“Didn’t Miss Lambert tell you anything about it?”
“She hired me to bring you down here and give you any help I could.”
Along the way, he hadn’t asked a single question. Obviously he had a remarkable reticence. “There’s a man missing,” I said. “Someone heard someone say he’d overheard someone else mention that someone or other had seen him down here.”
Tosche turned his intense blue eyes on me. “That’s a bit vague, isn’t it?”
“Extremely so. Like most rumors, it probably doesn’t amount to anything. On the other hand, since there haven’t been any other clues, it has to be checked carefully.”
“If it isn’t classified information, who’s missing?”
“A man named Marc DeVarnay. He owns and operates an antique store on Royal Street in the New Orleans French Quarter. Comes from an old and prominent New Orleans family.”
“Never heard of him,” Tosche said matter-of-factly, dismissing all of the old and prominent families of New Orleans with one eloquent shrug. “We get plenty of that kind down here fishing and hunting. I suppose it was one of his own crowd that saw him. Locals wouldn’t have known who he was.”
I made no comment. I still didn’t know enough about DeVarnay to know the sort of a crowd he ran with.
“How long has he been missing?” Tosche asked.
“About two and a half weeks.”
“When was he supposed to have been seen here?”
“That’s as vague as the rumor. Maybe a couple weeks ago.”
“All we can do is ask, but it’d be better if you let me do the asking. Everyone down here has a secret or two, and a snoopy outsider wouldn’t get very far. I suppose that’s why Miss Lambert hired me. Do you have a photo?”
“Of course.”
He parked at the end of the village, and we got out. The rain was coming down harder, now. I was wearing a raincoat with a hood, but that did nothing to protect my shoes and trouser legs. Tosche was still in his khaki jacket and trousers, but there was an all-weather look about him. He seemed to shed water. Fortunately Marc DeVarnay’s photos were in plastic sleeves, or they would have got as wet as I did.
We began going from door to door, marching up to one house after another and knocking. When there was any response, Tosche, who was Charlie to everyone and knew everyone’s name, displayed one of the photos and asked if this étranger had passed through Pointe Neuve in the past couple of weeks.
DeVarnay’s name wasn’t mentioned. I drew a few suspicious looks, but it was Tosche who was asking, and he got straight answers. All of them were spelled N-O if in English or N-O-N if in French.
We tackled the houses along the road first because zigzagging between them and the bayou houses would have quadrupled the distance we had to cover. After the tenth negative, Tosche turned to me with a frown. “Maybe we should talk about this before we go any further. Did the rumor say anything about what this guy was doing down here?”
I shook my head. “A friend of the family who knew he was missing heard about it tenth or twentieth hand and told DeVarnay’s mother. That’s as much as we know.”
Tosche pondered this for a moment. “Both the missing man and the person who saw him could have been in boats that passed on the bayou. In that case, people living here wouldn’t have seen him at all.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “But regardless of where he was or what he was doing, we have to inquire.”
Tosche shrugged indifferently. “We might as well get on with it, then.”
We continued knocking on doors, taking a stretch of houses along the road and then crossing to check houses by the bayou. I got wetter and wetter.
Out on the bayou, a flotilla of oil pipes hoved into sight. The pipes looked huge—maybe two feet in diameter and twenty or thirty feet long. They also looked old and rusty. Evidently a pipe line had been disassembled and the components were being moved elsewhere. Several lengths of pipe had been placed side by side on special floats. There were a number of such units arranged end-to-end, with tugs interspersed, and they made a long and thoroughly tedious procession. We were half way through Pointe Neuve before the flotilla disappeared from sight.
Watching it gave me something to occupy my mind with. As for the investigation, it was already a washout, and the only other thing that could be said about it was that we’d picked an appropriate day.
The rain suddenly gathered intensity, as though someone had turned the volume up a notch. I huddled in my raincoat and listened to Tosche ask the same questions and get the same answers while I thought, for no reason at all, about the historic parks and squares of Savannah and the splendid weather it was having. If a flock of wild geese had flown over, I would have been severely tempted to join up.
Eventually we reached the Community Store and Café. Like the nearby houses, it was set on cement block supports. There were only three small, high windows visible from the road. The paint was peeling and the corrugated roof was a mass of rust. The two gas pumps were in the open. Some of Pointe Neuve’s buildings had seen better days, but the Community Store and Café had the defeated air of always having been a wreck. A notice tacked to the side of the building had once read “Pizza,” but half of it had blown away.
“Could you do with coffee?” Tosche asked me.
“About four cups,” I said. “Maybe a sandwich, too. The breakfast I had on the plane was about as substantial as this rumor we’re chasing.”
We entered. There was no one in sight, but a cowbell clanged when we opened the door. Half of the long room was given over to the café, with a counter at one end, a few tables, and two booths, one on either side. The other half was the store, with a cabinet for frozen foods, one for refrigeration, and a couple of rows of shelves containing cans and boxes. It wasn’t much of a store; but then, it wasn’t much of a café, either. There was one unlikely ornament: Against the wall, on the boundary between café and grocery store, was a video poker machine.
A door opened behind the counter, and a tired-looking, very faded blonde rewarded our presence with a disinterested glance. The door closed again for a few moments, and then she came out. She was of hefty build, big-bosomed and big-armed, and her face and arms looked reddened by the wind. She had the look of having spent the previous night hauling on shrimp nets. She was wearing jeans with a frilly blouse.
She said, “Hi, Charlie.”
“Hi, Eva. Coffee pot functioning?”
“It’s the only thing I sell much of,” she grumbled.
We sat at the counter. She placed cups of coffee in front of us, and we ordered sandwiches. When she brought them, Tosche asked, “Seen any strangers around recently?”
“How recently?”
“In the past couple of weeks.”
She shook her head. “Just the usual hunting and fishing crowd. Some of ‘em are pretty strange, but they aren’t strangers.” She giggled.
I slid DeVarnay’s photo across the counter. The instant she saw what it was, she decided not to recognize it. She was already shaking her head when she took a quick look, and she kept on shaking it.
Resignedly I pulled the photo back.
“Just a minute,” she said suddenly. “Lemme see that again.”
I