AFTER I HAD called in a description of the shooter and his Toyota at the boat dock, I went back out on the road with a flashlight and hunted for the shells he had ejected from his rifle. Two fully loaded gravel trucks had passed on the road and crushed one of the.30-06 shells flat in the dirt and half buried the other in a muddy depression, but I prised each of them out with the awl of my Swiss army knife and dropped them in a plastic bag. They were wet and muddy and scoured from being ground under the truck's tires, but a spent cartridge thrown from a bolt-action rifle is always a good one to recover a print from, because usually the shooter presses each load down with his thumb and leaves a nice spread across the brass surface.
The next morning I listened quietly while the sheriff shared his feelings about my going to New Orleans for two days without authorisation. His face was flushed, his tie pulled loose and he talked with his hands folded on his desk in order to conceal his anger. I couldn't blame him for the way he felt, and the fact that I didn't answer him only made him more frustrated. Finally he stopped, shifted his weight in the chair, and looked at me as though he had just abandoned everything he had said.
"Forget that bullshit about procedure. What bothers me is the feeling I've been used," he said.
"I called before I left. You weren't in," I said.
"That's not enough."
Again I didn't answer him. The bagged rifle shells were on his desk.
"Tell the truth. What would you have done if you'd found the Haitian alive?" he asked.
"Busted him."
"I want to believe that."
I looked out of the window at a bright green magnolia tree in the morning haze.
"I'm sorry about what I did. It won't happen again," I said.
"If it does, you won't have to resign. I'll take your badge myself."
I looked at the magnolia tree a moment and watched a hummingbird hang over one of the white flowers.
"If we get a print off those shells, I want to send it to New Orleans," I said.
"Why?"
"The scene investigator dusted the radio that was in the bathtub with the Haitian. Maybe there's a connection with our shooter."
"How?"
"Who knows? I want New Orleans to give us a copy of Victor Romero's sheet and prints, too."
"You think he was the shooter?"
"Maybe."
"What's the motive?"
"Hell if I know."
"Dave, do you think maybe you're trying to tie too many things together here? I mean, you want your wife's killers. But you've only got one set of suspects that you can reach out and touch, so maybe you've decided to see some threads that aren't there. Like you said, you put a lot of people in Angola."
"The ex-con who snuffs you wants you to see his face and enjoy a couple of memories with him. The guy who shot at me last night did it for money. I don't know him."
"Well, maybe the guy's car will show up. I don't know how he got it out of the parish with all those holes in it."
"He boosted it, and it's in the bayou or a garage somewhere. We won't find it. At least not for a while."
"You're really an optimist, aren't you?"
I spent the day doing the routine investigative work of a sheriff's detective in a rural parish, I didn't enjoy it. For some reason, probably because he was afraid I'd run off again, the sheriff assigned me a uniformed deputy named Cecil Aguillard, an enormous, slow-witted redbone. He was a mixture of Cajun, Negro and Chitimacha Indian; his skin was the color of burnt brick, and he had tiny, turquoise-green eyes and a pie-plate face you could break a barrel slat across without his changing expression. He drove seventy miles an hour with one hand, spit Red Man out of the window, and pressed on the pedals with such weight and force that he had worn the rubber off the metal.
We investigated a stabbing in a Negro bar, the molestation of a retarded girl by her uncle, an arson case in which a man set fire to his own fish camp because his drunken guests wouldn't leave his party by the next morning, and finally, late that afternoon, the armed robbery of a grocery store out on the Abbeville road. The owner was a black man, a cousin of Cecil Aguillard, and the robber had taken ninety-five dollars from him, walked him back to the freezer, hit him across the eye with his pistol barrel, and locked him inside. When we questioned him he was still shaking from the cold, and his eye was swollen into a purple knot. He could only tell us that the robber was white, that he had driven up in a small brown car with an out-of-state license plate, had walked inside with a hat on, then suddenly rolled down a nylon stocking over his face, mashing his features into a blur of skin and hair.
"Somet'ing else. He took a bottle of apricot brandy and a bunch of them Tootsie Roll," the Negro said. "I tell him 'Big man with a gun, sucking on Tootsie Roll.' So he bust me in the face, him. I need that money for my daughter's col'ech in Lafeyette. It ain't cheap, no. You gonna get it back?"
I wrote on my clipboard and didn't reply.
"You gonna get it back, you?"
"It's hard to tell sometimes."
I knew better, of course. In fact, I figured our man was in Lake Charles or Baton Rouge by now. But time and chance happeneth to us all, even to the lowlifes.
On our radio we heard a deputy in a patrol car run a check on a 1981 tan Chevette with a Florida tag. He had stopped the Chevette out on the Jeanerette road because the driver had thrown a liquor bottle at a road sign. I called the dispatcher and asked her to tell the deputy to hold the driver until we got there.
Cecil drove the ten mile distance in less than eight minutes. The Chevette was pulled over on the oyster-shell parking lot of a ramshackle clapboard dance hall built back from the road. It was five p.m., the sun was orange over the rain clouds piled in the west, and Haliburton and cement and pickup trucks were parked around the entrance to the bar. A deeply tanned man in blue jeans, with no shirt on, leaned with one arm hooked over the open door of his Chevette, spitting disgustedly between his legs. His back was tattooed with a blue spider caught in a web. The web extended over both of his shoulder blades.
"What have you got him on?" I said to the deputy who had held him for us.
"Nothing. Littering. He says he works seven-and-seven offshore."
"Where's he break the bottle?"
"Back there. Against the railroad sign."
"We'll take it from here. Thanks for you help," I said.
The deputy nodded and drove off in his car.
"Shake this guy down, Cecil. I'll be back in a minute," I said.
I walked back to the railroad crossing, where an old Louisiana law-stop sign was postholed by the side of the gravel bedding. The wooden boards were stained with a dark, wet smear. I picked up pieces of glass out of the gravel and sootblackened weeds until I found two amber-colored pieces that were hinged together by an apricot brandy label.
I started back toward the parking lot with the two pieces of wet glass in my shirt pocket. Cecil had the tattooed man spread on the front of the fender of the Chevette and was ripping his pockets inside out. The tattooed man turned his head backwards, said something, and started to stand erect, when Cecil simultaneously picked him up in the air by his belt and slammed his head down on the hood. The man's face went white with concussion. Some oilfield roughnecks in tin hats, their denims spattered with drilling mud, stopped in the bar entrance and walked towards us.
"We're not supposed to bruise the freight, Cecil," I said.
"You want to know what he said to me?"
"Ease up. Our man here isn't going to give us any more trouble. He's already standing in the pig slop up to his kneecaps."
I turned to the oilfield workers, who obviously didn't like the idea of a redbone knocking around a white man.
"Private party, gentlemen," I said. "Read about it in the paper tomorrow. Just don't try to get your name in the story today. You got my drift?"
They made a pretense of staring me sullenly in the face, but a cold beer was much more interesting to them than a night in the parish jail.
The tattooed man was leaning on his arms against the front fender again. There were grains of dirt on the side of his face where it had hit the hood, and a pinched, angry light in his eyes. His blond hair was uncut and as thick and dry as old straw. Two Tootsie Roll wrappers lay on the floor of his car.
I looked under the seats. Nothing was there.
"You want to open the hatchback for us?" I said.
"Open it yourself," he said.
"I asked you if you wanted to do that. You don't have to. It beats going to jail, though. Of course, that doesn't mean you're necessarily going to jail. I just thought you might want to be a regular guy and help us out."
"Because you got no cause."
"That's right. It's called 'probable cause.' Were you in Raiford? I like the artwork on your back," I said.
"You want to look in my fucking car? I don't give a shit. Help yourself," he said, pulled the keys from the ignition, popped up the hatchback, and pulled open the tire well. There was nothing inside it except the spare and a jack.
"Cuff him and put him behind the screen," I told Cecil.
Cecil pulled the man's hands behind his back, snapped the handcuffs tightly onto his wrists, and walked him back to our car as though he were a wounded bird. He locked him behind the wire mesh that separated the back and front seats, and waited for me to get into the passenger's seat. When I didn't, he walked back to where I stood by the Chevette.
"What's the deal? He's the one, ain't he?" he said.
"Yep."
"Let's take him in."
"We've got a problem, Cecil. There's no gun, no hat, no nylon stocking. Your cousin's not going to be able to identify him in a lineup, either."
"I seen you pick up them brandy glass. I seen you look at them Tootsie Roll paper."
"That's right. But the prosecutor's office will tell us to kick him loose. We don't have enough evidence, podna."
"My fucking ass. You get a beer, you. Come see in ten minutes. He give you that stocking, you better believe, yeah."
"How much money was in his wallet?"
"A hunnerd maybe."
"I think there's another way to do it, Cecil. Stay here a minute."
I walked back to our car. It was hot inside, and the handcuffed man was sweating heavily. He was trying to blow a mosquito away from his face with his breath.
"My partner wants to bust you," I said.
"So?"
"There's a catch. I don't like you. That means I don't like protecting you."
"What are you talking about, man?"
"I went off duty at five o'clock. I'm going to get me a shrimp sandwich and a Dr. Pepper and let him take you in. Are you starting to see the picture now?"
He shook back his damp hair from his eyes and tried to look indifferent, but he didn't hide fear well.
"I have a feeling that somewhere between here and the jail you're going to remember where you left that gun and stocking," I said. "But anyway it's between you and him now. And I don't take stock in rumors."
"What? What the fuck you talking about rumors, man?"
"That he took a suspect into the woods and put out his eye with a bicycle spoke. I don't believe it."
I saw him swallow. The sweat ran out of his hair.
"Hey, did you see The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?" I asked. "There's a great scene in there when this Mexican bandit says to Humphrey Bogart, 'I like your watch. I think you give me your watch.' Maybe you saw it on the late show at Raiford."
"I ain't playing this bullshit, man."
"Come on you, you can do it. You pretend you're Humphrey Bogart. You drive your car back to that convenience store and you give the owner your hundred dollars and that Gucci watch you're wearing. It's going to brighten up your day. I guarantee it."
The mosquito sat on the end of his nose.
"Here comes Cecil now. Let him know what you've decided," I said.
The light was soft through the trees as I drove along the bayou road toward my house that evening. Sometimes during the summer the sky in southern Louisiana actually turns lavender, with strips of pink cloud in the west like flamingo wings painted above the horizon, and this evening the air was sweet with the smell of watermelons and strawberries in somebody's truck patch and the hydrangeas and night-blooming jasmine that completely covered my neighbor's wooden fence. Out on the bayou the bream were dimpling the water like raindrops.
Before I turned into my lane I passed a fire-engine-red MG convertible with a flat tire by the side of the road, then I saw Bubba Rocque's wife sitting on my front step with a silver thermos next to her thigh and a plastic cup in her fingers. She wore straw Mexican sandals, beige shorts, and a low-cut white blouse with blue and brown tropical birds on it, and she had pinned a yellow hibiscus in her dark hair. She smiled at me as I walked toward her with my coat over my shoulder. Once again I noticed that strange red cast in her brown eyes.
"I had a flat tire. Can you give me a ride back to my aunt's on West Main?" she asked.
"Sure. Or I can change it for you."
"There's no air in the spare, either." She drank from the cup. Her mouth was red and wet, and she smiled at me again.
"What are you doing down this way, Mrs. Rocque?"
"It's Claudette, Dave. My cousin lives down at the end of the road. I come over to New Iberia about once a month to see all my relatives."
"I see."
"Am I putting you out?"
"No. I'll be just a minute."
I didn't ask her in. I went inside to check on Alafair and told the baby-sitter to go ahead and serve supper, that I would be back shortly.
"Help a lady up. I'm a little twisted this evening," Claudette Rocque said, and reached her hand out to mine. She felt heavy when I pulled her erect. I could smell gin and cigarettes on her breath.
"I'm sorry about your wife," she said.
"Thank you."
"It's a terrible thing."
I held the truck door open for her and didn't answer.
She sat with her back at an angle to the far door, her legs slightly apart, and moved her eyes over my face.
Oh boy, I thought. I drove out of the shadows of the pecan trees, back onto the bayou road.
"You look uncomfortable," she said.
"Long day."
"Are you afraid of Bubba?"
"I don't think about him," I lied.
"I don't think you're afraid of very much."
"I respect your husband's potential. I apologise for not asking you in. The house is a mess."
"You don't get backed into a corner easily, do you?"
"Like I said, it's been a long day, Mrs. Rocque."
She made an exaggerated pout with her mouth.
"And you're not going to call a married lady by her first name. What a proper law officer you are. Do you want a gin rickey?"
"No, thanks."
"You're going to hurt my feelings. Has someone told you bad things about me?"
I watched a sparrow hawk glide on extended wings down the length of the bayou.
"Did someone tell you I was in St. Gabriel?" she said. Then she smiled and reached out and ticked the skin above my collar with her nail. "Or maybe they told you I wasn't all girl."
I could feel her eyes moving on the side of my face.
"I've made the officer uncomfortable. I think I even made him blush," she said.
"How about a little slack, Mrs. Rocque?"
"Will you have a drink with me, then?"
"What do you think the odds are of your having a flat tire by my front lane?"
Her round doll's eyes were bright as she looked at me over her raised drinking cup.
"He's such a detective," she said. "He's thinking so hard now, wondering what the bad lady is up to." She rubbed her back against the door and flattened her thighs against the truck seat. "Maybe the lady is interested in you. Are you interested in me?"
"I wouldn't go jerking Bubba around, Mrs. Rocque."
"Oh my, how direct."
"You live with him. You know the kind of man he is. If I was in your situation, I'd give some thought to what I was doing."
"You're being rude, Mr. Robicheaux."
"Read it like you want. Your husband has black lightning in his brain. Mess around with his pride, embarrass him socially, and I think you'll get to see that same kid who wheeled his crippled cousin into the coulee."
"I have some news for you, sir," she said. Her voice wasn't coy anymore, and the red tint in her brown eyes seemed to take on a brighter cast. "I did three years in a place where the bull dykes tell you not to come into the shower at night unless you want to lose your cherry. Bubba never did time. I don't think he could. I think he'd last about three days until they had to lock him in a box and put handles on it and carry it out in the middle of an empty field."
I drove onto the drawbridge. The tires thumped on the metal grid. I saw the bridge tender, a look at Claudette Rocque and me with a quizzical expression on his face.
"Another thought for you, sir," she said. "Bubba has a couple of sluts he keeps on tap in New Orleans. I'm not supposed to mention them. I'm just his cutie-pie Cajun girl that's supposed to clean his house and wash his sweat suits. I've got a big flash for you boys. Your jockstrap stinks."
In the cooling dusk I passed a row of weathered Negro shacks with sagging galleries, a bar and a barbecue joint under a spreading oak, an old brick grocery store with a lighted Dixie beer sign in the window.
"I'm going to drop you at the cab stand," I said. "Do you have money for cabfare?"
"Bubba and I own cabs. I don't ride in them."
"Then it's a good night for a walk."
"You're a shit," she said.
"You dealt it."
"Yeah, you got a point. I thought I could do something for you. Big mistake. You're one of those full-time good losers. You know what it takes to be a good loser? Practice." On East Main she pointed ahead in the dusk. "Drop me at that bar."
Then she finished the last of her thermos and casually dropped it out the truck window into the street. It sprang end over end on the concrete. A group of men smoking cigars and drinking canned beer in front of the bar turned and stared in our direction.
"I was going to offer you a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year deal to run Bubba's fish-packing house in Morgan City," she said. "Think about that on your way back to your worm sales."
I slowed the truck in front of the bar. The neon beer signs made the inside of the cab red. The men outside the bar entrance had stopped talking and were looking at us.
"Also, I don't want you to drive out of here thinking you've been in control of things tonight," she said, and got up on her knees, put her arms around my neck, and kissed me wetly on the cheek. "You just missed the best lay you'll ever have, pumpkin. Why don't you-try some pocket pool at your AA meetings? It really goes with your personality."
But I was too tired to care whether she had won the day or not. It was a night of black clouds rolling over the Gulf, of white electricity jumping across the vast, dark dome of sky above me, of the tiger starting to walk around in his cage. I could almost hear his thick, leathery paws scudding against the wire mesh, see his hot orange eyes in the darkness, smell his dung and the fetid odor of rotted meat on his breath.
I never had an explanation for these moments that would come upon me. A psychologist would probably call it depression. A nihilist might call it philosophical insight. But regardless, it seemed there was nothing for it except the acceptance of another sleepless night. Batist, Alafair, and I took the pickup truck to the drive-in movie in Lafayette, set out deck chairs on the oyster shells, and ate hot dogs and drank lemonade and watched a Walt Disney double feature, but I couldn't rid myself of the dark well I felt my soul descending into.
In the glow of the movie screen I looked at Alafair's upraised and innocent face and wondered about the victims of greed and violence and political insanity all over the world. I have never believed that their suffering is accidental or a necessary part of the human condition. I believe it is the direct consequence of corporate avarice, the self-serving manipulations of politicians who wage wars but never serve in them themselves, and, perhaps worse, the indifference of those of us who know better.
I've seen many of those victims myself, seen them carried out of the village we mortared, washed down with canteens after they were burned with napalm, exhumed from graves on a riverbank where they were buried alive.
But as bad as my Indochinese memories were, one image from a photograph I had seen as a child seemed to encapsulate the dark reverie I had fallen into. It had been taken by a Nazi photographer at Bergen-Belsen, and it showed a Jewish mother carrying her baby down a concrete ramp toward the gas chamber, while she led a little boy with her other hand and a girl of about nine walked behind her. The girl wore a short cloth coat like the ones children wore at my elementary school. The lighting in the picture was bad, the faces of the family shadowy and indistinct, but for some reason the little girl's white sock, which had worked down over her heel, stood out in the gloom as though it had been struck with a shaft of gray light. The image of her sock pushed down over her heel in that cold corridor had always stayed with me. I can't tell you why. But I feel the same way when I relive Annie's death, or remember Alafair's story about her Indian village, or review that tired old film strip from Vietnam. I commit myself once again to that black box that I cannot think myself out of.
Instead, I sometimes recall a passage from the Book of Psalms. I have no theological insight, my religious ethos is a battered one; but those lines seem to suggest an answer that my reason cannot, namely, that the innocent who suffer for the rest of us become anointed and loved by God in a special way; the votive candle of their lives has made them heaven's prisoners.
It rained during the night, and in the morning the sun came up soft and pink in the mist that rose from the trees across the bayou. I walked out to the road and got the newspaper from the mailbox and read it on the front porch with a cup of coffee.
The phone rang. I went inside and answered it.
"What are you doing driving around with the dyke?"
"Dunkenstein?" I said.
"That's right. What are you doing with the dyke?"
"None of your business."
"Everything she and Bubba do is our business."
"How'd you know I was with Claudette Rocque?"
"We have our ways."
"There wasn't a tail."
"Maybe you didn't see him."
"There wasn't a tail."
"So?"
"Have you got their phone tapped?"
He was silent.
"What are you trying to tell me, Dunkenstein?" I asked.
"That I think you're crazy."
"She used the phone to tell somebody I gave her a ride into New Iberia?"
"She told her husband. She called him from a bar. Some people might think you're a dumb shit, Robicheaux."
I looked at the mist hanging in the pecan trees. The leaves were dark and wet with dew.
"A few minutes ago I was enjoying a cup of coffee and the morning paper," I said. "I think I'm going to finish the paper now and forget this conversation."
"I'm calling from the little grocery store by the drawbridge. I'll be down to your place in about ten minutes."
"I think I'll make a point of being on my way to work by then."
"No, you won't. I already called your office and told them you'd be late. Hang loose."
A few minutes later I watched him drive his U.S. government motor pool car up my front lane. He closed his car door and stepped around the mud puddles in the yard. His loafers were shined, his seersucker slacks ironed with knife-edge creases, his handsome blond face gleaming with the closeness of his shave. He wore his polished brown belt high up on his waist, which made him look even taller than he was.
"Have you got another cup of coffee?" he said.
"What is it you want, Minos?" I held the screen open for him, but I imagine my face and tone were not hospitable.
He stepped inside and looked at Alafair's coloring book on the floor.
"Maybe I don't want anything. Maybe I want to help you," he said. "Why don't you try not to be so sensitive all the time? Every time I talk with you, you're bent out of joint about something."
"You're in my house. You're running on my meter. You haven't given me any help, either. Cut the bullshit."
"All right, you've got a legitimate beef. I told you we'd handle the action. We didn't. That's the way it goes sometimes. You know that. You want me to catch air?"
"Come on in the kitchen. I'm going to fix some Grape-Nuts and strawberries. You want some?"
"That sounds nice."
I poured him a cup of coffee and hot milk at the kitchen table. The light was blue in the backyard.
"I didn't talk to you at the funeral. I'm not good at condolences. But I wanted to tell you I was sorry," he said.
"I didn't see you there."
"I didn't go to the cemetery. I figure that's for family. I think you're a stand-up guy."
I filled two bowls with Grape-Nuts, strawberries, and sliced bananas, and set them on the table. He put a big spoonful in his mouth, the milk dripping from his lips. The overhead light reflected off his crewcut scalp.
"That's righteous, brother," he said.
"Why am I late to work this morning?" I sat down at the table with him.
"One of those shells you picked up had a beautiful thumbprint on it. Guess who New Orleans P.D. matched it with?"
"You tell me, Minos."
"Victor Romero is shooting at you, podna. I'm surprised he didn't get you, too. He was a sniper in Vietnam. I hear you shot the shit out of his car."
"How do you know New Orleans matched his print? I haven't even heard that."
"We had a claim on him a long time before you did. The city coordinates with us anytime his name pops up."
"I want you to tell me something, with no bullshit. Do you think the government can be involved in this?"
"Be serious."
"You want me to say it again?"
"You're a good cop. Don't fall for those conspiracy fantasies. They're out of style," he said.
"I went down to Immigration in New Orleans. That fellow Monroe is having some problems with personal guilt."
"What did he tell you?" His eyes were looking at me with new interest.
"He's one of those guys who wants to feel better. I didn't let him."
"You mean you actually think somebody in the government, the INS, wants you hit?"
"I don't know. But no matter how you cut it, right now they've got shit on their noses."
"Look, the government doesn't knock off its own citizens. You're sidetracking into a lot of claptrap that's not going to lead you anywhere."
"Yeah? Try this. What kind of Americans do you think the government uses down in Central America? Boy Scouts? Guys like yourself?"
"That's not here."
"Victor Romero sure is."
He let out his breath.
"All right, maybe we can stick it to them," he said.
"When's the last time you heard of the feds dropping the dime on each other? You're a laugh a minute, Minos. Finish your cereal."
"Always the PR man," he said.
That afternoon the street was filled with hot sunshine when Cecil Aguillard and I parked our car in front of the poolroom on Main in New Iberia. Some college boys from Lafayette had pried the rubber machine off the wall of the men's room and had taken it out the back door.
"They ain't got rubbers in Lafayette? Why they got to steal mine?" said Tee Neg, the owner. He stood behind the bar, pointing his hand with the three missing fingers at me. The wood-bladed fans turned overhead, and I could smell boudin and gumbo in the kitchen. Several elderly men were drinking draft beer and playing bourée at the felt tables in back. "They teach them that in col'ech? What I'm gonna do a man come in here for his rubber?"
"Tell them to take up celibacy," I said.
Tee Neg's mouth was round with surprise and insult.
"Mais I don't talk that, me. What's the matter you say something like that to Tee Neg? I think you gone crazy, Dave."
I walked out of the coolness of the poolroom into the hot sunlight to find Cecil, who had gone next door to get a description of the college boys' car. Just then a cream-colored Oldsmobile with tinted windows pulled out of the traffic. The driver didn't try to park; he simply stopped the car at an angle to the curb, dropped the transmission into neutral, flung open the door, and stepped onto the street with the engine still running. His hair was brushed with butch wax, his skin tanned as dark as a quadroon's. He wore expensive gray slacks, loafers with tassels, a pink polo shirt; but his narrow hips, wide shoulders, and boilerplate stomach made his clothes look like an unnecessary accident on his body. The wide-set, gray-blue eyes were round and staring and showed no expression, but the skin of his face was stretched so tight there were nests of fine white lines below his temples.
"What's happening, Bubba?" I said.
His fist shot out from his side, caught me squarely on the chin, and knocked me back through the open door of the poolroom. My clipboard clattered to the floor, I tried to catch myself against the wall, and then I saw him come flailing toward me out of the bright square of sunlight. I took two off the side of the head, ducked into a crouch, and smelled his cologne and sweat and heard his breath go out between his teeth as he missed with a roundhouse. I had forgotten how hard Bubba could hit. He rose on the balls of his feet with each punch, his muscular thighs and buttocks flexing like iron against his slacks. He never defended; he always attacked, swinging at the eyes and nose with such a vicious energy that you knew that once you were hurt he wouldn't stop until he had chopped your face into raw pork.
But I still had the reach on him, and I jabbed him in the eye with my left, saw his head come erect with the shock of the blow, and then I caught him flat on the jaw with a right cross. He reeled backwards and knocked over a brass cuspidor that rolled wetly across the floor. There was a red circle around his right eye, and I could see my knuckle marks on his cheek. He spit on the floor and hitched his slacks up on his navel with his thumb.
"If that's your best shot, your ass is glue," he said.
Suddenly Cecil burst through the doorway, his jaw filled with Red Man, his baton and handcuffs clattering on his pistol belt, and picked up Bubba from behind, pinning his arms to his sides, and threw him headlong onto a bourée table and circle of chairs.
Bubba got to his feet, his slacks stained with tobacco juice, and I saw Cecil slip his baton out of its plastic ring and grip it tightly around the handle.
"You turning candy-ass on me, Dave?" Bubba said.
"How you like I break your face?" Cecil said.
"You were messing with Claudette. Don't lie about it, either, you sonofabitch. Keep Bruno on his chain, and I'll put out your lamp."
"You're a dumb guy, Bubba."
"So I didn't get to go to college like you. You want to finish it or not?"
"You're busted. Turn around and put your hands on the table."
"Fuck you. I'll put that deputy's badge up your butt."
Cecil started toward him, but I motioned him back. I grabbed Bubba's arm, which was as hard as a cedar post in my hand, and spun him toward the table.
Vanity, vanity.
His torso turned back toward me as though it were powered by an overstressed spring, his fist lifting into my face like a balloon. His eyes were almost crossed with the force he put into his blow. But he was off balance, and I bobbed sideways, felt his knuckles rake across the top of my ear, then drove my right fist as hard as I could into his mouth. Spittle flew from his lips, his eyes snapped open wide, his nostrils flared white with pain and shock. I caught him again with my left, above the eye, then swung under his guard into his ribcage, right below the heart. He doubled over and fell back against the bar and had to hold on to the mahogany trim to keep from going down.
I was breathless, and my face felt numb and thick where he had hit me. I pulled my handcuffs loose from the back of my belt. I snapped one cuff over Bubba's wrist, then pulled his other arm behind him and locked on the second cuff. I sat him down in a chair while he hung his head forward and spit a string of bloody saliva between his knees.
"You want to go to the hospital?" I asked.
He was grinning, with a crazy light in his eyes. There was a red smear, like lipstick, on his teeth.
"Brasse ma chu, Dave," he said.
"You going to cuss me because you lost a fight?" I said. "You've got more class than that, Bubba. Do you want to go to the hospital or not?"
"Hey, Tee Neg," he said to the owner. "Give everybody a round. Put it on my tab."
"You ain't got a tab," Tee Neg said. "You ain't getting one, either."
Cecil walked Bubba out to the car and locked him in behind the wire screen. Green flecks of sawdust from the poolroom floor were stuck to the butch wax in his hair. Through the car window he looked like a caged animal. Cecil started the engine.
"Drive over into the park for a minute," I said.
"What for?" Cecil asked.
"We're in no hurry. It's a nice day. Let's have a spearmint snowcone."
We crossed the drawbridge over Bayou Teche. The water was brown and high, and dragonflies flicked over the lily pads in the sunlight. Close along the banks I could see the armored backs of cars turning in the shade of the cypress trees. We drove through the oak-lined streets into the park, passed the swimming pool, and stopped behind the baseball bleachers. I gave Cecil two one-dollar bills.
"How about getting us three cones?" I said.
"Dave, that man belong in jail, not eating snowcones in the park, no," he said.
"It's something personal between me and Bubba, Cecil. I'm going to ask you to respect that."
"He's a pimp. He don't deserve no slack."
"Maybe not, partner. But it's my collar." I winked at him and grinned.
He didn't like it, but he walked away through the trees toward the concession stand by the swimming pool. I could see kids springing off the diving board into the sunlit blue water.
"Do you really think I was messing around with your wife?" I asked Bubba through the wire-mesh screen.
"What the fuck do you call it?"
"Clean the shit out of your mouth and answer me straight."
"She knows how to get a guy on the bone."
"You're talking about your wife."
"So? She's human."
"Don't you know when you're being jerked around? You're supposed to be a smart man."
"You thought about it when she was in your truck, though, didn't you?" he said, and smiled. His teeth were still pink with his blood. His arms were pulled behind him by the handcuffs, and his chest looked as round and hard as a small barrel. "She just likes to flash her bread around sometimes. They all do. That doesn't mean you get to unzip your pants.
"Hey, tell me the truth, I really shook your peaches with that first shot, didn't I?"
"I'm going to tell you something, Bubba. I don't want you to take it the wrong way, either. Go to a psychiatrist. You're a rich man, you can afford it. You'll understand people better, you'll learn about yourself."
"I bet I pay my gardener more than you make. Does that say something?"
"You're not a good listener. You never were. That's why one day you're going to take a big fall."
I got out of the car and opened his door.
"What are you doing?" he said.
"Step out."
I put one hand under his arm and helped him off the seat.
"Turn around," I said.
"What's the game?"
"No game. I'm cutting you loose."
I unlocked the cuffs. He rubbed his wrists with his hands. In the shade, the pupils of his gray-blue eyes stared at me like burnt cinders.
"I figure what happened at Tee Neg's was personal. So this time you walk. If you come at me again, you're going up the road."
"Sounds like a Dick Tracy routine to me."
"I don't know why, but I have a strong feeling you're a man without a future."
"Yeah?"
"They're going to eat your lunch."
"Who's this 'they' you're talking about?"
"The feds, us, your own kind. It'll happen one day when you never expect it. Just like when Eddie Keats set one of your hookers on fire. She was probably thinking about a vacation in the Islands when he knocked on her door with a smile on his face."
"I've had cops give me that shuck before. It always comes from the same kind of guys. They got no case, no evidence, no witness, so they make a lot of noise that's supposed to scare everybody. But you know what their real problem is? They wear J. C. Higgins suits, they drive shit machines, they live in little boxes out by an airport. Then they see a guy that's got all the things they want and can't have because most of them are so dumb they'd fuck up a wet dream, so they get a big hard-on for this guy and talk a lot of trash about somebody cooling out his action. So I'll tell you what I tell these other guys. I'll be around to drink a beer and piss it on your grave."
He took a stick of gum out of his pocket, peeled off the foil, dropped it on the ground, and fed the gum into his mouth while he looked me in the eyes.
"You through with me?" he asked.
"Yep."
"By the way, I got drunk last night, so don't buy yourself any boxing trophies yet."
"I gave up keeping score a long time ago. It comes with maturity."
"Yeah? Tell yourself that the next time you look at your bank account. I owe you one for cutting me loose. Buy yourself something nice and send me the bill. I'll see you around."
"Don't misunderstand the gesture. If I find out you're connected to my wife's death, God help you, Bubba."
He chewed his gum, looked off at the swimming pool as though he were preparing to answer, but instead walked away through the oak trees, the soles of his loafers loud on the crisp, dead leaves. Then he stopped and turned around.
"Hey, Dave, when I straighten out a problem, the person gets to see this face. You give that some thought."
He walked on farther, then turned again, his spiked hair and tan face mottled with sun and shadow.
"Hey, you remember when we used to play ball here and yell at each other, 'I got your Dreamsicle hanging'?" he said, grinning, and grabbed his phallus through his slacks. "Those were the days, podna."
I bought a small bag of crushed ice, took it back to the office with me, and let it melt in a cleanplastic bucket. Every fifteen minutes I soaked a towel in the cold water and kept it pressed to my face while I counted to sixty. It wasn't the most pleasant way to spend the afternoon, but it beat waking up the next day with a face that looked like a lopsided plum.
Then, just before quitting time, I sat at my desk in my small office, while the late sun beat down on the sugarcane filds across the road, and looked once again at the file the New Orleans police department had sent us on Victor Romero. In his front and side mug shots his black curls hung down on his forehead and ears. As in all police station photography, the black-and-white contrast was severe. His hair glistened as though it were oiled; his skin was the color of bone; his unshaved cheeks and chin looked touched with soot.
His criminal career wasn't a distinguished one. He had four misdemeanor arrests, including one for contributing to prostitution; he had done one hundred eighty days in the parish jail for possession of burglar tools; he had an outstanding bench warrant for failing to appear on a DWI charge. But contrary to popular belief, a rap sheet often tells little about a suspect. It records only the crimes he was charged with, not the hundreds he may have committed. It also offers no explanation of what goes on in the mind of a man like Victor Romero.
His eyes had no expression in the photographs. He could have been waiting for a bus when the camera lens clicked. Was this the man who had murdered Annie with a shotgun, who had fired point-blank at her with buckshot while she creamed and tried to hide her face behind her arms? Was he made up of the same corpuscle, sinew, and marrow as I? Or was his brain taken hot from a furnace, his parts hammered together in a shower of sparks on a devil's anvil?
Next morning the call came in from the St. Martin Parish's Sheriff's office. A black man, fishing in his pirogue by the Henderson levee, had looked down into the water and seen a submerged automobile. A police diver had just gone down on it. The automobile was a maroon Toyota and the driver was still in it. The parish coroner and a tow truck were on their way from St. Martinville.
I called Minos at the DEA in Lafayette and told him to meet me there.
"This impresses me," he said. "It's professional, it's cooperative. Who said you guys were rural bumblers?"
"Put the cork in it, Minos."
Twenty minutes later, Cecil and I were at the levee on the edge of the Atchafalaya swamp. It was already hot, the sun shimmered on the vast expanse of water, and the islands of willow trees looked still and green in the heat. Late-morning fishermen were trying for bluegill and goggle-eye in the pilings of the oil platforms that dotted the bays or in the shade of the long concrete causeway that spanned the entire marsh. Turkey buzzards floated high on the updrafts against the white sky. I could smell dead fish in the lily pads and cattails that grew along the shore. Farther out from the bank, the black heads of water moccasins stuck out of the water like motionless twigs.
The ground had been wet when the car went off the crown of the levee. The tire tracks ran down at an angle through the grass and buttercups, cut deeply through a slough, and disappeared in the slit beyond a deep-water dropoff. The tow-truck driver, a sweating, barrel-chested man in Levi's with no shirt, fed the hook and cable off the truck to the police driver, who stood in the shallows in a bright yellow bikini with a mask and snorkel strapped to his face. Under the rippling sunlight on the water, I could see the dim outline of the Toyota.
Minos parked his car and walked down the levee just as the tow-truck driver engaged his winch and the cable clanged taut against the Toyota's frame.
"What do you figure happened?" Minos said.
"You got me."
"You think you parked one in him, after all?"
"Who knows? Even if I did, why would he drive out here?"
"Maybe he went away to die. Even a piece of shit like this guy probably knows that's one thing you got to do by yourself."
He saw me look at the side of his face. He bit off a hangnail, spit it off the end of his tongue, and looked at the wrecker cable quivering against the surface of the water.
"Sorry," he said.
A cloud of yellow sand mushroomed under the water, and suddenly the rear end of the Toyota burst through a tangle of lily pads and uprooted cattails into the sunlight. The tow-truck driver dragged the car clear of the water's edge and bounced it on the bank, the broken back window gaping like a ragged mouth. Two St. Martin Parish sheriff's deputies opened the side doors, and a flood of water, silt, moss, yellowed vegetation, and fish-eels cascaded out on the ground. The eels were long and fat, with bright silver scales and red gills, and they writhed and snapped among the buttercups like tangles of snakes. The man in the front seat had fallen sideways so that his head hung out the passenger's door. His head was strung with dead vines and covered with mud and leeches. Minos tried to see over my shoulder as I looked down at the dead man.
"Jesus Christ, half his face is eaten off," he said.
"Yep."
"Well, maybe Victor wanted to be part of the bayou country."
"It's not Victor Romero," I said. "It's Eddie Keats."