by Day Keene
“Praying?” one of his captors asked.
“Not exactly,” Latour admitted. “Just thinking.”
Villere got out of the car. “Then you’d better think fast. You haven’t much time left.”
The mosquitoes in the clearing were as bad as they’d been the first night. Latour sat slapping at them. Only two fragments of the picture remained to be fitted into place.
One was the reason for haste. The other was how the man who wanted him dead could possibly have known that he intended to drive out to the Lacosta trailer at two o’clock in the morning. He hadn’t even told Olga where he was going. All he’d told her was that he was going out on police business.
Then he thought he had the second part of the picture. Of course. Georgi had been up and dressed when he’d gone downstairs. And Georgi, well paid to report his movements, had made a phone call as soon as he’d left the house, a phone call to the man who had reason, good reason, to prevent him from talking to Lacosta. The rape had merely been a by-product of the more important business of murder.
Gars crowded into the clearing until the lane was filled and the tail of the lynch cavalcade extended far down the road. Car doors slammed in the night. Dry cane and fallen branches crackled under the feet of the mob. A bonfire leaped into being and filled the surroundings with light from its flames as the men sought to push back the inky darkness. Fifty pairs of eager hands added fuel to the flames when they weren’t busy passing bottles.
Villere opened the rear door of the car. “O.K. This is it, Latour. We know you can dish it out. Now let’s see if you can take it.”
Hands reached into the car and pulled Latour from the seat. Few of the men spoke. There was no shouting. Now that they’d reached the clearing, most of the men seemed anxious to be done with what they had come to do. It was one thing to shout and make threats in front of a jail. It was another to be identified as a member of a mob that had put a noose around the neck of a man and had swung him into eternity without the sanction of the law.
From any point from which it was viewed, this was a nasty business. An old man was dead, an old man who had worn a star. Newsreel and television cameras might have recorded the entire affair. It was just possible that all of the cameras hadn’t been smashed.
Sensing uncertainty in the men around him, Latour made a last plea for his life. “You’re making a big mistake, fellows. You’re being used. I — ”
A rifle butt smashed against his face and blood spurted from his mouth. A second blow caught him flush on the throat. Latour tried to scream and couldn’t. The second rifle blow had left him mute.
“If I thought they were making a mistake,” Georgi said, “I would be the first to try to stop them. But no mistake is being made. I know. Because my sister would no longer stand for your abusing her, you went directly from her to that other girl.” He reversed the rifle with which he’d struck Latour. “I ought to kill you myself.”
Villere brushed the rifle aside. “Easy makes it, fellow. We know how you feel. But don’t go off half-cocked. We’re going to attend to Latour right now.”
Still half blind with pain, Latour felt a noose being slipped over his head. Someone tied his hands behind him. He felt himself being lifted. Then he was standing on the curved roof of the trailer with the rope over the limb of a tree, its free end secured to a sapling.
It was difficult to stand on the curved roof. He had to stand with one foot higher than the other. With three hundred men looking up at him, he’d never felt so alone.
On the ground, Villere said, “Now one of you guys with a hitch on your car hook onto this trailer and I’ll tell you when to pull it out from under him.”
A man backed his car up to the trailer. Other men made the hitch secure.
His chest laboring with the effort to breathe, Latour watched Villere lift his arm to signal the driver of the car. But instead of dropping it, Villere continued to stand with his arm upraised. Working frantically at the rope that bound his wrists, Latour wondered why. Then, raising his eyes over the heads of the men no longer looking up at him, he knew.
Their drawn revolvers in their hands, Tom Mullen and Jack Pringle were striding across the clearing.
“Having a little fun?” Mullen asked.
Villere managed to lower his arm. “You can’t be here. You’re on your way to Ponchatoula.”
“Were on our way,” Pringle corrected him. “This is the best-publicized lynching party I ever attended. The police band is filled with it. We’ve been on our way back for three hours. And it may interest you boys to know that before we drove out here, we stopped at the jail. And what do you think we found on the lawn?”
A deathly silence filled the clearing. The man in the car hitched to the trailer got out. He looked as if he wished he were anywhere else but where he was.
Mullen stood with his broad shoulders pressed to the metal side of the trailer. “O.K. One of you bastards start talking. The old man was a friend of mine. Which one of you killed him?”
The men in the front of the crowd pushed back. There was no pressure from behind. The men in the rear of the mob were already slipping away into the temporary refuge of the night as rapidly as they could.
Latour kept straining at the rope binding his wrists and the hastily tied knot finally pulled free. The rope dropped to the roof of the trailer.
“I asked a question,” Mullen said. “And the next punk that backs one step is going to get a slug right through his guts. Which one of you killed the old man?”
Latour hesitated a moment, then loosened the noose around his neck and slipped the rope over his head. Silently he slid down the far side of the trailer, away from the leaping flames of the bonfire in the clearing.
The center of attraction a moment before, he was completely forgotten now. He was merely one of the dozens of men not immediately under the guns of the two deputies who were anxious to put as much space between themselves and the clearing as they could.
Out of the clearing and on the road, Latour filled his lungs with air and exhaled slowly, repeatedly, as he walked down the long lines of cars parked on the parish road.
There was a proven Providence that looked after drunks and fools. And God knew he’d been a fool.
He was willing to stand trial for the murder of Jacques Lacosta. He was willing to stand trial for the criminal assault on Rita. He wanted to stand trial for both offenses. But before he was locked up again, he wanted to ask one question.
And not of his attorney.
If what he was assuming was correct, the only man who knew the answer to his question was the field engineer of the Delta Oil Company.
Chapter Eighteen
THIS FAR OUT the Gulf had a nasty chop to it. Several times Latour was afraid the two twenty-five-horsepower outboard motors affixed to the transom of his borrowed sixteen-foot runabout were going to fail him and the whole craft would become engulfed by a following wave before he could reach the light toward which he was steering. But both times the motors caught and the small craft slued from the crest of one wave to another and sped on.
The oil raft for which he was making, fifteen miles from shore, was an ingenious device, about the size of a small bungalow and built entirely of steel, floating on a watertight hull.
The raft had two decks, the first deck containing the heavy power equipment that pumped in water and furnished the lights and turned the drilling rig. In the center of the raft was a round well through which the drilling was done. Watertight sleeves extended from the structure to the floor of the Gulf, and the drilling rods were pushed through these into earth beneath the water, the sleeves telescoping over each other to compensate for the rise and fall of the tide.
The second deck supported the derrick and the power hoists for raising the drill rods into place. It also held the gauges that measured depth, the temperature of the bit, and the pressure and speed of drilling.
At each corner of the raft steel girders were sunk to the floor of the Gulf and c
ollars attached to the raft rode over the girders as easily as a ring slips over a pencil, operating somewhat as an elevator, with the surging of the water acting as the motivating power.
Anchored to the raft was a large barge, converted into a kitchen and mess hall and day room and numerous small sleeping rooms for the cook and his helper and for those key workers and engineers who were obliged to spend most of their time aboard the raft.
Latour made fast to the landing platform and shouted, “Ahoy the raft.”
There was too much noise for the workers on the raft to hear him, but the cook poked his head and white cap out of the open door of the cook shack.
“What you doing out there on that shingle?” he asked.
Latour wiped salt spray out of his eyes. “Looking for Mr. Feldman.”
“Mr. Feldman, the field engineer?”
“That’s right. Is he aboard?”
The cook was dubious. “Yeah. Mr. Feldman’s here, all right, but he’s just turned in. And unless it’s important, I don’t think I’d bother him if I were you.”
Latour stepped from the boat to the landing platform. “It’s important.”
The cook came out on deck and looked at the sixteen-foot boat. “It must be for you to come out here in that cockleshell.” He looked from the boat to Latour. “Say. I make you now. You’ve been on the radio all night. Every time a disk jockey just got going smooth, someone bust in with another report about you. Aren’t you that French Bayou deputy sheriff the boys tried to lynch?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. The last bulletin I heard, you’d disappeared from some clearing and the cops were looking for you.”
“I’m going to turn myself in as soon as I talk to Mr. Feldman.”
The cook reached into the shack and picked up a wicked-looking boning knife. “You carrying a heater, fellow?”
“No.”
“You mind if I find out for myself?”
“Not at all.”
The cook patted Latour with his free hand and stepped back. “You’re clean, all right. What do you want with Mr. Feldman?”
“It’s a personal matter. I stopped at his office in town, and as there was no one there, I assumed he was out here.”
“I’ve already told you that.” The cook shrugged. “O.K. So you want to talk to Feldman. It’s no skin off my nose.” He indicated the door of one of the sleeping rooms. “But if I were you, I’d talk sweet. The guy has been up for forty hours. We damn near lost a string of tools. Now, on account of you, half of the day shift is in jail. This was one of those nights when everything went wrong.”
“No. Not everything,” Latour assured him.
He filled his lungs with fresh air flavored by the sea. It tasted good. There was nothing like standing on the curved roof of a trailer with a noose around his neck to make a man realize how good it was just to be alive.
Chapter Nineteen
FRENCH BAYOU looked as if she’d had a tough night.
Lafitte Street was littered with debris. The bars and clubs and cafés that usually ran twenty-four hours a day were closed and pink-cheeked National Guardsmen, carrying rifles on their shoulders, patrolled the street to see that they stayed that way.
Not that the town was asleep. Behind locked doors and drawn shades, the married oilmen and charter-boat captains who had been fortunate enough to get out of the clearing were busy convincing their wives that, if they should be questioned, it was to the family interest for them to swear that their mates had been home all night.
Behind other closed doors, the free-lance hustlers and the girls in Amy’s and the Palace and Mabel’s were reaping one last harvest by charging what the traffic would bear to swear that their frightened, unamorous partners hadn’t been out of their beds all night.
“Who? Johnny Merritt?” a girl would ask, surprised. When the right time came. When she was asked. For fifty or a hundred dollars already paid and securely tucked away in her sheer nylon safe-deposit vault. “No. You must be making a mistake. Johnny didn’t leave my room all night. You know how it is when a man really gets interested in what he’s doing.”
Latour’s elation had evaporated. He was suddenly dead-tired. And he still had to face Olga.
The crumbling whitewashed-brick jail smelled of fear and uric acid and age. He wondered how he’d stood it as long as he had. It was a wonder any law-enforcement officer had any illusions left. He constantly saw the world and the people that inhabited it on the worst side.
His florid face lined with fatigue, former first Deputy Tom Mullen, now acting sheriff, looked out of one of the broken windows at the youthful guardsmen patrolling Lafitte Street. “Why couldn’t they have come last night?” He fingered the shield on his shirt. “Still, believe it or not, I’m glad they’re here now. I guess we didn’t realize just how rotten we’d got.”
“Amen to that,” Pringle said. “If I ever get out of my part in this mess, if I don’t wind up in Angola, I’m going to be the best damn deputy this parish ever had.”
“You’re going to have a lot of competition,” Mullen said dryly. He sat on the sill of the window and looked at Latour and the big man sitting beside him. “You’re sure now, Andy?”
“You heard what Mr. Feldman said.”
Feldman said, “And I’ll stake my professional reputation as an engineer.”
“That’s good enough for me.” Mullen nodded to Bill Ducros. “Before we leave, bring in Villere and Georgi, will you, Bill? You ought to be willing to do some work. You and Andy and Todd Kelly are the only ones of us who are going to come out of this smelling like roses.”
“It’s my pleasure.” The deputy grinned.
When Ducros returned to the office, he had Villere and Georgi with him. The charter-boat captain was sullen. Georgi was indignant. “This is an outrage,” he protested. “I know the laws of this country. I want to talk to my attorney. I demand to be permitted to phone Mr. Avart.”
“In due time,” Mullen said. “But I don’t think Jean will appreciate being waked up at this time of morning. How about you, Villere? You feel like talking?”
“I’ve got nothing to say.”
“Buying all those free drinks and inciting a mob to lynch an innocent man was your own idea?”
“I still don’t believe Latour is innocent. All I was doing was my duty as a citizen of the community.”
“No one passed you a wad of bills?”
“Of course not.”
“How about you, Georgi?”
“I was merely doing what I thought was right.”
“Did that include killing Sheriff Belluche when it looked as if the mob was going to listen to him and disband?”
“I didn’t kill anyone.”
“You were carrying a rifle.”
“A lot of men were carrying rifles.”
Mullen said coldly, “But only one shot was fired.” He nodded to a bald man in a loud sports shirt. “You’ve developed the print of that film you took last night?”
“I have.”
“Run it off for us, will you, fellow?”
“I’ll be happy to.”
The bald man set up a portable screen and threaded a sixteen-millimeter film into a projector on the late Sheriff Belluche’s desk. He plugged the projector into an electrical outlet.
Georgi wet his lips with his tongue. “But we destroyed all of the motion-picture cameras.”
“You missed one,” Mullen said. He pulled the shades on the windows. “O.K. Let her rip, friend.”
The projector hummed as the film began to roll. It was a poor picture, taken in a bad light, but it embraced most of the lynch mob on the lawn in front of the jail.
As Latour watched, Sheriff Belluche came out on the front stoop, trailing a plume of cigar smoke, and began to talk. There was no sound. The lack of it added to the eeriness of the scene. The pitch-pine torches crackled. Sheriff Belluche’s lips moved but no sound came out of them. The only sound was the hum of the pro
jector. Then the camera moved away from the stoop of the jail and recorded the TV mobile unit and the bulk of the lynch mob. Standing on the very edge of the crowd, Georgi was listening intently. Then he raised the rifle he was carrying to his shoulder and the camera immediately panned back to Sheriff Belluche. The old man stopped talking and raised his left hand to his forehead. The dark spot between his eyes was plainly visible. His broad-brimmed Stetson fell from his head. His cigar dropped from his lips. He stood a moment longer. Then his knees gave way and he rolled down the stairs to lie face down on the walk.
Georgi’s voice was thin over the hum of the projector. “I’ll talk!” he shrilled. “I’ll talk!”
Mullen sounded tired. “Don’t bother. When it comes to murder I always prefer to talk to the head guy instead of his hired hands. Take him back to his cell and lock him up, Bill. And you take good care of that film, partner.”
“I’ll do that,” the bald man promised. “I realized how important it was the minute I processed it.”
Mullen picked his hat from a hook on the wall and Jack Pringle and Latour and the oil-company engineer followed him out of the office down the stairs and across the lawn to his mud-splattered car.
None of them spoke during the short ride. The house in front of which Mullen stopped was huge, with fluted colonnades. Painted a gleaming white, it looked like the movie version of Tara.
Mullen banged the brass knocker.
An aged colored man opened the door. “I’m sorry,” the colored man said, “but I don’t think Mr. Avart is up yet. Who shall I say called?”
Mullen pushed him out of the way. “I don’t think that will be necessary.” He led the way up the stairs to the second floor and opened one of the doors leading off a hall.
