Voodoo River

by Robert Crais

  I said, “Some days are more difficult than others, Mrs. Berteaux.”

  She nodded sagely. “Yes, Jeffrey. I know that to be true. However, I might suggest that you speak with Mrs. Martha Guidry.”

  “Yes?” Martha Guidry wasn’t on my list.

  “Martha was a midwife at that time and, if I remember correctly, quite a well-known busybody. Martha may know.” Then she looked thoughtful. “Of course, Martha may be dead.”

  I let myself out.

  Four up, four down, and nary a shred of evidence to show for it. I had three more women to see, and, if the results were the same, it was back to the drawing board. Not good. The key to all this seemed to be the sealed state documents. Maybe I should stop trying to investigate my way to Jodi Taylor’s medical history and concentrate on unsealing those documents. I could shoulder my way into the appropriate state agency, pistol whip a couple of civil servants, and force them to hand over the documents. Of course, this method might get me shot or imprisoned, but wasn’t that better than questioning women who called me Jeffrey? Of course, thirty-six-year-old documents would probably be buried under thirty-six years of more recent documents in an obscure state building long forgotten by any living person. You’d need Indiana Jones just to find the place.

  I decided to think about it over lunch.

  The Pig Stand was a white cinder block building with handwritten signs telling you what they offered and a couple of windows to order the food. The people on the sidewalk were mostly thin guys with crepey skin and women with pale skin and loose upper arms from eating too much deep-fried food. Everybody was drinking Dixie beer and eating off paper plates and laughing a lot. Guess if you stand around eating barbecued ribs in this kind of heat you had to have a sense of humor.

  An enormously wide black woman with brilliant white teeth looked out of the order window at me and said, “Take ya awdah, please?”

  I said, “Do you have boudin?” I had wanted to try boudin for years.

  She grinned. “Honey, we gots the best boudin in Evangeline Parish.”

  “That’s not what they say in Mamou.”

  She laughed. “Those fools in Mamou don’ know nuthin’ ’bout no boudin! Honey, you try some’a this, you won’t be goin’ back to no Mamou! This magic boudin! It be good for what ails you!”

  “Okay. How about a couple of links of boudin, a beef rib with a little extra sauce, some dirty rice, and a Dixie.”

  She nodded, pleased. “That’ll fix you up jes’ fine.”

  “What makes you think I need fixing?”

  She leaned toward me and touched a couple of fingers beneath her eye. “Dottie got the magic eye. Dottie know.” Her eyes were smiling when she shouted the order into the kitchen, and I smiled with her. It wasn’t just the food around here that gave comfort.

  Passing cars would beep their horns and diners would wave at the cars and the people in the cars would wave back, sort of like everybody knew everybody else. While I was waiting, a sparkling new white Mustang rag-top cruised past, top up, giving everybody the once-over and revving his engine. The Mustang circled the block, and when he came back around an older guy with a thick French accent yelled something I couldn’t understand and the Mustang speeded up. Guess the older guy didn’t like all the engine-revving.

  A couple of minutes later, Dottie called me back to the window and handed out my order on a coarse paper plate with enough napkins to insulate a house. I carried the food to the street, set the Dixie on the curb, then went to work on the food. The boudin were plump and juicy, and when you bit into them they were filled with rice and pork and cayenne and onions and celery. Even in the heat, steam came from the sausage and it burned the inside of my mouth. I had some of the dirty rice, and then some of the beef rib. The dirty rice was heavy and glutinous and rich with chicken livers. The rib was tender and the sauce chunky with onion and garlic. The tastes were strong and salty and wonderful, and pretty soon I was feeling eager to dive back into the case. Even if it meant being called Jeffrey.

  The black woman looked out of her little window and asked, “Whatchu say ’bout dat boudin now?”

  I said, “Tell me the truth, Dottie. This isn’t really Ville Platte, is it? We’re all dead and this is Heaven.”

  She grinned wider and nodded, satisfied. “Dottie say it’ll fix you up. Dottie know.” She touched her cheek beneath her left eye and then she laughed and turned away.

  At ten minutes after two, I used a pay phone at an Exxon station to call the last two women on my list. Virginia LaMert wasn’t home, and Charleen Jorgenson said that she’d be happy to see me.

  Charleen Jorgenson and her second husband, Lloyd, lived in a double trailer two miles outside of Ville Platte on Bayou des Cannes. The double trailer sat upon cement block piers and looked sort of ratty and overgrown. A small flat-bottomed boat rested on a couple of sawhorses in the backyard, and a blue tick hound slept in a tight knot in the shade thrown by the boat. They had a little drive made out of the crushed oyster shells, and when I pulled up, the oyster shells made a loud crunching sound and the blue tick hound charged at my car, barking and standing on its back legs to try to bite through the window. An old guy in his seventies came out on the step yelling, “Heah naow! Heah naow!” and threw a pop bottle at the dog. That would be Lloyd. The bottle missed the dog and hit the Taurus’s left front fender. Lloyd said, “Uh-oh,” and looked chagrined. Good thing it was a rental.

  Charleen Jorgenson told me that she wished she could help, but she just didn’t remember anything like I was asking.

  I said, “Think hard, Mrs. Jorgenson. Are you sure?”

  She sipped her coffee and nodded. “Oh, yes. I thought about it when that other fellow was here.”

  “What other fellow?”

  “Another young man was here a few months ago. He said he was trying to find his sister.”

  I said, “Do tell.”

  “He wasn’t very nice and he didn’t stay long.”

  “Were you able to help him find his sister?”

  “I would’ve been happy to, but I just couldn’t help him. He became very abusive. Lloyd like to threw a fit.” She nodded her head toward Lloyd, as if one of Lloyd’s fits was quite a spectacle. Lloyd, sitting in a heavy chair that had been covered with a bedspread, had fallen asleep as we talked. She said, “You’re trying to find some kind of organ donor, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. A marrow donor.”

  She shook her head. “That is so sad.”

  “Mrs. Jorgenson, this guy who was here, was his name Jeffrey?”

  She had more of the coffee, thinking. “Well, maybe. He had red hair, all piled up on his head and oily.” She made a sour face. “I remember that.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’ve never been comfortable with a red-haired person.”

  People say the damnedest things, don’t they?

  I left Charleen Jorgenson’s home at twenty-five minutes after four that afternoon and stopped at a bait and tackle shop on the road leading back to town. They had a pay phone on the wall under a huge sign that said LIVE WORMS. I tried calling Mrs. C. Thomas Berteaux to ask if Jeffrey’s hair had been red, but I got no answer. Probably out. I tried Virginia LaMert again, but also got no answer. Virginia LaMert was the last name on my list, and if she didn’t come through it was drawing-board time. I called Information and asked them if they had a listing for Martha Guidry. They did. I dialed Martha Guidry’s number and, as I listened to her phone ring, the same white Mustang I’d seen at the Pig Stand turned into the parking lot and disappeared behind the bait shop.

  Martha Guidry answered on the sixth ring. “Hello?”

  I identified myself and told her that Mrs. C. Thomas Berteaux had suggested I call. I said that I was trying to find someone who was born in the area thirty-six years ago, and I asked if I might pay a visit. She said that would be fine. She told me her address and gave me directions and said that, as old as she was, if I didn’t hurry she might be dead before I arrive
d. I was going to like Martha Guidry just fine.

  I hung up and stood at the phone, waiting. A blue Ford pickup pulled in and a young guy with a scraggly beard went into the bait shop. An older man came out of the shop with a brown bag and got into a Chevy Caprice. The young guy came out with a Budweiser Tall Boy and hopped back into his truck. The Mustang didn’t return.

  I climbed back into my car and followed the directions toward Martha Guidry’s house. Maybe this business with the Mustang was my imagination, like the heat.

  I had gone maybe three-quarters of a mile when the Mustang swung around a Kleinpeter Dairy milk truck and eased in behind me. He came up so close that I could see the driver in my rearview mirror. He had a scoop-cut pompadour maybe six inches high and long nasty sideburns carved down into points so sharp you could cut yourself.

  And he had red hair.

  5

  The guy in the Mustang wouldn’t let anyone get between us, as if he wanted to follow me and thought he had to stay close to do it. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled, and he drove with his left hand hanging down along the door. One of those.

  I turned off the state road and headed back toward town, and the Mustang turned with me. I pulled into an Exxon station and topped off my tank and asked a kid in a grease-stained uniform about the local bass fishing. The Mustang drove past while the kid was telling me, but a couple minutes later it pulled up to a stop sign a block away and sat waiting. Following me, all right.

  I took it easy up through town, letting him follow, and twice managed to stop for traffic lights. Each time I stopped he eased up behind me, and each time he made a big deal out of staring off to the side. The ostrich technique. If I don’t see you, you can’t see me. I had to smile at this guy. He was something. At a four-way stop a kid in a red Isuzu pickup tried to turn in behind me, and the guy in the Mustang jumped the stop sign and blew his horn, cutting him off. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t notice.

  A set of railroad tracks ran through the center of town. The tracks were prominent and the road was old, so everybody was slowing to ease their cars across the tracks. On the other side of the tracks there were several businesses and a couple of cross streets and, still further down, a little bridge where the road crossed the bayou. Cars were waiting at most of the cross streets, people getting off work.

  I eased the Taurus across the tracks, then punched it, putting enough distance between me and the Mustang for a woman in a light blue Acura to get between us. The Mustang came up to her fast, swerving into the oncoming lane, but there was too much traffic for him to pass. I swung to the right onto the shoulder, floored it past six or seven cars, then jerked it back into the traffic lane and then right again around a bread truck and into a Dairy Queen parking lot. He wouldn’t have been able to see me turn past the bread truck. I pushed it around the back of the Dairy Queen, threw it into park, then jumped out and ran up the side past a couple of kids sucking malts in a ’69 VW Bug. The Mustang was still behind the woman in the Acura, blowing his horn and swerving from side to side, until finally she couldn’t take it anymore and pulled to the side. He horsed it past her, giving the finger and screaming that she should get her head out her butt, and then he blasted away up the shoulder, spraying gravel and dust and little bits of oyster shell. I wrote down his license number, went back to my car, and turned again toward Martha Guidry’s. I checked the rearview mirror from time to time, but the Mustang didn’t reappear. You had to shake your head.

  I drove up the center of Evangeline Parish through dense stands of hardwood trees and sweet potato fields, passing small frame houses set near the road, many with rusted cars and large propane gas tanks and chickens in their yards. Martha Guidry lived in such a house across the street from a strawberry stand. She was a small bony woman with skin like rumpled silk and cataract glasses that made her eyes look huge and protruding. She was wearing a thin housedress and socks and house slippers, and when she answered the door she was carrying a large, economy-sized can of Raid Ant & Roach Killer. She squinted out the thick glasses. “You that Mr. Cole?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I appreciate your seeing me.”

  She pushed open the screen door and told me to come in quick. She said if you don’t come in quick all kinds of goddamned bugs come in with you. As soon as I was in she fogged the air around the door with the Raid. “That’ll get the little bastards!”

  I moved across the room to get away from the cloud of Raid. “I don’t think you’re supposed to breathe that stuff, Ms. Guidry.”

  She waved her hand. “Oh, hell, I been breathin’ it for years. You want a Pepsi-Cola?”

  “No, ma’am. Thank you.”

  She waved the Raid at the couch. “You just sit right there. It won’t take a moment.” I guess she was going to give me the Pepsi anyway. When she was in the kitchen there was a sharp slap and she said, “Gotcha, you sonofabitch!” The thing about this job is that you meet such interesting people.

  She came back with two plastic tumblers and a single can of Pepsi and the Raid. She put the glasses on her coffee table, then opened the Pepsi and poured most of it in one glass and a little bit in the other. She offered the full glass to me. “Now, what is it you want to know?”

  I lifted the glass but noticed something crusted down in the ice. I pretended to take a sip and put it down. “Mrs. Berteaux said that you’re a midwife.”

  She nodded, eyes scanning the upper reaches of the room for incoming bugs. “Unh-hunh. Not in years, a’course, but I was.”

  “Thirty-six years ago on July ninth a baby girl was born in this area and given up for adoption. Chances are that the child was illegitimate, but maybe not. Chances are that the mother was underage, but maybe not.”

  Her eyes narrowed behind the thick lenses. “You think I birthed the child?”

  “I don’t know. If not, maybe you heard something.”

  She looked thoughtful. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I waited, letting her think. Probably hard with all the nerve damage from the Raid.

  Martha Guidry scratched at her head, working on it, and then seemed to notice something in the far corner of the room. She put down her Pepsi, picked up the Raid, then crept across the room to peer into the shadows behind the television. I got ready to hold my breath. She said, “Goddamned ugly bugs,” but she held her fire. False alarm. She came back to the chair and sat. “You know, I think I remember something about that.”

  Well.

  She said, “There were some folks lived over here around the Nezpique.” She was nodding as she thought about it, fingering the Raid can. “They had a little girl, I think. Yes, that’s right. They gave her away.”

  Well, well. “You remember their names?” I was writing it down.

  She pooched out her lips, then slowly shook her head, trying to put it together. “I remember it was a big family. He was a fisherman or somethin’, but they might’ve cropped a share. They lived over on the bayou. Right over here on the Nezpique. Wasn’t no bastard, though. Just a big family with too many mouths to feed.”

  “A name?”

  She looked sad and shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s right on the tip of my tongue and I just can’t remember it. You get old, everything goes to hell. There’s one!” She raced to a potted plant beneath the window and cut loose with the Raid. Clouds of gas fogged up around her and I walked over to the door, leaned out, and took deep breaths. When she was finished with the Raid I went back to the chair. Everything smelled of kerosene and chemicals. I said, “These bugs are something, aren’t they?”

  She nodded smugly. “They’ll run you out of house and home, let me tell you.”

  I heard the crunch of a car pulling off the road. Not in her yard, but farther away. I went back to the door. The white Mustang was sitting across the street by the strawberry stand. I said, “Ms. Guidry, has someone else approached you about this?”

  She shook her head. “Unh-unh.”

  “A few month
s ago.”

  She got the thoughtful look again. “You know, I think a fella did come here.” She made a face like she’d bit into something sour. “I didn’t like his looks. I won’t deal with anybody I don’t like the way they look. No, siree. You can tell by a person’s looks, and I didn’t like that fella, at all. I ran ’m off.”

  I looked back out the door. “Is that the man?”

  Martha Guidry came over next to me and squinted out through the screen. “Well, my goodness. That’s him. That’s the little peckerwood, right over there!”

  Martha Guidry charged through the screen door with her can of Raid as if she’d seen the world’s largest bug. She screamed, “Here, you! What are you doin’ over there?!”

  I said, “Oh, God.”

  She lurched down the steps and ran toward the highway, and I was wondering if maybe I should tackle her before she became roadkill. Then the Mustang fishtailed out onto the highway and roared back toward Ville Platte, and Martha Guidry pulled up short, shaking her fist at him. I said, “Martha, do you remember his name?”

  Martha Guidry stalked back up the steps, breathing hard and blinking behind the thick glasses. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to dial 911. “Jerry. Jeffrey. Some-goddamnthing like that.”

  “Aha.”

  “That rotten sneak. Why do you think he was out here?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going to find out.”

  She took a deep breath, shook herself, then said, “God damn, but I feel like a drink! You’re not the kind of fool to let a lady drink alone, are you?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m not.”

  She threw open the door and gestured inside with the Raid. “Then get yer ass in there and let’s booze.”

  6

  At twenty minutes after six that evening I checked into a motel in Ville Platte and phoned Lucille Chenier at her office in Baton Rouge. I only had to wait eight or nine minutes for her to come on the line. She said, “Yes?”