Still, Wall Street’s top analysts had been known to be caught with their pin-striped trousers around their ankles, because, at root, they were dependent upon what companies told them. And because their interests lay in selling stock.

Was Obey’s empire teetering and had he sought out the Cossacks and the Larners for support? Did the Cossacks and the Larners have enough to offer Obey?

Bacilla and Horne’s involvement was puzzling. Obey’s planned city was located outside city limits, so what use could a pair of councilmen be?

Unless plans had changed and the focus had shifted back to downtown.

Nothing really sat right. Then I thought of the cement that held it all together:

John G. Broussard’s aid in covering up the Ingalls murder implied he’d had connections to the Cossacks and maybe the Larners. Walt Obey was one of the chief’s major patrons. Maybe Broussard had put them all together, earned himself a big fat finder’s fee in addition to the private stock assigned to his wife and daughter.

Had the chief concealed a substantial lump sum payment from public scrutiny? With Obey’s multiple corporations as shield, concealing cash would’ve been easy enough.

Payoff. Payback. For all his power and status, John G. Broussard remained a civil servant whose salary and pension by themselves would relegate him to upper-middle-class status, at best. Playing with the big boys could mean so much more.

I imagined the deal: Walt Obey salvaging his dream, the Cossacks and the Larners offered a big-time social and economic leap upward, from strip malls and parking lots to the grandest of monuments.

For Chief Broussard and the councilmen, good old cash.

So much at stake.

And now Milo had the opportunity to blow it all to smithereens.

CHAPTER

27

“Interesting theory,” said Milo. “I was wondering along the same lines, except that night Obey’s body language was more grantor than grantee. Bacilla and Horne were kissing up to him
big-time.”

I said, “Bacilla and Horne would be supplicants any way you look at it because their political life depends on fat cats. And Obey’s been alpha-dog with politicians for a long time. But you never had a chance to watch him interact with the Cossacks.”

“No,” he admitted.

We were at his kitchen table. I’d spent a miserable hour mulling how to mend things with Robin, had made another attempt to reach her at the hotel. Out. When I reached Milo he was on the way home from the Hall of Records with a briefcase full of photocopies. He’d combed through the property tax files and found fourteen fleabag hotels operating near Skid Row twenty years ago, but no ownership by the Cossacks or any of the other players.