“How can you be certain of that?” Ida Belle asked.
I looked at the pained expression on the brothers’ faces. “Because Willie was already dead, right?”
John looked down at the floor and nodded. “We had a message from him Sunday that he’d broken into Hot Rod’s shop the night before. The SUV was gone but he knew who had bought it. He wanted us to come over that night and work out a plan to boost it.”
“But someone else decided to chat with him first,” I said. “Then why didn’t that person go straight to Ida Belle’s house and steal the SUV? Why go back to Hot Rod’s place when the SUV wasn’t there any longer?”
“I don’t know,” John said. “All we could figure was that Willie lied and told them the SUV was still at Hot Rod’s place.”
I nodded. “Thinking it would buy you time to steal the right vehicle. Willie didn’t count on being killed.”
I stepped closer to them and leaned down a bit. “Then if you two didn’t shoot Willie and attempt to kill Hot Rod, who did?”
They glanced at each other, then back at me, and I could tell they didn’t have an answer. Not a concrete one. Finally, John spoke.
“I guess whoever set us up,” he said. “I mean, no one else would care, right?”
“I don’t know. What happened to Gary Thibodeaux?” I asked.
John shook his head. “I guess he left like he told Willie.”
I looked over at Big. “Can we speak for a minute outside?”
He nodded and everyone not duct-taped to a chair trailed outside the storage unit far enough away so that we wouldn’t be overheard.
“Do you believe all of that?” Gertie asked.
“I think I do,” I said, and looked over at Big and Little, who both nodded.
“Let’s assume this Patrick Marion was looking into drug trafficking in the French Quarter, and one or more of the major players invited him to back off,” I said. “Assuming he refused, killing his kid is one way to change his mind. Most people have more than one loved one to lose, and when they find out just how serious the warning was, they usually take heed.”
“Filthy animals,” Big said. “It’s why we hate drug traffickers. They have no code.”
“Family, especially children,” Little said, “should never be made part of business, but unfortunately, the scenario you set forward is entirely plausible and likely exactly what happened.”
“It had to be their supplier, right?” Ida Belle asked. “He’s taking heat from the cop, and the brothers were expendable.”
Big nodded. “That makes the most sense.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but there’s also the cop. If he thought there was a chance the brothers were telling the truth and it was a setup, he’d also have a vested interest in knowing who the real killer was.”
“But would a cop do that sort of thing?” Gertie asked.
“Cops go rogue,” Ida Belle said. “Having your kid killed is enough to do it.”
Little tapped on his phone. “Doesn’t appear to be a lot on Marion on the Internet, but I can make some calls tomorrow and see if I can find out anything.” He turned his phone around to us. “It’s an old picture, but here he is.”
We leaned forward to look at the image, and I frowned. The guy in the picture was around forty and completely average-looking, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen him somewhere before. I started rolling through the events since Monday morning and gasped.
“That’s the deputy,” I said. “The one from Mudbug who was guarding Hot Rod’s place.”
Everyone stared at me.
“You’re sure?” Big asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s older now, of course, but that was him. I’m certain.”
Big shook his head. “Convenient that he just happened to be on location.”
“Not convenient,” I said. “Carter said this guy called and offered help in case they needed some extra hands. The local law enforcement likes to avoid calling in the state if they can help it.”
“But if he’s the one who broke in the night before,” Gertie asked, “why would he come back to the scene of the crime?”
“He didn’t find what he was looking for,” I said. “Or he wanted a solid reason for his DNA to be at the scene.”
Little nodded. “And if he wasn’t the one who broke in before, he might have been hoping to find evidence of who did.”
“So now there are two,” Ida Belle said. “The cop and the supplier.”
“Then let’s find out who the supplier was,” I said.
We all trailed back into the storage unit. The brothers had moved beyond looking uneasy and were drifting toward panic. They probably thought we were outside discussing whether or not to kill them.
“Who was the supplier?” I asked.
John shook his head. “We don’t know.”
“You have to know,” I said. “Someone gave you drugs in return for cash.”
“We only dealt with Gary,” John said. “He didn’t want to work the crowd, so he hired us to do it.”
More likely Gary wanted his own plausible deniability if the brothers were busted. If the cops couldn’t find anyone who bought drugs directly from Gary, it would be his word against the brothers if there was an arrest.
“You never saw anyone?” I asked. “Gary never mentioned a name?”
“I saw a guy once,” John said, “and asked who he was, but Gary said he was just a delivery boy. Honestly, I don’t think he wanted to know that kind of stuff. He always said the less everybody knew, the better.”
I frowned. It was certainly possible that Gary didn’t know who was ultimately running the show, especially since it appeared he had a desire to keep his own hands clean. Maybe being framed for murder had caused him to take a closer look into things he should have long before. Maybe that’s why he had evidence to hide.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s just say we take your story at face value for now. The only way we keep believing it is if we catch the real killer. That means we need the evidence that Gary hid. So what’s the name on the crypt?”
“We don’t know,” John said. “If we knew that, we would have just broken the lock on it. We figure Gary told Willie when he gave him the key, but…”
“Willie forgot.” I sighed.
“Do you at least know what cemetery?” I asked.
John nodded. “Metairie.”
Ida Belle shook her head. “It had to be one of the biggest.”
“Yeah,” John said, “between that and the name…I mean, do you know how many Thibodeaux are buried there? We started hunting down the Thibodeaux crypts and breaking in but on the second night someone took a couple shots at us.”
I looked over at Ida Belle and Gertie. “Does that cemetery have night patrol?”
“I don’t think so,” Ida Belle said. “But I haven’t been out there in at least a decade.”
“Who was doing the shooting?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” John said, “but we wasn’t sticking around to find out. We figured if we found the key then we could go proper-like during the day.”
I struggled a bit to keep from laughing at the use of the word “proper.” There was absolutely nothing proper about any of this. If anything it was a campaign for anti-proper.
I looked back at Big. “Well?”