Ridley Pearson - Pied Piper

“You have eagles in here?”

“Third or fourth book, I think. One of ’em’s nothing but animals: frogs, lizards, snakes. I do a lot of reptiles, for whatever reason.”

“And you do all of this work?”

“I didn’t do all of it, no. ’Course not. But I could. Sure. What my eye sees, my hands can paint.”

“That includes the women?”

“Some guys get their girls to pose. I’m not shitting you. Imagination plays into it,” said the artiste. He had a wide boyish smile, not at all what Boldt might have expected from such a brute.

Boldt worked through the lions, pussy cats, tigers, an aardvark, pandas, teddy bears and landed on a series of bald eagles. A profile of just the beak and head. An eagle in flight. A number of eagles with various messages or items clutched in the talons. An eagle with its wings wrapped around its body like a cape.

Boldt pointed it out.

“My own design. Maybe half what you see is original design. The rest I rip off from magazines, film or whatever, or I do custom from a photo or something. I charge extra for the custom work.”

“Any others?” Boldt asked, flipping the page of Polaroids, his eye immediately answering his own question as it landed on an eagle drawn onto a knotty biceps. “You did this?”

“I told you: It’s original. It’s mine.”

“There’s one missing,” Boldt stated.

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s missing. Maurice,” Boldt encouraged, making a point of the fifty, “it showed an eagle on a forearm, not a biceps.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Someone else was here ahead of me,” Boldt suggested to the man.

Boldt handed him the fifty. It had come out of his and Liz’s joint account using the ATM card. The account was seventeen hundred dollars in the red, thanks to the hospital. More now with the airfare. “Guy looks like a surfer but has an attitude. He tell you who he was?”

Maurice considered the money. “Like I gotta ask? A suit like that?”

“He took a photo with him,” Boldt stated. “He paid you how much?” Boldt asked.

Maurice pocketed Boldt’s cash. “Not enough. Fucking prick Fed.”

“Threatened to bust you.”

“The half of it,” the man said. Boldt produced another fifty. Maurice said, “I gave him the picture and I kept my door open for business.”

“He told you how to reach him in case your memory came back.” Boldt knew the routine. He pulled a third fifty out of his pocket.

“He might have mentioned the Hyatt.” The fifty disappeared into the jeans.

“Anything you left out? Anything you forgot to tell him?” Boldt’s time at the Intelligence desk had not been for naught.

The big stump of an index finger pointed out several other photos on the page. He flipped forward a page, then back two, and pointed out another row of photos. “You see that gray wall? The background? You know what that cement wall means?”

Many of the photos were shot against the same gray background. “Tell me, Maurice. What is the significance of that wall?”

“Couple times of year they bring one or another of us inside. Ends up like a fucking arts and crafts fair, know what I mean?”

Boldt felt his system charge with adrenaline. “We’re talking about the penitentiary, Maurice. The guy with the eagle on the forearm-he was doing time.”

“You got it.”

“When?”

Maurice slipped out a photo and flipped it over. “Nineteen ninety-five.”

“The suit … does he know this?”

“He didn’t ask,” Maurice said, his face spreading into a smile.

“Jesus, su-gar, what da hell dey got going up in Seattle we ain’t got down here? You ever consider yourself a transfer, how ’bout looking down our way?”

NOPD’s detectives division was a mismatch of gray metal government furniture, paddle fans and noisy, window-mounted air conditioners. Half the building had been remodeled, but they were working from the top down-from the chief to the garage-and the detectives division was low in the building and low on the list.

Daphne bristled at the man’s sexist attitude but played to him rather than make trouble. Priorities.

Detective Broole was white, thirty-five, modestly good looking, with acne scars and sleepy brown eyes. He wore his hair like a Las Vegas showman and talked with a Dixie drawl that she had to mentally replay to understand.

“He was in your medium lockup in ’95. He’s white, with an eagle tattoo on his left forearm. Six foot, maybe six-one. In for fraud or bunco-”

“A confidence artist?” Broole said, planting his swagger down in front of an outdated computer terminal. “Well, hell, if that don’t describe half the population, sugar.” He hooked another chair with his toe and pulled it close to him on its casters. He lit up a nonfilter and blew the smoke away from her. “Shitty habit,” he said, “but somebody’s got to die young.” He motioned for her to sit in the chair, but she remained standing.

“Maybe kiddie pornography. Stalking.” She couldn’t mention the abduction of children without risking connecting herself to the Pied Piper. “He may work with a female accomplice,” she said.

“We’d all like one of those,” he conceded, turning his sweaty face toward her.

“Maybe ran a telephone scam using nine-one-one,” she suggested.

“That dial-back scam?”

“Which one is that?” she asked, hanging on his every word.

“That one didn’t reach Seattle?” he asked. “Fella puts himself up as a cop. Was an embezzlement scam involving the elderly. To insure he really is a cop, he tells the mark to hang up and quickly call him back at the station using the nine-one-one line. Never mind that ain’t possible. The mark hangs up. The line stays open-it won’t go to dial tone on the receiving end. Did you know that? So the confidence man plays a recording of a dial tone into the phone; mark picks up the phone, hears the dial tone, dials nine-one-one. Trickster turns off the recording of the dial tone. Some of ’em use another voice, some an accomplice, but the line is answered something like, ‘Emergency Services,’” he said, feigning a woman’s voice. “The mark asks to speak to the cop; the con man comes on the line, and the mark is absolutely convinced from that moment on that she’s talking to a cop. And that’s all it takes. A person’ll do just about anything for a man carrying a badge.” He looked her body over a little too closely. “A woman carrying a badge too, I imagine.”

“Do we know who went down for that one?”

“Su-gar, we got so many damn scams crawling out of the swamp, we don’t hardly keep track. Holding down a job is the most common one we see. You know somebody’s crooked if they got a nine-to-five job.”

“Including cops?”

He smiled. He enjoyed his own company. “Last name? First name? You got anything more than nine-one-one for me?” He looked at her chest again and then lowered his eyes to her waist. “Anything at all?”

“I’ll take everyone serving time in ’95 for fraud and bunco. That’s a good place to start.”

“A better place to start is dinner at Commander’s Palace. Then maybe a ride up the river on a jazz barge and a nice long, lazy look at the stars from around the pool at a little bungalow I know just outside the parish. In too close to the city the sky is all lit up and glowing and you don’t see no stars at all. And let me tell you, there ain’t nothing as pleasing to the eye as the Louisiana night sky.” Having properly loaded his own statement, he added, “Excepting, that is, maybe you, su-gar. Seattle gotta be damn proud have you carrying their shield.”

“Alphabetized. Fraud and bunco. If there’s a way to isolate it to telephone scams-”