“I don’t want to hear about anything overtly criminal, but if it’s arguable I do want to hear about it,” Tremanty said.
The waitress arrived with the drinks—beers for Bob and Rae, a lemonade for Tremanty, and a Diet Coke for Lucas—and they shut up for the minute she was there, and, when she was gone, Lucas said, “I want to interview Roger Smith. I want to ask him where he thinks Deese went.”
“Good luck with that,” Tremanty said. “There’s no way he’ll tell you a thing. If Deese flipped on him, he could be looking at the needle himself.”
“This would not be a formal recorded interview,” Lucas said. “I’ll ask him to take a walk. I might lie to him a little.”
Tremanty gazed at him for a moment, then said, “Huh.” And, a moment later, “Now that the cannibalism thing is out, the pressure is going to get intense.”
“That’s exactly what I’m thinking,” Lucas said.
Rae was sitting next to Tremanty and pushed an elbow into his arm. “We wouldn’t want to use the word ‘blackmail’ about a Smith interview. That would be wrong.”
“Why would the word even come up?” Tremanty asked.
“We’ve worked with Lucas before,” Rae said.
“Ah. If you did use the word, what would scare him enough that he might cooperate?” Tremanty asked. “He’s got a lot of reasons not to.”
“That might be something that you don’t want to discuss,” Lucas said.
“Let’s try not to wreck my career,” Tremanty said. “But if you were to do this, when would you do it?”
“Tomorrow morning, early. If you have an address for Smith? And a phone number?”
“Oh, yeah. We’ve got all of that. He’s out late every night and sleeps in. Usually starts stirring around about ten o’clock,” Tremanty said. “He has live-in help. A housekeeper, plus a driver who carries a legal gun.”
“You’ve done surveillance on him,” Lucas said.
“Sure. He’s got links to every organized crime outfit in the city. Actually, more disorganized crime than anything else, but you know what I mean. Ratshit gangs trying to peel money off anything they can. A lot of dope goes through here; that’s where the money is. There’s some gambling and so on, but not like it used to be. Smith knows the players, and his law firm does a lot of work for them.”
“Was he a competent lawyer?”
“He was okay, when he was practicing,” Tremanty said. “He doesn’t practice anymore. He has a dozen or so associates to do the trial work. He’s the CEO; he mostly coordinates. He’s the biggest loan shark in town. We’ve heard . . . no, we know that he’s got a million or more on the street at any one time. He charges ten percent per week, that’s around five hundred percent per year. It comes back all cash.”
“Ten percent isn’t bad, for a shark,” Lucas said. “New York, Chicago, they get fifteen or twenty percent.”
“That’s why he’s the biggest in town. He’s driven most of the others out of business,” Tremanty said. “He’s smart. Takes a smaller bite that still brings in five mil a year, donates money to widows and orphans at Christmas, only gets mean when he really has to. Like with our boy Howell Paine.”
They talked through a second round of drinks, and when they were done Lucas said, “I’ll roll this out tomorrow. Right now, I need to know where there’s a Walmart.”
* * *
—
BOB AND RAE were staying at a Best Western in Plaquemine, but Lucas suggested that they check out and go with him to New Orleans. “I’ve already got rooms reserved for the three of us. I’ll need you down there. Depending on what we find out tomorrow, we might be flying.”
“We thought we might,” Rae said. “We’re basically packed; we’ve got our gear bag.”
Lucas nodded. Their gear bag contained enough weaponry to start a revolution.
After leaving the Best Western, and a brief stop at a Walmart, they went on to downtown New Orleans and checked into a Hampton Inn. The trip down took an hour and a half, and they agreed to meet in the restaurant for breakfast at eight o’clock. “We should be at Smith’s place by nine o’clock at the latest. I don’t want to miss him,” Lucas said.
Alone in his room, Lucas opened up his new burner phone, the one he’d bought at Walmart, and called WVUE. “I need to talk to the producer on the Clayton Deese cannibal story. I just got back from there and I have a tip for