the suspense is killing him. He still thinks Sarah is dead or he would have heard from her.”
“What do you think?”
“I think maybe they took the money and skipped, but something doesn’t feel right. I can’t talk now. Just find her,” he added and then he was gone.
“What now, Blood?” Billy asked.
“The Big Easy, Chief, the Big Easy.”
Sandy and I were on a Monday afternoon flight to New Orleans, and she was asleep with a book in her lap, while I revisited Sunday’s sports pages. We had spent much of the weekend together at the lake house. Dinner at Big Bob’s Friday night had been a welcome relief from the emptiness I was feeling about Sandy’s impending departure. Sylvia, Big Bob’s wife, had fixed a huge pot roast with new potatoes, carrots, and delicious brown gravy, baked apples, and homemade yeast rolls. Big Bob and I ate to the point of gluttony and then sat on the front porch with our feet up sipping after-dinner drinks and discussing the upcoming football game between Tennessee and Georgia that we were attending Saturday.
We drove down in Big Bob’s marked Chief of Police car, which gained us access to parking next to the stadium—professional courtesy and all that. Big Bob knew a few Athens policemen and Georgia state troopers, which led to more introductions and a lot of good-natured kidding. All the Georgians were positive this was going to be their day. I was introduced as a detective on the Mountain Center force. PIs were not necessarily held in high esteem.
Our box seats were in the loge level of Sanford Stadium. The tickets had been sent to me by an Atlanta publisher whose IRA account I was still handling as a favor, and my reward was Tennessee-Georgia tickets every other year.
Big Bob and I were both nervous about Tennessee’s chances but as game time grew near I was feeling an unexplainable sense of calm. Seconds before kickoff I turned to Big Bob and asked, “What do you think?”
“The Georgia fans are entirely too cocky,” he said. “I think it filters down to the team. I believe we will kick butt.”
“You may be right,” I responded. Kick butt we did. Tennessee dominated from start to finish in a rout that could have been worse. Reading about it now as we winged to New Orleans was just as sweet as it had been on the ride home from the game with Big Bob.
I looked at Sandy and wondered what life was going to be like after she left for Atlanta. There was only one way I could keep her from leaving and I was not ready to make that commitment. Absence makes the heart grow fonder or out of sight out of mind? Very soon I was going to find out.
I rented a car at the airport and we drove into the city. I took the Poydras Street exit and cut over to the Residence Inn on St. Joseph in the warehouse district right next to the French Quarter. We unpacked and settled into our suite by opening a bottle of KJ and sharing it in our kitchen that overlooked the courtyard. When the wine was gone we checked out the four-poster bed.
Later Sandy and I had dinner at a corner table of Mike Anderson’s Seafood Restaurant on Bourbon Street. We arrived late and the dinner crowd was thinning out, which let us dine in relative quiet. We talked about everything except her move, but the essence of it hung in the air creating a subtle tension that had not previously existed between us. Our parting was not going to be easy.
Bud Hoffman was about five feet ten inches tall with dark complexion and the serious look cops have to cultivate to be successful on the street, especially if your beat is Bourbon Street. He looked trim and fit and I would guess his age to be early forties. Perps would think twice before messing with Officer Hoffman.
We were having early morning lattes at a table in a back corner of Café Du Monde, the world-famous open-air coffee house beneath the Mississippi River levee on the edge of the French Quarter. We were deep in conversation about Tennessee football and last week’s game. Having worked the Knoxville police force for nine years, Hoffman had become a fan even though he had grown up in Louisiana.
“So,” he finally said. “You didn’t come all this way to talk Tennessee football. What’s on your mind?”
I slid my file and personal notes on the Ed Sanders accident across the table. While he read it, I quietly sipped my latte that was just beginning to cool enough to drink. When Hoffman finished he slid the file back and stared at me for a few seconds in silence.
“Mary Sanders ask you to look into this?”
I nodded. It was, at least, a partial truth.
“She never thought it was an accident,” Bud said.
“What did you think?”
“Initially, there were some things that I thought didn’t add up.”
“For instance?”
He looked out toward the levee and let out a deep breath.
“I’m out on I-640 cruising toward Broadway early in the morning,” he began. “I come around this long sweeping curve and I think I see a flash. Then I see car taillights about a half mile up ahead on the side of the road. I get a little closer and it looks like a fire, so I hit the lights. The car at the side of the road takes off. I get to the spot where the car was and I see another car engulfed in flames down over the embankment. At that point I have a decision to make.”
“Chase the car or look for survivors.”
“Exactly! So I decide the car that left probably just stopped to see what was going on and I spooked it when I hit the lights.”
He was a lot more animated than when we first started talking.
“Didn’t make much difference,” I interrupted. “You would have still had to check out the accident.”
“Exactly!” he said again with emphasis.
“So I go over the hill and look and see if I can find anyone and I find Ed Sanders who was apparently thrown from the car. I check for life signs. None. Looks like a broken neck. So I call it in and while I’m waiting I look for skid marks. None. So I figure he must have fallen asleep at the wheel and run off the road.”
“Did you check the car for other passengers?”
“Tried to. The fire was hotter than hell and had already set the brush around it on fire, so I couldn’t get that close. Wouldn’t have made much difference. Nobody could have survived inside that inferno.”
“What made you think it might not have been an accident?”
“No one particular thing,” he said and paused. “Combination of things. No skid marks but upon examining the grass on the side of the road it appeared the car was going very slow. You follow?”
“Yeah. If the car had been going at least the speed limit it would have sailed some distance before touching ground,” I answered.
“Exactly! And the fire was extremely hot and there was already a lot of burning around the car.”
