by Kris Lackey
“He looks kind of familiar, but I can’t put a name on him.”
The manager took the photo from Maytubby and showed it to the cashier and a stocker. They shook their heads in turn. Black ceiling fans wobbled and thumped, and the stocker hefted a bushel of okra down the produce aisle. Maytubby bought a package of Konriko brown-rice cakes, made just down the road in New Iberia, and two bananas from Costa Rica.
The last few pickup trucks of the lunch rush were parked under live oaks in front of C’est Si Bon, a faded gray flat-roofed restaurant near the south edge of town. Patrons were drifting out—mostly men, snugging their dozer caps, some lighting cigarettes. As Maytubby approached the door, a sweet gust of sautéed onion and green pepper and fried shrimp swept over him. His mouth watered, and he regretted the bananas.
A warhorse Ford 350 pulled into the lot and parked by the kitchen entrance. On the driver’s door, someone had stenciled shrimp + fish. Two bearded, sun-creased men in wifebeaters, jeans, and white rubber shrimp boots got out and began unloading ice chests. They did not look at Maytubby. After they had gone in the kitchen, he walked to the rear of the truck and waited. Eventually, they returned with an empty chest. When they saw he was holding papers, they scowled at the ground.
Maytubby introduced himself and explained his errand. He showed them the photograph. One of the men shook his head and walked away. The other stared at the photo and squinted. Then he flicked the paper with the nail of his middle finger. “Basile Trepanier. Egsept he had brown hair. Come from way up Bayou Nehpeekay.”
Maytubby could spell the person’s name but not the name of the bayou. He took out a pen and held it over the paper. “Nezpique,” he wrote, as the man dictated. Tattooed nose.
“I wend to school wid dad guy. ‘Mullet,’ we called him. ’Cause of his eyes.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“High school. He lef’ outta here long time ago.”
“Can you tell me where he lived?”
“Won’t do you no good. All his people long dead, place sold.”
“Anything unusual about Trepanier? Besides his eyes.”
“Oh, shah.” The man smiled and shook his head. “Nothin usual aboud Mullet. Smart but”—he put an open palm in front of his chin and then flicked his hand away—“coo-yon. Crazy.”
“He gay?”
A shrug.
* * *
Maytubby drove past the address on the Cobalt’s bill of sale. There was a number on the house, but no roof.
The Jefferson Davis Parish Sheriff’s Department was on Plaquemines Street in Jennings, in a tall, modern red-brick building shaded by live oaks that were already ancient when modern came along. A young deputy named Thibault examined Maytubby’s badge. The sheriff was busy, and Maytubby could see that Thibault was hesitant to open his files to a tribal policeman. Shouldn’t have used the word “nation.” He took Scrooby’s card out of his wallet and handed it to Thibault. “This is my boss at OSBI. Give him a call.” Maytubby smiled. “He might grouse at you, but he’ll identify me.”
Thibault frowned less and waved the card away. He typed Trepanier’s name into the computer and found people with that surname, but no Basile. “Our computerized records don’t go back a long way. We’re gettin’ there.” He disappeared down a hallway and returned a few minutes later with a thin file. He opened it for Maytubby to hold like a book.
The face in all three mug shots of Basile Trepanier was a much younger, auburn-haired version of David Woodley, but they were the same person. The meager beard and shoulder-length hair on the younger man didn’t change the face much. Trepanier’s eyes, despite the territory between them, held a kind of furtive insolence.
The file documented three state charges over the course of four years: forgery, deceptive trade practices, and illegal gambling. In the second case, he was accused of taking large deposits from northern Louisiana residents for an alligator hunt that never materialized. Trepanier had been acquitted of all three charges.
“Deputy Thibault, do you know anyone who might remember these trials?” Maytubby handed him back the file.
Thibault stuck his thumbs in his duty belt and drummed on it with his index fingers for a few seconds. Then he pointed at Maytubby. “Miss Bernadette. She’ll be smoking on her bench.”
Thibault introduced Maytubby to Miss Bernadette, a stout woman in her seventies who was indeed smoking on her bench, and told her what the tribal policeman wanted to know. He showed her the mug shots. She clamped a Marlboro Gold long between her lips, took the file with both hands, and held it as close to her face as the cigarette would allow. A dirt bike blatted down Main, and Maytubby looked at it over his shoulder. Blue.
Miss Bernadette closed the file abruptly, handed it back to Thibault, and shooed him away. She patted the bench for Maytubby to sit beside her. But after he sat, she didn’t face him. Instead, she spoke as if she had an audience: turning her face from side to side and gesticulating. In an incongruously soft voice, she said, “Dawlin’, I don’t know where that lawyer came from and I don’t know where he went back to, but he was one hell of a lawyer. He got that Trepanier boy off every time. Lord only knows how he got paid or if he got paid. That batch of Trepaniers was poor as dirt.
“After Basile …” She bent her head toward Maytubby, still not looking at him, whispered “Fou” out of the corner of her mouth, and then resumed her story aloud. “After he suckered those old boys from Shreveport believing they was going on a gator hunt, the prosecutor thought he had him over a barrel. Those boys paid Basile three hundred dollars each. In advance, in cash, which they sent through the mail. When they got to the end of the road down here, where he told them to meet him, he showed ’em a little johnboat ’bout as big as a shoebox. Not even a motor, just paddles.” She chortled. “He gave ’em a map he had made in pencil that told them where to find the gators. The prosecutor held up that map in court. It looked like one of the gators drew it. You couldn’t tell where anything was.
“But by the time that jury was charged, Basile’s lawyer had made those poor men from Shreveport look like city slickers who expected to be treated like English lords on safari in Africa. ‘Maybe these gentlemen have brought charges against my client because he didn’t put them on a yacht and stock the galley with champagne!’ Oh, but he was good.”
“Do you remember his name?” Maytubby said. “If you don’t, I can look it up.”
Miss Bernadette held her cigarette at arm’s length and studied it. “A funny name. He didn’t talk like anyone around here. A Bible name first and an ugly name after.”
“Goliath Butts.”
“No, not Goliath Butts.” After a beat, a little wheezy chuckle rose from Miss Bernadette. “You,” she said. She took a deep drag on her cigarette and then tossed it under a boxwood bush.
A mockingbird ran the gamut of its impressions, from cardinal to chuck-will’s-widow, to squalling baby. Distant thunder from a sea-breeze squall on the coast echoed off the red-brick wall. “You made a joke,” she said, “but you were close. Scab, stob, cob …”
Maytubby had not seen this coming. “Solomon Stoddard?” he said, unable to keep the rush out of his voice.
Now Miss Bernadette did look at him. “How did you know that?”
“I didn’t.”
Chapter 21
Maytubby rarely ate sausage, but the scent rolling out of the smoker at Cormier’s Specialty Meats made him dizzy. As he walked under the store’s sign, which bore a large red cayenne pepper, he reminded himself of his charge: buy tasso for Hannah Bond. Ten minutes later, he emerged with a small ice chest stuffed with tasso, boudin, andouille, and chaurice. He told himself he had many friends.
While his cell was ringing Jill Milton’s, he scanned the parking lot and the street. No dirt bikes, no black sedans. Jill was still at her nation office. Maytubby told her about the shooting and assured he
r that the gunman had absconded into the darkest Ouachita and not pursued him. He told her the sheriff was keeping a close watch on Love. She was quiet. “You remember the preacher in the Cobalt—the guy with Johnny Rotten hair said he was a preacher?”
“Satan is Waitin’?”
“The same. He’s from a little town down here. Name’s Basile Trepanier.”
“Bastille—as in French Revolution?”
“No ‘T,’ one ‘L.’ Petty crook after he dropped out of high school. Charged with three felonies. Never convicted. Had a hot-wire lawyer who appeared from thin air whenever he went astray. You’ll never guess who.”
“Perry Mason.”
“Solomon Stoddard.”
“No.”
“Improbable.”
“Impossible. What in the name of Pete was he doing down there? Not defending the downtrodden.”
“You don’t think he was burnishing his humanitarian creds?”
“Pfffft.”
“You’re likely right.”
“He probably had ulterior motives—an intricate strategy for preserving the Oklahoma way of life. Whatever that is.”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know. You’re just playing dumb while you go about destroying it.”
“Shhhh. Don’t tell.”
“Want to have breakfast at the Aldridge tomorrow morning?”
“If you promise to wear your policeman hat.”
* * *
Six hours later, in Paris, Texas, Maytubby watched an orange sunset, filtered through steam rising from a Campbell’s soup plant. The scene had a postapocalyptic feel.
He didn’t have a grand unified theory yet—just some general suspicions. Stoddard was cultivating Trepanier, a poor young sociopath who needed help and money. Maybe sex was involved, maybe not. Jennings, Louisiana, was physically and culturally a long way from Oklahoma City, and even early in his political career, Stoddard could not have afforded to be seen defending a hoodlum. In Jennings, he might as well have been recruiting in Albania. Had he recruited others? Was he after a mischief maker? A hit man? A go-between? Muscle seemed unlikely. Trepanier looked mean enough, but on the small side for a head cracker.
In the dark, Maytubby wound down the little bluffs of the Red River and returned to Oklahoma. The name was Choctaw, a language very close to Chickasaw, and meant “red humans”—that is, Indians. How strange to see a sign that read “Welcome to Indians.”
Before midnight, he was standing in the foyer of the Pontotoc County Jail, stretching his back and blinking in the harsh light. There was a little trail of blood on the floor, and the air smelled of booze and sweat.
The dispatcher’s name was Judy. Her eyes were red, and she yawned and stretched. Maytubby asked her if someone had told Love about the shooter on the motorcycle.
“Yeah. They said he didn’t say nothin’.”
“Shocking.”
Crickets chirped down the hall. Someone deep in the jail yelled something unintelligible.
Maytubby bade Judy a good night and walked out into the hot night. Though the jail was surrounded by buildings—civic offices, banks—their parking lots were empty. Downtown was dead as the Martian plain.
Love was not his responsibility now. And the unsavory fellow was behind some stout walls. There was likely a deputy back among the cells. Maytubby had not slept, to speak of, the night before. And he had driven twelve hundred miles.
A half hour later, he was parked across Townsend Avenue from the jail, between two city cars, e-mailing updates to Scrooby and Bond. He typed fast so he could douse the blue screen light. Nobody had shot up his house—or torched it. Still, he had twisted all the mini-blinds shut before he stowed the Cajun meats, brewed coffee, and iced it in an old thermos jug.
A bat juked around a street light, feasting on insects. Far to the south, a BNSF engine blew for a country crossing. Maytubby fought sleep by imagining the train’s progress from quarry to quarry, up into town. He heard the crossing bells on Mississippi, and the horn fading in the direction of Kansas City.
Had the early morning not been so still, the noise wouldn’t have awakened him. A distant tenor whine, its pitch rising and falling. His wristwatch said 4:20. The bat was gone, and there wasn’t a car on the streets. The cycle was coming off the State 3 bypass. It wasn’t a dirt bike. Something weightier, but not a cruiser or a touring bike. It was coming fast, not stopping for lights or signs.
Maytubby sat up and shook his head. He was thirsty and took a pull of iced coffee. He called the jail and told Judy not to buzz anybody in. Then he hung up before she finished her first question. The cycle shot past Townsend, made a U-turn on Main, made the wide left, and roared toward the jail.
Reflected streetlamps raced like tracers over the rider’s black helmet. His sprinter’s crouch on the sport bike all but obscured his visor. He wore black gloves. Abruptly, the whine fell silent, and the bike, a green Ninja ZX-11 with the “Kawasaki” taped out, veered toward the jail. Maytubby waited until the rider dismounted before starting the cruiser and juicing it across the street. The rider spun on his feet and faced the headlight glare. He was holding a gray blob of something. Two holsters hung at his sides, bulging with what looked like bottles.
Maytubby flung open the door of his cruiser, but before he could draw his pistol or shout a command, the rider had emptied both holsters and launched their contents in two directions: one over the jail wall and one toward Maytubby. From his crouch behind the cruiser door, Maytubby followed the arc of the object. In the reflected glow of his headlights, it looked like a beer bottle in a paper sack. He leaned on his right haunch and deflected the thing with the heel of his left boot. It made a shallow arc and smashed on the asphalt, sprouting tentacles of flame. Behind the wall, the jail facade danced in the glow of a second fire.
The rider was on his unlit bike and fifty yards down Townsend before Maytubby could follow, riding always being faster than driving. Maytubby radioed the Lighthorse dispatcher and could briefly see her through a window at headquarters as he sped past. She said she would call the fire department and alert the sheriff and the state cops. By the time the bike moved out of the acceleration lane onto State 3, it was doing well over a hundred. The cruiser’s big hemi was straining as Maytubby tried to see anything useful before he ran out of streetlight—and before the bike outran him. There was no tag on the bike, and though the tail lamp was unlit, he saw that the red lens was chipped.
On the deserted four-lane, Maytubby pushed the cruiser past 140. A nighthawk sailed out of the brush beside the road and burst like a feather bomb on the grille. The Ninja screamed as it pulled away from him. A Pontotoc Sheriff’s cruiser with a full head of steam joined the bypass at 377, its strobes lit. The Ninja slalomed around it and plunged into darkness. As Maytubby slowed, he saw the Ninja’s lights flick on just as the Pontotoc cruiser’s strobes flicked off.
Maytubby followed the cruiser to a crossover and parked beside it. When their windows came down, he saw the smiling hatchet face of Katz. “Phoo-ooo!” Katz said. “You need a jet engine strapped on your car to folla that thang.”
“Yeah.”
“Get up early to get some coffee.” Katz smiled and shook his head. “Teach me. Ever emergency vehicle in the town is rollin’, the jail’s on fire, and I get a backup call on a pursuit. Order a coffee and end up in the got-dang end times.”
“That guy on the bike was trying to kill Love.”
Katz gaped. “You mean burn him up like that guy in Antlers?”
“Wiley Bates.”
“You think it was the same guy.”
“I don’t know. Or the same guy who shot at me last night.” Maytubby put his finger in the exit hole.
“I heard about that, too. You’re onto some badasses.”
“Or one badass who gets around.”
“What kind of bike was that?”
“I’ll call it in to OHP Troop E and Coal and Johnston.”
“Thanks for that, Katz.”
“No problemo.”
Pools of water on Townsend Street reflected the strobes of every emergency vehicle in Ada. One fog machine short of a rock show, Maytubby thought. He parked outside the crush and walked to the rear of the jail, where he found a rank of prisoners shackled in a chain gang. They wore navy-blue jumpsuits. A young deputy stood in front of them, cradling a pump 12-gauge and yawning loudly. He nodded at Maytubby in midyawn. The air smelled moldy and acrid.
Love was the last prisoner in the rank. The deputy understood, detached him from the others, and chained him to a stanchion. Maytubby stood near Love but did not look him in the eye. He looked away toward the gray light in the east. “He went after me before he went after you. But he got Wiley. You know that?”
Love stared into the strobes.
“Wiley’s a lump of charcoal in Antlers.”
Love showed nothing. He had been in Mac a good spell.
The young deputy walked toward them. “Better talk to Sergeant Maytubby, Love. He saved your bacon this morning.”
Maytubby and Love both ignored him, and he walked away.
“Guy who tried to shoot me—and probably the guy who killed Majesty Tate—dressed all in sand camo but not real camo, rode a dirt bike same color. Don’t know if the same guy did this.” Maytubby tilted his head toward the jail. “He was dressed in black, helmet same. I chased him. He was riding a big Ninja, so I didn’t chase him for long. Same wiry build as the other biker. You got a name?”
Love’s face wore the vacancy of death.
The east grew rosier. One by one, the strobes went dark and the vehicles rolled away. The young deputy conducted his charges back into the jail. The fire had burned two juniper trees and licked at the eaves of the jail before the trucks arrived.
