Chapter 16

16

“Oh, my God in heaven, what have I done to deserve this?”

Nick chuckled low in his throat. “Donnie Bichon, as I live and breathe. How the hell are you?”

It was Bichon’s turn to laugh. “Like you give a bright shiny fuck!”

They went back. Their history had begun with the brutal murder of Donnie’s estranged wife, the case that had eventually brought Annie into Nick’s life, making it a twisted thing to be somehow grateful for. He admitted to making Donnie’s life a particular sort of hell during it all, not that Donnie hadn’t deserved most of it. He’d been a legitimate suspect right up until he wasn’t. The ne’er-do-well cheating husband on the brink of losing everything if his wife had divorced him. The perpetual screwup who had never missed the chance to make a wrong choice.

“Don’t tell me you still have hard feelings,” Nick said, prowling the office like a restless cat.

Donnie’s personal space in the Bichon Bayou Development offices looked the same as he remembered—like the office of a genteel hunt club with antique oak furnishings and expensive wildlife prints in frames on the burgundy walls.

Donnie hadn’t changed much either, though hard lessons had etched some lines into his perpetually boyish good looks. He was tall and lean with sun-bleached brown hair and a tan that spoke of excessive time on the golf course. He had played basketball in college and still had that slight hunch to his shoulders that made him look like he was ready to drive to the basket at any moment.

“Why would I have hard feelings?” he asked affably, spreading his arms wide. “I remember so fondly that time you stuck my head in a toilet and flushed. Those were the days!”

“You came out all right in the end,” Nick said.

“I did indeed. Truth to tell, I turned my life around after that, though you’ll forgive me if I don’t thank you effusively. I’m not so evolved that I can’t still hold a little grudge.”

“Fair enough,” Nick conceded. “How’s Josie?”

“She rules my life, that little girl,” Donnie declared with a broad smile as he leaned forward and tapped a finger on the framed photo of his now-teenaged daughter. “Look at that. Pretty as her mama, and she’s on the A honor roll every quarter. Fixing to take her SATs, if you can believe that. Obviously got her smarts from Pam.”

“Obviously.”

“She straightened her daddy out, that’s for sure. She’ll rule the world one day. I have no doubt.”

He settled into the oxblood leather chair behind his desk and swiveled back and forth.

“Please have a seat, Detective. You’re giving me motion sickness, prowling around like you do. Do you need to be on Ritalin or something?”

“I’m looking for Dozer Cormier,” Nick said, running his fingertips over the head of a carved wooden mallard on the credenza. “I’m told he works for you.”

“Dozer? Sure. He works on Tommy Crawford’s crew, framing and whatnot. I try to hire those Sacred Heart boys when I can. You know, support the alma matter. Why? What’s he done?”

“Why would you think he’s done something?”

“In my experience, you specialize in accusing people of crimes they didn’t commit,” Donnie said without any rancor at all. “Whose murder do you want to pin on him? That body y’all found yesterday? Or are y’all trying to clear cold cases?”

“He’s not a suspect in anything,” Nick said evenly. “I’m told he’s a friend of Marc Mercier.”

“So am I,” Donnie confessed, making his eyes go wide. “Is that a crime now?”

“Not yet. How do you know Marc?”

“He was a Sacred Heart boy, an athlete, and I put a word in for him with the right people at Tulane when the time came.”

“How benevolent of you, Donnie,” Nick said. “At the risk of ruining your reputation as a feckless narcissist.”

“Never let it be said that tigers can’t change their stripes,” Donnie said pleasantly.

“Have you seen Mr. Mercier recently?”

“On the news last night. They say he’s missing. Is that gonna be my fault? Or Dozer’s? Lots of people know Marc. You’re spoiled for choice here, Fourcade.”

“How many of them would want him gone?” Nick asked.

“None that I know of. Marc’s a good guy. There’s no reason for him to disappear that I can think of.”

“That’s the mystery,” Nick said. “I’m hoping Mr. Cormier might be able to shed some light on that.”

“Yvonne, my office manager, can get you his phone number and address. That crew is working down in Luck today,” Donnie said. “Imagine that. Luck is getting a subdivision! When I was a kid, Luck wasn’t nothing but a wide spot in the road and a fish canning plant. Next thing you know, they’ll have indoor plumbing and everything down there! It’s gonna end up being a suburb. Progress.”

“So they call it,” Nick remarked. “When was the last time you actually saw Marc in the flesh?”

“I saw him Halloween night at Monster Bash. Him and Dozer. I was working the Rotary Club shrimp boil booth.”

“What can you tell me about Dozer?”

“Well, he’s a big dumb lummox with a bad disposition when he drinks, but he’d give a friend the quadruple-XL shirt off his back,” Donnie said. “He’s a hard worker if he’s supervised and lazy as the day is long if he’s not.”

“And him and Marc are tight?”

“They always have been. Dozer was Marc’s left tackle in high school senior year. Mr. Blind Side. He ate defensive linemen for lunch and picked his teeth with their bones. I thought he had a shot at the NFL, but college and Dozer didn’t mix. He couldn’t spell ‘SAT,’ let alone pass it—not that that ever stopped a good football player from getting into a Southern university. He just couldn’t keep himself out of trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Drinking, fighting, flunking. The usual.”

“You hired him, though.”

“He took the twelve steps a few years back—as did I a few years before him.”

“Congratulations,” Nick said honestly. “Good for you, Donnie. I mean that.”

“Thank you. I was as big an idiot as they come when I was drinking—as you well know. All that business with Pam’s murder and everything that happened after…I needed to pull my head out of the whiskey bottle and get my shit together if I was gonna be a proper father to my daughter, save my business, and grow the fuck up.”

“That’s hard work. Takes a lot of courage to step up like that.”

“Yep. I’ve been sober nearly six years now, and I’m damn proud of it,” he said. “The program didn’t stick entirely for Dozer, but he’s good enough for day labor. I keep an eye on him. He’ll go off the rails on the weekend, but he doesn’t miss a day’s work, and that’s something.”

“Tell me,” Nick said, “do you do any business with the Mercier brothers?”

Donnie shook his head. “No. We’re strictly new construction. Don’t have any real need for the scrap business.”

“You’re not knocking down old houses or anything like that?”

“No. That’s more trouble than it’s worth to me. There’s a couple small contractors around do that, and I leave it to them—K and B, Parcelles’, Melancon brothers.”

“What about copper theft? Has that been a problem on your end?”

“Oh, my God, yes!” Donnie said, rolling his eyes. “We have to guard that stuff like it’s Fort Knox. And it’s not just copper, it’s every damn thing. Can’t hardly leave anything on a jobsite, and the Bayou Breaux PD…Don’t get me started on them! They’re a goddamn clown show. My warehouse is in the city limits, you know. Next to over where they store the Mardi Gras floats.

“We hired private security,” he said. “It was the only thing to do. Drives costs up, but so do thieves. And still we lose materials. All the time. That’s the world we live in, sad to say.”

“Sounds to me like you’ve got somebody inside stealing from you.”

Donnie sighed. “I hate to think it. I’m good to my people. Most of them have worked for me for a good long while. That’s saying something in this business.”

“Those materials are insured, yeah?” Nick asked. “You get reimbursed, or you get to write off the loss at least, right?”

Donnie gave him a perturbed look. “Are you gonna accuse me of insurance fraud?”

“No,” Nick said. “Some people don’t think of it as stealing if the owner gets compensated for the loss. That’s how to rationalize stealing from people who trust you.”

“That doesn’t really comfort me,” Donnie said. “I want to think better of my fellow man. This just pisses on my optimism.”

“You know what they say, Donnie,” Nick said, pulling a business card from his pocket. “You want loyalty, get yourself a dog.”

He held up the card and placed it on the desk. “You call me directly the next time it happens.”

Donnie arched a brow. “What about the town cops?”

“Fuck ’em.”

Donnie laughed. “You’re the dog in this story! I’ll hold you to it. Who would’a guessed we’d be having this conversation all these years down the road? Life is a kick in the head, man!”

“ C’est vrai ,” Nick conceded. “That’s for true.

“Talking about Sacred Heart boys,” he said. “Have you seen Robbie Fontenot lately?”

“Robbie?” Donnie sighed. “Now, there’s a sad story. I had heard he was back in town, and then I saw him Halloween night as well.”

“With Marc and Dozer?”

“No. They don’t run together that I know of,” Donnie said. “I imagine on account of what happened.”

“Because of Robbie’s drug use?”

“I reckon it goes back to when Robbie blew out his knee. I was actually there when it happened. A lot of people used to show up to watch their practices then because, I’ll tell you what, Robbie Fontenot was the real deal. That was gonna be his year. He was being courted by every college in the Southeastern Conference, and plenty others. They wanted him at Alabama, but I think he was leaning toward LSU. His daddy was an LSU alumnus. But shit happens. You know, it’s a rough sport with big, strong young men. Even then, Dozer weighed 350 pounds if he weighed an ounce. He fell into Robbie on a play and down they went. Robbie didn’t get back up. That’d be like having a small elephant fall on you.

“It was just an unfortunate accident, but I don’t think anything was the same with any of them after that. Marc took over as quarterback and the team still went on to win the state championship, but Robbie was gone, in more ways than one. Dozer—I think that’s still at the heart of his problems, truth to tell. He never has forgiven himself. You gotta do that if you’re gonna move on,” he said. “I’ve told him. That’s part of the twelve steps: admit your mistakes and make amends. He can’t bring himself to do it. I think there’s a lot of shame and guilt at the heart of that, and that’s a shame in itself.”

“Life is a journey,” Nick said, thinking of the conversation he’d had with Annie the night before. “We can’t make it for someone else.”

“Nope,” Donnie said, shaking his head. “It’s hard to watch people struggle, though. I think of what a shit show I was back in the day. My poor family, having to watch me drive my life off a cliff.”

It was hard to reconcile the Donnie Nick had known back then with the man before him now. Despite his many faults, Donnie had always had a certain likable quality about him, with his good looks and self-deprecating humor, but Nick would never have imagined the man he knew then possessing the inner strength to turn himself around.

Every once in a great while, people were surprising in a good way.

“So, you saw Robbie Fontenot on Halloween night,” he said, turning back to the matter at hand. “About what time was that?”

“Must have been around ten. I couldn’t swear to it, though. We were busy.”

“Was he with anybody?”

“He was talking to some town cop.”

“Really?” Nick asked. “What’d that look like? Like he was in trouble?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just figured par for the course for Robbie. He’s got a long drug history. The cops know it. He knows they know it. Around and around they go.”

“He’s not one of your AA reclamation projects?”

“People have to want help before they’ll accept help,” Donnie said. “Robbie…I don’t know. He was always kind of a loner, that kid. A world of talent, but a puzzle. His folks did everything they could—rehab and whatnot. That Oxy, man, that is some bad shit. I’ve known too many people got hooked on that, and mostly not through any real fault of their own. They say it’s as bad as heroin for addiction.

“I saw on the news Robbie’s missing, too,” he said, frowning. “I hate to say it, but my first thought was that he’s probably dead somewhere. Playing with that shit, your luck runs out eventually.”

“This cop he was talking to that night,” Nick said. “Did you recognize them?”

“No. I just saw a uniform. I didn’t really look. I was busy slinging shrimp and sweet tea. That was a hell of a party. Were you there?”

“No,” Nick said. “Me, I don’t like crowds. Get that many drunks together, that’s just work waiting to happen for me.”

“True enough,” Donnie said, rising as Nick started to move toward the door. “I heard you married that Broussard girl, the deputy.”

“I did.”

Donnie shook his head, chuckling as he opened the office door. “I liked her. Man, she deserves way better than you!”

“She does,” Nick agreed, smiling, “but she’s my wife nevertheless.”

“Good for you. Kids?”

“We have a little boy. He’s five already.”

Donnie gave him a look as they walked down the hall. “I’m not the only tiger changed his stripes.”

“ Mais non ,” Nick confessed. “You’re not.”

He held his hand out, a peace offering long overdue. Donnie took it.

“I’m glad to see you’re doing well, Donnie,” Nick said. “Not everybody comes out the other side.”

“Same to you.”

“You call if you need me,” Nick said. “Thanks for the info.”