It was dark now and rain was falling on the bayou and the tin roof of the bait shop. Jerry Joe drank out of a thick white coffee cup across the table from me. A bare electric light bulb hung over our heads, and his face was shadowed by his fedora.
"What's the point?" I said.
"You're a parish cop in a small town, Dave. When's the last time you turned the key on a rich guy?"
"A DWI about twenty years ago."
"So am I getting through here?"
"It doesn't change anything."
"I saw Buford pitch in a college game once. A kid slung the bat at him on a scratch single. The kid's next time up, Buford hit him in the back with a forkball. He acted sorry as hell about it while the kid was writhing around in the dirt, but after the game I heard him tell his catcher, 'Looks like we made a Christian today.'"
"Buford's not my idea of a dangerous man."
"It's a way of mind. They don't do things to people, they let them happen. Their hands always stay clean."
"If you're letting the LaRoses use you, that's your problem, Jerry Joe."
"Damn, you make me mad," he said. He clicked his spoon on the handle of his cup and looked out at the rain falling through the glare of the flood lamps. His leather jacket was creased and pale with wear, and I wondered how many years ago he had bought it to emulate the man who had helped incinerate the Florence of northern Europe.
"Take care of what you got, Dave. Maybe deep-six the job, I'll get you on with the union. It's easy. You get a pocketful of ballpoint pens and a clipboard and you can play it till you drop," he said.
"You want to come up and eat with us?"
"That's sounds nice…" His face looked melancholy under his fedora. "Another time, though. I've got a gal waiting for me over in Lafayette. I was never good at staying married, know what I mean?… Dave, the black hooker who saw the screenwriter popped, you still want to find her, she works for Dock Green… Hey, tomorrow I'm sending you a jukebox. It's loaded, podna-Lloyd Price, Jimmy Clanton, Warren Storm, Dale and Grace Broussard, Iry LeJeune… Don't argue."
And he went out the screen door into the rain. The string of electric bulbs overhead made a pool of yellow light around his double shadow, like that of a man divided against himself at the bottom of a well.
Dock Green was an agitated, driven, occasionally vicious, ex-heavy-equipment operator, who claimed to have been kidnapped from a construction site near Hue by the Viet Cong and buried alive on the banks of the Perfume River. His face was hard-edged, as though it had been layered from putty that had dried unevenly. It twitched constantly, and his eyes had the lidless intensity of a bird's, focusing frenetically upon you, or the person behind you, or the inanimate object next to you, all with the same degree of wariness.
He owned a construction company, a restaurant, and half of a floating casino, but Dock's early money had come from prostitution. Whether out of an avaricious fear that his legitimate businesses would dry up, or the satisfaction he took in controlling the lives of others, he had never let go of the girls and pimps who worked the New Orleans convention trade and kicked back 40 percent to him.
He had married into the Giacano family but soon became an embarrassment to them. Without warning, in a restaurant or in an elevator, Dock's voice would bind in his throat, then squeeze into a higher register, like a man on the edge of an uncontrollable rage. During these moments, his words would be both incoherent and obscene, hurled in the faces of anyone who tried to console or comfort him.
He had a camp and acreage off of old Highway 190 between Opelousas and Baton Rouge, right by the levee and the wooded mudflats that fronted the Atchafalaya River. His metallic gray frame house, with tin roof and screened gallery, was surrounded by palm and banana trees, and palmettos grew in the yard and out in his pasture, where his horses had snubbed the winter grass down to the dirt. Clete and I drove down the service road in Clete's convertible and stopped at the cattleguard. The gate was chain-locked to the post.
A man in khakis and a long-sleeve white shirt with roses printed on it was flinging corn cobs out of a bucket into a chicken yard. He stopped and stared at us. Clete blew the horn.
"What are you doing?" I said.
"He's crazy. Give him something to work with."
"How about waiting here, Clete?"
"The guy's got syphilis of the brain. I wouldn't go in his house unless I put Kleenex boxes over my shoes first."
"It's Tourette's syndrome."
"Sure, that's why half of his broads are registered at the VD clinic."
I climbed through the barbed wire fence next to the cattleguard. Dock Green was motionless, the bale of the bucket hooked across his palm as if it had been hung from stone. His thin brown hair was cut short and was wet and freshly combed. I saw the recognition come into his eyes, a tic jump in his face.
But the problem in dealing with Dock Green was not his tormented and neurotic personality. It was his intuitive and uncannily accurate sense about other people's underlying motivations, perhaps even their thoughts.
"Who told you I was here?" he said.
"You've got a lot of respect around here, Dock. The St. Landry sheriff's office likes to know when you're in town."
"Who's in the shit machine?"
"Clete Purcel."
He put down the bucket, cupped one hand to his mouth, the other to his genitalia, and shouted, "Hey, Purcel, I got your corndog hanging!"
"Dock, I'm looking for a black hooker by the name of Brandy Grissum."
"An addict, the one saw the screenwriter get capped?"
"That's right."
"I don't know anything about her. Why's he parked out there?"
"You just said-"
"NOPD already talked to me. That's how I know." The skin under his eye puckered, like paint wrinkling in a bucket. "Short Boy Jerry put you here?"
"Why would he do that?" I smiled and tried to keep my eyes flat.
"Y'all went to school together. Now he's moving back to New Iberia. Now you're standing on my property. It don't take a big brain to figure it out."
"Give me the girl, Dock. I'll owe you one."
"You looking for a black whore or a black hit man, you should be talking to Jimmy Ray Dixon."
"I'm firing in the well, huh?" I said. The wind puffed the willow trees that grew on the far side of the levee. "You've got a nice place here."
"Don't give me that laid-back act, Robicheaux. I'll tell you what this is about. Short Boy Jerry thought he could throw up some pickets on my jobs and run me under. It didn't work. So now he's using you to put some boards in my head. I think he dimed me with NOPD, too."
"You're pretty fast, Dock."
His eyes focused on the front gate.
"I can't believe it. Purcel's taking a leak in my cattleguard. I got neighbors here," Dock said.
"You and the Giacanos aren't backing Buford LaRose, are you?" I asked.
For the first time he smiled, thin-lipped, his eyes slitted inside the hard cast of his face.
"I never bet on anything human," he said. "Come inside. I got to get a Pepto or something. Purcel's making me sick."
The pine walls of his front room were hung with the stuffed heads of antelope and deer. A marlin was mounted above the fireplace, its lacquered skin synthetic-looking and filmed with dust. On a long bookshelf was a line of jars filled with the pickled, yellowed bodies of rattlesnakes and cottonmouth moccasins, a hairless possum, box turtles, baby alligators, a nutria with its paddlelike feet webbed against the glass.
Dock went into the kitchen and came back with a beer in his hand. He offered me nothing. Behind him I saw his wife, one of the Giacano women, staring at me, hollow-eyed, her raven hair pulled back in a knot, her skin as white as bread flour.
"Purcel gets under my skin," Dock said.
"Why?"
"Same reason you do."
"Excuse me?"
"You make a guy for crazy, you think you can drop some coins in his slot, turn him into a monkey on a wire. The truth is, I've been down in a place where your eye sockets and your ears and your mouth are stuffed with mud, where there ain't any sound except the voices of dead people inside your head… You learn secrets down there you don't ever forget."
"I was over there, too, Dock. You don't have a franchise on the experience."
"Not like I was. Not even in your nightmares." He drank from his beer can, wiped his mouth on the inside of his wrist. His eyes seemed to lose interest in me, then his face flexed with an idle thought, as though a troublesome moth had swum into his vision.
"Why don't you leave me alone and go after that Klansman before he gets the boons stoked up again. At least if he ain't drowned. We got enough race trouble in New Orleans as it is," he said.
"Who are you talking about?"
He looked at me for a long moment, his face a bemused psychodrama, like a metamorphic jigsaw puzzle forming and reforming itself.
"That guy Crown, the one you were defending on TV, he jumped into the Mississippi this morning," he said. "Your shit machine don't have a radio?"
He drank from his beer can and looked at me blankly over the top of it.