”I need to talk with you, Sonny.“
”Go ahead.“
”No, in person. We've got to work some stuff out.“
”You put me in the bag once, Dave.“
”I kicked you loose, too.“
He was silent. I could hear the streetcar clanging on the neutral ground.
”I'll be in the Pearl at ten o'clock in the morning,“ I said. ”Be there or stay away, Sonny. It's up to you.“
”You got something on Delia's murder?“
”How can I, unless you help me?“
”I eat breakfast at Annette's on Dauphine,“ he said.
* * *
I rose early in the morning and helped Batist open up the shop, fire the barbecue pit, and bail the boats that had filled with rainwater during the night. The sky was clear, a soft blue, the wind cool and sweet smelling out of the south, and I tried to keep my mind empty, the way you do before having surgery or entering into situations that you know you'll never successfully rationalize.
He looked good at the table in Annette's, with a fresh haircut, in a lavender shirt and brown suit with dark stripes in it, eating a full breakfast of scrambled eggs with bloodred catsup and sausage patties and grits off a thick white plate; he even smiled, his jaw full of food, when Helen and I came through the entrance with a murder warrant and a First District NOPD homicide cop behind us.
He kept chewing, his eyes smiling, while I shook him down against the wall and pulled the nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson from the back of his belt and hooked up each of his wrists.
Then he said, ”Excuse me, I almost choked on my food there. Don't worry about this, Streak. A Judas goat has got to do its job.“
CHAPTER 15
Thursday morning Julia Bertrand walked into my office, her tan face glowing with purpose. She sat down without asking, as though we were both there by a prearranged understanding.
”Could I help you, Julia?“
”I have a complaint,“ she said, smiling prettily, her back erect, her hands uncertain.
”What might that be?“
”It's prostitution, if you ask me. Out by Cade, I'm talking about.“
One hand fluttered on her thigh, then remained motionless.
”By Cade?“
”I drove our maid home yesterday. She lives on the dirt road by this bar. You know the one I'm talking about.“
”I think I do, Julia.“
”There were white men walking with these black women back to these trailers.“
When I didn't respond, she said, ”Dave, I'm not a prude. But this is our community.“
”Two doors down, there're a couple of guys inside you can talk to.“
”I suspect one of them is the same gentleman I spoke to earlier. He could hardly contain his yawn.“
”Some people believe it's better to know where the players are rather than spread them all over the community,“ I said.
”The maid told me a black woman named Ruthie Jean Fontenot brings the prostitutes to that nightclub, or whatever you want to call it.“
I looked at her, at the manic, pinched energy in her face and the bleached hair spiked on the ends, the eyes bright with either residual booze or black speed, and I didn't doubt that the Furies waited for Julia each morning inside her dresser mirror.
”I'll ask someone to look into it,“ I said.
”How kind.“
”Have I done something to offend you?“
”Of course not. You're a sweetie, Dave. I just wish I'd had a chance with you before Bootsie came along.“
”It's always good to see you, Julia.“
A few minutes later I watched through the window as she got into her yellow convertible and roared out into the traffic, her morning temporarily in place, as though reporting a crippled black woman to a rural sheriff's office had purged the earth of a great evil.
* * *
I had a cup of coffee, opened my mail, and went to the lockup. Kelso was chewing on a soda straw and reading from a folder opened on his desk. At the top of a page I could see Sonny's name.
”Robicheaux, my man, work out something, get his bail reduced, go the bail yourself, let him box up worms out at your dock, he don't belong here,“ Kelso said.
”That's the way it shakes out sometimes, Kelso.“
”I got him in isolation like you asked, I'm even taking his food from my house to his cell. So what's he tell me? He wants to go back in main pop.“
”Bad idea.“
”He says it don't matter where I put him, his ticket's run out, he don't like small places. He wants to go back into main pop or he ain't gonna eat his food.“
”You've dealt with problem inmates before.“
”Here's the rest of it. My night man, he didn't make this cat Pogue, right, but now he says maybe he saw him around the jail earlier, maybe with some other guys. I go, ‘Why the fuck didn't you tell me this?’ So now he says he don't remember anything, and besides that, his wife calls him in sick. I never had a hit in my jail, Robicheaux. You get this cocksucker out of here.“
I checked my weapon with Kelso, and a uniformed guard pulled the levers on a sliding barred door that gave onto a corridor of individual cells.
The guard walked me past three empty cells to the last one on the row and let me in.
Sonny sat on the edge of his bunk in his skivvies, one bare foot pulled up on the thin mattress. His body looked hard and white, the scars on his rib cage and chest like a network of dried purple lesions.
I lowered the bunk from the opposite wall on its chain and sat down.
”You want to square with me?“ I said.
”If you're here for absolution, I don't have the right collar for it,“ he said.
”Who says I need it?“
”You work for the Man, Dave. You know how things really are, but you still work for the Man.“
”I'm going to be hard on you, Sonny. I think that girl in St. Martinville is dead because of you, so how about getting your nose out of the air for a while?“
He put both his feet on the concrete floor and picked up an apple from a paper plate that contained two uneaten sandwiches and a scoop of potato salad.
”You want it? Kelso brought it from his house,“ he said.
”You're really going on a hunger strike?“
He shrugged, let his eyes rove over the graffiti on the walls, looked at a cross somebody had scorched on the ceiling with a cigarette lighter.
”You're not a bad guy, Streak,“ he said.
”Help us. Maybe I can get you some slack.“
”Hey, how about some prune-o? The sweep-up slipped me some.“
He looked at the expression on my face. ”I got nothing I can help you with. That's what you don't hear.“
”What's in the notebook?“
He looked at me for a beat, considering his words, perhaps already dismissing their value. ”How close are the next-door neighbors?“ he said.
”The next three cells are empty.“
”I did a gig with the DEA, not because they liked me, they just thought my city library card meant I probably had two or three brain cells more than the pipe heads and rag-noses they usually hire for their scut work. Anyway, considering the environment, it's not the kind of press I need, know what I'm saying?“
”Come on, Sonny.“
”Down in the tropics, the cocaine trail always leads back to guns. I met guys who'd been in Laos, the Golden Triangle, guys who'd helped process opium into heroin in Hong Kong. Then I started hearing stories about POWs who'd gotten written off by the government. I was carrying this shitload of guilt, so I thought I could trade it off by involving myself with these MIA-POW families. I helped put together this telephone tree, with all kinds of people on it who I didn't even know. I didn't realize some of them were probably ex-intelligence guys who'd been mixed up with these opium growers in Laos. You with me?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said.
“Their consciences bothered them and the
y started telling the families about what went on over there. I was making out a death list and didn't know it. At least that's the best I can figure it. I burned the Xerox copy. Do the same with the original, Dave, before more people get hurt.”
“Guilt about what?” I said.
“I used people-Indians, peasant girls, people who'd always gotten the dirty end of the stick, anyway.” He brushed at the top of his bare thigh.
“We walked into an ambush. I had a flak vest on. Everybody around me got chewed up,” he said.
“Sometimes a guy feels guilt when the guy next to him catches the bus. That's just the way it is, Sonny.”
“I was hit twice. When I went down, a half dozen other guys got shredded into horse meat right on top of me. Later, the Indians thought I had religious powers or I was an archangel or something. I played it for all it was worth, Streak. Look, my whole life I peddled my ass and ran games on people. Guys like me don't see a burst of light and change their hustle.”
He reached under the top of the mattress and took out a jar and unscrewed the cap. The smell was like soft fruit that had been mixed with lighter fluid and left in a sealed container on a radiator. After he drank from the jar the skin of his face seemed to flex against his skull.
“You called me a Judas goat. I have a hard time accepting that, Sonny.”
“Yeah, I don't like this cell too much, either.”
“You think I led you down the slaughter chute?”
“No, not really,” he said.
I nodded, but I couldn't look at his face. We both knew that had he not phoned me at the house to warn me about Patsy Dap, he might be riding on a breezy streetcar down St. Charles Avenue.
“I'll tell you something else, Dave,” he said. “I've whacked out five guys since I left the tropics. Jack and Pogue's brother were just two knots on the string.”
“You have a peculiar way of expiating your sins.”
“I don't want to hurt your feelings, for a roach you're a stand-up guy, but go write some parking tickets, or shuffle some papers, or take some of the Rotary boys out to supper and let them work your dork under the table. I'm probably going down for the big bounce. Don't drag your bullshit into my cell, Streak. This is one place where it's truly an insult.”
I hit on the bars with the side of my fist and called for the turnkey to open up. When I looked back at him, the cartilage working in my jaw, he was picking at a callus on his foot. The tattoo of the blue Madonna on his right shoulder, with needles of orange light emanating from it, looked like a painting on polished moonstone. I started to speak again, but he turned his eyes away from me.
* * *
Rufus Arceneaux had been a tech sergeant in the Marine Corps at age twenty-three. In the ten years he had been with the department he had gone from uniform to plainclothes and back to uniform again. He was a tall, raw-boned man, with a long nose and blond crewcut hair, whose polished gunbelt and holster fitted against his trim body as though it had been welded there. Rufus wore dark-tinted pilot's sunglasses and seldom smiled, but you always had the sense that his hidden eyes were watching you, taking your inventory, a suppressed sneer tugging at his mouth as soon as your back was turned.
It was Friday morning when Luke Fontenot called and told me his sister, Ruthie Jean, was in jail and that Rufus had been the arresting officer.
I walked down to his office and went inside without knocking. He was talking on the phone, one leg propped across an opened desk drawer. He glanced sideways at me, then returned to his conversation. I waited for him to finish. But he didn't. His mouth dropped open when I tore the receiver out of his hand and hung it up in the cradle.
“What the hell you think you're doing, Robicheaux?”
“You busted Ruthie Fontenot for procuring?”
“So what?”
“You're intruding in a homicide investigation.”
“Tough shit. That place is crawling with nigger whores. It should have been cleaned out a long time ago.”
“You think Julia Bertrand is going to get you promoted?”
“Get the fuck out of my office.”
I leveled my finger at him. “She'd better be kicked loose by five o'clock this afternoon. Don't underestimate your situation, Rufus.”
“Fuck you,” he said as I went out the door.
I talked with the sheriff and the prosecutor's office. Rufus had done his job well; he used another deputy as a witness to the sting, paid a prostitute at the juke to go in back, waited until she in turn passed the money to Ruthie Jean at the bar, and busted and Mirandized both the hooker and Ruthie Jean on the spot. At eleven o'clock I got a surprise phone call.
“What can you do?” Moleen said.
“I don't know. Maybe nothing,” I said.
“She's not a procurer. What kind of crazy ideas do y'all operate on down there?”
“She took the money, she put it in the cash register.”
“You know what goes on in those places. She can't sanitize every dollar that goes through her hands.”
“You're getting on the wrong person's case, Moleen.”
“Yeah?” I didn't speak. I could almost hear his anger building on the other end of the line. “Goddamn it, you stop jerking me around, Dave.”
“Your wife was in here yesterday. I explained to her I didn't take vice complaints. I think she found the right person, though.”
“Are you telling me…” He couldn't get the sentence out.
“The arresting officer was Rufus Arceneaux. Talk to him, Moleen. In the meantime, you want to do some good, go her bail.”
“You self-righteous sonofabitch.”
“Thanks for your call,” I said, and hung up.
* * *
At noon, as I was leaving the building for lunch, I saw Luke Fontenot's paintless smoking, 1970s gas-guzzler, its ruptured muffler roaring against the pavement, swing out of the traffic toward the curb. He leaned down so he could see me through the passenger's window.
“I ain't gone hide no more,” he said.
“I got to talk. When you gone be back?”
“Talk about what?”
“He ain't want the baby. That's where it all gone bad, even before I had to shoot that man 'cause he was bad-mouthing my sister and blackmailing Mr. Moleen at the same time.”
I opened the car door and got in beside him.
“How about I buy us both a po'-boy?” I said.
CHAPTER 16
This is how luke told it to me, or as best as I can reconstruct it.
The Bertrand family had always been absentee landowners and had left the general care of the plantation to an overseer named Noah Wirtz, a sharecropper from the Red River parishes who could pass or not pass for a person of color, whichever the situation required. Other than a few teachers at the rural elementary school, Ruthie Jean, at age eleven, had little immediate contact with white adults, until that smoky winter morning when Moleen came to the plantation with his college friends from Springhill to shoot doves.
He had been kneeling by the coulee's edge, his double-barrel propped against the trunk of a leafless sycamore, pouring a cup of coffee from his thermos while his dog hunted for the birds Moleen had just downed in the cane stubble, when he turned around and saw her watching him. Her pigtails were tied with rubber bands, her plump body lost in a man's mackinaw.
“Why, good heavens, you gave me a start,” he said, although she knew it wasn't true. He winked at her. “My friends and I are all out of coffee. Can you go ask your mama to fill this up?”
She took the thermos and wet cup from his hands, her eyes fascinated with his handsome face and the lifeless birds that he had charmed out of the sky into his canvas game pouch.
“Wait a minute,” he said, and slipped his thumb in his watch pocket and put a silver dollar in her palm. The ends of his slender fingers brushed her skin. She had not known a coin could be that heavy and big. “That's for Christmas. Now, run along and tell your mama the coffee's for Mr. Moleen.”
&nb
sp; She didn't see him again for six years, then on a cold New Year's afternoon she heard guns popping on the far side of the cane field, out by the treeline, and when she went out on the gallery she saw four men walking abreast through the frozen stubble, while a frenzy of birds leaped into the air in front of them and tried to find invisibility against a pitiless blue sky.
The hunters unloaded canvas chairs, a cooler, a collapsible grill from the bed of a pickup, and drank whiskey and cooked two-inch bloodred steaks on a wood fire that whipped in the wind like a torn handkerchief. When the one named Moleen saw her from across the field and asked her to bring water, she went quickly into the kitchen and filled a plastic pitcher, her heart beating in her breast for a reason she didn't understand.
The faces of the hunters were red with windburn and bourbon, their eyes playful, their conversation roaming between the depth of drilling wells and the remembered adrenaline surge in the glands when they led a throbbing covey with ventilated-rib sights and, one-two-three-four-five, turned each bird into a broken smudge against the winter sun. She filled their glasses, now aware that her sense of alarm was not only baseless but vain, that their eyes never really took note of her, other than a glance to ensure the water didn't spill over their outstretched wrists.
But as she walked away, she heard a pause, a silence so loud that her ears popped, then the register dropped in one man's voice, and the muscles in her back seemed to gather and constrict inside her dress, as though the coarseness, the undisguised connotation of the remark had the power to shrink her in physical as well as emotional stature.
“It's all pink inside, Moleen. ”
She kept her eyes straight ahead, focused on the gallery where her aunt and brother were husking and shelling pecans in a bucket, where the Christmas lights were still strung under the eaves, where her two cats played in a water oak that stood as stark against the winter light as a cluster of broken fingers.
She expected to hear the hunters laugh. Instead, there was silence again, and in the wind blowing at her back she clearly heard the voice of the man named Moleen:
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