Page 52 of Return of the Spider

Maria agreed. “Rodolpho doesn’t trust anyone except Prince. I worked with him off and on during his long rehab, and he sure didn’t trust me. And he checked with Prince before he said anything to me.”

“He have other relatives come in to see him?”

“No mom. No dad. No girlfriend that I remember. He hadother visitors besides Prince, male and female, but I couldn’t tell you what their relationships were.”

“What about LeClerc?”

“Nontalker. Another suspicious, guarded guy.”

“Okay, of the two, who do you think might be involved in the murders of the two boys?”

Maria considered that for several moments as she chewed the last of her chicken. “Rodolpho. He and Prince are blood-related and Haitian-born. LeClerc was born in Miami, and I never saw Prince come to the hospital to see him. I don’t know how LeClerc and Prince connected.”

“Probably through LMC in South Florida.”

She nodded and put down her fork. “Makes sense.”

“You think we can turn Rodolpho or LeClerc against Prince?”

Maria scrunched up her face. “That’s going to be a tough one. I imagine it’ll take some heavy leverage to make that happen.”

“Two murder-one charges might do it,” I said. “But we’re a long way from that point, and I don’t want to talk about gangsters killing kids anymore.”

“Fine with me,” she said, smiling. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know. Spell-weaving?”

My wife threw her head back and laughed. “I was thinking the same thing!”

CHAPTER

39

Around nine in themorning two days later, Sampson and I were parked in a dark blue utility van down the street from Valentine Rodolpho’s row house in Capitol Heights. Sampson lowered his binoculars. “Our boy Valentino’s sleeping in again. We didn’t need to be here so early.”

“Valentine,”I said, suppressing a yawn.

“Not to me, he isn’t,” Sampson said. He reached for his Styrofoam coffee cup while I shifted uncomfortably, trying to get my right leg to stop cramping.

We’d had our eye on the number three in Prince’s gang for days and he’d made no suspicious moves whatsoever. He limped out once a day around ten, caught a taxi to La Coccinelle Café and Bakery, bought two cafés créoles and a large bag of beignets,then went home in another taxi. The rest of the time he stayed in his house.

“Wish to hell we could get a wiretap on his place,” Sampson said.

“Pittman said zero chance of that for the time being.”

“I can dream, can’t I?”

“Donovan did say in her report that Rodolpho can be reclusive.”

“Looks like that leg gives him a lot of pain.”

“Baseball bat will do that to you.”

“That’s what he was beaten with?”

“Maria said that leg was broken in six—there he is.”

Clutching a black cane with a carved ivory handle, Valentine Rodolpho, a long, lean man, limped out onto his front porch and squinted at the late-fall sunlight. He rested his cane against the wall, zipped up his hoodie, slipped sunglasses on, and put a New York Yankees ball cap on his head.