Mirot studied me, leather creaking as he shifted his position in his chair and stroked a silver pen.
“Probably not,” Talley said to me. “At first, yes. That’s what we thought, because every indicator pointed to the dead man in Richmond as this killer: Loup-Garou written on the carton, the physical description as best you could tell, considering the state the body was in. The expensive way he was dressed. But when you supplied us with further information about the tattoo with, quote, yellow eyes that might have been altered in an attempt to make them smaller. . .”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Marino cut in. “You saying this Garou guy’s got a tattoo with yellow eyes?”
“No,” Talley replied. “We’re saying his brother did.”
“Did?” I asked.
“We’ll get to that, and maybe you’ll begin to pick up on why what happened tó your niece is tangentially connected with all this,” Talley said, filling me “No,” Talley replied. “We’re saying his brother did.”
with torment again. “Are you familiar with an international criminal cartel we’ve come to call the One-Sixty-Fivers?”
“Oh, God,” I said.
“Named such because they seem to be very fond of onesixty-five-grain Speer Gold Dot ammo,” Talley explained. “They smuggle the stuff. They use it exclusively in their own guns and we can generally tell their hits because Gold Dot’s going to be the bullet recovered.”
I thought of the Gold Dot cartridge case recovered from the Quik Cary.
“When you sent us information about Kim Luong’s murder-and thank God you did-pieces began to fit together,” Talley said.
Then Mirot spoke. “All members of this cartel are tattooed with two bright yellow dots.”
He drew them on a legal pad. They were the size of dimes.
“A symbol of membership in a powerful, violent club, and a reminder that once in, you’re in for life, because tattoos don’t come off. The only way out of the One-SixtyFiver cartel is death.”
“Unless you are able to make the gold dots smaller and turn them into eyes. A small owl’s eyes-so simple and so quick. Then escape to some place where nobody will think to look for you.” .
“Like a niche port in the unlikely city of Richmond, Virginia,” Talley added.
Mirot nodded. “Exactly.”
“What for?” Marino asked. “Why suddenly does this guy freak out and run? What’s he done?”
“He’s crossed the cartel,” Talley replied. “He’d betrayed
his family, in other words. We believe this dead man in your morgue,” he said to me, “is Thomas Chandonne. His father is the godfather, for lack of a better term, of the OneSixty-Fivers. Thomas made the small mistake of deciding to make his own dope and do his own gun trafficking and cheat the family.”
“Mind you,” Mirot said, “the Chandonne family has lived on the fie Saint-Louis since the seventeenth century, one of the oldest, wealthiest parts of Paris. The people there call themselves Louisiens, and are very proud, very elitist. Many don’t consider the island part of Paris, even though it’s in the middle of the Seine in the heart of the city.
“Balzac, Voltaire, Baudelaire, Cézanne,” he said. “Just a few of its better-known residents. And it is where the Chandonne family has been hiding behind their noblesse facade,, their visible philanthropy and high place in politics while they run one of the biggest, bloodiest organized crime cartels in the world.”
“We’ve never been able to get enough on them to nail them;” Talley said. “With your help, we might have a chance.”
“How?” I asked, although I wanted nothing to do with a murderous family like that.
“Verification, to start with. We need to prove the body is Thomas. I have no doubt. But there are those little legal nuisances we law enforcers have to put up with.” He smiled at me.
“DNA, fingerprints, films? Do we have anything for comparison?” I asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.
“Professional criminals make it a point to avoid such things,” Mirot remarked.
“We’ve found nothing,” Talley replied. “And that’s where Loup-Garou comes into the picture. His DNA could identify his brother’s.”
“So we’re supposed to put an ad in the paper and ask the Loup to drop by and give a blood sample?” Marino was getting surlier as the morning went on.