickup truck under the porte cochere attached to the shotgun house where Molly and I live in what is called the historical district of New Iberia. Our home is a modest one compared to the Victorian and antebellum structures that define most of East Main, but nonetheless it is a beautiful old place, built of cypress and oak, long and square in shape, like a boxcar, with high ceilings and windows, a small gallery and peaked tin roof, and ventilated green shutters that you can latch over the glass during hurricane season.
The flower beds are planted with azaleas, lilies, hibiscus, philodendron, and