That evening Bootsie, Alafair, and I went to a shrimp Tboil in the park on Bayou Teche. The air smelled of flowers and new-cut grass, the clouds were marbled with pink, the oak trees around the wood pavilion were dark green and thick with birds. School was out for the summer, and Alafair and some other kids played kickball on the baseball diamond with the sense of dusty, knee-grimed joy that's the special province of children during summer. In fact, Alafair's aggressiveness at play made me wonder if she didn't have a bent for adversarial roles. Her cheeks were dirt-streaked and flushed with excitement; she charged without blinking at the kicker and took the volleyball full in the face, and then ran after it again, sometimes knocking another child to the ground.
The last four days with Bootsie had been wonderful. The new balance of medicine seemed to be working. Her eyes smiled at me in the morning, her posture was erect and selfassured, and she helped me and Batist at the dock and in the bait shop with cheerful eagerness. Only an hour ago I had looked up from my work and caught her in a moment when she was unconscious of my glance, just as though I had clicked the camera lens and frozen her in the pose of the healthy and unworried woman that I prayed she would become again for both of us. She had just emptied the bait tanks, her denim shirt stuck wetly to her uplifted breasts, and she was staring abstractedly out the screen window at the bayou, eating a carrot stick, her hair touched by the breeze, one hand set jauntily on her hip, the muscles in her back and neck as strong and firm as a Cajun fishergirl's.
At that moment I realized the error of my thinking about Bootsie. The problem wasn't in her disease, it was in mine. I wanted a lock on the future; I wanted our marriage to be above the governance of mortality and chance; and, most important, in my nightly sleeplessness over her health, and the black fatigue that I would drag behind me into the day like a rattling junkyard, I hadn't bothered to be grateful for the things I had.
She peeled the shell off a shrimp, dipped the shrimp in a horseradish sauce and put it in her mouth. She reached out and touched my chin lightly with two fingers, as though she were examining for a skin blemish.
"Is that where Weldon hit you?" she asked.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Oh my, such innocence." I cleared my throat.
"I was in the supermarket this morning," she said. "A woman whose husband is a floorman on Weldon's rig couldn't stop herself from asking about your welfare."
Her eyes crinkled at the corners.
"Weldon's not always a rational man," I said.
"Why didn't you arrest him?"
"He's a tormented man, Boots. He carries a burden nobody should have to carry."
She stopped chewing. Her eyes looked into mine.
"Lyle told me some things about their childhood, about Weldon's relationship with Drew," I said.
A crease went across her brow, and she set her half-eaten shrimp back on the paper plate. The children out on the baseball diamond were tumbling in the dust, their happy cries echoing off the backstop.
"They're messed up in the head real bad," I said. "Weldon's a pain in the butt, all right, but I suspect he wakes up each morning with the Furies after him."
"He and Drew?" she said, the meaning clear and sad in her eyes now.
"Probably Lyle, too. I said something pretty rough to Weldon about it. So he had a free one coming."
"That's an awful story."
"They'll probably never tell all of it, either."
She was quiet for a few moments. Her eyes were flat and turned inward; her hair looked like it was touched with smoke in the broken light through the tree.
"When this is over, maybe we can invite them to dinner," she said.
"That'd be fine."
"You wouldn't mind?"
"No, of course not."
"Why didn't anyone-" she began. Then she stopped, coughed in the back of her throat, and said, "I never guessed. Poor Drew."
I squeezed her hand; but it felt dry and pliant inside mine.
Her mouth had the down-turned expression of someone who might have opened a bedroom door at the wrong moment.
Then she stood up and began clearing the table, her face concentrating on her work.
"I'm going to invite her to go shopping with me in Lafayette," she said. "You think she'd like that?"
"You bet," I said.
You'll always be a standup lady, Boots, I thought.
Out on the baseball diamond a shout went up from the children as someone fired the volleyball into the backstop.
It was dusk when we returned home, and the air was heavy and cool, motionless, loud with the croaking of frogs out in the cypress. I parked under the pecan trees in the front yard, and Bootsie and Alafair walked up to the house while I rolled up the truck's windows. The sky had turned blueblack, the color of scorched iron, and I could feel the barometer dropping again, and smell sulfur and distant rain.
As I started up the incline toward the gallery, a beat-up flatbed truck bounced through the chuckholes in the dirt road and turned in to my drive. On the back was a huge chrome-plated cross, with the top end propped on the cab's roof and the shaft fastened to the bed with a boomer chain.
Lyle Sonnier cut the ignition and stepped down, grinning, from the running board. He wore a pair of striped overalls without a shirt, and his thin chest and shoulders were red with sunburn.
"I thought I'd take your time just for a minute," he said.
"What do you think of it?"
"It looks like it's made of car bumpers."
"It is. Me and this ole boy in Lafayette welded a shell all around the wood beams. What do you think?"
Batist had left on the string of electric bulbs over the dock, and the cross rippled and glowed with a silver and blue light.
"It looks like an artwork. It's beautiful," I said.
"Thanks, Loot. It's the only thing the Reverend Jimmy Bob Clock left me before they sent him off to Parchman Farm. One time we were outside New Albany, Mississippi, where some Klan uglies had burned a cross in a field, and Jimmy Bob was eating a hamburger in the truck across the road, looking out at that black cross, when he says, 'No sense letting good building material go to waste.' Then he walks across the road and gives this colored farmer who was out there plowing a dollar for it."
" 'What in the world are we gonna do with that?' I say."
"He says, 'Son, the most exciting place in a shithole like this is the Dairy Queen on Saturday night. When you run a hallelujah tent show, you gotta give them lights in the sky.' "
"He went into a supermarket, bought eight rolls of aluminum foil, and wrapped the cross in it, then we drove out to a junkyard and he got a guy to string it with electric bulbs.
That night we put it up on a hill, way up the slope from the tent, and hooked it up to the generator, and you could see that cross glowing in the mist for five miles."
I nodded absently and looked up toward my lighted gallery.
"Well… I didn't mean to take up a lot of your evening," he said. "I just wanted to tell you I didn't feel good about the other night in Baton Rouge. You came to me for help and I couldn't offer you very much."
"Maybe you did, Lyle."
He looked at me curiously, then lifted one of his overall straps off his sunburn with his thumb.
"I'm going to put the cross up on my new bible college," he said. "I was going to call it the Lyle Sonnier Bible Institute. Now I'm just going to call it the South Louisiana Bible College. How's that sound?"
"It sounds pretty good."
"I told you I ain't as bad as you think."
"I think maybe you're not bad at all, Lyle."
His eyes looked into the corners of mine, then he brushed at the dirt and leaves in the drive with his shoe.
"I appreciate it, Loot," he said.
"You want to come in?" I asked.
"No, thanks anyway. I just came into town to see Drew at the hospital and pick up my cross in Lafayette. Weldon told me about him taking a swing on you. I'm sorry that happened. I know you've been as good and fair as you can to both him and Drew. But you really stuck a garden rake in his head."
"Weldon has to stop jerking everybody around. Maybe it's time he takes his own fall."
Lyle etched lines in the leaves and dust with the point of his shoe. He rested his mutilated hand, which in the deepening shadows looked almost like part of an amphibian, on the truck's door handle.
"Weldon told me last night what he's been involved in. It's a mess, it surely is," he said. "I think he wants to tell you about it. He's pretty well worn-out with it."
"Do you want to tell me what it is?"
"It's his grief. You'll have to get it from him. No offense meant." He got up in the cab of his truck and clicked the door shut with his underarm. He smiled. "I better get out of here before I get in some kind of legal trouble. You know why I keep that burnt cross, why I'm gonna put it up on top of my Bible college? It don't let me forget where I've been and what I'm fixing to be. It's like that ole boy says in the song, 'I might be an old chunk of coal but I'm gonna be a diamond someday.' Give Weldon a chance. Maybe inside that cinder-block head of his he wants you to like him."
"What I think is unimportant, Lyle. Your brother's problem is going to be with the court. Anyway, there's something I should tell you before you go. We brought in an old-timer from the Sally in Lafayette, a fellow who'd been in a fire. He might be the same man you saw in your audience."
"He told you his name was Vic Benson?"
"You know him?"
"Sure. I drove to Lafayette and talked to him the other day. We run a shelter in Baton Rouge and a couple of new guys told me about him."
"He's not your father, then?"
He smiled again and started his truck.
"It's him, all right. He denied it, said he had only one son and not some diddly-squat TV preacher he wouldn't waste his jizzurn on." He shook his head good-naturedly. "That old has-… that old son of a buck still knows how to rub a little pain into you. But he's a wet-brain now, been in and out of jails and insane asylums all over Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, at least that's what the other wet-brains say. They say maybe he's got cancer in the lungs, too. So what are you gonna do except feel sorry for a guy like that? I gotta deedee, Loot. Hang loose."
He drove down the dirt road through the dark tunnel of oak trees, the chrome-plated cross vibrating against his cab, just as the first raindrops dimpled the bayou.
I was tired, but I had to drive to Lafayette that night and pick up a new aluminum shiner tank and water pump for the bait shop. On my way back out of town I saw one of Weldon Sonnier's company trucks pull out of the traffic and park under the trees in front of the Catholic home for handicapped children.
Weldon, in a pair of knife-creased brown slacks and a form-fitting T-shirt like a 1950s hood would wear, walked up the sidewalk to the front entrance with a stuffed shopping bag hanging from each hand.
I stopped at the traffic light, clicked my fingernails on the horn button, turned the radio on and off at least three times, resolved under my breath that I would continue on home and not intrude any more than necessary on Weldon's pride, hardheadedness, and carefully nursed store of private misery.
The light turned green, and I went around the block and parked across the street from Weldon's truck. The moon was up, and the sky in the north, where it hadn't yet started to rain, looked like a lighted ink wash. I headed up the walk toward the entrance.
Why?
Because he needs to know that you don't get the heat off your back by punching out a police officer on an oil rig floor, I told myself.
But that wasn't it. The truth was I wanted to believe in Weldon, in the same way that sometimes you encourage someone you care about to lie to you. Or perhaps I wanted somehow to dispel the fear that one day I would have to make him Joey Gouza's fall partner.
But what would I find in a Catholic children's home that would be of any value in eventually cutting Weldon loose from the investigation or prosecuting the executioners of a deputy sheriff or taking down a racist politician?
Answer: Nothing.
I walked through the front door into a softly lit and immaculately clean oak-floored hallway, with statues of St. Anthony, St. Theresa, and Jesus resting on pedestals against the walls, and looked through a set of open French doors into a large recreation room.
It was filled with the children whom nobody wanted.
They were retarded, spastic, mongoloid, born with deformed limbs, locked in metal braces, wired to electronic devices on wheelchairs. Scattered about on the floor was a tangle of torn wrapping paper., colored ribbon and bows, and boxes that had contained all kinds of toys. He must have made several trips back and forth to the truck.
Neither the nuns nor the children looked in my direction.
Weldon had taken off his shoes and was walking on his hands in the middle of the room. His face was almost purple with blood, his muscles quivering with tension, while coins and keys from his pockets bounced all over the rug and the children screamed in delight.
When he finally flipped himself over on his back, his mouth grinning crazily, his eyes bright with exertion, the children and nuns clapped as though they had just witnessed the world's greatest aerialist at work.
He sat up and rubbed his knees, still grinning. Then he saw me.
I waved at him with two fingers. His eyes lingered on mine a moment, bemused, faintly embarrassed perhaps, then he turned back to the children and said, "Hey, you guys, the ice cream man made a big delivery this evening. Sister Agnes says it's time to fang it down."
I turned and walked back outside into the night and a snap of lightning across the sky and the odor of rain striking warm concrete.
It rained hard during the night, and in the morning the sun came up yellow and hot and wreathed with mist over the marsh. I got up early and went down to the dock to help Batist open up, then had breakfast with Bootsie and Alafair in the kitchen. The backyard was wet and still blue with shadow, and the bloom of the mimosa was as bright as blood where the sun struck the treetop.
"What are you going to do today, little guy?" I said to Alafair.
"Bootsie's taking me to buy a new swimsuit, then we're going to have a picnic in the park."
"Maybe I can join you guys later," I said.
"Why don't you, Dave? We'll be under the trees by the Pool."
"I'll head over about noon, or a little earlier if I can," I said. Then I winked at Alafair. "You keep Boots out of the sun, little guy. She's already got enough tan."
"It's bad for her?"
Bootsie looked at me and made an impatient face.
"Well, she doesn't listen to us sometimes and we have to take charge of her," I said.
Bootsie rapped me across the back of the hand with her spoon, and Alafair's eyes squinted with delight. I grinned back at her, then when Bootsie was putting dishes in the sink I came up behind her and hugged her hard around the middle and kissed her neck.
"Later, later," she whispered, and patted me quietly on the thigh.
It was going to be a fine day. I kissed Alafair good-bye, then flipped my seersucker coat over my shoulder and was almost out the door when the phone on the counter rang and Bootsie picked it up.
"It's the sheriff," she said, and handed it to me.
I put my hand over the receiver and touched her shoulder as she walked away. "The picnic is at noon. I'll be there, I promise, unless he sends me out of town. Okay?" I said.
She smiled without replying and began washing dishes in the sink.
"I just talked to the city chief," the sheriff said. "They had to take Joey Gouza to Iberia General at seven last night. He went apeshit in his cell, crashing against the bars, rolling around on the floor, and kicking his feet like he was having a seizure, slurping water out of the toilet."
"You mean he had a psychotic episode?"
"That's what they thought it was. They got him in a van to take him to the hospital and he puked all over it. The doc at emergency receiving said he acted like he'd been poisoned, so they pumped his stomach out. Except by the time they got the tube down his throat there was hardly anything left inside him except blood from his stomach lining. Evidently the guy's got ulcers on top of his other problems."
"What do you think happened?"
"A guard found an empty box of ant poison in the food area. Maybe somebody dumped it into his mashed potatoes. But to tell you the truth, Dave, I don't believe the city people are in a hurry to admit they can't provide security for a celebrity prisoner. They're having more fun with Joey Gouza than pigs rolling in slop."
"What do you want me to do?"
"If he's connected with Garrett's murder, let's nail his butt before they take him out in a body bag. Not that half of New Orleans wouldn't get drunk in the streets."
I drove over to Iberia General and walked down the hall to Joey Gouza's room. A uniformed cop was reading a magazine outside the door.
"How you doin', Dave?" he said.
"Pretty good. How's our man?"
"I have a fantasy. I see him running down the hall in his nightshirt. I see me parking a big one in his brisket. Does that answer your question?"
"Is he that bad?"
"It probably depends on whether or not you have to clean up his piss."
"What?"
"He took a piss off the side of the bed, right in the middle of the floor. He said he doesn't use bedpans."
I went inside the room and closed the door behind me.
Gouza's right wrist was cuffed to the bed rail and one ankle was locked to a leg chain. His elongated face was white on the pillow, his lips caked at the corners with dried mucus.
In the middle of the floor was a freshly mopped damp area.
The room smelled bad, and I tried to open the window but it was sealed with locks that could only be turned with an Allen wrench.
He rubbed his nose with his finger. His eyes were black and cavernous in his drawn face.
"You don't like the smell?" he asked. His voice sounded like air wheezing out of sand.
"It's kind of close in here, partner."
"They told you I took a leak on the floor?"
"Somebody mentioned it."
"They told you they keep me chained to the bed, they don't even let me walk to the toilet?"
"I'll see what I can do about it."
"I can't raise my voice. Come closer."
I moved a chair to his bedside and sat down. His sour breath and the odor from under his sheet made me swallow.
"It's a whack," he said.
"On who?"
"Who the fuck you think?"
"Maybe it was an accident. It happens. The people who prepare jailhouse food haven't worked in a lot of five-star restaurants."
"I jailed too long, man. I know when the whack's out. You feel it. It's in people's eyes."
"You're a superstar, Joey. They're not going to lose you."
"You listen to me. Yesterday afternoon a trusty, this punk, a kid with mushmelons for buns, is sweeping out the corridor. Then he looks around real careful and walks over to my cell and says, 'Hey, Joey, I can get you something.' "
"I go, 'You can get me something? What, a case of AIDS?' "
"He says, 'Stuff you might could use.' "
"I go, 'The only stuff I see around here is you, sweetcakes.' "
"He says, 'I can get you a shank.' "
"I go, 'What I need a shank for from a punk like you?' "
"He says, 'Sometimes there's some badasses in the shower, man.' "
"I go, 'You clean the shit out of your mouth when you talk to me.' "
"He says, 'It's just a city jail, but there's a couple of bad guys here. You don't want the shank, you don't want a friend, that's your business. I was only trying to help out.' "
"I go, 'What guys?' But he's already walking off. I go, 'Come back, you little bitch,' but he clanks on the door for the screw to open up and shoots me the bone."
"Like you say, Joey, he's probably just a punk who wants a job when he gets out. What's the big deal?"
"You don't get it. A guy like that don't shoot the bone at a guy like me. Something's happening. There's been some kind of change.…" His hand motioned vaguely at the air, at the sunlight through the window. "Out there somewhere. It's a whack. Look, I want a hot plate and canned food brought in."
Then I saw something in his eye that I hadn't seen before, in the corner, a tremolo, a moist, threadlike yellow light, like a worm feeding.
He and his kind spent a lifetime trying to disguise their self-centered fear. It accounted for their grandiosity, their insatiable sexual appetites, their unpredictable violence and cruelty. But almost always, if you were around them long enough, you saw it leak out of them like a sticky substance from a dead tree.
"I owe you a confession, Joey," I said.
"You owe me a-" He turned his head on the pillow to look at me.
"Yeah, I haven't been honest with you."
His brow became netted with lines.
"I cooked the books on you a little bit," I said. "You wanted me to tell Weldon you weren't going down by yourself. I did as you asked, but I told the same thing to Bobby Earl."
His head lifted an inch off the pillow.
"You told Earl-" His breath was rasping. "You told Earl what? "
"That you're going to take other people down with you."
"Why you trying to tie me with Earl?"
"You seem to know a lot of the same people, Joey."
His face was gray and dry. His eyes searched in mine.
"I got you figured," he said. "You're trying to put out word to the AB I'm gonna roll over. That's it, ain't it? You're gonna keep squeezing me till I cop to some bullshit plea. Do you know what you're doing, man? The AB's not part of the organization. They think somebody's gonna ratout a member, it's an open contract. They're in every joint in the country. You do time when there's an AB hit on you, you do it in lockup. I mean with a solid iron door, too, man, or they'll get you with a Molotov through the bars. That's what you're trying to bring down on me? That's why you're pulling on Bobby Earl's crank? That's a lousy fucking thing to do, man."
"Would Jewel Fluck try to whack you, Joey?"
His eyes narrowed and grew wary.
"I saw him take out Eddy Raintree. It was pretty ugly."
"I got no more to say to you."
"I can't blame you. I'd feel the same way if all the doors were slamming around me. But think about it this way, Joey. You're a made guy. There're cops who respect that. Are you going to do major time while a guy like Bobby Earl sips Cold Duck and gets his picture on the society page? He's a Nazi, Joey, the honest-to-God real article. Are you going to take a jolt for a guy like that?"
He leaned over the side of the bed and spit in the wastebasket. I looked the other way.
"Drop dead, man. I don't know anything about Bobby Earl."
I studied his face. His skin was grained, unshaved, filled with twitches.
"What are you staring at?" he said.
"Give him up."
"You must have some kind of brain tumor or something. Nothing I say seems to get in your head. You guys ain't gonna do this stuff to me. You tell these local bozos I'm walking out of this beef. I'm not doing time, I'm not getting whacked in custody, either. I ain't getting whacked. Can you handle that, Jack?"
"The local bozos aren't taking a lot of interest in your point of view, Joey. Every once in a while a token guy gets dropped in the skillet, and this time it looks like you're it. It might not be fair, but that's the way it works. You never saw a mob run across town to do a good deed, did you?"
He tried to turn away from me, but his wrist clanked the handcuff chain against the bed rail. He hit the mattress with his other fist, then clenched his arm over his eyes.
"I want you to leave me alone," he said.
I got up from the chair and walked to the door. His chained right foot stuck out from under the sheet. He tried to clear his throat and instead choked on his saliva.
"I'll see about the canned goods and the hot plate," I said.
He worked the sheet up to his chin, kept his arm pressed tightly across his eyes, and didn't reply.
I arrived in the park before Bootsie and Alafair and walked idly along the bayou's edge under the trees. Desiccated gray leaves were scattered along the mud-bank. I squatted down and flipped pebbles at several thin, needle-nosed garfish that were turning in the current.
I was troubled, uncomfortable, but I couldn't wrap my hand around the central concern in my mind.
Joey Gouza was in custody, where he belonged. Why did I worry?
Policemen often have many personal problems. TV films go to great lengths to depict cops' struggles with alcoholism, bad marriages, mistreatment at the hands of liberals, racial minorities, and bumbling administrators.
But my experience has been that the real enemy is the temptation to misuse power. The weaponry we possess is awesome-leaded batons, slapjacks, Mace, stun guns, M-16s, scoped sniper rifles, 12-gauge assault shotguns, high-powered pistols and steel-jacketed ammunition that can blow the cylinders out of an automobile's engine block.
But the real rush is in the discretionary power we sometimes exercise over individuals. I'm talking about the kind of people no one likes-the lowlifes, the aberrant, the obscene and ugly-about whom no one will complain if you leave them in lockdown the rest of their lives with a goodhumored wink at the Constitution, or if you're really in earnest, you create a situation where you simply saw loose their fastenings and throw down a toy gun for someone to find when the smoke clears.
It happens, with some regularity.
I saw Bootsie and Alafair setting out picnic food on a table by the baseball diamond and I walked over to join them.
Alafair streaked past me, her face already flushed with expectation.
"Hey, where you going, little guy?" I said.
"To play kickball."
"Don't blind anyone."
"What?"
"Never mind."
Then she turned and plunged into the midst of the game, knocking another child to the ground. I sat down in the shade with Bootsie and ate a piece of fried chicken and two or three bites of dirty rice before my attention wandered.
"Did something happen this morning?" Bootsie asked.
"No, not really. Joey Gouza's probably having his day in the Garden of Gethsemane, but I guess that's the breaks."
"Do you feel bad about him for some reason?"
"I don't know what I feel. I suppose he deserves anything that happens to him."
"Then what is it?"
"I think he's in jail for the wrong reasons. I think Drew Sonnier is lying. I also think nobody cares whether Drew is lying or not."
"That doesn't make sense, Dave. If he didn't do it to her, who did?"
Out on the field the kids had torn loose a base pad from its fastening in the sand, where it served as the home base for one side. Alafair had the volleyball under one arm and was trying to replace the wooden peg in the sand without anyone else taking the ball from her.
"I don't know who did it," I said. "Maybe Gouza ordered it done as a warning to Weldon, then Drew lied to put him at the scene. But a guy like Gouza doesn't go out on a job himself."
"It's the city's case. It's not your responsibility."
"I twisted him. I made Bobby Earl think Gouza was going to drop the dime on him, then I told Gouza about it. The guy's experiencing some real psychological pain. He thinks a hit's out on him."
"Is there?"
"Maybe. And if there is, I might be responsible."
"Dave, a man like that is a human garbage truck. Whatever happens to him is the result of choices he made years ago… Are you listening?"
"Sure," I said. But I was watching Alafair. She couldn't hold the wooden peg with one hand and tamp it down in the sand without releasing the volleyball with the other, so she balanced the peg against her folded knee, then knocked it down with the heel of her free hand.
"What is it?" Bootsie said.
"Nothing," I said. "You're right about Joey Gouza. It would be impossible to be more than a footnote in that guy's life."
"Do you want another piece of chicken?"
"No, I'd better get back to the office."
"Let the city people handle it."
"Yeah, why not?" I said. "That's the best idea."
She squinted one eye at me, and I averted my gaze.
Ten minutes after I was back at the office, my phone rang.
"Dave?" His voice was cautious, almost deferential, as though he were afraid I'd hang up.
"Yeah, what is it, Weldon?"
He waited a moment to reply. In the background I could hear "La Jolie Blonde" on a jukebox and the rattle of pool balls.
"You want to have a bowl of gumbo down at Tee Neg's?" he asked.
"I've already eaten, thanks."
"You shoot pool?"
"Once in a while. What's up?"
"Come down and shoot some nine-ball with me."
"I'm a little busy right now."
"I'm sorry," he said.
"About what?"
"For taking a punch at you. I'm sorry I did it. I wanted to tell you that."
"Okay."
"That's all 'okay'?"
"I pushed you into a hard corner, Weldon."
"You're not still heated up about it?"
"No, I don't think so."
"Because I wouldn't want you mad at me."
"I'm not mad at you."
"So come down and shoot some nine-ball."
"No more games, podna. What's on your mind?"
"I've got to get out of this situation. I need some help. I don't know anybody else to ask."
After I hung up I drove over to Tee Neg's pool hall on Main Street. The interior had changed little since the 1940s.
A long mahogany bar with a brass rail and cuspidors ran the length of the room, and on it were gallon jars of cracklings (which are called graton in southern Louisiana), hard-boiled eggs, and pickled hogs' feet. Wood-bladed fans hun from the ceiling; green sawdust was scattered on the floor; and the pool tables were lighted by tin-shaded lamps. In the back, under the blackboards that gave ball scores from all around the country, old men played dominoes and bourse at the felt tables, and a black man in a porter's apron shined shoes on a scrolled-iron elevated stand. The air was thick and close with the smell of gumbo, boiled crawfish, draft beer, whiskey, dirty-rice dressing, chewing tobacco, cigarette smoke, and talcum from the pool tables. During football season illegal betting cards littered the mahogany bar and the floor, and on Saturday night, after all the scores were in, Tee Neg (which means "Little Negro" in Cajun French) put oilcloth over the pool tables and served free robin gumbo and dirty rice.
I saw Weldon shooting pool by himself at a table in back.
He wore a pair of work boots, clean khakis, and a denim shirt with the sleeves folded in neat cuffs on his tan biceps.
He rifled the nine ball into the side pocket.
"You shouldn't ever hit a side-pocket shot hard," I said.
"Scared money never wins," he said, sat at a table with his cue balanced against his thigh, knocked back a jigger of neat whiskey, and chased it with draft beer. He wiped at the corner of his mouth with his wrist. "You want a beer or a cold drink or something?"
"No thanks. What can I do to help you, Weldon?"
He scratched at his brow.
"I want to give it up, but I don't want to do any time," he said.
"Not many people do."
"What I mean is, I can't do time. I've got a problem with tight places. Like if I get in one, I hear popsickle sticks snapping inside my head."
He motioned his empty jigger at the bar.
"Maybe your fears are getting ahead of you," I said.
"You don't understand. I had some trouble over there."
"here?"
"In Laos." He waited until the barman had brought him another shot and a fresh draft chaser. He tipped the whiskey into the beer and watched it balloon in a brown cloud off the bottom of the glass. "We operated a kind of flying taxi service for some of the local warlords. We were also transporting some of their home-grown organic. Eventually it got processed into heroin in Hong Kong. For all I know, GIs in Saigon ended up shooting it in their arms. Not too good, huh?"
"Go on."
"I got sick of it. On one trip I told this colonel, this halfChinese character named Liu, that I wasn't going to load his dope. I pushed him off the plane and took off down the runway. Big mistake. They shot the shit out of us, killed my copilot and two of my kickers. I got out of the wreck with another guy, and we ran through jungle for two hours. Then the other guy, this Vietnamese kid, said he was going to head for a village on the border. I told him I thought NVA were there, but he took off anyway. I never found out what happened to him, but Liu's lice heads caught me an hour later. They marched me on a rope for three days to a camp in the mountains, and I spent the next eighty-three days in a bamboo cage just big enough to crawl around in.
"I lived in my own stink, I ate rice with worms in it, and I wedged my head through the bamboo to lick rainwater out of the mud. At night the lice heads would get drunk -on hot beer and break the bottles against my cage. Then one morning I smelled this funny odor. It was blowing in the smoke from the campfire. It smelled like burned hair or cowhide then, when the wind flattened out the smoke, I saw a dozen human heads on pikes around the fire. I don't want to tell you what their faces looked like.
"Liu's buttholes probably wanted to ransom me, but at the same time they were afraid of our guys because they'd shot up the plane and killed three of my crew. So I figured eventually they'd get tired of busting bottles on my cage and pissing on me through the bars, and my head was going to be curing in the smoke with those others.
"I used to wake with fear in the morning that was unbelievable. I'd pray at night that I would die in my sleep. Then one day some other guys came into the camp, guys who knew I was money on the hoof and who wanted to make some toady points with the CIA. They bought me for a case of Budweiser and six cartons of cigarettes."
He drank from his boilermaker, his eyes glazed faintly with shame.
"It's a funny experience to have," he said. "It makes you wonder about your worth."
"Cut it loose, Weldon."
"What?"
"We already paid our dues. Why run the same old tape over and over again?"
"I volunteered for Air America. I can't blame that on somebody else."
"You didn't volunteer to be a heroin mule."
He pulled the cellophane off a cigar and rubbed it between his fingers until it was a small ball.
"If you were going to cut a deal with the feds, who would you go to?"
"It depends on what you did."
"We're talking about guns and dope."
"You mean you got into it again?"
"Yes and no."
I looked at him quietly. He made a series of wet rings on the table with his jigger.
"The guns and the dope didn't get delivered, but I burned some guys for one hundred and eighty grand," he said.
His eyes flicked away from mine.
"This is straight? You actually ripped off some traffickers for that kind of money?" I said.
"Yeah, I guess it was sort of a first for them."
"One of the guys you burned is right there in the city jail, isn't he?"
"Maybe, maybe not."
"There's no maybe about it. My advice is you should talk to the DEA or to Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. I know a pretty good agent in Lafayette."
"That's about all you can suggest, huh? No magic answers."
"You won't confide in me. I'm at a loss to help you."
"If I did confide in you, I'd probably be under arrest."
He smiled wanly and started to drink from his glass, then set it back down.
"I'll give what you said some thought, Dave."
"No, I doubt that, Weldon. You'll go your own way until you beat your head into jelly."
"I wish I always knew what was going on inside other people. It'd be a great asset in the oil business."
Before I drove back to the office I walked across the drawbridge over the Teche and watched the current running through the pilings and the backs of the garfish breaking the water in the sunlight. The air was hot, the sky bright with haze, the humidity so intense that my eyes burned with salt and my skin felt like insects were crawling on it. Even under the trees by the old brick firehouse in the park, the air felt close and moist, like steam rising off a stove.
Weldon had his problems, but I had mine, too. This case went far beyond Iberia Parish, and it appeared to involve people and power and politics of a kind that our small lawenforcement agencies were hardly adequate to deal with.
Once again, I felt like the outside world was having its way with us, that it had found something vulnerable or weak or perhaps even desirous in us that allowed the venal and the meretricious to leave us with less of ourselves, less of a way of life that had been as sweet in the mouth as peeled sug gills arcane, as poignant and heartbreaking in its passing as the words to "La Johe Blonde" on Tee Neg's jukebox: Jolie blonde, gardez done c'est t'as fait.
Ta Was quit-te pour t'en aller, Pour t'en aller avec un autre que moi.
Jolie blonde, pretty girl, Flower of my heart I'll love you forever, My jolie blonde.
Still, Joey Gouza was in the city of New Iberia's custody, and if the prosecutor's office had its way he would be hoeing sweet potatoes on Angola Farin the rest of his life.
But something that had bothered me at noon while I had watched Alafair playing in the park was troubling me again, this time because of an idle glance across the bayou at a young man fishing under a cypress tree. I was watching him because he reminded me of so many working-class Cajun boys I had grown up with. He stood while he fished, bare chested, lean, olive-skinned, his body knotted with muscle, his Marine Corps utilities low on his stomach, smoking a cigarette in the center of his mouth without taking it out.
His bobber went under, and he jerked his pole up and pulled a catfish through the lily pads. Then I noticed that his left hand was gone at the wrist and he had to unhook the catfish and string it with one hand. But he was quite good at it. He laid the fish across a rock, pressed the sole of his boot down on its stomach, slipped the hook loose from the corner of its mouth, and worked a shaved willow fork through the gills until the hard white point emerged bloody and coated with membrane from the mouth. Then with his good hand he flopped the fish into the shallows and sank the willow fork deep into the mud.
The sheriff was sitting sideways in his swivel chair, reading a diet book, punching at his stomach with three fingers, when I walked into his office. He looked up at me, then put the book in his drawer and began fiddling with some papers on his blotter. Like many Cajun men, his chin was round and dimpled and his cheeks ruddy and flecked with small veins.
"I was thinking about going on a diet myself," I said.
"Somebody left that in here. I don't know who it belongs to."
"Oh."
"What's up?"
I told him I was going out to Drew Sonnier's again and my suspicions about what had happened at the gazebo.
"All right, Dave, but make sure you get her permission to look around on the property. If she won't give it to you, let's get a warrant. We don't want any tainted evidence."
He saw me raise my eyebrows.
"What?" he said.
"You're talking about evidence we might use against her?"
"It's not up to us. If she's filed false charges against Joey Gouza, the prosecutor might want to stick it to her. You still want to go out there?"
"Yes."
"Then do it. By the way, she was discharged from the hospital this morning, so she's back home now."
"Okeydoke."
"Dave, a little advice. Try to put the lid on your personal feelings about the Sonniers. They're grown-up people now."
"All right, sheriff."
"There're a couple of other things I need to tell you. While you were out the jailer called. It seems one trusty decided to snitch on another one. The night Joey Gouza went apeshit and vomited all over his cell, the trusty preparing the food got swacked on paregoric and accidentally knocked a box of ant poison off the shelf onto a table. It probably got in Gouza's food. Except the trusty didn't tell anybody about it. Instead he wiped off the table and served the trays like nothing had happened."
"Gouza's convinced there's a hit on him."
"That might be, but this time it looks like it was an accident."
"Where's the trusty now?"
"They're moving him over to the parish jail. I'd hate to be that guy when Gouza finds out who fired up his ulcers."
"There's no chance an AB guy was involved?"
"The guy who spilled the ant poison is a migrant farm worker in for DWI… You almost look disappointed."
"No, I just thought maybe the guys in the black hats were starting to cannibalize each other. Anyway, was there something else?"
"Yeah, I'm afraid there is." He kept putting one hand on top of the other, which was always his habit when he didn't want to say something offensive to someone. Then he pressed his glasses more tightly against his eyes. "I got three phone calls, two from state legislators and one from Bobby Earl's attorney. They say you're harassing Earl."
"I don't read it that way."
"They say you gave him a pretty bad time in a Baton Rouge restaurant."
"I had five minutes' conversation with him. I didn't see anything that unusual in it, considering the fact that I think he's involved with a murder."
"This is another thing that bothers me, Dave. We don't have any evidence that Earl is connected with Garrett's death. But you seem determined to tie Earl to it."
"Should I leave him alone?" I looked him straight in the face.
"I didn't say that. I'm just asking you to look at your motivations."
"I want-" He saw the heat in my face.
"What?" he asked.
"I want to turn the key on the people who killed Garrett. It's that simple, sheriff."
"Sometimes we have an agenda we don't tell ourselves about. It's just human."
"Maybe it's time somebody 'fronts a guy like Earl. Maybe he's gotten a free pass too long."
"You're going to have to ease up, Dave, or it'll be out of my hands."
"He's got that kind of juice?"
"No, he doesn't. But if you try to shave the dice, you'll give it to him. You got into it at his house, then you created a situation with him in a public place. I don't want a suit filed against this department, I don't want a couple of peckerwood politicians telling me I've got a rogue cop on my hands. It's time to take your foot off the accelerator, Dave."
My palms were ringing with anger.
"You think I'm being too hard on you?" he asked.
"You have to do what you think is right."
"You're probably the best cop we ever had in this department. Don't walk out of here thinking my opinion is otherwise, Dave. But you've got a way of kicking it up into overdrive."
"Then the bottom line is we're cutting Bobby Earl some slack."
"You once told me the best pitch in baseball is a change of pace. Why not ease up on the batter and see what happens?"
"Ease up on the wrong guy and he'll drill a hole in your sternum with it."
He turned his hands up on the blotter.
"I tried," he said, and smiled.
When I left the room, the back of my neck felt as though someone had held a lighted match to it.
Drew answered her door in a print sundress covered with yellow flowers. Her tan shoulders were spotted with freckles the size of pennies. Even though her left hand was swathed in bandages as thick as a boxing glove, she had put on eye shadow, lipstick, and dangling earrings set with scarlet stones, and she looked absolutely stunning as she stood with one plump hip pressed against the door jam.
I had called fifteen minutes earlier.
"I don't want to keep you if you're on your way out, Drew," I said.
"No, it's fine. Let's sit on the porch. I fixed some tea with mint leaves in it."
"I just need to look around back."
"What for?"
"I might have missed something when I was out before."
"I thought you might like some tea."
"Thanks just the same."
"I appreciated the flowers."
"What flowers?"
"The ones you sent up to my hospital room with the Amnesty International card. One of the pink ladies saw you buy them."
"She must have been mistaken."
"I wanted to act nice toward you."
"I need to look around back. If you don't want to give me your permission, I have to get a warrant."
"Who lit your fuse today?"
"The law's impersonal sometimes."
"You think I'm trying to get you in the sack?"
"Give it a break, Drew."
"No, give me an honest answer. You think I'm all heated up for you, that I'm going to walk you into my bedroom and ruin your marriage? Do you think your old girlfriends are lining up to ruin your marriage?"
"Can I go in back?"
She put her good hand on her hip. Her chest swelled with her breathing.
"What do you think you'll find that no one else did?" she asked.
"I'm not sure."
"Whose side are you on, Dave? Why do you have to spend so much time and effort on me and Weldon? Do you have any doubt at all that an animal like Joey Gouza belongs in jail? Of all the people in the parish, why are you the only one who keeps turning the screws on us? Have you asked yourself that?"
"Should I go after the warrant?"
"No," she said quietly. "Look anywhere you want to… You're a strange man. You understand principle, but I wonder how well you understand pain in other people."
"That's a rotten thing to say."
"No, you're not going to get away with that, Drew. If you and Weldon weren't my friends, both of you would have been in jail a long time ago for obstruction of justice."
"I guess we're very fortunate to have a friend such as you. I'm going to shut the door now. I really wish you had had some tea. I was looking forward to it."
"Listen, Drew-"
She closed the door softly in my face, then I heard her turn the bolt in the lock.
I went back to my truck, took a screwdriver and three big Ziploc bags off the seat, and walked through the side yard to the gazebo. The latticework was thick with bugle and grapevine, and the myrtle bushes planted around the base were in full purple flower. I knelt down in the moist dirt and probed through the bushes until I found the two pieces of brick I had seen previously. I dropped them both in a plastic bag, then found the broken slat from an apple crate and picked it up carefully by the edges. There was a split from the top down to a nail hole in the center of the slat. I turned it over between my fingers. Even in the deep shade I could see a dark smear around the hold on the opposite side. I slipped the slat into another bag and worked my way back out of the myrtle bushes onto the grass.
I glanced behind me and saw her face at a window. Then it disappeared behind a curtain.
Each of the steps on the gazebo had been carpentered with a two-inch gap between the horizontal and perpendicular boards. I tried looking through the openings into the darkness below the gazebo but could see nothing. I used the screwdriver to unfasten a section of latticework at the bottom of the gazebo and lifted it out with my fingers. It was moist and cool inside and smelled of standing water and pack-rat nests. I reached underneath the steps and touched the cold metal head of a ball-peen hammer.
I wondered if she had tried to remove it before I had arrived. I worked it out from under the steps with the screwdriver and carefully fitted it into the third plastic bag, then walked up to the screened-in porch on the side of the house.
When she didn't answer, I banged louder with the side of my fist against the wall.
"What is it?" she said, jerking open the door, her face pinched with both anger and defeat.
I let her take a hard look at the two broken bricks, the split apple-box slat, and the ball-peen hammer.
"I'm going to tell you a speculation or two, Drew, but I don't want you to say anything unless you're willing to have it used against you later. Do you understand that?"
Her mouth was a tight line, and I could see her pulse beating in her neck.
"Do you understand me, Drew? I don't want you to say anything to me unless you're completely aware of the jeopardy it might put you in. Are we perfectly understood on that?"
"Yes," she said, and her voice almost broke in her throat.
"You punched the nail through the slat, and you laid the slat across the two bricks. Then you put your hand under the nail and drove it all the way through into the step. The pain must have been terrible, but before you passed out, you splintered the slat away from the nail and shoved it and the bricks into the myrtle bushes. Then you pushed the hammer through the gap in the step."
Her eyes were filming.
"Your prints are probably all over the bricks and the slat, but that won't mean anything in itself," I said. "But I have a feeling there won't be any prints on the hammer except yours. That one might be hard to explain, particularly if there are blood traces on the hammer and we know for sure it's the one that was used to drive the nail into the gazebo floor."
She was breathing hard now, her throat was aflame with color, and her eye shadow had started to run. She licked her lips and started to speak.
"This time listen to me for a minute," I said. "I'm going to take this stuff down to the prosecutor's office and they can make of it what they want. In the meantime I recommend you drop the charges against Joey Gouza. Do it without comment or explanation."
She nodded her head. Her eyes were glistening, and she kept shutting them to clear the tears out of the lashes.
"It happens all the time," I said. "People change their minds. If anyone tries to build a case against you, you keep an attorney at your side and you turn to stone. You think you can do that?"
"Yes."
I wanted to put my arms around her shoulders. I wanted to press her against me and touch her hair.
"Will you be okay?" I asked.
"Yes, I believe I'll be fine."
"Call Weldon."
"I will."
"Drew?"
"Yes."
"Don't mess with Gouza anymore. You're too good a person to get involved with lowlife people."
She kept closing and unclosing her good hand. Her knuckles were white and as tight against her skin as a row of nickels.
"You liked me, didn't you?" she said.
"What?"
"Before you went away to Vietnam. You liked me, didn't you?"
"A woman like you makes me wish I could be more than one person and have more than one life, Drew."
I saw the sunlight bead in her eyes.
A few minutes earlier she had asked me whose side I was on. I felt I knew the answer now. The truth was that I served a vast, insensate legal authority that seemed determined to further impair the lives of the reckless and vulnerable while the long-ball hitters toasted each other safely at home plate.
That night the sheriff called me at home and told me that Joey Gouza was being moved from the hospital back to a jail cell. He also said that in light of the evidence I had found at Drew Sonnier's, the prosecutor's office would probably drop charges against Gouza in the morning.
When I got to the jail on East Main early the next morning, the sun was yellow and hazy through the moss-hung canopy of oak trees over the street, and the sidewalks were streaked with dew. I left my seersucker coat on when I went inside and stopped in the men's room. I took my.45 out of the holster, pulled the clip out of the magazine, ejected the round in the chamber, and slipped the pistol and the clip in the back of my belt under my coat. Then I unclipped the holster from my belt and dropped it in my coat pocket.
I waited for the guard to open the barred door that gave onto the row of cells where Joey Gouza was housed.
"You want to check your weapon, Dave?" he asked.
"They've got it up front."
"Somebody said he might walk. Is that true?"
"Yep."
"How the hell'd that happen?"
"Long story."
"The sonofabitch is eating his soft-boiled eggs now. Can you beat that? Fucking soft-boiled eggs for a piece of shit like that."
He opened the door, then walked with me down the corridor to Gouza's cell and turned the key in the lock.
"You sure you want inside with this guy?" he asked. "He won't shower. He thinks somebody's gonna shank him if he leaves his cell."
"It's all right. I'll yell when I'm ready," I said.
The guard closed the door behind me and went away.
Gouza lay on his bunk in his jockey underwear. A band of dark hair grew in a line from his navel to his sternum. An empty bowl streaked with egg yolk and a wastebasket filled with torn and stained newspaper sat on the floor by his bunk. His face looked as pale as it had been in the hospital.
His seemingly lidless black eyes studied me as I pulled up the single chair in the cell and sat on it.
"They're going to kick you loose," I said.
"Yeah, I owe you one."
"You really believe that somebody is going to do you in the shower?"
"Put it this way. One guy in this place got poisoned. Me. Your people say it was an accident. Maybe so. But I don't want any more accidents. Does that seem reasonable?"
I leaned forward with my forearms on my thighs. "I've got a problem," I said.
"You've got a problem?"
"Yeah, a serious one, Joey."
"What are you talking-"
"You're a made guy. A made guy worries about respect, about what people think of him."
"So?"
"When you get out of here, you'll probably have a nice dinner somewhere, maybe drink a glass of wine, maybe do a few lines with one of your whores. Then after a while all kinds of thoughts will start to turn over in your head. Are you with me?"
"No."
"You'll think about how you were humiliated, how a woman set you up for a fall, how Elmer Fudd and company turned you into a sideshow. Then you'll remember how you got scared and asked for your own hot plate and canned food and told the screw you wanted to stay in lockup. You'll wake up thinking about it in the middle of the night, then you'll wonder if the people around you are figuring you for a guy who's about to lose it, maybe a guy who's ripe for replacement. That's when you'll decide it's time for an object lesson. So that's what's been on my mind, partner. Sooner or later we'll have a visit from one of your people, a button man from Miami or maybe some AB sex deviate you turn loose on women."
He leaned over the bunk and spat into the wastebasket, then took a sip from a brown bottle of chalky medicine and screwed the cap back on.
"Think anything you want," he said. "I got nothing on my mind except getting treatment for my ulcers before they have to cut out half my stomach. Any beef I got against this shithole I let my lawyers handle with a civil suit. You can thank Fudd and the broad if y'all have to pass a sales tax to pay off the damages."
"What I'm really trying to do is apologize to you, Joey."
He raised his elon ated head up on his elbow. The skin at the corner of his mouth wrinkled with a smile.
"You're gonna apologize? You're good, man. You ought to get yourself some kind of nightclub act. I can probably book you into a couple of places."
"Because I was going to pull a cheap ruse on you. I was going to treat you like a punk instead of a made guy. So I'm apologizing."
"You talk like you got clap in your brain or something. What's with you? You never make sense. Can't you talk to people like you got sense?"
I reached behind me and pulled the.45 from under my coat. I rested it on my thigh.
"You ain't supposed to have that in here, man," he said.
"You're right. That's what I've been trying to tell you. I want to apologize for what I had in mind."
He was rigid in the bunk. I stared intently at the floor, then cocked the hammer with my thumb and raised the barrel and fitted it into the hollow of his cheek. His eyes closed, then opened again, and his Adam's apple worked up and down with a dry click in his throat.
I squeezed the trigger, and the hammer snapped on the empty chamber. He gasped, and his face jerked like he'd been slapped.
"I was going to pull a cheap trick like that to scare you," I said. "But you're a made guy, Joey, and you deserve more respect than I've shown you. And even if I rattled you a little bit, you'd be back, wouldn't you?" I winked at him.
"You'd really rip some ass, right or wrong?"
A sweat had broken on his ashen face.
"You're a head case, man," he said. "You stop this shit. You get the fuck out of my life."
I pulled the clip from my belt and let it rest against my thigh. The hollow-points were loaded tightly against the spring. I rubbed my thumb casually over the top round in the clip. The fingers of both my hands made tiny, delicate prints in the thin sheen of oil on the steel surfaces of the pistol and the clip. I could hear him breathing loudly through his nose and smell the odor of fear that rose from his armpits.
"You weren't in the service, were you?" I said.
"Who gives a shit?"
"Did you ever kill anybody close up?"
He didn't answer. His eyes went from my hands to my face and back to my hands again. I inserted the clip in the magazine, pulled back the receiver, and slid a hollow-point round into the chamber.
"I'm going to give you your chance," I said.
"What?"
"for do me. Right in this cell. I lied to the guard and told him I'd already checked my weapon. So everybody will believe you when you tell them I tried to kill you, that you got the weapon away from me and did me instead."
"I ain't playing this game."
"Yes, you are."
"I want the screw."
"It's just you and me, Joey. Here," I said, and I laid the.45 on the striped mattress next to his arm.
His hands were shaking. A drop of sweat fell from the point of his chin.
"I ain't touching it," he said.
"It's the only chance you'll get at me. If you send anybody back to Iberia Parish to square a beef, I'll be coming through your door two hours after it happens. It'll be under a black flag, too, Joey. No warrant, no rules, just you and me and maybe Clete Purcel as a Lucky Strike extra. Are you going to pick it up?"
He pressed one hand against his naked stomach and grimaced with a spasm that made his eyes close.
"You quit doing this to me. You fucking lay off," he said hoarsely.
I reached out and took the.45 back and eased the hammer back down. I tried to hide the deep breath that I drew into my lungs.
He leaned his head over the bunk and vomited into the wastebasket. The hair on his bare shoulders was damp with sweat. I wet some paper towels in the washbasin and handed them to him.
"Any vendetta you have against the Sonniers ends here, Joey," I said. "Are we understood on this?"
He sat up on the bunk and took the crumpled towels away from his mouth.
"I'll give you what you want," he said.
"I'm not quite following you."
"I'll give you the guy you want. You get the guy."
"Which guy?"
"I'll deliver him up. Packaged. You get the guy."
" 'Packaged'? What do you mean 'packaged'?"
"Don't act like a stupid fuck. You know what I mean."
"You're coming to some wrong conclusions. You don't make terms, you don't do our job."
"You got a dead cop. You want it squared. So the beef gets squared. Now, you stop pulling my insides out."
He hung his head over the wastebasket, one hand trembling on his temple. His long neck looked like a bent swan's.
"You can't walk out of here with that kind of misunderstanding, Joey. Do you hear me? This isn't a barter situation. Are you listening to me? Look at me."
But he continued to stare between his legs, his eyes glazed and dull, focused inward on his own pain.
That evening, eleven hours after Joey Gouza was kicked loose from custody, someone tried to garrote Weldon Sonnier in his boathouse with a strand of piano wire.