NCIS New Orleans, page 19
“You were pretty sure a couple of minutes ago.”
“I was wrong. We only have one traditional men’s Baron Samedi in that size, and we didn’t rent it this year.”
“Would you take another look, sir? This is very important.”
“Look, I can’t help you. I made a mistake, that’s all. You showed me a tiny picture on a phone, and I misidentified it. As I said, ours don’t even come with gloves. Those gloves were pretty clearly part of the set.”
“They’re just black leather gloves.”
“All the same. I wish I could help you, but I can’t.”
“Would a subpoena change your mind?”
“Do whatever you have to do, but that costume did not come from my shop.”
“Whoever you’re afraid of, sir, we can protect you.”
“Please,” he said. “Just go. I can’t do anything for you.”
“Oookay,” Sonja replied. She started for the door. “You might see me again, though.”
“Save yourself the trip.”
“Oh, trust me,” she said, stopping with the door half-open. “It’s no trouble.”
* * *
Rich Brandt’s house was three stories tall and set well back from the road, near Audubon Park in one direction and Clancy’s, one of Lasalle’s favorite restaurants, in another. It was deep and narrow, as houses were in many of the city’s neighborhoods, with a two-car garage on the ground floor.
Lasalle climbed a steep flight of stairs leading to a porch that looked more like a garden, with tomatoes and strawberries growing in planters on the floor, and ferns and other greens drooping from hanging wire baskets. Somewhere behind the jungle, he located a doorbell and pressed it.
The woman who answered the door seemed harried, which might have been due to the blood-curdling screams Lasalle heard coming from an infant somewhere inside.
“If you’re selling something, I don’t need it. If you’re pushing a cause, I’m not interested. And if you’re looking for a handout, screw off. I am not in the mood today.”
“None of the above, ma’am,” Lasalle said. He identified himself and showed her his badge. “Is Mr. Brandt home?”
She stared at him so long he started to wonder if he still had powdered sugar on his face from the beignets. Finally, she said, “You don’t look like a cop.”
“I usually hear that I look exactly like a cop, so thank you for that. I am one, just the same.”
“He’s upstairs,” she said. “I’ll fetch him.” She started to close the door, then opened it. “How are you with colicky babies?”
“Pretty good, actually,” he replied. He loved kids, and he found himself missing Tucker, if not so much Tucker’s mother Melody, who had lied to him about the boy’s parentage. Tucker had turned out not to be his son, after all, but in the short time they had been together, they’d bonded.
“In here,” she said. He followed her inside, and she pointed toward the kitchen. “I would’ve been happy with the two older ones,” she said. She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling as she said the next part. “They’re already at school. But no, he wanted another. So that’s Pammie. Do what you can with her, and Rich will be right down.”
Lasalle looked inside as she clomped up the stairs. Pammie sat in a high chair, wearing a plastic bib that curled up at the bottom to catch any dropped food. The high chair’s tray was covered in Cheerios and spit.
“Hey, Pammie,” he said as he entered. He used a soft, friendly voice. Kids at the hospital responded to it. So did Pammie, looking up at the stranger. “I’m Chris. How you doin’ today?”
She blinked a couple of times, and he was afraid she was about to start screaming again. He scooped her up out of the high chair and bounced her in the air a couple of times. “Cheerios not doin’ it for you this morning? How about some crawfish étouffée? Dirty beans and rice? You’re a New Orleans baby, you got to have something better than cereal out of some old box, don’t you?”
He jiggled her a couple more times, and got a smile in return. Overhead, he heard two sets of feet coming back downstairs. A moment later, Rich Brandt appeared in the doorway, still knotting what looked like an expensive silk tie. His shirt was sky blue, and the slate gray jacket over his arm matched his pleated pants. His aftershave entered the room before he did.
“Detective…” he began.
Lasalle corrected him. “Special Agent Lasalle.”
“Yes, right. We met yesterday in the conference room.”
“Correct,” Lasalle said. Brandt’s wife squeezed past him and took Pammie from his hands with a look of gratitude.
“Let’s step into the living room, Special Agent,” Brandt said.
“That’s fine.”
He followed Brandt out of the kitchen and into a tastefully furnished room. From the huge windows that encompassed most of the exterior wall, Lasalle got a glimpse of the park two blocks west.
“It’s much calmer here,” Brandt said. “Would you like to sit down?”
“That’s not necessary, sir,” Lasalle answered.
“What can I do for you, then? I told you folks everything I know about that man at the parade.”
“Not everything.”
“No? I thought sure I did.”
“You didn’t mention that you went to high school with Landry.”
A look of shock flashed across Brandt’s face, but he erased it so quickly, it could easily have been missed or taken for a shadow going across the sun. “Did I? I don’t remember him.”
“You did. He and Burl Robitaille were the heroes of the football team. You didn’t talk about old times when you met with Robitaille yesterday?”
“Burl Robitaille has four restaurant locations in the city of New Orleans,” Brandt said. “When we’re in conference at City Hall, we’re usually discussing those.”
“So Landry didn’t come up.”
“Why would he? Like I said, I don’t even remember going to school with him. I admit, I wasn’t much for school sports. I think I went to a basketball game once, because a girl I was dating wanted to see one.”
“I see,” Lasalle said.
“I was on the student council,” Brandt said. “That’s where my interests were. Senior class president.”
“I saw that in your yearbook. I also saw a picture of the three of you sitting together on some bleachers. You looked pretty chummy.”
He had to admit, Brandt was good at disguising his reactions. He guessed that was the politician in him, always on his guard and focused on what kind of impression he made. “Like you said, Burl was the star quarterback and captain of the team. I was class president. We had to spend some time together, especially for things like yearbook photos. If you say this other guy, Landry, was in a picture with us, I believe you. I honestly don’t remember him.”
“Excuse me if I find that a little hard to believe, sir,” Lasalle said.
“You’ll believe what you want to believe, I’m sure. Now that you mention it, though, when I said I’d met Landry at a party, I think it might have been at Burl’s home. He throws some pretty big bashes there, though not so many now that his wife is gone. It’s entirely possible that I met Landry there without even remembering him from high school. I doubt that he remembered me, either. A lot of water under the bridge; none of us look like we did then.”
“No, we don’t,” Lasalle admitted. “And yet, you recognized him in full Baron Samedi makeup and costume, on a busy street, in the middle of a parade, when he just happened to walk by.”
Brandt squeezed his lower lip. If that was a tell of some kind, Lasalle didn’t know him well enough to speculate as to what it meant. “Something about his eyes,” he said. “I noticed it and it just struck me.”
“He has a scar on one,” Lasalle said.
“Yes!” Brandt snapped his fingers, then touched the outside corner of his left eye. “Right here. That’s what it was. I saw that—the makeup didn’t disguise that—and I just knew who it was. I’m good with names, so it came back to me.”
“You’re good with names, except of people you knew in high school.”
“I’m telling you, Agent Lasalle, I didn’t really know him in high school. I had my clique, my group of friends. I knew Burl because we were both big men on campus, as they say, but we didn’t hang out. My clique wasn’t the jocks. I was a student council, debate club nerd.”
Lasalle didn’t want to believe the man. It was too coincidental—those two running into each other on St. Charles Avenue, just minutes before Landry threw Alpuente off the hotel balcony.
At the same time, he found Brandt’s story convincing. He wasn’t coming across as evasive or dishonest. He made a good point about the nature of high school friendships. Lasalle had hung with the jocks in high school, and now that he thought about it, he couldn’t come up with the name of his senior class president. He remembered her face, vaguely, but if he saw her today, he couldn’t say for sure that he’d recognize her after the passage of the years. And Brandt was a few years older than he was.
“Yesterday, Pride said this was all connected to the death of that naval officer during the parade,” Brandt said. “Is this Landry a person of interest in that case?”
“I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation,” Lasalle said. His usual answer in such circumstances.
“I’m not the press, I’m a member of the mayor’s inner circle.”
“I understand that.”
Brandt looked like he was about to raise another protest, but then he waved it away. “Never mind. I respect your position, Agent Lasalle. I’m sure when there’s definitive progress in the case, Mayor Hamilton will be informed, and I’ll hear it from him.”
“I’m sure he will be,” Lasalle said.
“Have I answered all your questions? I’m going to be late for work as it is. And Hamilton’s a stickler for promptness.”
“I think so, yes,” Lasalle replied. “Thanks for your cooperation.”
“Any time,” Brandt said. “Have a terrific day.”
“I’ll try. You do the same.”
Lasalle was almost out the door when Brandt’s wife hurried over to him, still holding the baby. “Thank you for whatever you did,” she said. “Pammie’s feeling much better now.”
“She just wanted some dirty beans and rice,” Lasalle told her. Off her shocked expression, he stepped back into the jungle and closed the door behind him.
27
Pride was passing through Belle Chasse on Louisiana Highway 23 when Sebastian called. He considered letting it go to voicemail, just because he would be at Robitaille’s soon, and brief conversations with Sebastian were less common than Bigfoot sightings. But the forensic scientist wouldn’t call if it weren’t important, so he took the call.
“Hello, Sebastian.”
“Hi, Pride. It’s Seb—well, you already knew that. Modern technology, huh? We’re living in the future. Except without the jet packs and flying cars and tricorders. Though I’m still hoping those are coming soon.”
“Do you have something for me?” Pride asked, hoping to prod the man closer to his point.
“Something?” Sometimes, Pride wondered why he seemed to make Sebastian nervous. The truth was, almost everyone made Sebastian a little nervous. But he saw Pride as the boss, the authority figure, and that seemed to ramp up his anxiety even further. “Oh, right. I do, in fact, have something. I’ve identified that substance you found on some of those food containers at Lt. Alpuente’s house in Tremé. The kind of tacky, sticky stuff?”
“What is it?”
“It’s oil. More specifically, it’s crude oil. The unrefined stuff.”
“He got crude oil on food containers? How did he do that?”
“I wasn’t there, so I can only speculate, but you said those containers were on the floor, right? My guess is he brought the oil in on his shoes, and then set the containers down in it.”
“I guess that could happen,” Pride said. “Is there anything else?”
“You haven’t asked me where the oil came from.”
“I kind of did, when I asked how he did that. But okay, Sebastian, where did the oil come from?”
Pride could hear Sebastian’s grin when he answered. “From the BP oil spill.”
“Sebastian, that was, what, 2010?”
“That’s right. The Deepwater Horizon rig blew on April 20, 2010.”
“He didn’t rent that house until late last year.”
“I’m not saying it’s been in the house since 2010. The vast majority of the oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout has long since been cleaned up. But there’s still some lingering in remote coastline areas, especially in St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes. Lt. Alpuente was supposedly working on wetlands issues out there, so it’s possible that he got some on his shoes or boots, then came home and tracked it on the floor, or got it on his hands, and transferred it to those containers.”
“Okay, I’ll grant you that’s a possibility. Is there anything else?”
“Anything else else?” Sebastian echoed. “That was already an ‘anything else.’ I thought that was some pretty good detective work.”
“Sorry,” Pride said. “You’re right, Sebastian, it was. Do me a favor?”
“Sure thing, Dwayne.”
“Call the squad room and let the team know. I’ll be at my destination in a few minutes, and I don’t want to be on the phone when I get there.”
“Roger, Dodger. I mean, umm, over and out.”
“Bye, Sebastian.”
“Right, yes, that. Goodbye.”
BP oil, Pride thought. The longer this case dragged on, the more it seemed to center on Plaquemines Parish and not New Orleans at all.
Approaching Belle Chasse, with Robitaille’s house on the far side, he hoped he wasn’t heading straight into the lion’s den.
* * *
Patton had started going through Alpuente’s work files on the laptop Pride had brought him, but then things had happened so fast he’d had to shift over to other tasks. Lasalle had taken over, but then he had been retasked, too. Sebastian’s call, coming shortly before Lasalle reached the squad room, sent him back to the laptop. The missing component all along had been motive—why would anyone kill a Navy lieutenant working on issues of coastal degradation? What was it in his life that had made him a target?
But when oil entered the equation, things changed. Most murders revolved around passion or money, and the oil business meant big money. BP had spent billions to clean up the Deepwater Horizon spill—and although it ate up profits for a while, the company could ultimately afford it, because oil companies were some of the wealthiest businesses on the planet.
The idea that a major oil company had targeted Alpuente for murder was the stuff of potboilers and TV thrillers, but that didn’t mean there weren’t individuals who might have taken a dim view of his activities. Historically, much of Louisiana’s economy had depended on the oil and gas industries, which employed tens of thousands of people and pumped huge amounts of money into New Orleans and other cities. The recent slump in oil prices had hurt the area hard, and with the high-profile oil spill essentially mopped up, those billions were no longer flowing into the economy. There were plenty of oil industry workers on the unemployment rolls these days, or working in menial jobs for far less than they’d earned on the rigs and pipelines. If the lieutenant’s research revolved around the spill’s effect on wetlands, plenty of local folks might have considered him a threat to their livelihoods.
Lasalle scrolled through the lists of files on Alpuente’s laptop. Draft reports, photographs saved as JPEG images, scanned questionnaires, and spreadsheets. Lots and lots of spreadsheets. Lasalle was pretty sure nothing more boring than spreadsheets had ever been invented. Reading them made watching paint dry look like high-octane entertainment.
Sadly, he had no choice. Once he had skimmed the report drafts and checked out the photos, he opened the first spreadsheet and tried to keep his eyes from glazing over.
“You awake, Lasalle?”
Lasalle turned in his chair to see that Patton had quietly entered the bullpen. “Barely. This stuff is making my eyes bleed.”
Patton laughed. “That’s because you’ve never spent an eighteen-hour day writing lines of code. Once you do that, nothing you encounter on a computer screen will ever faze you again. I mean, except this video I saw once of ostriches mating. Some things are just plain wrong.”
“This probably isn’t as bad as that,” Lasalle said. “It’s just spreadsheets from Alpuente’s computer.” He filled the other man in on Sebastian’s call, and the possible oil connection.
“Did you find anything in the spreadsheets?” Patton asked when he was finished.
“It’s hard to say. In the reports, there are a lot of calculations that I can’t always follow. The spreadsheets clarify some of it, and between those and the text, what I’m getting is that he’s studying the wetlands loss in a particular area of the St. Bernard Parish coast. He’s got references in there to a proposed high-end resort development project owned by something called Southern Louisiana Holdings, LLC, but it doesn’t look like he’s been able to figure out who all is involved in that, and, from what I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be any specific connection between that partnership and the oil industry. It looks like there are shell companies on top of shell companies—like those Russian dolls, you know, that fit into each other?”
“Nesting dolls,” Patton said. “I can dig it. Lots of folks with too much money to burn hide their corporate identities that way. I think if you look deep enough, it turns out that all the money in the world belongs to some old geezer hiding in a cave someplace, and the rest of us are just borrowing it. Send me what you’ve got and I’ll do some checking.”
“Thanks. It’s coming your way in a minute.”
He transferred the files to an internal shared drive, and told Patton where to find them. Then he shifted to another question that had been dogging him—the precise location of the development in question. Finding those coordinates was comparatively easy, once he had figured out how to navigate the parish’s online records system.
