Kent Conwell - Tony Boudreaux 13 - The Diamonds of Ghost Bayou (8 page)

I paused, studying the words before me, wondering if there
were a connection. What if Benoit had somehow learned of the
hidden diamonds? I made a note to see if Sheriff Lacoutrue
could learn the name of Benoit’s cell mates up at Winn.

For the next few minutes, I toyed with the possibility of some
sort of tie-in between Benoit and Anthony O’Donnell. I had no
doubt the casino owner could have lied about the diamonds.
Who wouldn’t? Of course, I reminded myself, while such a possibility existed, it was still quite a stretch.

Glancing back over my notes, I saw again that the robbery
was thirteen years old. Almost ancient history by today’s standards, but apparently someone had decided to delve back into
the past. After all, I told myself, eight million was mighty enticing, and in today’s market, given its volatility, the eight could
be worth as much as from twelve to twenty.

Having exhausted my meager supply of ideas, I tossed my
pencil onto the notepad and leaned back. Tomorrow morning
after I visited the hospital, I’d head for the newspaper office.

I rose and stretched. I glanced out the window one last time
and froze as flickering lights played through the swamp. I hurried to the front window, watching the light move through the
trees and then, in the blink of an eye, vanish.

When I awoke the next morning, the pungent smell of clove
still hung in the air, and I still hadn’t come up with a good lie for Diane to explain the odor. I couldn’t tell her the truth. She’d
never set foot in the house again.

Reluctantly, I closed all the windows and locked them before
I left. I didn’t want any more surprises waiting. The smell of
clove would be bad enough.

Jack was healing quickly. He still looked like death, but the
sparkle had returned to his eyes. I glanced at Diane sitting
beside his bed. She looked as if she could use a long rest as
well.

“The doctor just left,” she said. “He says Jack’s doing better
than he expected.”

“That’s good news. He say how long he’s going to keep you
in here?” I asked Jack.

“Not much longer,” he muttered through clenched teeth.
“Nothing else they can do for the arm. I’m hoping tomorrow.”

Diane gave him a wan smile. She was exhausted. The dark circles under her eyes spoke volumes. “We don’t want to rush
anything, Jack.”

He winked at me. “You hear that? She’s a jewel, huh?”

“Yeah. She’s a jewel.”

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’ll do whatever the doc says. Now,
you need to go home and get some rest.” He looked back up at
me. “Take care of her, okay?”

I cursed to myself. I’d planned on stopping by the sheriff’s
office as well as the local newspaper. Now I was going to be
hamstrung for the rest of the day taking care of my ex-wife.
“Sure, Jack. You just take it easy”

Diane slid behind the wheel of her Cadillac. She looked at me
before closing the door. “I need to stop at the market first. I’ll
be right along.”

“No problem,” I replied, almost gleefully. “I’ve got a couple
of stops to make myself.”

She forced a weary smile. “I’ll see you out at the house.”

Sheriff Lacoutrue looked up when I opened the door. “Morning”

“Good morning, Sheriff. Looks like a hot day. Probably thunderstorms later.”

At a desk against the wall, a second officer looked around.
Lacoutrue said, “That be my deputy, Paul Thibodeaux.”

I smiled. “Morning.”

Thibodeaux was a few inches shorter than the sheriff but just
as thin. He studied me for a moment and then dipped his head.
“Good morning.”

Lacoutrue leaned back in his chair. “Well, Mr. Boudreaux.
How be your friend?”

“Good. Probably come home in a few days.”

He pursed his lips. “That sound good.”

“Any luck in running down who might have jumped him?”

“Mais non, no luck, but me, I do talk to LeBlanc. He say to
tell you hello.”

“He’s a good man,” I replied.

“Oui.”

I grew serious. “Sheriff, when I was last here, you mentioned
a murder a couple of weeks back. Was that the old boy named
Benoit?”

“How you know?”

“I ran into an old gentleman named Rouly.”

Lacoutrue chuckled. “Old Rouly. He be the local scrap man.
That one, he know everything what go on in this parish.”

“Well, he said Benoit had just gotten out of Winn Correctional.”

He frowned. “That what they say. He was supposed to see me about the parole, but he never come by. Why you want to know?”

That was the one question I was hoping he wouldn’t ask. In my
business, convincing lies sometimes are an asset, but for the life
of me, I couldn’t come up with one that made any sense. I decided
to take a drastic step and tell him the truth. “I know this is probably going to sound idiotic to you, Sheriff, but-” I hesitated.

He leaned back in his chair, eyeing me suspiciously. “But
what?”

I gestured to the chair in front of his desk. “May I sit?”

“Sure. Take a load off. Me, I’m interested in what you got to
say.”

“After I left you the day before yesterday, I ran into Mr. Rouly
down the road.” Over the next few minutes, I sketched out all that
had taken place since, up through the snake in the house the
previous night.

“So,” I concluded, “Al Theriot owned the house at the time
he masterminded the robbery.”

The sheriff shook his head. “Mais non. He sell to Ramsey,
the superintendent, before he rob the jewelry store.”

I grimaced. That piece of information put a little crimp in
my theory. “If he didn’t own it, then why is there so much
talk about the diamonds being at his old place?”

Lacoutrue shrugged. “Me, I got no idea, but that’s the talk,
and it don’t go away.”

I pondered the new information. “Okay. If that’s the talk, then
it makes no difference. Like I was saying, Theriot and his
two accomplices died in prison. And since the jewels are still
missing-”

He stopped me. “Maybe not all.”

“Yeah. I heard some surfaced a few years back. Now the two
down at the casino, Carl and Patsy, admitted looking for the
diamonds at the house. Rouly has searched everywhere down
there by his own admission.”

“So, what you got in mind?” The sheriff rocked forward in his
chair.

“I want to see if I can find the diamonds or at least what happened to them.”

“Why?„

I pursed my lips while I formed my response. “The diamonds
and the assault on my friend are related.” I decided to be perfectly
honest with Lacoutrue. “According to Jack, one of the goons who
jumped him demanded to know the whereabouts of the diamonds.
Proof enough that’s what they were looking for, right?”

“Just what you got in mind?” he asked again.

I suppressed a smile. “All right, maybe I’m reaching, but I’ve
got to have a starting place. It strikes me as curious that an excon found beaten to death was paroled from the same prison
where Theriot and his accomplices served their time. Makes
me wonder if the two are somehow connected. I’d like to know
who Benoit’s cell mates were at Winn.”

“What good will that do?”

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “What if … what if Benoit somehow got on to where the jewels were hidden? What if he planned
to get them?” I shook my head. “I might just be grabbing at air,
but at least it’s someplace to start.”

“So you think,” he began, “that them what killed Benoit
might be the ones what whipped up your friend?”

“It’s possible,” I replied. “Can you find out who his cell
mates were?”

Sheriff Lacoutrue didn’t answer for several moments. Finally,
he replied, “Oui, I can do that for you.”

“Great. How long do you figure it’ll take?”

He shook his head. “Not long. Me, I’ll get Thibodeaux here
to call up there this morning.”

Thibodeaux nodded.

I had more questions, most of which the sheriff could probably have answered, but I was reluctant to keep asking them. At
any time he could have figured I was getting too nosy or butting
into his business and insisted I steer clear of the whole matter.
“Thanks, Sheriff.”

After leaving the sheriff’s office, I headed for the local newspaper, the Priouxville Bayou News. All I wanted was a list of
those who had owned the house. I wasn’t sure what good it
would do, but at least it gave me some names to investigate.

I didn’t plan on mentioning the diamonds, for, given the
dynamics of small towns, were I to mention the jewels, everyone in town would know before I left the office.

Well, perhaps not that quickly, but within five minutes for sure.
On the other hand, Tony, you dummy, I told myself, probably
everybody in town already knows more about them than you.

Like all small-town papers, the Bayou’s archives left a great deal to be desired, but the longtime editor and owner, seventysix-year-old Louis Brasseaux and his ace reporter, sixty-threeyear-old Emerente Landry, both knew even more about the
community than old Rouly, saving me a world of digging through
dusty files. Emerente, like most Cajun women, wore her hair
swept up on her head in a bouffant and not a strand out of
place.

Between the two of them, over a pot of coffee, half a dozen
chocolate-covered eclairs, and several heated exchanges on the
questionable deterioration of each other’s memory, I learned
that the previous owner, Harry Guzik, who owned the Sparkle
Paradise nightclub north of town, was murdered in July 2008.

The announcement got my attention. Had he been involved
with the diamonds? What other explanation for his murder? “July,
huh? I thought it was during colder weather, winter or so.”

The two gazed, unseeing, at each other. Brasseaux pursed
his wrinkled lips. “No. July. I remember that well.”

Rouly had said the winter, but now the editor claimed six
months earlier. I shrugged the discrepancy off. “So, during the
summer, huh? That’s when he was killed?”

Emerente interrupted. “Some say that one, he kill himself. So
there,” she added, as if punctuating her remark with an exclamation point.

Brasseaux snorted. “That be impossible. How that one, he
shoot himself in the back of the head?” He snorted again.
“Nope. That be a mob hit.” He glared at Emerente.

After they settled that disagreement, I learned that Guzik had
purchased the home from Big Tim Strollo, who had owned it for
five or six years.

Before Strollo, retired superintendent Jimmy Ramsey owned
the house for a few years. He had been living in a leased cabin
down the bayou, but when Theriot, running into financial problems, put his place up for sale, Ramsey bought it.

The old editor explained that Theriot’s father, Alexandre, had
bought the house from the Priouxes, and after he died, young
Al later moved the house a hundred feet to a crest well above the thousand-year flood level and completely remodeled it, keeping,
however, as much of the cypress logs as possible, especially the
front stairs and their unique railings and balusters.

“They are beautiful,” Emerente said. “Have you ever looked
at them, really looked at them?”

Sheepishly, I shrugged. I’d looked at them enough not to like
them. “Not really.”

“Do. On the side of the handrails and balusters are handcarved fleurs-de-lis.” She shook her head. “Simply magnificent,”
she gushed.

I wasn’t about to fall into a discussion about the cypress railings and balusters. Personally, regardless of the fleur-de-lis
carvings, I thought they were as out of place on the house as a
wart on a beautiful woman’s nose.

Brasseaux grunted and ran his hand through his long white
hair. “That Theriot, me, I never see no one so picky about the
way that house be built.”

Emerente snorted. “That one, he should have been more particular about robbing that jewelry store over in New Orleans
with the Judice brothers.” She gave her head an emphatic shake.

Putting on what I hoped was an expression of naivety, I
replied, “Jewel robbery? I hadn’t heard that.”

“Oui. It happen back in ‘96. That why Theriot, he go to prison.”
Smugly, she looked around at Brasseaux.

The old editor glared at her and then added, “Theriot, he
plan the job with C. K. and Donat Judice, so say Lacoutrue.” He
grinned smugly at Emerente.

Her eyes narrowed. I had the feeling she was not to be outdone by her boss. “What you mean, `so say Lacoutrue’? That
sheriff, he dumber than a snake. It be Thibodeaux what run
them down, but it not be the boys who plan the job. It be Theriot.
The boys, they just be with him. That’s why the law, Lacoutrue,
he don’t catch them at first.”

Brasseaux wagged a finger at her. “You forget to say that
some of the jewels show up eight years later.”

She grimaced, as if chiding herself for forgetting such a juicy
piece of gossip. “That be right,” she replied. “From what we hear, the jewels was found in a pawnshop up in Alexandria. The owners over in New Orleans still have a reward up for the rest of the
jewels.” She looked at Brasseaux. “Me, I forget how much. You
remember?”