Chapter 2 - The Marsh Inspector
The river office of Orsini Logistics was not a mansion. It sat on the industrial fringe of the Bywater, where the Mississippi made its crescent turn south toward the parish lines. The building had been an iron foundry in the 1890s: red brick stained black with coal soot, corrugated tin roofs that rattled when the container barges sounded their horns, and a chain-link yard crowded with freight trailers and wooden pallets.
Dennis Vidor sat on a straight-backed wooden chair in the middle of Carmine’s second-floor warehouse office. He had not taken off his windbreaker, though the space heater in the corner was glowing dull orange. He was sixty-one, with the florid, broken-veined cheeks of a heavy gin drinker and fingers that twitched against the denim of his trousers.
Carmine sat across from him behind an unpainted pine table. Between them lay a white porcelain plate holding a single, cold slice of pecan pie.
"Taste it," Carmine said.
Vidor stared at the plate. A bead of sweat formed at his hairline, despite the draft coming off the river. "Look, Mr. Orsini, your boy Benny picked me up at the dock. I didn't even have my gear stowed. I don't know what this is about. If there's a code issue on the wharf warehouses—"
"I don't have code issues on my wharves, Dennis. The fire marshals who inspect my facilities don't retire to fifty-foot pontoon boats on Lake Pontchartrain after thirty years on a civil servant’s pension." Carmine tapped his fountain pen against the pine. "Taste the crust."
Vidor’s throat hitched. He looked toward the door, where Benny was leaning against the jamb with an unlit cigar between his teeth. Slowly, the retired marshal reached for the fork, broke off a corner of the browned crust, and put it in his mouth.
He chewed. His eyes dropped to his boots.
"Lard," Vidor muttered. "Lard and ice water. Vinegar in the flour."
"Who made it?" Carmine asked.
"How the hell should I know who baked a pie?"
"You knew nineteen years ago," Carmine said, his voice dropping into that terrifying, even tempo that felt like water rising against an embankment. "You ate lunch at the counter on Magazine Street every Thursday. Emmett Fontaine used to save you the end-cuts of the cinnamon loaves. You knew his daughter was nineteen when she took over the ovens. You knew she used cider vinegar to keep the dough short."
Vidor’s hand began to shake. The fork clattered against the porcelain plate.
"It was an accident," Vidor said, though the words sounded thin, reedy, stripped of conviction. "The valve on the back of the deck oven had a hairline fissure. The flame caught the grease in the vent hood. By the time the trucks rolled out of the Eighth Ward station, the ceiling had dropped into the display cases."
"And the back door?" Carmine asked.
"The back door was blocked."
"With what?"
"A timber," Vidor whispered. "A four-by-four. Wedged between the door handle and the concrete drainage culvert across the alley."
Carmine did not move. He leaned back in his chair, his gaze fixed on the retired inspector. "A timber doesn't walk into an alley and jam itself under a brass latch, Dennis."
"I didn't put it there!" Vidor’s voice rose, cracking at the edges. "I didn't write the report because I wanted to! I had three years until my pension vested! My wife had tumors in her spine! Do you know what private nursing care costs in this state? Do you know what happens to a marshal who crosses Marcus Vance?"
The name hung in the damp river air like a foul grease.
Marcus Vance.
A real estate developer who owned three blocks of luxury condominiums along the St. Charles streetcar line, two boutique hotels in the French Quarter, and four city councilmen who never voted against an urban renewal zoning variance. Vance was seventy, soft-handed, and possessed the kind of wealth that smelled of clean bank vaults and old state families.
"Vance wanted the corner lot," Carmine said. It wasn't a question.
"He offered Fontaine two hundred thousand," Vidor said, his head hanging so low his double chin pressed into his collar. "Emmett laughed at him. Told him his grandfather bought the bricks with money he earned off the sugar barges. Said the bakery was staying Fontaine until his daughter had children to take the flour bins. Two weeks later, the block caught fire."
"And you signed off on arson due to owner negligence."
"Vance had the insurance company in his pocket," Vidor wept, wiping his nose with the cuff of his windbreaker. "If it was ruled negligence, the policy didn't pay. The bank foreclosed on the burned ground within ninety days. Vance bought the municipal tax lien for forty thousand dollars on the courthouse steps. He built that glass-and-steel coffee bar that's sitting there now."
Carmine looked at Benny. Benny didn't need an order. He stepped away from the door, reached into his coat pocket, and pulled out an envelope containing five hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills.
"Take Dennis back to his pontoon," Carmine said. "Tell him if he forgets where Slidell is, or if he talks to Marcus Vance before I do, I won't use the courts to revoke his pension."
Vidor scrambled out of the chair, his boots slipping on the sawdust-covered floorboards, clutching the envelope to his ribs as Benny escorted him into the stairwell.
Carmine remained alone at the pine table.
The pie slice sat on the white plate, brown, glossy, and cold.
He reached out with his fork, cut another small piece from the crust, and ate it.
"Seven minutes," Carmine whispered to the empty room. "You were twenty-four years old, and you were pulling your father out of a burning hallway while Marcus Vance’s boys were driving away in a sedan."
He stood up, took his overcoat from the wooden peg by the window, and reached for the telephone receiver on the desk.
"Mrs. Pruitt," Carmine said when the line connected.
May you like
"Yes, Mr. Orsini?"
"Have Miss Brisco brought to my private dining room tonight at eight o'clock. Tell the kitchen staff they are dismissed for the evening. We are going to have dinner."
