”Who's the in-your-face bitch-woman at your office?“ she said.
”Beg your pardon?“
”You heard me, the one with the mouth on her.“
”Clete hired her. She didn't strike me that way, though.“
”Well, tell her to pull the splinters out of her ass or learn how to talk on the telephone.“
”How's life?“ I said, hoping the subject would change.
”I'm working a double homicide with Rufus Arceneaux. I never quite appreciated the expression 'dirt sandwich' before.“
”It sounds like you really got a jump start on the day. You want breakfast?“
She hooked one thumb in her gunbelt and thought about it. Then she winked. ”You're a sweetie,“ she said.
I fixed coffee and hot milk and bowls of Grape-Nuts and blueberries for us on the picnic table in the backyard.
”There's something weird going on with Fart, Barf, and Itch,“ she said. ”The RAG in New Orleans called me yesterday and asked if I'd heard anything about Sonny Boy Marsallus. I said, ‘Yeah, he's dead.’ He says, ‘We think that, too, but his body's never washed up. The tide was coming in when he got it.’ I say, ‘Think?’ This guy is a real comedian. He says, ‘You remember that army-surplus character you bent out of round with your baton? Guy with a haircut like a white bowling ball, always chewing gum, Tommy Carrol? Somebody found him working late in his store last night and fried his mush.’ ‘Sorry, I don't remember a baton,’ I say. He thought that was real funny. He says, ‘Tommy Carrol did more than sell khaki underwear. He was mixed up with Noriega and some dope operations in Panama. After the ME dug him out of the ashes and opened him up, he found a nine-millimeter slug in what was left of his brain.’ I knew what was coming but I go, ‘So?’ He says, ‘I want to see if we got a match with the rounds from Marsallus's Smith & Wesson. Y'all still have those in your evidence locker, don't you?’ I say, ‘Sure, no problem, glad to do it.’ But guess who the department just hired to catalog evidence? Kelso's little brother threw them out. I called the comedian back and told him he was out of luck, then asked why he thought Marsallus could be involved. It was strange, he was quiet a long time, then he said, ‘I guess I'd like to believe Sonny's not dead. I met him years ago in Guatemala City. He was a good guy.’“
”He's heard something,“ I said. ”Those ex-military guys believe Sonny's still out there.“ I told her about my encounter with Emile Pogue by the drawbridge.
”Why do they want the Bertrand plantation?“ she said.
”One day the country is going to bottom out and get rid of the dope trade. The smart ones are putting their money somewhere else.“
”In what?“
”You got me,“ I said.
”Come back with the department.“
”The sheriff's the man.“
She grinned and didn't reply.
”What's that mean?“ I said.
”He needs you. With guys like Rufus and Kelso and his brother on the payroll, give me a break. Stop thinking with your penis, Dave.“ She put a spoonful of cereal and milk in her mouth.
* * *
That evening I drove past Spanish Lake and bought a Dr. Pepper at a convenience store by the four corners in Cade and drank it in the cab of my truck. It had rained hard that afternoon, and the air was bright and clear and the sugarcane on the Bertrand acreage rippled in the wind like prairie grass.
I was convinced this was where the story would end, one way or another, just as it had started here when Jean Lafitte and his blackbird-ers had sailed up Bayou Teche under a veiled moon with their cargo of human grief.
Moleen didn't see it. His kind seldom did. They hanged Nat Turner and tanned his skin for wallets, and used their educations to feign a pragmatic cynicism and float above the hot toil of the poor whose fate they saw as unrelated to their own lives. The consequence was they passed down their conceit and arrogance like genetic heirlooms.
I wondered what it would be like to step through a window in time, into another era, into an age of belief, and march alongside Granny Lee's boys, most of them barefoot and emaciated as scarecrows, so devoted to their concept of honor and their bonnie blue flag they deliberately chose not to foresee the moment when their lives would be scattered by grapeshot like wildflowers blown from their stems.
As I finished my cold drink, I looked again at the red-tinged light on the fields and wondered if history might not be waiting to have its way with all of us.
CHAPTER 28
Most people think it's a romantic and intriguing business. The imagination calls to mind the wonderful radio shows of the forties, featuring private investigators who were as gallant as their female clients were beautiful and cunning. The reality is otherwise. When I went into the office Monday morning Clete was talking to two men in their twenties who were slumped forward in their metal chairs, tipping their cigarette ashes on the floor, looking at their watches, at the secretary, at the door. One of them had three slender blue teardrops tattooed by the corner of his eye; the second man was blade-faced, his skin the color and texture of the rind on a smoked ham.
”So you guys got your bus tickets, your money for lunch, all the paperwork in case anybody stops you,“ Clete said, his voice neutral, his eyes empty. ”But y'all check in with Nig soon as you arrive in New Orleans. We're clear on that, right?“
”What if Nig ain't in?“ the man with the teardrops said.
”He's in,“ Clete said.
”What if he ain't?“
”Let me try it another way,“ Clete said. He popped a crick out of his neck, laced his fingers on his desk blotter, stared through the front window rather than address his listener.
”You're probably going to skate, even though you raped a two-year-old girl. Primarily because the child is too young to testify and the mother, who is your girlfriend, was too wiped out on acid to remember what happened. But the big factor here is Nig wrote your bond because you're willing to dime your brother, who skipped his court appearance and hung Nig out to dry for a hundred large. What does that all mean to a mainline con and graduate of Camp J like yourself? It means we don't have bars on the windows anymore. It also means you report in to Nig, you stay at the flop he's got rented for you, or I hunt your skinny, worthless ass down with a baseball bat.” Clete opened his palm, held it out in the air. “Are we're connecting here?”
The man with the teardrops studied his shoes, worked an incisor tooth against his lip, his eyes slitted with private thoughts.
“How about you, Troyce? Are you squared away on this?” Clete said to the second man.
“Sure.” He drew in on his cigarette, and you could hear the fire gather heat and crawl up the dry paper.
“If the woman you branded stands up, Nig will continue your bond on the appeal. But you got to get UA-ed every day. Don't come back to the halfway house with dirty urine, you okay with that, Troyce?” Clete said.
“She's not gonna stand up.”
“You boys need to catch your bus, check out the countryside between here and New Orleans,” Clete said.
The blade-faced man rose from his chair, offered his hand to Clete. Clete took it, looked at nothing when he shook it. Later, he went into the lavatory and came back out, drying his hands hard with a paper towel, his breath loud in his nose. He wadded up the towel and flipped it sideways toward the wastebasket, the unshaved back of his neck stippled with roses, as swollen against his collar as a fireplug.
* * *
An hour later I was walking toward my truck when Helen Soileau angled her cruiser out of the traffic and pulled to the curb. She leaned over and popped open the passenger door.
“Get in,” she said.
“What's wrong?”
“The old man had a heart attack. He got up to fix a sandwich at four this morning, the next thing his wife heard him crash across the kitchen table.”
“How bad is it?”
“They had to use the electric paddles. They almost didn't get him back.”
I looked through the windshield at the quiet flow of traffic on the street, the people gazing in shop windows, and felt, almost with a sense of shame, my unacknowledged and harbored resentment lift like a film of ash from a dead coal. “Where is he now?” I asked.
“Iberia General… Hold on, that's not where we're going. He wants us to interview a guy in a county lockup in east Texas.”
“Us?”
“You got it, sweet cakes.”
“I need to talk with him, Helen.”
“Later, after we get back. This time we're doing it his way. Come on, shake it, you're on the clock, Streak.”
* * *
The county prison was an old, white brick two-story building just across the Sabine River, north of Orange, Texas. From the second-story reception room Helen and I could look down onto the exercise yard, the outside brick wall spiraled with razor wire, and the surrounding fields that were a shimmering violent green from the spring rains. Two guards in khaki uniforms without guns crossed the yard and unlocked a cast-iron, slitted door that bled rust from the jamb, and snipped waist and leg chains on a barefoot leviathan of a man in jailhouse whites named Jerry Jeff Hooker who trudged between them as though a cannonball were hung from his scrotum. When the two guards, both of them narrow-eyed and cheerless piney woods crackers, brought him into the reception room and sat him down in front of a scarred wood table in front of us and slipped another chain around his belly and locked it behind the chair, which was bolted to the floor, I said it would be all right if they waited outside.
“Tell that to the nigger trusty whose arm he busted backward on a toilet bowl,” one of them said, and took up his position five feet behind Hooker.
“You want to run it by us, Jerry Jeff?” I said. His skin was as pale as dough, his massive arms scrolled with green dragons, his pale blond eyebrows ridged like a Neanderthal's.
“I was the wheel man on the Marsallus hit,” he said. “I testify against Emile Pogue, I walk on the vehicular homicide.”
“Wheelman?” I said.
“I drove. Emile chopped him.”
“Witnesses say there were two shooters,” Helen said.
“There was only one,” he said.
“We have trouble buying your statement, Jerry Jeff,” I said.
“That's your problem,” he said.
“You're copping to a murder beef,” Helen said.
“Marsallus ain't dead.” I felt my heart quicken. He looked at my face, as though seeing it for the first time. “He was still flopping around in the waves when we left,” he said. “A guy in New Orleans, Tommy Carrol, got clipped the other night with a nine-Mike. That's Marsallus's trademark.”
“You a military man?” I said.
“Four-F,” he answered. He tried to straighten himself in his chains. His breath wheezed in his chest. “Listen, these people here say I got to do a minimum two-bit in the Walls.”
“That doesn't sound bad for a guy who went through a red light drunk and killed a seventy-year-old woman,” I said.
“That's at Huntsville, my man, with the Mexican Mafia and the Black Guerrilla Liberation Army. For white bread it's the Aryan Brotherhood or lockdown. Fuck that.”
Helen and I let our eyes meet. “You're jail wise but you got no sheet. In fact, there's no jacket of any kind on you anywhere,” I said.
“Who gives a shit?” he said.
“Who put out the hit?” I asked.
“Give me a piece of paper and a pencil,” he answered.
I placed my notebook and felt pen in front of him and looked at one of the guards. He shook his head. “We need this, sir,” I said.
He snuffed down in his nose and unlocked Hooker's right wrist from the waist chain, then stepped back with his palm centered on the butt of his baton. Hooker bent over the pad and in a surprisingly fluid calligraphy wrote a single sentence, You give me the name of the donkey you want and I'll pin the tail on him.
“Bad choice of words,” I said, tearing the page from the pad.
“Emile used a .223 carbine. He had Marsallus trapped in a phone booth but he blew it,” he said.
“You'll rat-out Pogue to beat a two-year bounce?” I said.
His free hand rolled into a big fist, the veins in his wrist cording with blood, as though he were pumping a small rubber ball. “I'm in the first stage of AIDS. I don't want to do it inside,” he said. “What's it gonna be?”
“We'll think about it,” Helen said.
His nose was starting to run. He wiped it on the back of his wrist and laughed to himself.
“What's funny?” I said.
“Think about it? That's a kick. I'd do more than think, Muffy,” he said, his blue eyes threaded with light as they roved over her face.
“You killed my animals and birds,” she said.
He twisted his neck until he could see the guard behind him. “Hey, Abner, get me a snot rag or walk me back to my cell,” he said.
* * *
The sheriff was in the Intensive Care unit when Helen and I visited him at Iberia General in the morning. Tubes dripped into his veins, fed oxygen into his nose; a shaft of sunlight cut across his forearm and seemed to mock the grayness of his skin. He looked not only stricken but also somehow diminished in size, shrunken skeletally, the eyes hollow and focused on concerns that floated inches from his face, like weevil worms.
I sat close to his bed and could smell an odor similar to withered flowers on his breath.
“Tell me about Hooker,” he whispered.
“It's time to let other people worry about these guys, skipper,” I said.
“Tell me.”
I did, as briefly and simply as possible.
“Say the last part again,” he said.
“He used the term 'nine-Mike' for a nine-millimeter,” I said. “
”Mike' is part of the old military alphabet. This guy came out of the same cookie cutter as Emile Pogue and the guy named Jack.“
He closed and opened his eyes, wet his lips to speak again. He tilted his head until his eyes were looking directly into mine. He was unshaved, and there were red and blue veins, like tiny pieces of thread, in the hollows of his cheeks.
”Last night I saw star shells bursting over a snowfield filled with dead Chinese,“ he said. ”A scavenger was pulling their pockets inside out.“
”It was just a dream,“ I said.
”Not just a dream, Dave.“
I heard Helen rise from her chair, felt her hand touch my shoulder.
”We should go,“ she said.
”I was wrong. But so were you,“ he said.
”No, the fault was mine, Sheriff, not yours,“ I said.
”I squared it with the prosecutor's office. Don't let anybody tell you different.“
He lifted his hand off the sheet. It felt small and lifeless inside mine.
* * *
But I didn't go back to the office the next day. Instead, Batist and I took my boat all the way down Bayou Teche, through the vast green splendor of the wetlands, where blue herons and cranes glided above the flooded gum trees and the rusted wrecks of oil barges, into West Cote Blanche Bay and the Gulf beyond, while a squall churned like glazed smoke across the early sun.
My father, Aldous, was an old-time oil field roughneck who worked the night tower on the monkey board high above the drill platform and the sliding black waves of the Gulf of Mexico. The company was operating without a blowout preventer on the wellhead, and when the bit punched into a natural gas dome unexpectedly, the casing geysered out of the hole under thousands of pounds of pressure, a spark danced off a steel surface, and the sky blossomed with a flame that people could see from Morgan City to Cypremort Point.
My father clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and jumped into the darkness, but the derrick folded in upon itself, like coat hanger wire melting in a furnace, taking my father and nineteen other men with it.
I knew the spot by heart; I could even feel his presence, see him in my mind's eye, deep below the
waves, his tin hat cocked at an angle, grinning, his denim work clothes undulating in the tidal current, one thumb hooked in the air, telling me never to be afraid. Twice a year, on All Saints' Day and the anniversary of his death, I came here and cut the engines, let the boat drift back across the wreckage of the rig and quarter boat which was now shaggy with green moss, and listened to the water's slap against the hull, the cry of seagulls, as though somehow his voice was still trapped here, waiting to be heard, like a soft whisper blowing in the foam off the waves.
He loved children and flowers and women and charcoal-filtered bourbon and fighting in bars, and he carried the pain of my mother's infidelity like a stone bruise and never let anyone see it in his eyes. But once on a duck hunting trip, after he got drunk and tried to acknowledge his failure toward me and my mother, he said, ”Dave, don't never let yourself be alone,“ and I saw another dimension in my father, one of isolation and loneliness, that neither of us would have sufficient years to address again.
The water was reddish brown, the swells dented with rain rings. I walked to the stern with a clutch of yellow roses and threw them into the sun and watched a capping wave break them apart and scatter their petals through the swell.
Never alone, Al, I said under my breath, then went back into the cabin with Batist and hit it hard for home.
* * *
That night I had an old visitor, the vestiges of malaria that lived like mosquito eggs in my blood. I woke at midnight to the rumble of distant thunder, felt the chill on my skin and heard the rain tin king on the blades of the window fan, and thought a storm was about to burst over the wetlands to the south. An hour later my teeth were knocking together and I could hear mosquitoes droning around my ears and face, although none were there. I wanted to hide under piles of blankets even though my sheet and pillow were already damp with sweat, my mouth as dry as an ashtray.
I knew it would pass; it always did. I just had to wait and, with luck, I would wake depleted in the morning, as cool and empty as if I had been eviscerated and washed out with a hose.
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