"That's where my picture is incomplete."
She looked at the screen again. At her grandmother's byline, the small photograph. Something moved through her face that I couldn't categorize precisely, not grief, which would have been simpler, but something more like the particular heaviness of returning to an old hurt that had never fully resolved.
"My grandmother talked about him," she said. "Not often. Not in the way you talked about people who were gone and you'd made your peace with. In the way you talked about something that still had an open edge." She turned from the screen. "She never believed the official version."
"The official version being that there was no investigation and no conclusion."
"The official version being the one everyone in that neighborhood assumed without saying directly." Her voice was even but had weight in it. "That the Moreaus had him killed."
The library held its quiet around us. Somewhere the archivist moved in the back room. The afternoon light had shifted, lower now, longer shadows across the table.
"Tell me what she told you," I said.
* * *
Thomas Reyes had been twenty-six and talented in the way that made older musicians protective of him, not threatened, protective. That was Adele's word, according to Cleo. He'd had something that couldn't be taught, which meant he was worth investing in and worth worrying about in equal measure, because the music world had a long history of consuming exactlythat kind of talent before it had time to develop into something durable.
He had also been, for approximately eight months before his disappearance, involved with a girl named Marisol Salas.
"Salas," I said.
"Salas." Cleo confirmed it without emphasis, letting the name sit and be recognized. "Her family had been trying to move into New Orleans territory for two years. Victor Salas, her uncle, the one who ran the family operation, had been meeting with different groups, trying to establish footholds. The Moreaus were the main obstacle."
I was writing this down on the legal pad, the same one I'd used for contract law notes, careful and fast.
"Thomas knew Marisol from the music scene," Cleo continued. "She liked jazz, she came to the clubs, they met the way people meet when they both show up in the same places enough times. My grandmother didn't think either of them understood, at first, what the other's family represented. By the time they understood, they were already in it."
"What happened when the families found out."
"Pressure. On both sides." She paused. "My grandmother's understanding was that Victor Salas was furious. Not about the relationship specifically, about the leverage it created. If Thomas was with Marisol, Thomas knew things. Heard things. Had access, even accidentally, to information that moved between the two families through normal relationship channels." She looked at her hands. "Thomas went to my grandmother two weeks before he disappeared. That Tuesday you read about. He told her he thought he was in trouble. He didn't say what kind. She told him to be careful."
Patient, and then suddenly not. The quality of his playing that afternoon. A man trying to put something in order before it came apart.
"After he disappeared," Cleo said, "there were two years of, my grandmother called it friction. Territory disputes, incidents in the port district, a fire at a Moreau-affiliated business. Nothing that ever rose to the level of open conflict but enough that everyone who knew the city understood something was happening underneath."
"And the assumption was that the Moreaus had killed him."
"The assumption was the Moreaus had killed him." She said it flatly, as a stated consensus rather than her own position. "Because Marisol broke off contact with Thomas at the same time Victor Salas was increasing his territorial pressure. The reading was that the Moreaus had removed the source of the security risk, that someone in Thomas's life was passing information to Salas, and Thomas was the weakest point in the chain."
It was a coherent reading. It was the reading my grandfather had arrived at, building from Patrick's eyewitness account and the payment record and the known geography of the Moreau organization. I had arrived at the same place, from the same starting point, with the same documentation.
"But," I said.
Cleo looked at me. "But my grandmother didn't believe it."
"Why."
"Because she knew Thomas." The answer was simple and its simplicity was the whole argument. "And she knew what kind of trouble he was in. He wasn't passing information to anyone. He wasn't involved in whatever the Salas family was doing. He was a musician who'd fallen in love with the wrong girl and was trying to figure out how to extract himself from a situation he hadn't chosen." She paused. "My grandmother believed Victor Salas had Thomas killed. Not because Thomas was a security risk to the Moreaus. Because he was a leverage point that Salas could no longer control."
I wrote this down. Read it back.
"If Thomas stayed with Marisol," I said slowly, working through it, "he was a conduit between the families. Salas could use that, could use the relationship to move information, to create pressure, to establish a presence in New Orleans through a human connection the Moreaus couldn't easily sever without escalating."
"Right."
"But if the relationship ended, if Thomas was no longer in contact with Marisol, the leverage disappeared. And Thomas himself became a liability. He knew things. Not operational things, maybe, but enough."
"Enough," Cleo agreed.