Page 60 of The Fourth Option
He had pushed too hard.
“If the shoe fits,” he said, echoing her words from moments earlier in a bad attempt at a joke. “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. Most everyone, like you, correctly assumes I’m homeless.”
“Well, get a haircut and take a shower,” she said, settling back down.
“Maybe I will.”
“And for the record, I don’t do the hard stuff. Connor lost a friend to some synthetic hard shit. He hated the drugs that ripped this town apart. That’s one of the reasons he was going into journalism. He wanted to bring a light to it. He was different than other kids from the Garden District. Guess I was attracted to the contrasts.”
Walker took a breath.
“Belle, I wonder if you can help me.”
“Help you with what?”
He reached into his bag and withdrew Connor’s journal, the leather cover worn and creased. He laid it on the table and opened it to the center. “You recognize any of this?”
She leaned in and froze for a moment when she saw Connor’s handwriting. “Let me see that.” She flipped through the pages. “So it exists.”
“You’ve never seen this before?”
“No, but I knew about it. Connor told me he wrote in code.”
“He did. He used some sort of a cipher, a key book that I don’t have,” Walker said.
“I know it had something to do with his dad’s old work.”
“Old work?”
“Military stuff.”
“That’s helpful.”
The waitress stopped by to check on them. Belle was still picking at her food. Walker asked for coffee.
“He was looking for Snowball,” she said.
“Do you know it?”
“Ofit.”
“Leigh Ann thinks Connor was framed by the cops for digging into this. Would that make sense to you?”
“You’re kidding, right? In this town, cops and criminals work together. Connor wanted to blow the lid off something like that, make a difference.”
“How do you know?”
“Know what?”
“That he found a connection between law enforcement and this Snowball drug.”
“I was his girlfriend. We talked a lot, but when I asked too many questions about this story, particularly around cops and the drug trade, he would tell me the less I knew, the better, at least until his story broke.”
The waitress set down a coffee and the check and walked away.
“Another dead end,” Walker said to Belle as much as to himself.
“We’re in the Lower Ninth, Chris. New Orleans kids hit the Ninth to score pills. All those empty shacks after Katrina have turned into a drug mall.”
