The sheriff called me personally at 5 a.m. the next morning so there would be no mistake about my status with the department: I was suspended without pay. Indefinitely.
It was 7 a.m. and already hot and muggy when Rosie Gomez and I pulled up in front of Red's Bar in her automobile. The white Buick was still parked across the street. The bar was locked, the blinds closed, the silver sides of the house-trailer entrance creaking with heat.
We walked back and forth in front of the building, feeling dents in the tin, scanning the improvised rain gutters, even studying the woodwork inside the door jamb.
"Could the bullets have struck a car or the pickup truck you took cover behind?" she said.
"Maybe. But I didn't hear them."
She put her hands on her hips and let her eyes rove over the front of the bar again. Then she lifted her hair off the back of her neck. There was a sheen of sweat above the collar of her blouse.
"Well, let's take a look at the Buick before they tow it out of here," she said.
"I really appreciate your doing this, Rosie."
"You'd do the same for me, wouldn't you?"
"Who knows?"
"Yeah, you would." She punched me on the arm with her little fist.
We walked across the dirt street to the Buick. On the other side of the vacant lot I could hear freight cars knocking together. I opened all four doors of the Buick and began throwing out the floor mats, tearing up the carpet, raking trash out from under the seats while Rosie hunted in the grass along the rain ditch.
Nothing.
I sat on the edge of the backseat and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. I felt tired all over and my hands were stiff and hard to open and close. In fact, I felt just like I had a hangover. I couldn't keep my thoughts straight, and torn pieces of color kept floating behind my eyes.
"Dave, listen to me," she said. "What you say happened is what happened. Otherwise you would have taken up your friend on his offer."
"Maybe I should have."
"You're not that kind of cop. You never will be, either."
I didn't answer.
"What'd your friend call it?" she asked.
"A 'throw-down.' Sometimes cops call it a 'drop.' It's usually a.22 or some other piece of junk with the registration numbers filed off." I got up off the seat and popped the trunk. Inside, I found a jack handle. I drove the tapered end into the inside panel of the back door on the driver's side.
"What are you doing?" Rosie said.
I ripped the paneling away to expose the sliding frame and mechanism on which the window glass had been mounted.
"Let me show you something," I said and did the same to the inside panel on the driver's door. "See, both windows on this side of the car were rolled partially up. That's why my first rounds blew glass all over the place."
"Yes?"
"Why would the shooter try to fire through a partially opened window?"
"Good question."
I walked around to the passenger side of the Buick. The carpet had a dried brown stain in it, and a roach as long and thick as my thumb was crawling across the stiffened fibers.
"But this window is all the way down," I said. "That doesn't make any sense. It had already started to rain. Why would this woman sit by an open window in the rain, particularly in the passenger seat of her own car?"
"It's registered to Amber Martinez?"
"That's right. According to Lou Girard, she was a hooker trying to get out of the life. She also did speedballs and was ninety pounds soaking wet. Does that sound like a hit artist to you?"
"Then why was she in the car? What was she doing here?"
"I don't know."
"What did the homicide investigator have to say last night?"
"He said, 'A.45 sure does leave a hole, don't it?' "
"What else?"
"He said, 'Did you have to come over to Lafayette to fall in the shithouse?' "
"Look at me," she said.
"What?"
"How much sleep did you get last night?"
"Two or three hours."
I threw the tire iron on the front seat of the Buick.
"What do you feel now?" she said.
"What do you mean?" I was surprised at the level of irritation in my voice.
"You know what I mean."
My eyes burned and filmed in the haze. I saw the three oaks in the vacant lot go out of focus, as though I were looking at them inside a drop of water.
"Everyone thinks I killed an unarmed woman. What do you think I feel?" I said. I had to swallow when I said it.
"It was a setup, Dave. We both know it."
"If it was, what happened to the gun? Why aren't there any holes in the bar?"
"Because the guy behind this is one smart perp. He got a woman, probably a chippy, to make calls to your dispatcher to give the impression your fly was open, then he got you out of your jurisdiction and involved you in another hooker's death. I think this guy's probably a master at control."
"Somehow that doesn't make me feel a lot better, Rosie."
I looked at the stain on the Buick's carpet. The heat was rising from the ground now and I thought I could smell a salty odor like dead fish. I closed the passenger door.
"I really walked into it, didn't I?" I said.
"Don't worry, we're going to bust the guy behind this and lose the key on him." Her eyes smiled, then she winked at me.
I had brought a garden rake from home. I took it out of Rosie's car and combed a pile of mud and soggy weeds from the bottom of the ditch next to the Buick. Then Rosie said, "Dave, come over here and look at this."
She stood next to the vegetable patch that was located on the edge of the vacant lot. She pointed at the ground.
"Look at the footprints," she said. "Somebody ran through the garden. He broke down the tomato stakes."
The footprints were deep and wide-spaced in the soft earth. The person had been moving away from the street toward the three oak trees in the center of the lot. Some of the tomato and eggplant bushes were crushed down flat in the rows.
A wrecker came around the corner with two men in it and stopped behind the Buick. The driver got out and began hooking up the rear end of the Buick. A middle-aged plain-clothes detective in short sleeves with his badge on his belt got out with him. His name was Doobie Patout, a wizened and xenophobic man, with faded blue tattoos on his forearms; some people believed he'd once been the official executioner at Angola.
He didn't speak. He simply stared through the heat at me and Rosie.
"What's happening, Doobie?" I said.
"What y'all doin' out here?" he said.
"Looking for a murder weapon," I said.
"I heard you were suspended."
"Word gets around."
"You're not supposed to be messin' 'round the crime scene."
"I'm really just an observer."
"Who's she?" He raised one finger in Rosie's direction.
"Special Agent Gomez," Rosie said. "This is part of an FBI investigation. Do you have a problem with that?"
"You got to coordinate with the city," he said.
"No, I don't," she said.
The driver of the wrecker began winching the Buick's weight off its back wheels.
"I wouldn't hang around here if I was you," Doobie said to me.
"Why not?" Rosie said.
"Because he don't have legal authority here. Because he made a mistake and nobody here'll probably hold it against him. Why piss people off, Robicheaux?"
"What are you saying, Doobie?"
"So you got to go up against Internal Affairs in your own department. That don't mean you're gonna get indicted in Lafayette Parish. Why put dog shit on a stick and hold it under somebody's nose?"
Behind us, an elderly fat mulatto woman in a print dress came out on her porch and began gesturing at us. Doobie Patout glanced at her, then opened the passenger door to the wrecker and paused before getting in.
"Y'all can rake spinach out of that ditch all you want," he said. "I ran a metal detector over it last night. There's no gun in it. So don't go back to New Iberia and be tellin' people you got a bad shake over here."
"Y'all gonna do somet'ing 'bout my garden, you?" the woman shouted off the porch.
The wrecker drove off with the Buick wobbling on the winch cable behind it. At the corner the wrecker turned and a hubcap popped off the Buick and bounced on its own course down the empty dirt road.
"My, what a nasty little man," Rosie said.
I looked back at the footprints in the vegetable patch. They exited in the Johnson grass and disappeared completely. We walked into the shade of the oaks and looked back at the road, the bits of broken glass that glinted in the dirt, the brilliant glare of sunlight on the white shell parking lot. I felt a weariness that I couldn't find words for.
"Let's talk to some of the neighbors, then pack it in," I said.
We didn't have to go far. The elderly woman whom we had been ignoring labored down her porch steps with a cane and came toward us like a determined crab. Her legs were bowed and popping with varicose veins, her body ringed with fat, her skin gold and hairless, her turquoise eyes alive with indignation.
"Where that other one gone?" she said.
"Which one?" I said.
"That policeman you was talkin' to."
"He went back to his office."
"Who gonna pay for my li'l garden?" she asked. "What I gone do wit' them smush tomato? What I gone do wit' them smush eggplant, me?"
"Did you see something last night, auntie?" I said.
"You ax me what I seen? Go look my li'l garden. You got eyes, you?"
"No, I mean did you see the shooting last night?"
"I was in the bat'room, me."
"You didn't see anything?" Rosie said.
The woman jabbed at a ruined eggplant with her cane.
"I seen that. That look like a duck egg to you? They don't talk English where y'all come from?"
"Did you see a woman in a white car outside your house?" I said.
"I seen her. They put her in an ambulance. She was dead."
"I see," I said.
"What you gone do 'bout my garden?"
"I'm afraid I can't do anything," I said.
"He can put his big feet all over my plants and I cain't do nothin' 'bout it?"
"Who?" I said.
"The man that run past my bat'room. I just tole you. You hard of hearin' just like you hard of seein'? I got up to go to the bat'room."
My head was swimming.
"Listen, auntie, this is very important," I said. "You're telling me you saw a man run past your window?"
"That's right. I seen him smush my li'l plants, break down my tomato pole, keep on runnin' right out yonder t'rough them tree, right on 'cross the tracks till he was gone. I seen the light on that li'l gun in his hand, too."
Rosie and I looked at each other.
"Can you describe this fellow, auntie?" I said.
"Yeah, he's a white man who don't care where he put his big muddy feet."
"Did the gun look like this one?" Rosie said, opened her purse, and lifted out her.357 magnum.
"No, it mo' li'l than that."
"Why didn't you tell this to the police last night?" I asked.
"I tole them. I be talkin' and they be carryin' on with each other like I ain't here, like I some old woman just in they way. It ain't changed, no."
"What hasn't?" I said.
"When the last time white people 'round here ax us what we t'ink about anyt'ing? Ain't nobody ax me if I want that juke 'cross from my li'l house, no. Ain't nobody worried 'bout my li'l garden. Black folk still black folk, livin' out here without no pave, with dust blowin' off the road t'rough my screens. Don't be pretendin' like it ain't so."
"You've helped us a great deal, auntie," I said.
She leaned over on her cane, wrapped a tangle of destroyed tomato vines around her hand, and flung them out into the grass. Then she began walking back toward her porch, the folds of skin in her neck and shoulders creasing like soft tallow.
"Would you mind if we came to see you again?" I asked
"Waste mo' of my day, play like you care what happen down here on the dirt road? Why you ax me? You comin' when you want, anyway, ain't you?"
Her buttocks swelled like an elephant's against her dress when she worked her way up the steps. On the way out of town we stopped at a nursery and I paid cash to have a dozen tomato plants delivered to her address.
"Not smart giving anything to a potential witness, Slick," Rosie said when we were back on the highway.
"You're used to operating in the normal world, Rosie. Did you hear what Doobie Patout said? Lafayette Homicide has given that girl's death the priority of a hangnail. Welcome to the New South."
When I got back home I turned on the window fan in the bedroom, undressed, and lay down on top of the sheets with my arm across my eyes. The curtains, which were printed with small pink flowers, lifted and fell in the warm breeze, and I could hear Tripod running back and forth on his chain in the dead leaves under the pecan trees.
In my sleep I thought I could feel the.45 jumping in my palm, the slide slamming down on a fresh cartridge, the recoil climbing up my forearm like the reverberation from a jackhammer. Then, as though in slow motion, I saw a woman's face bursting apart; a small black hole appeared right below the mouth, then the fragile bone structure caved in upon itself, like a rubber mask collapsing, and the back of her head suddenly erupted in a bloody mist.
I wanted to wake from my dream, force myself even inside my sleep to realize that it was indeed only a dream, but instead the images changed and I heard the ragged popping of small-arms and saw the border of a hardwood forest in autumn, the leaves painted with fire, and a contingent of Confederate infantry retreating into it.
No, I didn't simply see them; I was in their midst, under fire with them, my throat burning with the same thirst, my hands trembling as I tried to reload my weapon, my skin twitching as though someone were about to peel it away in strips. I heard a toppling round throp close to my ear and whine away deep in the woods, saw the long scarlet streaks in the leaves where the wounded had been dragged behind tree trunks, and was secretly glad that someone else, not me, had crumpled to his knees, had cried out for his mother, had tried futilely to press his blue nest of entrails back inside his stomach.
The enemy advanced across an open field out of their own cannon smoke, their bayonets fixed, their artillery arching over their heads and exploding behind us in columns of dirt and flame. The light was as soft and golden as the season, but the air inside the woods was stifling, filled with dust and particles o'f leaves, the smell of cordite and bandages black with gangrene, the raw odor of blood.
Then I knew, even in sleep, what the dream meant. I could see the faces of the enemy now, hear the rattle of their equipment, their officers yelling, "Form up, boys, form up!" They were young, frightened, unknowledgeable of politics or economics, trembling as much as I was, their mouths too dry now even to pray, their sweaty palms locked on the stocks of their rifles. But I didn't care about their innocence, their beardless faces, the crimson flowers that burst from their young breasts. I just wanted to live. I wanted every round we fired to find a target, to buckle bone, to shatter lungs and explode the heart; I wanted their ranks to dissolve into a cacophony of sorrow.
My head jerked erect on the pillow. The room was hot and close and motes of dust spun in the columns of weak light that shone through the curtains. My breath rasped in my throat, and my chest and stomach were slick with perspiration.
The general sat in a straight-backed chair by the foot of my bed, with his campaign hat resting on one knee. His beard was trimmed and he wore a brushed gray coat with a high gold collar. He was gazing out the window at the shifting patterns of light made by the pecan and oak trees.
"You!" I said.
"I hope you don't mind my being here."
"No, I-you simply surprised me."
"You shouldn't have remorse about the kinds of feelings you just experienced, Mr. Robicheaux. A desire to live doesn't mean you lack humanity."
"I opened up on the Buick too soon. I let off the whole magazine without seeing what I was shooting at."
"You thought your life was at risk, suh. What were you supposed to do?"
"They say I killed an unarmed woman, general."
"Yes, I think that would probably trouble me, too." He turned his hat in a circle on his knee. "I have the impression that you were very fond of your father, the trapper."
"Excuse me?"
"Didn't he once tell you that if everyone agrees on something, it's probably wrong?"
"Those were his words."
"Then why not give them some thought?"
"General, somebody has done a serious mind fuck on me. I can't trust what I see or hear anymore."
"I'm sorry. Someone has done what?"
"It's the same kind of feeling I had once in Golden Gloves. A guy hooked me after the bell, hard, right behind the ear. For two or three days I felt like something was torn loose from the bone, like my brain was floating in ajar."
"Be brave."
"I see that woman, the back of her head… Her hair was glued to the carpet with her own blood."
"Think about what you just said."
"What?"
"You're a good police officer, an intelligent man. What does your eye tell you?"
"I need some help, general."
"You belong to the quick, you wake in the morning to the smell of flowers, a woman responds to the touch of your fingers, and you ask help of the dead, suh?"
He lifted himself to his feet with his crutch.
"I didn't mean to offend you," I said.
"In your dream you saw us retreating into a woods and you saw the long blue line advancing out of the smoke in the field, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Were you afraid?"
"Yes."
"Because you thought time had run out for you, didn't you?"
"Yes, I knew it had."
"We should have died there but we held them. Our thirst was terrible. We drank rainwater from the hoof prints of livestock. Then that night we tied sticks in the mouths of our wounded so they wouldn't cry out while we slipped out of the woods and joined the rest of our boys."
The wind began blowing hard in the trees outside the window. Last fall's leaves swirled off the ground and blew against the house.
"I sense resentment in you," he said.
"I already paid my dues. I don't want-"
"You don't want what?" He pared a piece of dirt from under his fingernail.
"To be the only man under a flag."
"Ah, we never quit paying dues, my friend. I must be going now. The wind's out of the south. There'll be thunder by this afternoon. I always have a hard time distinguishing it from Yankee cannon."
He made a clucking sound with his tongue, fitted his campaign hat on his head, took up his crutch, and walked through the blades of the window fan into a spinning vortex of gold and scarlet leaves.
When I finally woke from my sleep in midafternoon, like rising from the warm stickiness of an opium dream, I saw Alafair watching me through the partly opened bedroom door. Her lips were parted silently, her round, tan face wan with incomprehension. The sheets were moist and tangled around my legs. I tried to smile.
"You okay, Dave?"
"Yeah, I'm fine."
"You were having a dream. You were making all kinds of sounds."
"It's probably not too good to sleep in the daytime, little guy."
"You got malaria again?"
"No, it doesn't bother me much anymore."
She walked into the room and placed one hand on the bedstead. She looked at the floor.
"What's the matter, Alf?" I said.
"I went to the grocery down at the four-corners with Bootsie. A man had the newspaper open on the counter and was reading something out loud. A lady saw us and touched the man on the arm. Then both of them just stared at us. Bootsie gave them a real mean look."
"What was the man saying?"
"A lady got shot." Her palm was cupped tightly on the knob of the bedstead. She stared at the floor, and there were small white discolorations in her cheeks like slivers of ice. "He said you shot the lady. You shot the lady, Dave."
I sat up on the edge of the bed.
"I had some trouble last night, Alafair. Somebody fired a pistol at me and I shot back. I'm not sure who fired at me or what this lady was doing there. But the situation is a lot more complex than maybe some people think. The truth can be real hard to discover sometimes, little guy."
"Did you do what they say, Dave?" I could see the shine of fear in her brown eyes.
"I don't know. But I never shot at anybody who didn't try to hurt me first. You have to believe me on that, Alf. I'm not sure what happened last night, but sooner or later I probably will. In the meantime, guys like you and me and Bootsie have to be standup and believe in each other."
I brushed her bangs away from her eyes. She looked for a long time at the whirling blades of the window fan and the shadows they made on the bed.
"They don't have any right," she said.
"Who?"
"Those people. They don't have the right to talk about you like that."
"They have the right to read what's in the newspaper, don't they?"
"The lady at the counter was saying something just before we walked in. I heard her through the screen. She said, 'If he's gone back to drinking, it don't surprise me he done that, no.' That's when the man started reading out loud from the newspaper."
I picked her up by the waist and sat her on the bed. Her muscular body felt as compact as a small log.
"Look, little guy," I said, "drinking isn't part of my life anymore. I gave it to my Higher Power." I stroked her hair and saw a smile begin to grow at the edge of her mouth and eyes.
"Dave?"
"What?"
"What's it mean when you say somebody's got to be standup?"
"No matter what the other side does to you, you grin and walk through the cannon smoke. It drives them crazy."
She was grinning broadly now, her wide-set teeth white in the shadows of the room.
"Where's Bootsie?" I asked.
"Fixing supper."
"What are we having?"
"Sac-a-lait and dirty rice."
"Did you know they run freight trains on that in Louisiana?"
She started bouncing on the edge of the bed, then my words sank in. "What? Freight… what?" she said.
"Let me get dressed, little guy, then we'll check out the food situation."
My explanation to Alafair was the best I could offer, but the truth was I needed to get to an AA meeting. Since the night I had seen the general and his soldiers in the mist, I had talked once over the phone to my AA sponsor but had not attended a meeting, which was the place I needed to be most. What might be considered irrational, abnormal, aberrant, ludicrous, illogical, bizarre, schizoid, or schizophrenic to earth people (which is what AAs call non-alcoholics) is usually considered fairly normal by AA members.
The popular notion exists that Catholic priests become privy to the darkest corners of man's soul in the confessional. The truth is otherwise. Any candid Catholic minister will tell you that most people's confessions cause eye-crossing boredom in the confessor, and the average weekly penitent usually owns up to a level of moral failure on par with unpaid parking violations and overdue library books.
But at AA meetings, I've heard it all at one time or another: extortion, theft, forgery, armed robbery, child molestation, sodomy with animals, arson, prostitution, vehicular homicide, and the murder of prisoners and civilians in Vietnam.
I went to an afternoon meeting on the second floor of an Episcopalian church. I knew almost everyone there: a few housewives, a black man who ran a tree nursery, a Catholic nun, an ex-con bartender named Tee Neg who was also my sponsor, a woman who used to hook in the Column Hotel Bar in Lafayette, a psychologist, a bakery owner, a freight conductor on the Southern Pacific, and a man who was once a famous aerialist with Ringling Brothers.
I told them the whole story about my psycho-historical encounters and left nothing out. I told them about the electricity that snapped and flickered like serpents' tongues in the mist, my conversations with the general, even the unwashed odor that rose from his clothes, the wounds in his men that maggots had eaten as slick as spoons.
As is usual with one's dramatic or surreal revelations at an AA meeting, the response was somewhat humbling. They listened attentively, their eyes sympathetic and good-natured, but a number of the people there at one time or another had ripped out their own wiring, thought they had gone to hell without dying, tried to kill themselves, or been one step away from frontal lobotomies.
When I had finished, the leader of the meeting, a pipeline welder, said, "Damn, Dave, that's the best endorsement of Dr Pepper I ever heard. You ought to call up them sonsof-bitches and get that one on TV."
Then everyone laughed and the world didn't seem so bad after all.
When I left the meeting I bought a spearmint snowball in the city park on Bayou Teche and used the outdoor pay phone by the recreation building. Through the moss-hung oak trees I could see kids diving into the public pool, their tan bodies glistening with water in the hot sunlight.
It took a couple of minutes to get the Lafayette coroner on the line. He was a hard-nosed choleric pathologist named Sol lie Rothberg, whom cops quickly learned to treat diplomatically.
"I wondered what you had on the Amber Martinez shooting," I said.
I could hear the long-distance wires humming in the receiver.
"Robicheaux?" he said.
"That's right."
"Why are you calling me?"
"I just told you."
"It's my understanding you're suspended."
"So what? Your medical findings are a matter of public record, aren't they?"
"When they become public they are. Right now they aren't public."
"Come on, Sollie. Somebody's trying to deep-fry my cojones in a skillet."
In my mind's eye I could see him idly throwing paper clips at his wastebasket.
"What's the big mystery I can clear up for you?" he said.
"What caliber weapon killed her?"
"From the size of the wound and the impact of the round, I'd say a.45."
"What do you mean 'size'?"
"Just what I said."
"What about the round?"
"It passed through her. There wasn't much to recover. It was a clean exit wound."
"It was a copper-jacketed round?"
"That's my opinion. In fact, I know it was. The exit hole wasn't much larger in diameter than the entry."
I closed and opened my eyes. I could feel my heart beating in my chest.
"You there?" he said.
"Yes."
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing, Sollie. I use hollow-points."
I could hear birds singing in the trees, and the surface of the swimming pool seemed to be dancing with turquoise light.
"Anything else?" he asked.
"Yeah, time of death."
"You're crowding me."
"Sollie, I keep seeing the back of her head. Her hair had stuck to the carpet. The blood had already dried, hadn't it?"
"I can't tell you about that because I wasn't there."
"Come on, you know what I'm asking you."
"Did she die earlier, you want to know?"
"Look, partner, you're my lifeline. Don't be jerking me around."
"How about I go you one better? Did she die in that car, you want to ask me?"
I had learned long ago not to interfere with or challenge Sollie's moods, intentions, or syntax.
"It's gravity," he said. "The earth's always pulling on us, trying to suck us into the ground."
"What?"
"It's what the shooter didn't think about," he said. "Blood's just like anything else. It goes straight down. You stop the heart, in this case the brain and then the heart, and the blood takes the shortest course to the ground. You with me?"
"Not quite."
"The blood settles out in the lowest areas of where the body is lying. The pictures show the woman curled up on her side on the floor of the Buick. Her head was higher than her knees. But the autopsy indicates that she was lying full length on her back at the time of death. She also had high levels of alcohol and cocaine in her blood. I suspect she may have been passed out when she died."
"She was shot somewhere else and moved?"
"Unless the dead are walking around on their own these days."
"You've really been a friend, Sollie."
"Do you ever carry anything but a.45? A nine-millimeter or a.357 sometimes?"
"No, I've always carried the same Colt.45 auto I brought back from Vietnam."
"How many people know that?"
"Not many. Mostly cops, I guess."
"That thought would trouble me. So long, Robicheaux."
But the moment was not one for brooding. I walked back to the hot-dog stand and bought snowballs for a half-dozen kids. When a baseball bounced my way from the diamond, I scooped it up in my palms, rubbed the roughness of the horse hide, fitted my fingers on the stitches, and whipped a side-arm slider into the catcher's glove like I was nineteen years old and could blow a hole through the backstop.
That night I called Lou Girard at his home in Lafayette, told him about my conversations with the coroner and the mulatto woman across from the bar, and asked him if anyone had vacuumed the inside of the Buick.
"Dave, I'm afraid this case isn't the first thing on everybody's mind around here," he said.
"Why's that?"
"The detective assigned to it thinks you're a pain in the ass and you should have stayed in your own territory."
"When's the last time anyone saw Amber Martinez?"
"Three or four days ago. She was a bender drinker and user. She was supposed to be getting out of the life, but I think she'd work up a real bad Jones and find a candy man to pick up her tab until she ended up in a tank or a detox center somewhere."
"Who was her pimp?"
"Her husband. But he's been in jail the last three weeks on a check-writing charge. Whoever killed her probably got her out of a bar someplace."
"Yeah, but he knew her before. He used another woman to keep leaving Amber's name on messages at my office."
"If I can get the Buick vacuumed, what are we looking for?"
"I know I saw gun flashes inside the car. But there weren't any holes in the front of the bar. See what you come up with."
"Like what?"
"I don't know."
"Why don't you forget the forensic bullshit and concentrate on what your nose tells you?"
"What's that?"
"This isn't the work of some lone fuckhead running around. It has the smell of the greaseballs all over it. One smart greaseball in particular."
"You think this is Julie's style?"
"I worked two years on a task force that tried to get an indictment on the Bone. When he gets rid of a personal enemy, he puts a meat hook up the guy's rectum. If he wants a cop or a judge or a labor official out of the way, he does it long distance, with a whole collection of lowlifes between him and the target."
"That sounds like our man, all right."
"Can I give you some advice?"
"Go ahead."
"If Balboni is behind this, don't waste your time trying to make a case against him. It doesn't work. The guy's been oiling jurors and judges and scaring the shit out of witnesses for twenty years. You wait for the right moment, the right situation, and you smoke him."
"I'll see you, Lou. Thanks for your help."
"All right, excuse me. Who wants to talk about popping a cap on a guy like Balboni? Amber Martinez probably did herself. Take it easy, Dave."
At six the next morning I took a cup of coffee and the newspaper out on the gallery and sat down on the steps. The air was cool and blue with shadow under the trees and the air smelled of blooming four o'clocks and the pecan husks that had moldered into the damp earth.
While I read the paper I could hear boats leaving my dock and fishermen's voices out on the water. Then I heard someone walking up the incline through the leaves, and I lowered the newspaper and saw Mikey Goldman striding toward me like a man in pursuit of an argument.
He wore shined black loafers with tassels on them, a pink polo shirt that hung out of his gray slacks, and a thick gold watch that gleamed like soft butter on his wrist. His mouth was a tight seam, down-turned at the corners, his jaw hooked forward, his strange, pale, bulging eyes flicking back and forth across the front of my house.
"I want a word with you," he said.
"How are you today, Mr. Goldman," I said.
"It's 6 a.m., I'm at your house instead of at work; I got four hours' sleep last night. Guess."
"Do I have something to do with your problem?"
"Yeah, you do. You keep showing up in the middle of my problem. Why is that, Mr. Robicheaux?"
"I don't have any idea."
"I do. It's because Elrod had got some kind of hard-on for you and it's about to fuck my picture in a major way."
"I'd appreciate it if you didn't use that kind of language around my home."
"You got a problem with language? That's the kind of stuff that's on your mind? What's wrong with you people down here? The mosquitoes pass around clap of the brain or something?"
"What is it you want, sir?"
"He asks me what I want?" he said, looking around in the shadows as though there were other listeners there. "Elrod doesn't like to see you get taken over the hurdles. Frankly I don't either. Maybe for other reasons. Namely nobody carries my load, nobody takes heat for me, you understand what I'm saying?"
"No."
He cleared something from a nostril with his thumb and forefinger.
"What is it with you, you put your head in a bucket of wet cement every morning?" he asked.
"Can I be frank, too, Mr. Goldman?"
"Be my guest."
"A conversation with you is a head-numbing experience. I don't think any ordinary person is ready for it."
"Let me try to put it in simple words that you can understand," he said. "You may not know it, but I try to be a fair man. That means I don't like somebody else getting a board kicked up his ass on my account. I'm talking about you. Your own people are dumping on you because they think you're going to chase some big money out of town. I leave places or I stay in places because I want to. Somebody gets in my face, I deal with it, personal. You ask anybody in the industry. I don't rat-fuck people behind their back."
I set down my coffee cup, folded the newspaper on the step, and walked out into the trees toward his parked automobile. I waited for him to follow me.
"Is there anything else you wanted to tell me?" I said.
"No, of course not. I'm just out here to give you my personal profile. Listen to me, I'm going to finish this picture, then I'm never coming back to this state. In fact, I'm not even going to fly over it. But in the meantime no more of my people are going to the hospital."
"What?"
"Good, the flashbulb went off."
"What happened?" I said.
"Last night we'd wrapped it up and everybody had headed home. Except Elrod and this kid who does some stunt work got loaded and Elrod decides he's going to 'front Julie Balboni. He picks up a Coke bottle and starts banging on Julie's trailer with it. Julie opens the door in his jockey undershorts, and there's a twenty-year-old local broad trying to put on her clothes behind him. So Elrod calls him a coward and a dago bucket of shit and tells him he can fix him up in L.A. with Charlie Manson's chippies, like they got hair under their arms and none on their heads and they're more Julie's speed. Then El tells him that Julie had better not cause his buddy Robicheaux any more grief or El's going to punch his ticket for him, and if he finds out Julie murdered Kelly he's going to do it anyway, big time, with a shotgun right up Balboni's cheeks.
"I don't know what Balboni was doing with the broad, but he had some handcuffs. He walked outside, clamped one on El's wrist, the other on a light pole, and said, 'You're a lucky man, Elrod. You're a valuable piece of fruit. But your friend there, he don't have any luck at all.' Then he stomped the shit out of the stunt kid. 'Stomped' is the word, Mr. Robicheaux, I mean with his feet. He busted that kid's nose, stove in his ribs, and ripped his ear loose from his head."
"Why didn't you stop it?"
"I wasn't there. I got all this from the kid at the hospital. That's why I didn't get any sleep last night."
"Is the kid pressing charges?"
"Get real. He was on a flight back to Los Angeles this morning with enough dope in him to tranquilize a rhinoceros."
"What do you want with me?"
"I want you to take care of Elrod. I don't want him hurt."
"Tell me the truth. Do you have any concerns at all except making your pictures?"
"Yeah, human beings. If you don't accept that, I say fuck you."
His tense, protruding eyes reminded me of hard-boiled eggs. I looked away from him, felt my palm close and unclose against my trousers. The sunlight on the bayou was like a yellow flare burning under the water.
"I'm not in the baby-sitting business, Mr. Goldman," I said. "My advice is that you tell all this to the sheriff's department. Right now I'm still suspended. I'm going back and finish my coffee now. We'll see you around."
"It's Dogpatch. I'm in a cartoon. I talk, nobody hears me." He tapped himself on the cheek. "Maybe I'm dead and this is hell."
"What else do you want to say?" I heard the heat rising in my own voice.
"You accuse me of not having any humanity. Then I tell you Elrod's striking matches on Balboni's balls on your account and you blow me off. You want Balboni to put his foot through El's face?"
"He's your business partner. You brought him here. You didn't worry about the origins of his money till you-"
"That's all true. The question is what do we do now?"
"We?"
"Right. I'm getting through. Everybody around here doesn't have meatloaf for brains after all."
"There's no we in this. I'll talk to Elrod, I'll take him to AA meetings, but he's not my charge."
"Good. Tell him that. I'm on my way to work. Dump him in a cab."
"What?"
"He's down there in your bait shop. Drunk. I think you have a serious hearing problem. Get some help."
He stuck a peppermint candy cane in the corner of his mouth and walked back down the slope to his automobile, his shoulders rolling under his polo shirt, his jaws cracking the candy between his teeth, his profile turned into the freshening breeze like a gladiator's.