The sky was clear when I woke in the morning, and I could hear gray squirrels racing across the bark of the trees outside the window. The icebag I had put on the lump behind my ear fell to the floor when I got out of bed to answer the phone.
"I called your office and found out you're still suspended," Lou Girard said. "What's going on over there?"
"Just that. I'm still suspended."
"It sounds like somebody's got a serious bone on for you, Dave. Anyway, I talked to this FBI agent, what's her name, Gomez, as well as your boss. We vacuumed the Buick. Guess what we found?"
"I don't know."
"Paper wadding. The kind that's used to seal blank cartridges. It looks like somebody fired a starter's gun at you. He probably leaned down through the passenger window, let off a couple of rounds, then bagged out."
"What'd the sheriff have to say when you told him?"
"Not much. I got the feeling that maybe he was a little uncomfortable. He doesn't look too good, right, when one of his own men has to be cleared by a cop and a pathologist in another parish? I thought I could hear a little Pontius Pilate tap water running in the background."
"He's always been an okay guy. He just got too close to a couple of the oil cans in the Chamber of Commerce."
"Your friends don't stand around playing pocket pool while civilians kick a two-by-four up your butt, either."
"Anyway, that's real good news, Lou. I owe you a red-fishing trip out to Pecan Island."
"Wait a minute, I'm not finished. That Gomez woman has some interesting theories about serial killers. She said these guys want control and power over people. So I got to thinking about the LeBlanc girl. If your FBI friend is right and the guy who killed her is from around here, what kind of work would he be in?"
"He may be just a pimp, Lou."
"Yeah, but she got nailed on a prostitution charge when she was sixteen, right? That means the court gave somebody a lot of control over her life. What if a probation or parole officer had her selling out of her pants?"
"I saw the body. I think the guy who mutilated her has a furnace instead of a brain. I think he'd have a hard time hiding inside a white-collar environment."
"It was the pencil pushers who gave the world Auschwitz, Dave. Anyway, her prostitution bust was in Lafayette. I'll find out if her P.O. or social worker is still around."
"Okay, but I still believe we're after a pimp of some kind."
"Dave, if this guy's just a pimp, particularly if he's mobbed-up, he would have been in custody a long time ago. These are dumb guys. That's why they do what they do. Most of them couldn't get jobs cleaning gum off movie seats."
"So maybe Balboni's got a smart pimp working for him."
"No, this guy knows how things work from the inside. He sucked us both in on that deal at Red's Bar."
Lou had never gotten along with white-collar authority, in fact, was almost obsessed about it, and I wasn't going to argue with him.
"Let me know what you come up with," I said.
But he wasn't going to let it drop that easily.
"I've been in law enforcement for thirty-seven years," he said. "I've lost count of the lowlifes I've helped send up the road. Is Louisiana any better for it? You know the answer to that one. Face it. The real sonsofbitches are the ones we don't get to touch."
"Don't be too down, Lou." I told him about Julie line-driving a ball off the side of my head. Then I told him the rest of it. "I asked the paramedics who called in the report. They said it was anonymous. So I went down later and listened to the 911 tapes. It was a guy named Cholo Manelli. He's a-"
"Yeah, I know who he is. Cholo did that?"
"There's no mistaking that broken-nose Irish Channel accent."
"He owes you or something?"
"Not really. But he's an old-time mob soldier. He knows you don't antagonize cops unnecessarily. Maybe Julie's starting to lose control of his people."
"It's a thought. But stay away from Balboni till you get your shield back. Stay off baseball diamonds, too. For a sober guy you sure have a way of spitting in the lion's mouth."
After I hung up the phone I showered, dressed in a pair of seersucker slacks, brown loafers, a charcoal shirt with a gray and red striped tie, and got a haircut and a shoe shine in town. My scalp twitched when the barber's scissors clipped across the lump behind my ear. Through the front window I saw Julie Balboni's purple limo drive down Main Street. The barber stopped clipping. The shop was empty except for the shoe-shine man.
"Dave, how come that man's still around here?" the barber said. His round stomach touched lightly against my elbow.
"He hasn't made the right people mad at him."
"He ain't no good, that one. He don't have no bidness here."
"I think you're right, Sid."
He started clipping again. Then, almost as a casual afterthought, he said, "Y'all gonna get him out of town?"
"There're some business people making a lot of money off of Julie. I think they'd like to keep him around awhile."
His hands paused again, and he stepped around the side of the chair so I could see his face.
"That ain't the rest of us, no," he said. "We don't like having that man in New Iberia. We don't like his dope, we don't like his criminals he bring up here from New Orleans. You tell that man you work for we gonna 'member him when we vote, too."
"Could I buy you a cup of coffee and a doughnut this morning, Sid?"
A little later, with my hair still wet and combed, I walked out of the heat into the air-conditioned coolness of the sheriff's department and headed toward the sheriff's office. I glanced inside my office door as I passed it. Rosie was not inside but Rufus Arceneaux was, out of uniform now, dressed in a blue suit and tie and a silk shirt that had the bright sheen of tin. He was sitting behind my desk.
I leaned against the door jamb.
"The pencil sharpener doesn't work very well, but there's a pen knife in my drawer that you can use," I said.
"I wasn't bucking for plainclothes. The old man gave it to me," he said.
"I'm glad to see you're moving on up, Rufe."
"Look, Dave, I'm not the one who went out and got fucked up at that movie set."
"I hear you were out there, though. Looking into things. Probably trying to clear me of any suspicion that I got loaded."
"I got a GED in the corps. You're a college graduate. You were a homicide lieutenant in New Orleans. You want to blame me for your troubles?"
"Where's Rosie?"
"Down in Vermilion Parish."
"What for?"
"How would I know?"
"Did she say anything about Balboni having legal troubles with Mikey Goldman?"
"What legal-" His eyes clouded, like silt being disturbed in dark water.
"When you see her, would you ask her to call me?"
"Leave a message in her box," he said, positioned his forearms on my desk blotter, straightened his back, and looked out the window as though I were not there.
When I walked into the sheriff's office he was pouring a chalky liquid from a brown prescription bottle into a water glass. A dozen sheets of paper were spread around on his desk. The "hold" light was flashing on his telephone. He didn't speak. He drank from the glass, then refilled it from the water cooler and drank again, his throat working as though he were washing out an unwanted presence from his metabolism.
"How you doin', podna?" he said.
"Pretty good now. I had a talk with Lou Girard this morning."
"So did I. Sit down," he said, then picked up the phone and spoke to whoever was on hold. "I'm not sure what happened. When I am, I'll call you. In the meantime, Rufus is going to be suspended. Just hope we don't have to pass a sales tax to pay the bills on this one."
He hung up the phone and pressed the flat of his hand against his stomach. He made a face like a small flame was rising up his windpipe.
"Did you ever have ulcers?" he asked.
"Nope."
"I've got one. If this medicine I'm drinking doesn't get rid of it, they may have to cut it out."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"That was the prosecutor's office I was talking to. We're being sued."
"Over what?"
"A seventy-six-year-old black woman shot her old man to death last night, then killed both her dogs and shot herself through the stomach. Rufus in there handcuffed her to the gurney, then came back to the office. He didn't bother to give the paramedics a key to the cuffs either. She died outside the emergency room."
I didn't say anything.
"You think we got what we deserved, huh?" he said.
"Maybe he would have done it even if he hadn't been kicked up to plainclothes, sheriff."
"No, he wouldn't have been the supervising officer. He wouldn't have had the opportunity."
"What's my status this morning?"
He brushed at a nostril with one knuckle.
"I don't know how to say this," he said. "We messed up. No, I messed up."
I waited.
"I did wrong by you, Dave," he said.
"People make mistakes. Maybe you made the best decision you could at the time."
He held out his hands, palms front.
"Nope, none of that," he said. "I learned in Korea a good officer takes care of his men. I didn't get this ulcer over Rufus Arceneaux's stupidity. I got it because I was listening to some local guys I should have told to butt out of sheriff's department business."
"Nobody's supposed to bat a thousand, sheriff."
"I want you back at work today. I'll talk to Rufus about his new status. That old black woman is part my responsibility. I don't know why I made that guy plainclothes. You don't send a warthog to a beauty contest."
I shook hands with him, walked across the street to a barbecue stand in a grove of live oaks, ate a plate filled with dirty rice, pork ribs, and red beans, then strolled back to the office, sipping an ice-cold can of Dr Pepper. Rufus Arceneaux was gone. I clipped my badge on my belt, sat in the swivel chair behind my desk, turned the air-conditioner vents into my face, and opened my mail.
ROSIE WAS BEAMING WHEN SHE CAME THROUGH THE OFFICE door an hour later.
"What's that I see?" she said. "With a haircut and a shoe shine, too."
"How's my favorite Fed?"
"Dave, you look wonderful!"
"Thanks, Rosie."
"I can't tell you how fine it is to have you back."
Her face was genuinely happy, to such an extent that I felt vaguely ill at ease.
"I owe you and Lou Girard a lot on this one," I said.
"Have you had lunch yet?"
"Yeah, I did."
"Too bad. Tomorrow I'm taking you out, though. Okay?"
"Yeah, that'd be swell."
She sat down behind her desk. Her neck was flushed and her breasts rose against her blouse when she breathed. "I got a call this morning from an old Frenchman who runs a general store on Highway 35 down in Vermilion Parish. You know what he said? 'Hey, y'all catch the man put dat young girl in dat barrel?' "
I filled a water glass for her and put it on her desk.
"He knows something?" I said.
"Better than that. I think he saw the guy who did it. He said he remembers a month or so ago a blond girl coming in his store at night in the rain. He said he became worried about her because of the way a man in the store was watching her." She opened her notebook pad and looked at it. "These are the old fellow's words: 'You didn't need but look at that man's face to know he had a dirty mind.' He said the girl had a canvas backpack and she went back out in the rain to the highway with it. The man followed her, then he came back in a few minutes and asked the old fellow if he had any red balloons for sale."
"Balloons?"
"If you think that sounds weird, how about this? When the old fellow said no, the man found an old box of Valentine candy on the back shelf and said he wanted that instead."
"I'm not making connections here," I said.
"The store owner watched the man with the candy box through the window. He said just before he pulled out of the parking lot he threw the candy box in the ditch. In the morning the old fellow went out and found it in the weeds. The cellophane wrapping was gone." She watched my face. "What are you thinking?"
"Did he see the man pick up the girl?"
"He's not sure. He remembers the man was in a dark blue car and he remembers the brake lights going on in the rain." She continued to watch my face. "Here's the rest of it. I looked around on the back shelves of the store and found another candy box that the owner says is like the one the man in the blue car bought. Guess what tint the cellophane was."
"Red or purple."
"You got it, slick," she said, and leaned back in her chair.
"He wrapped it around a spotlight, didn't he?"
"That'd be my bet."
"Could the store owner describe this guy?"
"That's the problem." She tapped a ballpoint pen on her desk blotter. "All the old fellow remembers is that the man had a rain hood."
"Too bad. Why didn't he contact us sooner?"
"He said he told all this to somebody, he doesn't know who, in the Vermilion Parish Sheriff's Department. He said when he called again yesterday, they gave him my number. Is your interagency cooperation always this good?"
"Always. Does he still have the candy box?"
"He said he gave the candy to his dog, then threw the box in the trash."
"So maybe we've got a guy impersonating a cop?" I said.
"It might explain a lot of things."
Unconsciously I fingered the lump behind my ear.
"What's the matter?" she said.
"Nothing. Maybe our man is simply a serial killer and psychopath after all. Maybe he doesn't have anything to do with Julie Balboni."
"Would that make you feel good or bad?"
"I honestly can't say, Rosie."
"Yeah, you can," she said. "You're always hoping that even the worst of them has something of good in him. Don't do that with Balboni. Deep down inside all that whale fat is a real piece of shit, Dave."
Outside, a jail trusty cutting the grass broke the brass head off a sprinkler with the lawnmower. A violent jet of water showered the wall and ran down the windows. In the clatter of noise, in the time it takes the mind's eye to be distracted by shards of wet light, I thought of horses fording a stream, of sun-browned men in uniform looking back over their shoulders at the safety of a crimson and gold hardwood forest, while ahead of them dirty puffs of rifle fire exploded from a distant treeline that swarmed with the shapes of the enemy.
It's the innocent we need to worry about, he had said. And when it comes to their protection, we shouldn't hesitate to do it under a black flag.
"Are you all right?" she said.
"Yeah, it's a fine day. Let's go across the street and I'll buy you a Dr Pepper."
That evening, at sunset, I was sprinkling the grass and the flower beds in the backyard while Elrod and Alafair were playing with Tripod on top of the picnic table. The air was cool in the fading light and smelled of hydrangeas and water from the hose and the fertilizer I had just spaded into the roots of my rosebushes.
The phone rang inside, and a moment later Bootsie brought it and the extension cord to the back screen. I sat down on the step and put the receiver to my ear.
"Hello," I said.
I could hear someone breathing on the other end.
"Hello?"
"I want to talk to you tonight."
"Sam?"
"That's right. I'm playing up at the black juke in St. Martinville. You know where that's at?"
"The last time I had an appointment with you, things didn't work out too well."
"That was last time. I was drinkin' then. Then them womens was hangin' around, made me forget what I was supposed to do."
"I think you let me down, partner."
He was quiet except for the sound of his breathing.
"Is something wrong?" I said.
"I got to tell you somet'ing, somet'ing I ain't tole no white man."
"Say it."
"You come up to the juke."
"I'll meet you at my office tomorrow morning."
"What I got to say can put me back on the farm. I sure ain't gonna do it down there."
Elrod picked Tripod up horizontally in his arms, then bounced him up and down by tugging on his tail.
"I'll be there in an hour or so," I said. "Don't jerk me around again, Sam."
"You might be a policeman, you might even be different from most white folks, but you still white and you ain't got no idea 'bout the world y'all give people of color to live in. That's a fact, suh. It surely is," he said, and hung up.
I should have known that Hogman would not be outdone in eloquence.
"Don't pull his tail," Alafair was saying.
"He likes it. It gets his blood moving," Elrod said.
She sighed as though Elrod were unteachable, then took Tripod out of his arms and carried him around the side of the house to the hutch.
"Can you take yourself to the meeting tonight?" I asked Elrod.
"You cain't go?"
"No."
"How about I just wait till we can go together?" He rubbed the top of the table with his fingers and didn't look up.
"What if I drop you off and then come back before the meeting's over?"
"Look, this is a, what do you call it, a step meeting?"
"That's right."
"You said it's about amends, about atoning to people for what you did wrong?"
"Something like that."
"How do I atone for Kelly? How do I make up for that one, Dave?" He stared out at the late red sun over the cane-field so I couldn't see his eyes.
"You get those thoughts out of your head. Kelly's dead because we have a psychopath in our midst. Her death doesn't have anything to do with you."
"You can say that all you want, but I know better."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah."
I could see the clean, tight line of his jaw and a wet gleaming in the corner of his eye.
"Tell me, did you respect Kelly?" I asked.
He swiveled around on the picnic bench. "What kind of question is that?"
"I'm going to be a little hard on you, El. I think you're using her death to feel sorry for yourself."
"What?" His face was incredulous.
"When I lost my wife I found out that self-pity and guilt could be a real rush, particularly when I didn't have Brother Jim Beam to do the job."
"That's a lousy fucking thing to say."
"I was talking about myself. Maybe you're different from me."
"What the hell's the matter with you? You don't think it's natural to feel loss, to feel grief, when somebody dies? I tried to close the hole in her throat with my hands, her blood was running through my fingers. She was still alive and looking straight into my eyes. Like she was drowning and neither one of us could do anything about it." He pressed his forehead against his fist; his flexed thigh trembled against his slacks.
"I got four of my men killed on a trail in Vietnam. Then I got drunk over it. I used them, I didn't respect them for the brave men they were. That's the way alcoholism works, El."
"I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me be for a while."
"Will you go to the meeting?"
He didn't answer. There was a pained light in his eyes like someone had twisted barbed wire around his forehead.
"You don't have to talk, just listen to what these guys have to say about their own experience," I said.
"I'd rather pass tonight."
"Suit yourself," I said.
I told Bootsie where I was going and walked out to the truck. The cicadas droned from horizon to horizon under the vault of plum-colored sky. Then I heard Elrod walking through the leaves and pecan husks behind me.
"If I sit around here, I'll end up in the beer joint," he said, and opened the passenger door to the truck. Then he raised his finger at me. "But I'm going to ask you one thing, Dave. Don't ever accuse me of using Kelly again. If you do, I'm going to knock your teeth down your goddamn throat."
There were probably a number of things I could have said in reply; but you don't deny a momentary mental opiate to somebody who has made an appointment in the Garden of Gethsemane.
The black jukejoint in St. Martinville was set back in a grove of trees off a yellow dirt road not far from Bayou Teche. It was one of those places that could be dropped by a tornado in the middle of an Iowa cornfield and you would instantly know that its origins were in the Deep South. The plank walls and taped windows vibrated with noise from Friday afternoon until late Sunday night. Strings of Christmas-tree lights rimmed the doors and windows year round; somebody was barbecuing ribs on top of a tin barrel, only a few feet from a pair of dilapidated privies that were caked under the eaves with yellow jacket and mud-dauber nests; people copulated back in the woods against tree trunks and fought in the parking lot with knives, bottles, and razors. Inside, the air was always thick with the smell of muscatel, smoke, cracklings, draft beer and busthead whiskey, expectorated snuff, pickled hogs' feet, perfume, body powder, sweat, and home-grown reefer.
Sam Patin sat on a small stage with a canopy over it hung with red tassels and miniature whiskey bottles that clinked in the backdraft from a huge ventilator fan. His white suit gleamed with an electric purple glow from the floor lamps, and the waxed black surfaces of his twelve-string guitar winked with tiny lights. The floor in front of him was packed with dancers. When he blew into the harmonica attached to a wire brace on his neck and began rolling the steel picks on his fingers across an E-major blues run, the crowd moaned in unison. They yelled at the stage as though they were confirming a Biblical statement he had made at a revival, pressed their loins together with no consciousness of other people around them, and roared with laughter even though Hogman sang of a man who had sold his soul for an ox-blood Stetson hat he had just lost in a crap game:
Stagolee went runnin'
In the red-hot boilin' sun,
Say look in my chiffro drawer, woman,
Get me my smokeless.41.
Stagolee tole Miz Billy,
You don't believe your man is dead,
Come down to the barroom,
See the.41 hole in his head.
That li’l judge found Stagolee guilty
And that li’l clerk wrote it down,
On a cold winter morning,
Stagolee was Angola bound.
Forty-dollar coffin,
Eighty-dollar hack,
Carried that po' man to the burying ground,
Ain't never comin' back.
Two feet away from me the bartender filled a tray with draft beers without ever looking at me. He was bald and had thick gray muttonchop sideburns that looked like they were pasted on his cheeks. Then he wiped his hands on his apron and lit a cigar.
"You sho' you in the right place?" he said.
"I'm a friend of Hogman's," I said.
"So this is where you come to see him?"
"Why not?"
"What you havin', chief?"
"A 7 Up."
He opened a bottle, placed it in front of me without a glass, and walked away. The sides of the bottle were warm and filmed with dust. Twenty minutes later Hogman had not taken a break and was still playing.
"You want another one?" the bartender said.
"Yeah, I would. How about some ice or a cold one this time?" I said.
"The gentleman wants a cold one," he said to no one in particular. Then he filled a tall glass with cracked ice and set it on the bar with another dusty bottle of 7 Up. "Why cain't y'all leave him alone? He done his time, ain't he?"
"I look like the heat?" I said.
"You are the heat, chief. You and that other one out yonder."
"What other one? What are you talking about, partner?"
"The white man that was out yonder in that blue Mercury."
I got off the stool and looked into the parking lot through the Venetian blinds and the scrolled neon tubing of a Dixie beer sign.
"I don't see any blue Merc," I said.
" 'Cause he gone now, chief. Like it's a black people's club, like he figured that out, you understand what I'm sayin'?"
"What'd this guy look like?" I said.
"White. He look white. That he'p you out?" he said, tossed a towel into the tin sink, and walked down the duck-boards toward the far end of the bar.
Finally Hogman slipped his harmonica brace and guitar strap off his neck, looked directly at me, and went through a curtained door into a back storage room. I followed him inside. He sat on a wood chair, among stacks of beer cases, and had already started eating a dinner of pork chops, greens, and cornbread from a tin plate that rested on another chair.
"I ain't had a chance to eat today. This movie-star life is gettin' rough on my time. You want some?" he said.
"No, thanks." I leaned against a stack of beer cartons.
"The lady fix me these chops don't know how to season, but they ain't too bad."
"You want to get to it, Sam?"
"You t'ink I just messin' with you, huh? All right, this is how it play. A long time ago up at Angola I got into trouble over a punk. Not my punk, you understand, I didn't do none of that unnatural kind of stuff, a punk that belong to a guy name Big Melon. Big Melon was growin' and sellin' dope for a couple of the hacks. Him and his punk had a whole truck patch of it behind the cornfield."
"Hogman, I'm afraid this sounds a little remote."
"You always know, you always got somet'ing smart to say. That's why you runnin' around in circles, that's why them men laughin' at you."
"Which men?"
"The ones who killed that nigger you dug up in the Atchafalaya. You gonna be patient now, or you want to go back to doin' it your way?"
"I'm looking forward to hearing your story, Hogman."
"See, these two hacks had them a good bidness. Big Melon and the punk growed the dope, cured it, bagged it all up, and the hacks sold it in Lafayette. They carried it down there themselves sometimes, or the executioner and another cop picked it up for them. They didn't let nobody get back there by that cornfield. But I was half-trusty then, livin' in Camp I, and I used to cut across the field to get to the hog lot. That's how come I found out they was growin' dope back there. So Big Melon tole the hack I knowed what they was doin', that I was gonna snitch them off, and then the punk planted a jar of julep under my bunk so I'd lose my trusty job and my good-time.
"I tole the hack it ain't right, I earn my job. He say, 'Hogman, you fuck with the wrong people in here, you goin' in the box and you goin' stay in there till you come out a white man.' That's what the bossman say. I tole him it don't matter how long they keep me in there, it still ain't right. They wrote me up for sassin' and put me to pickin' cotton. When I get down in a thin patch and come up short, they make me stand up all night on an oil barrel, dirty and smellin' bad and without no supper.
"I went to the bossman in the field, say I don't care what Big Melon do, what them hacks do, it ain't my bidness, I just want my job back on the hog lot. He say, 'You better keep shut, boy, you better fill that bag, you better not put no dirt clods in it when you weigh in, neither, like you tried to do yesterday.' I say, 'Boss, what's I gonna do? I ain't put no dirt clods in my bag, I ain't give nobody trouble, I don't be carin' Big Melon want to grow dope for the hacks.' He knock me down with a horse quirt and put me in the sweat-box on Camp A for three days, in August, with the sun boilin' off them iron sides, with a bucket between my knees to go to the bat'room in."
He had stopped eating now and his face looked solitary and bemused, as though his own experience had become strange and unfamiliar in his recounting of it.
"You were a standup guy, Hogman. I always admired your courage," I said.
"No, I was scared of them people, 'cause when I come out of the box I knowed the gunbulls was gonna kill me. I seen them do it befo', up on the levee, where they work them Red Hat boys double-time from cain't-see to cain't-see. They shot and buried them po' boys without never missin' a beat, just the way somebody run over a dog with a truck and keep right on goin'.
"I had me a big Stella twelve-string guitar, bought it off a Mexican on Congress Street in Houston. I used to keep it in the count-man's cage so nobody wouldn't be foolin' with it while I was workin' or sleepin'. When I come out of the box and taken a shower and eat a big plate of rice and beans, I ax the count-man first thing for my guitar. He say, 'I'm sorry, Sam, but the bossman let Big Melon take it while you was in the box.'
"I waited till that night and went to Big Melon's 'hunk,' that's what we call the place where a wolf stay with his punk. There's that big fat nigger sittin' naked on his mattress, like a big pile of black inner tubes, while the punk is playin' my guitar on the floor, lipstick and rouge all over his face and pink panties on his li'l ass.
"I say, 'Melon, you or your punk fuck wit' my guitar again and I gone cut that black dick off. It don't matter if I go to the electric chair for it or not. I'm gonna joog you in the shower, in the chow line, or while you pumpin' your poke chops here. They's gonna be one fat nigger they gonna have to haul in a piano crate down to the graveyard.'
"Melon smile at me and say, 'We just borrowed it, Hogman. We was gonna give it back. Here, you want Pookie to rub your back for you?'
"But I knowed they was comin'. Two nights later, right befo' lockup, I was goin' to the toilet and I turn around and his punk is standin' in the do'. I say, 'What you want, Pookie?' He say, 'I'm sorry I was playin' your guitar, Hogman. I wants be yo' friend, maybe come stay up at your hunk some nights.'
"When I reached down to pull up my britches, he come outta his back pocket with a dirk and aim it right at my heart. I catched him around the neck and bent him backwards, then I kept bendin' him backwards and squeezin' acrost his windpipe, and he was floppin' real hard, shakin' all over, he shit in his pants, 'cause I could smell it, then it went snap, just like you bust a real dry piece of firewood acrost your knee.
"I look up and there's one of the hacks who's selling the dope. He say, 'Hogman, we ain't gonna let this be a problem. We'll just stuff this li'l bitch out yonder in the levee with them others. Won't nobody care, won't make no difference to nobody, not even to Big Melon. It'll just be our secret.'
"All that time they'd been smarter than me. They sent Pookie to joog me, but they didn't care if he killed me or if I killed him. It worked out for them just fine. They knew I'd never cause them no trouble. They was right, too. I didn't sass, I done what they tole me, I even he'ped hoe them dope plants a couple of times."
"I don't understand, Sam. You're telling me that the lynched black man was killed by one of these guards?"
"I ain't said that. I said they was a bunch of them sellin' that dope. They was takin' it out of the pen in a police car. What was the name of that nigger you dug out of the sandbar?"
"DeWitt Prejean."
"I'll tell you this. He was fuckin' a white man's wife. Start axin' what he done for a livin', you'll find the people been causin' you all this grief."
"Who's the guy I'm looking for?"
"I said all I can say."
"Look, Sam, don't be afraid of these gunbulls or cops from years ago. They can't harm you now."
He put a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, then took a pint bottle of rum from his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap with his thumb. He held the bottle below his mouth. His long fingers were glistening with grease from the pork chops he had eaten.
"This still the state of Lou'sana, or are we livin' somewhere else these days?" he said.
I COULDN'T SLEEP THAT NIGHT. I POURED A GLASS OF MILK AND walked down by the duck pond in the starlight. A pair of mudhens spooked out of the flooded reeds and skittered across the water's surface toward the far bank. The pieces of the case wouldn't come together. Were we looking for a serial killer who had operated all over the state, a local psychopath, a pimp, or perhaps even a hit man from the mob? Were cops involved? Hogman thought so, and even believed there was someone out there with the power to send him back to prison. But his perspective was colored by his own experience as a career recidivist. And what about the lynched black man, DeWitt Prejean? Would the solution to his murder in 1957 lead us to the deviate who had mutilated Cherry LeBlanc?
No, the case was not as simple as Hogman had wanted me to think, even though he was obviously sincere and his fears about retribution were real. But I had no answers, either.
Unfortunately, they would come in a way that I never anticipated. I saw Elrod come out of the lighted kitchen and walk down the slope toward the pond. He was shirtless and barefoot and his slacks were unbuttoned over his skivvies. He clutched a sheet of lined notebook paper in his right hand. He looked at me uncertainly, and his lips started to form words that obviously he didn't want to speak.
"What's wrong?" I said.
"The phone rang while I was in the kitchen. I answered it so y'all wouldn't get woke up."
"Who was it? What's that in your hand?"
"The sheriff…" He straightened the piece of paper in his fingers and read the words to himself, then looked up into my face. "It's a friend of yours, Lou Girard, Dave. The sheriff says maybe you should go over to Lafayette. He says, I'm sorry, man, he says your friend got drunk and killed himself."
Elrod held the sheet of paper out toward me, his eyes looking askance at the duck pond. The moonlight was white on his hand.