Page 9

CHAPTER NINE

V elina…

They fixed my car – both the starter and the air conditioning. I guess the only thing that was wrong with the air conditioning was a need for some kind of recharge of the refrigerant. It took them a little while to scare some up, but they wouldn’t hear of me leaving until they did it, and after? The vents blew blessedly cool and then cold air.

I was grateful for that.

Saint had shown me every piece of art he’d spray painted inside the club and out – and each piece was more impressive than the one before. We’d wound up back at the bar in the front room next to Louie’s urn and photo.

He’d told me the story about how Louie had ended up in the mugshot behind his urn. A drunk and disorderly in the French Quarter. Dumbass shit… you know?

I let slip that I’d never been arrested, and Saint had poked fun at me for being some kind of a virgin. Never arrested, only ever passed out the one time, next thing you’d know, I’d tell him I’d never broken a bone.

That one I had done. More than once.

I’d told him about it, opening up a little about my dad and what he was like on a bender.

He’d said his dad was a drinker, too.

All I’d been able to say was, “Guess we aren’t so different after all.”

I’d come back to the hotel in Metairie after all was said and done. Hex had told me to come back in a day or two and they’d have pictures and stories. They’d hold another sort of impromptu wake for my brother, just for me.

I’d asked why, and I’d been met with the same sort of lackadaisical shrug and the explanation, “You’re family.”

I sat up in bed, trying to ignore the roach-infested motel surroundings as I scrolled through old text messages with Louie. The last ones were all about a girl named True and how she wasn’t a girl – at least not all the way, not yet – and I had to smile.

She was trans, and I was surprised that Louie was so enamored with her, but the way he was gushing about her in his texts, he was absolutely mad for her.

I guess it was later that very night that he’d died, and the texts had just… stopped.

It was an interesting maelstrom of emotions keeping me awake, not just about Garnett but also about Saint. He was inscrutable. I mean, hard to read is the understatement of the year here. Just when I thought he hated my guts, he would crack a smile and banter with me or laugh at one of my sarcastic remarks, leaving me all sorts of confused all over again.

Color me shocked when he’d handed me a card at the end of the night – blank but for the phone number in black block numbers on its face in the center of the card.

He’d told me to call him if I needed to. I didn’t honestly know if I needed to, but I couldn’t help but find myself wanting to.

I picked it up from the side table under the golden pool of lamplight, frowned, and tried not to shudder at the thought of the tiny brown roach I’d seen crawling on it a few minutes ago. I’d seen another in the bathroom, when I’d flipped on the light, making a break for it off the top of the toilet seat under the lip of it.

I wished like hell I could afford better than the La Chiquita on Veteran’s Boulevard, but I wasn’t here on vacation. I was here to find my missing brother, and now, I was here to learn what I could about him, now that I’d found he was dead.

I sighed, set the card aside and switched out the light, sinking into the uncomfortable, but thankfully bedbug-free bed. Making sure my phone was plugged in, I closed my eyes.

Saint had resisted telling me the details of my brother’s death beyond that of he’d been shot in some kind of a drive-by shooting.

Tomorrow, I would go another route on that and hopefully find justice for Garnett before my time in New Orleans was through.

I waited the better part of an hour for the detective or, hell, for anyone involved in my brother’s case to come fucking talk to me. It was almost one hundred percent apparent from the time I hit the front desk of the station to the time I waited in the cubical and watched who I was pretty sure was the detective I was waiting for shoot the shit with another bad suit at the water cooler and coffee maker for at least twenty more minutes while I sat there, staring, waiting, and yes, seething .

I mean, tell me you don’t give a good goddamn without telling me you don’t give a good goddamn.

When he finally decided to look up and down the line of cubicles in my direction, the laughter on his face turned dour, like it was somehow my fault he’d been standing there fucking off, leaving me waiting while he talked Saints football for twenty minutes with his dude-bro coworker.

I was pissed, but I did my level best to hold back my father’s famous temper. Our father’s temper, because screaming at this cop about what an inept fucking troll he was wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Would it make me feel better? Probably. Would it get Garnett anything close to resembling justice?

No.

Of course, it didn’t look like Detective Troy Malcom was working too hard at it anyway – a notion that was only about to receive further reinforcement when he slid past me and went around his desk to take a seat.

He dropped heavily into the desk chair that sank several inches under his considerable bulk, and I wondered vaguely when this guy had last passed a fitness test.

“How you doin’, Miss…”

“Velina,” I said. “Just call me Velina.”

“Miss Velina,” he said finally.

“Velina is my first name,” I told him. He gave me a smile that, if he had been eighteen and strapping, might have done something for fifteen-year-old Crystal Methalina down at the trailer park but didn’t do anything for me except make me like him even less.

Was I biased?

Maybe just a little.

I had more than one occasion to show up to a scene and have to wait around for forensics or detectives to finish up, and man, these assholes thought they were God’s gift to a crime scene and looked down on me like I was just the janitor.

Which was annoying, considering I probably had more education than both detectives partnering combined, if a lot less experience. Still, it was always a satisfying feeling for me when I found missed evidence and had to call the detectives or forensics team back in to pull a walk of shame to collect what they’d missed.

That part of my job never got old, and yeah – I called every time . I wasn’t so petty as to deny anyone justice because I was pissed at the cops for treating me like I was some fresh-off-the-boat, didn’t-speak-a-lick-of-English, hotel maid… who, truth be told, put in more work in a week than these overstuffed egotistical motherfuckers probably put in all year.

All it’d really taken for me to hate the cops and forensics teams I had so much wanted to be when I grew up was a few months working in a position that they felt was beneath them.

That was the truth.

“Well, this is the South, Miss Velina, so anytime you’re properly addressed by a good ol’ Southern boy or gentlemen, ‘miss’ is going to be a part of the mix,” he said and chuckled.

Which… ew . The correction dripped with condescension and more than a little misogyny. Looked like I had two things working against me, I wasn’t Southern and I had a vagina.

Fucking peachy.

“What can I help you with, Miss Velina?” he asked, and I heaved an inward sigh that I hoped I managed to keep any outward appearance of under wraps.

Unfortunately, I could be one of those people who it didn’t matter what my mouth was saying, my face told the truth anyway, which in this particular setting could be a detriment to getting what I wanted.

“I’m here about the Garnett Whitcomb case,” I said in my most professionally bland tone I could muster. Mustn’t seem too eager.

“Whitcomb, Whitcomb, Whitcomb,” he muttered to himself under his breath, spinning in his chair to the low filing cabinets behind his desk and a stack of file folders on the top of one of them. He pulled a disappointingly thin and barely battered folder out from under three much fatter ones, and I felt my heart sink.

Did they even fucking try?

“Here it is,” he said absently. Tipping it up so I couldn’t see its contents, he flipped it open.

He let his watery blue eyes travel down the page and spread a few pages to skim over their contents.

“Not much here,” he said with a gusty sigh. “Why are you interested in a Voodoo Bastard? You know they’re bad news, don’t cha?” he asked me, flipping the folder shut and tossing it on his desk. The corners of a few photographs slipped out, but just enough to let me know they were photos with no actual discernible content.

I made eye contact and said, “Most motorcycle gangs are, aren’t they?”

He huffed a bit of a laugh. “Hell, just them one-percenters, as they call themselves,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Most of the rest of ‘em are law-abiding citizens and responsible riding clubs – but the Voodoo Bastards?” He made a face and shook his head. “Why you wanna know anything about that?” he asked.

“Because he’s my brother,” I said point blank and let the period at the end hang between us.

He grunted and leaned forward in his chair, a frown furrowing his brow below his receding hairline as he picked up the folder and flipped through the pages.

“Says here, he didn’t have no family. His mamma died in a drug deal gone bad – never solved… no siblings to speak of…”

“We shared the same father,” I said. “I have a commercial DNA test that says we are, most definitely, related.”

“Is that what brings you down to New Orleans?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “We were in constant contact for almost the last nine months or so, and then everything just… stopped. I got worried, and so I came down to find him.”

“Ah.” He nodded. “I can see how communication would, ah… cease under these circumstances.”

“Yeah,” I said unhappily.

“Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there ain’t a whole lot here to work with,” he said with a big sigh that, to his credit, sounded genuinely frustrated. “What do you know about it so I can fill in the blanks?” he asked.

“Nothing, really,” I said. “Drive-by shooting – some kind of club turf war thing.”

“Mm-hm, I know that’s right now,” he said. “Some new group outta the bayou causin’ a mess of trouble tryin’ to move into the city onto the Voodoo Bastard’s territory – like either one of ‘em have a claim.”

I nodded.

“I wish I could say this would be solved,” he said, looking sorry, but I could tell it was a painted-on emotion that he didn’t genuinely feel. “But no witnesses on the outside and no real cooperation from the boys on the inside. I’m afraid this is one of those cases that’s destined to just… sit until someone gets to talkin’ out of turn around the right set of ears, if you know what I mean.”

“You’re stalled,” I said. “I’m also getting the impression that you’re not even going to try.”

He sighed and gave me a disappointed look. The way he leaned back in his seat said I was about to get a stern talking to and that I wasn’t going to like it.

Bring it on , I thought, as he flipped through a couple of the top pages and unfolded a long, old-fashioned, dot-matrix printout that was at least three pages long.

“Assault, drunk and disorderly, drunk and disorderly, drunk and disorderly, possession of a controlled substance, looks like marijuana for some personal use – not sure anyone cares about that these days.” His eyebrows went up. “Battery – with a domestic enhancement – looks like he shoved his mama into a table?—”

I snorted.

“Something funny about that?” he asked.

“If you knew his mother and how he was raised, you’d have pinned him with a medal for that one,” I told him.

He made a sort of eh face and went on, “Assault, assault with a deadly, drunk and disorderly, another possession, this time with an intent to distribute… are you getting a clear picture here?” he asked me.

“That my little brother was no saint? You should have met our father,” I said. “That doesn’t mean someone gets to drive or ride by, shoot and kill him, and that there’s no justice to be had.”

“No, that’s true,” he said gently. “But do you know how many homicides come through here on any given day?” he asked.

“I know that once upon a time, New Orleans was the murder capital of the United States before it lost its crown to DC.”

“That’s right, and that makes for a lot of homicides… and this one? Dead end after dead end, and no family to speak of?—”

“I’m his family,” I cut him off. “Me.”

“I do apologize, but if you’d let me finish, I was about to say ‘until you walked in the door.’”

I nodded and let my posture, which had tensed, ease back down.

“Now I’ll see if I can’t find the time to give this another look, but darlin’, I’m not sure that even with another stab at it, I can get somewhere with it.”

Tell me you don’t want to try without telling me you don’t want to try, I thought to myself. I let my eyes flicker up and down his face and said finally…

“I clean up crime scenes for a living. Sometimes, I find things that were missed. Can I?” I half-heartedly reached for the file, but he drew it away from me.

“All due respect, Miss Velina, I think that might be a bad idea. You don’t want to remember your brother like that.”

My shoulders sunk in defeat.

I knew he had a point, but damn.

“What if I spot something?” I tried, and I think I failed at keeping the pleading out of my tone.

“It’s a big ‘if,’ and I promise to go over these again, thoroughly, and with another pair of eyes – but again, the likelihood of a case like this ever being solved really does come down to dumb luck and the wrong people talkin’ around the right ones. I’m sorry. I wish I had better things to tell you, but that’s just how it is.”

“It is what it is,” I said bitterly.

“Exactly,” he said, but at least he genuinely didn’t sound happy about it.

He stood up and held out a hand, and that was my cue. I reluctantly stood up, too, and sighed heavily.

“Thank you for your time,” I said as professionally as I could.

“Don’t mention it,” he said. “Thanks for stopping in. Again, I wish I had better news to tell you.”

I nodded, turned, and said, “I’ll see myself out.”

He gave a nod, and I left the floor, stopping at the elevator and stabbing the button to go down with my finger.

I wanted to scream with the unfairness of it all, and I felt like I was being sucked into a whirlpool and thrashed about on the inside.

I hated it, but by the same token, I wasn’t giving up.

It sounded like anyone and everyone in Garnett’s life had – our dad, his mom, the cops, society as a whole… but you know who hadn’t?

The Voodoo Bastards.

They hadn’t, and maybe it was time for another talk with Saint.