House of the Rising Sun

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was the kind of place Ray hated. A coffee shop that didn’t sell real coffee. The yuppie and punk hangout on Canal Boulevard was part of a corporate chain that considered black coffee a special order. Cappuccinos, mochas, and lattes with sprinkles were the beverages of choice.

Ray saw Jimmy LaGrange sitting at a table against the back wall, next to the restrooms. The detective looked nervous as hell. Ray strolled through the shop, passing a couple of late-morning breakfasters and a geek with orange hair and a laptop. The geek looked like he was eating a granola biscuit.

When Ray reached LaGrange’s table, he dropped into a chair across from his former partner. “You got the reports?”

LaGrange glanced past Ray’s shoulder toward the door. “I shouldn’t be seen talking to you.”

“You picked this place, not me.”

The detective looked around some more. “I’ve got to be careful. Someone might be following me.”

Maybe it was a lack of coffee, maybe it was Jimmy LaGrange acting like a dick, maybe it was the geek with the laptop-what kind of man dyes his hair orange and eats granola biscuits?-but after only a few seconds inside this joint, Ray was already angry. “Cut the cloak-and-dagger bullshit, Jimmy. You weren’t worried about being followed back in the day when you were stuffing Vinnie’s envelopes into your pocket.”

LaGrange’s eyes popped open. He leaned across the table and spoke in a harsh whisper. “Hold your goddamn voice down. I don’t do that anymore. I told you I got a new wife and a new…” His eyes darted around the yuppie coffee shop once more, then focused on Ray. “That stuff’s over.” LaGrange made a short cutting motion with his hand. “Finished.”

Ray wanted to ask his old partner how, if he really was clean, he could afford a new family while he was still paying for his old one-an ex-wife and two kids. But he didn’t ask. He needed LaGrange’s help. “What did you find out?”

A waitress came by, a big smile plastered on her face. She interrupted them and introduced herself as Brandy and said she would be their server. She was cute, Ray thought, in a wholesome, well-scrubbed, perky sort of way. He figured she had to be a college student. Real people weren’t that happy. He ordered the closest thing they had to black coffee. LaGrange ordered an espresso and a bran muffin.

“A bran muffin?” Ray asked after the waitress left.

“My cholesterol,” LaGrange said. He looked embarrassed.

A few minutes later the perky waitress brought their order.

When they were alone again, LaGrange leaned back, looking a little more relaxed now that he had his espresso and bran muffin. “You’re lucky, you know that?” he said.

Ray didn’t feel lucky. “Why?”

“This case is on the fast track.”

Ray raised his eyebrows. “How come?”

“Landry’s on it.”

“Why?”

“You know how he is,” LaGrange said. “He’s got it in for the Messina family. My guess is he wants to spin this off into another investigation of dirty cops.”

“He told me he isn’t with PIB anymore.”

LaGrange looked surprised. “You talked to him?”

“Sort of,” Ray said. “He slugged me.”

The detective sat up. “He did what?”

“I mentioned his dad.”

LaGrange nodded. “Then I’m not surprised. Even as much of a tight-ass as Landry is, he goes ape-shit if anybody brings up his old man.”

“Screw Landry.”

LaGrange drummed his fingers on the table. “How’s his dad doing?”

Ray took a sip of coffee. It tasted like warm shit. “He got sick about a year before I got out. They transferred him to the medical prison at Springfield. I haven’t heard from him since.”

“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 attache 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 attache 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 shithead 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 amp; 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 amp; 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.