Early the next morning I drove southwest of New Orleans, into the bayou country. It was the south Louisiana I had grown up in, around New Iberia. Oak, cypress, and willow trees lined the two-lane road; the mist still clung like torn cotton to the half-submerged dead tree trunks back in the marsh; the canebrakes were thick and green, shining in the light, and the lily pads clustered along the bayou's banks were bursting with flowers, audibly popping, their leaves covered with drops of quicksilver. The bream and bass were still feeding in the shadows close to the cypress roots; egrets were nesting in the sand where the sun had risen above the tree line, and occasionally a heron would lift from its feeding place on the edge of the cattails and glide on gilded wings down the long ribbon of brown water through a corridor of trees.
Now these same bayous, canals, and marshlands where I had grown up were used by the Barataria pirates. But their namesakes, Jean Lafitte's collection of brigands and slavers, were romantic figures by comparison. The current group was made up of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin smugglers who would murder a whole family out on the Gulf simply for the one-time use of their boat, after which they'd open up the cocks and sink it. Occasionally the Coast Guard would find one half-filled with water and beached on a sandbar, the gunwales painted with blood.
But why should this shock or revile? The same people sometimes killed infants by injection, embalmed the bodies, and filled the stomachs with balloons of heroin so women transporters could walk through customs as though they were carrying their sleeping children.
The Cataouatche Parish sheriff was not at the courthouse. He was at his horse farm outside of town, galoshes on his feet, feeding two Arabians in a side lot. His house had a fresh coat of white paint and a wide screen porch, and Was surrounded by azalea bushes and flaming hibiscus. The long white fence along the back horse pasture was entwined with climbing roses. The sheriff was around fifty, a man in control of his property and his political life. His blue uniform fitted tightly on his compact, hard body, and his round, freshly shaved face and direct eyes gave you the impression of a self-confident rural law officer who dealt easily with outside complexities.
Unfortunately for him, I proved to be the exception.
"She drowned," he said. "My deputies said a bucket of water came out of her when they flipped her off the gurney."
"She had tracks on her arms."
"So? Addicts drown too. You need an autopsy to tell you that?"
"Do you know if she was right-handed or left-handed?"
"What the hell are you talking about?" he said.
"She'd been shooting regularly into the left arm, but she had only one needle hole on the right. What's that tell you?"
"Not a goddamn thing."
"When a junkie flattens the vein in one arm, he starts on the other. I don't think she'd been shooting up that long. I think somebody gave her a hotshot."
"The parish coroner signed the death certificate. It says 'drowned.' You take it up with him if you want to pursue it. I'm late for work." He walked out of the horse lot, pulled off his muddy galoshes on the grass, and slipped on his polished, half-topped boots. His round face was turned away from me as he bent over, but I could hear the repressed anger in his breathing.
"Those are fine Arabians," I said. "I understand they can bring thirty thousand or so when they're trained."
"That wouldn't touch them, Lieutenant. Like I say, I don't mean to be rude, but I'm late. You want me to introduce you to the coroner?"
"I don't think so. Tell me, as a matter of speculation, how do you figure a healthy young woman, wearing all her clothes, would come to drown in a narrow bayou?"
"What's going to make you happy, Lieutenant? You want somebody to write down for you that she died of a hotshot? You want to take that back to New Orleans with you? All right, you have my permission. It's no skin off our ass. But how about her family? She was raised up in the quarters on a sugar plantation about five miles south of here. Her mother is feeble-minded and her daddy is half-blind. You want to drive out there and tell them their daughter was a junkie?"
"Everything in this case stinks of homicide, Sheriff."
"I've only got two more things to say to you, podna, and it's important you understand this. I trust what my deputies told me, and if you got a complaint, you take it to the coroner's office. And number two, this conversation is over."
Then he looked away at his horses in a distant field, as though I were not there, slipped on his pilot's sunglasses, got into his Cadillac, and drove down his pea-gravel lane to the blacktop. I felt like a post standing in the ground.
The dead girl's name had been Lovelace Deshotels. Her parents lived in one of the weathered, paintless shacks along a dirt road on the back of a corporate sugar plantation. All the shacks were identical, their small front porches so evenly aligned that you could fire an arrow through the receding rectangle of posts, roofs, and bannisters for the entire length of the quarters without striking wood. The thick green fields of cane stretched away for miles, broken only by an occasional oak tree and the distant outline of the sugar mill, whose smokestacks in the winter would cover these same shacks with a sickening sweet odor that made the eyes water.
The shack was like thousands of others that I had seen all my life throughout Louisiana and Mississippi. There was no glass in the windows, only hinged board flaps that were propped open on sticks. The walls had been insulated with pages from the Sears catalog, then covered with wallpaper that was now separated and streaked brown with rainwater. The outhouse, which was set next to a small hog lot, had a rusted R.C. Cola sign for a roof.
But there were other things there that leaped at your eye when you walked through the door: a color television set, an imitation Bavarian clock above the woodburning stove, plastic flowers set in jelly glasses, a bright yellow Formica breakfast table next to an ancient brick fireplace filled with trash.
The parents would tell me little. The mother stared vacantly at a game show on television, her huge body stuffed in a pair of lime-green stretch pants and a man's army shirt cut off at the armpits. The father was gray and old and walked with a cane as though his back were disjointed. He smelled of the cob pipe in his shirt pocket. His eyes were scaled over and frosted with cataracts.
"She gone off to New Orleans. I tolt her a colored girl from the country dint have no business there, her," he said, sitting on the couch, his hand curved along the top of his cane. "She only a country girl. What she gonna do with them kind of people they got in New Orleans? I tell her that, me."
"Who did she work for, Mr. Deshotels?"
"What I know about New Orleans? I ain't got no truck there, me." He smiled at me, and I saw his toothless blue gums.
"Do you believe she drowned?"
He paused and the smile went out of his face. His eyes seemed to focus on me for the first time.
"You think they care what some old nigger say?" he said.
"I do."
He didn't answer. He put his dead pipe in his mouth, made a wet sound with his tongue, and stared blankly at the television screen.
"I'll be going now," I said, standing up. "I'm sorry about what happened to your daughter. I really am."
His face turned back toward me.
"We had eleven, us," he said. "She the baby. I call her tite cush-chush cause she always love cush-cush when she a little girl. He'p me walk out front, you."
I put my hand under his arm and we stepped out into the bright sunlight on the porch. The wind was ruffling the green fields of sugarcane on the opposite side of the road. The old man's arm was webbed with veins. He limped along with me to my automobile before he spoke.
"They kilt her, them, dint they?" he asked.
"I think they did."
"She just a little colored jellyroll for white mens, then they throw her away," he said. His eyes became wet. "I tolt her 'Jellyroll, jellyroll, rollin' in the cane, lookin' for a woman ain't got no man.' She say 'Look the television and the clock and the table I give Mama.' She say that, her. Little girl that don't know how to read can buy a five-hundred-dollar television set for her mama. What you gonna do when they nineteen? Ain't no listenin', not when she got white men's money, drive a big car down here from New Orleans, tellin' me she gonna move us up North, her. Little girl that still eat cush-cush gonna outsmart the white mens, her, move her old nigger daddy up to New York. What she done they got to kill her for?"
I didn't have an answer for him.
I was on an empty stretch of road bordered on one side by a flat, shimmering lake and on the other by a flooded woods, when I saw the blue and white patrol car in my rearview mirror. The driver already had on his bubblegum light, and when he drew close to my bumper he gave me a short blast with his siren. I started to pull to the shoulder, but there were shards of beer-bottle glass like amber teeth shining in the weeds and gravel. I tried to drive on to a clear spot before I stopped, and the patrol car leaped abreast of me, the engine roaring, and the deputy in the passenger's seat pointed to the side of the road with an angry finger. I heard my tires crunch over the beer glass.
Both deputies got out of the car, and I knew it was going to be serious. They were big men, probably Cajuns like myself, but their powerful and sinewy bodies, their tight-fitting, powder-blue uniforms, polished gunbelts and holsters, glinting bullets and revolver butts made you think of backwoods Mississippi and north Louisiana, as though they'd had to go away to learn redneck cruelty.
Neither one of them had a citation book in his hand or pocket.
"The siren means pull over. It don't mean slow down, Lieutenant," the driver said. He smiled back at me and took off his sunglasses. He was older than the other deputy. "Step out of the car, please."
I opened the door and stepped out on the road. They looked at me without speaking.
"All right, I'll bite. What have you got me for?" I said.
"Sixty in a fifty-five," the other deputy said. He chewed gum, and his eyes were humorless and intent.
"I didn't think I ever got over fifty," I said.
"'Fraid it creeped up on you," the older man said. "On a pretty morning like this you get to looking around, maybe looking at the water and the trees, maybe thinking about a piece of ass, and before you know it you got lead in your pecker and foot, both."
"I don't guess we're going to have an instance of professional courtesy here, are we?" I said.
"The judge don't allow us to let too many slide," the older man said.
"So write me a ticket and I'll talk to the judge about it."
"Lot of people from outside the parish don't show up in court," the older deputy said. "Makes him madder than a hornet with shit on its nose. So we got to take them down to the court."
"You guys didn't get completely dressed this morning," I said.
"How's that?" the other deputy said.
"You forgot to put on your name tags. Now, why would you do that?"
"Don't worry about any goddamn name tags. You're coming back to the courthouse with us," the younger deputy said. He had stopped chewing his gum, and his jawbone was rigid against his cheek.
"You got a flat tire, anyway, Lieutenant," the older man said. "I figure that's kind of our fault, so while you ride in with us I'll radio the tow to come and change it for you."
"Facts-of-life time," I said. "You don't roust a City of New Orleans detective."
"Our territory, our rules, Lieutenant."
"Fuck you," I said.
They were both silent. The sun was shimmering brilliantly on the flat expanse of water behind them. The light was so bright I had to force myself not to blink. I could hear both of them breathing, see their eyes flick at each other uncertainly, almost smell the thin sweat on their skin.
The younger man's shoe shifted in the gravel and his thumb fluttered toward the strap on the holster that held his chrome-plated.357 Magnum revolver. I tore my.38 out of the clip holster on my belt, squatted, and aimed with two hands into their faces.
"Big mistake, podjo! Hands on your head and down on your knees!" I shouted.
"Look-" the older deputy began.
"Don't think, do it! I win, you lose!" My breath was coming hard in my throat.
They looked at each other, laced their hands on their heads, and knelt in front of their car. I went behind them, pulled their heavy revolvers from their holsters, and pitched them sideways into the lake.
"Take out your cuffs and lock up to the bumper," I said.
"You're in over your head," the older deputy said. The back of his suntanned neck was beaded with sweat.
"That's not the way I read it," I said. "You guys thought you'd be cowboys and you got your faces shoved into the sheepdip. What was it going to be, a day or so in the tank, or maybe some serious patty-cake in the backseat on the way to the jail?"
They didn't reply. Their faces were hot and angry and pained by the rocks that cut their knees.
"Put the cuffs through the bumper and lock your wrists," I said. "You didn't answer me, which makes me wonder if I was going to make the jail. Are you guys into it that big?"
"Kiss my ass," the younger deputy said.
"Tell me, are y'all that dumb? You think you can pop a New Orleans cop and walk out of it?"
"We'll see who walks out of what," the older deputy said. He had to twist sideways on his knees and squint up into the sun to talk to me.
"The sheriff is letting you clean up his shit for him, isn't he?" I said. "It looks like lousy work to me. You ought to get him to spread the juice around a little more. You guys probably rip off a little change now and then, maybe get some free action in the local hot-pillow joint, but he drives a Cadillac and raises Arabians."
"For a homicide cop you're a stupid bastard," the older deputy said. "What makes you think you're so important you got to be popped? You're just a hair in somebody's nose."
"I'm afraid you boys have limited careers ahead of you."
"Start figuring how you're going to get out of here," the younger deputy said.
"You mean my fiat tire? That is a problem," I said thoughtfully. "What if I just drive your car down the road a little ways with you guys still cuffed to it?"
For the first time their faces showed the beginnings of genuine fear.
"Relax. We have our standards in New Orleans. We don't pick on the mentally handicapped," I said.
In the distance I saw a maroon car approaching. The two deputies heard it and looked at each other expectantly.
"Sorry, no cavalry today," I said, then squatted down at eye level with them. "Now look, you pair of clowns, I don't know how far you want to take this, but if you really want to get it on, you remember this: I've got more juice than you do, more people, more brains, more everything that counts. So give it some thought. In the meantime I'm going to send somebody back for my car, and it had better be here. Also, tell that character you work for that our conversation was ongoing. He'll get my drift."
I flagged down the maroon car with my badge and got in the passenger's seat before the driver, a blond woman in her late twenties with windblown hair and wide eyes, could speak or concentrate on the two manacled deputies. Her tape player was blaring out Tchaikovsky's First Concerto, and the backseat was an incredible litter of papers, notebooks, and government forms.
"I'm a New Orleans police officer. I need you to take me to the next town," I shouted above the music.
Her eyes were blue and as round as a doll's with surprise and fear. She began to accelerate slowly, her eyes sliding past the handcuffed cops but then riveting on them again in the rearview mirror.
"Are those men locked to the car bumper?" she said.
"Yes. They were bad boys," I yelled back. "Can I turn this down?"
"I'm sorry, but I have to do this. You can go ahead and shoot if you want to."
And with that she slammed on the brakes, dropped the transmission into reverse, and floorboarded the car backwards in a screech of rubber and a cloud of black smoke. My head hit the windshield, then I saw my old Chevrolet coming up fast. "Watch it!" I shouted.
But it was too late. Her bumper caught my front fender and raked both doors. Then she careened to a stop, flipped off the stereo, leaned across me, and yelled at the deputies, "This man says he's a police officer. Is that true?"
"Call the Cataouatche sheriff's office, lady," the older deputy said. He was squatting on one knee, and his face was strained with discomfort.
"Who is this man in my car?"
"He's a piece of shit that's going to get ground into the concrete," the younger deputy said.
The woman yanked the car into low, pushed the accelerator to the floor, and roared past my car again. I felt her back bumper carom off my front fender. She drove like a wild person, papers blowing in the backseat, the lake and flooded woods streaking past us.
"I'm sorry about your car. I have insurance. I think I still do, anyway," she said.
"That's all right. I've always wanted to see the country from inside a hurricane. Are you still afraid, or do you always drive like this?"
"Like what?" Her hair was blowing in the wind and her round blue eyes were intent over the wheel.
"Do you still think I'm an escaped criminal?" I said.
"I don't know what you are, but I recognized one of those deputies. He's a sadist who rubbed his penis all over one of my clients."
"Your clients?"
"I work for the state handicapped services."
"You can put him away."
"She's scared to death. He told her he'd do it to her again, and then put her in jail as a prostitute."
"God, lady, look out. Listen, there's a restaurant on stilts just across the parish line. You pull in there, then we're going to make a phone call and I'm going to buy you lunch."
"Why?"
"Because you're wired and you don't believe who I am. By the way, what you did back there took courage."
"No, it didn't. I just don't give rides to weird people. There's a lot of weirdness around these days. If you're a police detective, why are you driving a wreck of an automobile?"
"A few minutes ago it wasn't entirely a wreck."
"That's what I mean by weirdness. Maybe I saved your life, and you criticize my driving."
Don't argue with God's design on a sun-spangled morning in a corridor of oak trees, Robicheaux, I thought. Also, don't argue with somebody who's doing eighty-five miles an hour and showering rocks like birdshot against the tree trunks.
The restaurant was a ramshackle board place with screen windows, built up on posts over the lake. Metal Dixie 45 and Jax beer signs were nailed all over the outer walls. Crawfish were out of season, so I ordered fried catfish and small bowls of shrimp gumbo. While we waited for the food, I bought her a drink at the bar and used the phone to call my extension at First District headquarters in New Orleans. I put the receiver to her ear so she could hear Clete answer, then I took the receiver back.
"I'm having lunch with a lady who would like you to describe what I look like," I told him, and gave the phone back to her. I saw her start to smile as she listened, then her eyes crinkled and she laughed out loud.
"That's outrageous," she said.
"What'd he say?"
"That your hair is streaked like a skunk's and that sometimes you try to walk the check."
"Clete's always had satirical ambitions."
"Is this how you all really do things? Chaining up other cops to cars, terrifying people on the highway, playing jokes over the phone?"
"Not exactly. They have a different set of rules in Cataouatche Parish. I sort of strayed off my turf."
"What about those deputies back there? Won't they come after you?"
"I think they'll be more worried about explaining themselves to the man they work for. After we eat, can you take me back to the city?"
"I have to make a home call at a client's house, then I can." She sipped from her Manhattan, then ate the cherry off the toothpick. She saw me watching her, and she looked out the window at the lake, where the wind was blowing the moss in the cypress trees.
"Do you like horse racing?" I said.
"I've never been."
"I have a clubhouse pass. Would you like to go tomorrow night, provided I have my car back?"
She paused, and her electric blue eyes wandered over my face.
"I play cello with a string quartet. We have practice tomorrow night," she said.
"Oh."
"But we'll probably finish by eight-thirty, if that's not too late. I live by Audubon Park," she said.
See, don't argue with design and things will work out all right after all, I told myself.
But things did not go well back at the District the next day. They never did when I had to deal with the people in vice, or with Sergeant Motley in particular. He was black, an ex-career enlisted man, but he had little sympathy for his own people. One time a black wino in a holding cell was giving Motley a bad time, calling him "the white man's knee-grow, with a white man's badge and a white man's gun," and Motley covered him from head to foot with the contents of a can of Mace before the turnkey slapped it out of his hand.
But there was another memory about Motley that was darker. Before he made sergeant and moved over to vice, he had worked as a bailiff at the court and was in charge of escorting prisoners from the drunk tank to morning arraignment. He had seven of them on a wrist-chain in the elevator when a basement fire blew the electric circuits and stalled the elevator between floors. Motley got out through the escape door in the elevator's roof, but the seven prisoners were asphyxiated by the smoke.
"What do you want to know about her?" he said. He was overweight and had a thick mustache, and his ashtray was full of cigar butts.
"You busted her three times in a month-twice for soliciting, once for holding. You must have had an interest in her," I said.
"She was a ten-dollar chicken, a real loser."
"You're not telling me a lot, Motley."
"What's to tell? She was freebasing and jacking guys off in a massage parlor on Decatur. She was the kind a john cuts up or a pimp sets on fire. Like I say, a victim. A country girl that was going to make the big score."
"Who went her bail?"
"Probably her pimp. I don't remember."
"Who was he?"
"I don't remember. There's a new lowlife running that joint every two months."
"You know anybody who'd have reason to give her a hotshot?"
"Ask me her shoe size. When'd she become your case, anyway? I heard you fished her out of the bayou in Cataouatche Parish."
"It's a personal interest. Look, Motley, we cooperate with you guys. How about being a little reciprocal?"
"What is it you think I know? I told you she was just another brainless whore. They all come out of the same cookie cutter. I lost contact with her, anyway."
"What do you mean?"
"We busted the massage parlor a couple of times and she wasn't working there anymore. One of the other broads said Julio Segura moved her out to his place. That don't mean anything, though. He does that all the time, then he gets tired of them, gives them a few balloons of Mexican brown, and has that dwarf chauffeur of his drive them to the bus stop or back to the crib."
"You're unbelievable."
"You think a guy like him is interested in snuffing whores? Write it off, Robicheaux. You're wasting your time."
Fifteen minutes later, Captain Guidry walked into the office I shared with Clete. He was fifty and lived with his mother and belonged to the Knights of Columbus. But recently he had been dating a widow in the city water department, and we knew it was serious when the captain began to undergo a hair transplant. His gleaming bald scalp was now inlaid with tiny round divots of transplanted hair, so that his head looked like a rock with weeds starting to grow on it. But he was a good administrator, a straight arrow, and he often took the heat for us when he didn't have to.
"Triple-A called and said they towed in your car," he said.
"That's good," I said.
"No. They also said somebody must have broken all the windows out with a hammer or a baseball bat. What went on over there with the sheriff's department, Dave?"
I told him while he stared at me blankly. I also told him about Julio Segura. Cletus kept his face buried in our file drawer.
"You didn't make this up? You actually cuffed two sheriff's deputies to their own car?" the captain said.
"I wasn't holding a very good hand, Captain."
"Well, you probably had them figured right, because they haven't pursued it, except for remodeling your windows. You want to turn the screws on them a little? I can call the state attorney general's office and probably shake them up a bit."
"Clete and I want to go out to Segura's place."
"Vice considers that their territory," Captain Guidry said.
"They're talking about killing a cop. It's our territory now," I said.
"All right, but no cowboy stuff," he said. "Right now we don't have legal cause to be out there."
"Okay."
"You just talk, let him know we're hearing things we don't like."
"Okay, Captain."
He rubbed his fingernail over one of the crusted implants in his head.
"Dave?"
"Yes, sir?"
"Forget what I said. He's threatening a New Orleans police officer and we're not going to tolerate it. Put his head in the toilet. Tell him it came from me, too."
Oleander, azalea, and myrtle trees were planted thickly behind the scrolled iron fence that surrounded Segura's enormous blue-green lawn. Gardeners were clipping the hedges, watering the geranium and rose beds, cutting away the dead brown leaves from the stands of banana trees. Back toward the lake I could see the white stucco two-story house, its red tile roof gleaming in the sun, the royal palms waving by the swimming pool. Someone sprang loudly off a diving board.
A muscular Latin man in slacks and a golf shirt came out the front gate and leaned down to Clete's window. There were faded tattoos under the black hair on his forearms. He also wore large rings on both hands.
"Can I help you, sir?" he said.
"We're police officers. We want to talk to Segura," Clete said.
"Do you have an appointment with him?"
"Just tell him we're here, partner," Clete said.
"He's got guests right now."
"You got a hearing problem?" Clete said.
"I got a clipboard with some names on it. If your name's on it, you come in. If it ain't, you stay out."
"Listen, you fucking greaseball…" Without finishing his sentence, Clete got out of the car and hit the man murderously in the stomach with his fist. The man doubled over, his mouth dropped open as though he had been struck with a sledgehammer, and his eyes looked like he was drowning.
"Got indigestion troubles? Try Tums," Clete said.
"What's the matter with you?" I said to him.
"Nothing now," he said, and pushed back the iron gate so we could drive through. The Latin man held on to the fence with one hand and labored to get his breath back. We drove up the driveway toward the stucco house. I continued to look at Clete.
"You never worked vice. You don't know what kind of scum these bastards are," he said. "When a greaseball like that gets in your face, you step all over him. It defines the equations for him."
"Did you get drunk last night?"
"Yeah, but I don't need an excuse to bash one of these fuckers."
"No more of it, Clete."
"We're in, aren't we? We're the surprise in Julio's afternoon box of Cracker Jacks. Look at that bunch by the pool. I bet we could run them and connect them with every dope deal in Orleans and Jefferson parishes."
About a dozen people were in or around the clover-shaped pool. They floated on rubber rafts in the turquoise water, played cards on a mosaic stone table and benches that were anchored in the shallow end, or sat in lawn chairs by the slender gray trunks of the palms while a family of dwarf servants brought them tall tropical drinks filled with fruit and ice.
Clete walked directly across the clipped grass to an umbrella-shaded table where a middle-aged man in cream-colored slacks and a yellow shirt covered with blue parrots sat with two other men who were as dark as Indians and built like fire hydrants. The man in the print shirt was one of the most peculiar-looking human beings I had ever seen. His face was triangular-shaped, with a small mouth and very small ears, and his eyes were absolutely black. Three deep creases ran across his forehead, and inside the creases you could see tiny balls of skin. On his wrist was a gold watch with a black digital dial, and he smoked a Bisonte with a cigarette holder. The two dark men started to get up protectively as we approached the table, but the man in the yellow and blue shirt gestured for them to remain seated. His eyes kept narrowing as though Clete's face were floating toward him out of a memory.
"What's happening, Julio?" Clete said. "There's a guy out front puking his lunch all over the grass. It really looks nasty for the neighborhood. You ought to hire a higher-class gate man."
"Purcel, right?" Segura said, the recognition clicking into his eyes.
"That's good," Clete said. "Now connect the dots and figure out who this guy with me is."
One of the dark men said something to Segura in Spanish.
"Shut up, greaseball," Clete said.
"What do you think you're doing, Purcel?" Segura asked.
"That all depends on you, Julio. We hear you're putting out a very serious shuck about my partner," Clete said.
"Is this him?" Segura asked.
I didn't answer. I stared straight into his eyes. He puffed on his cigarette holder and looked back at me without blinking, as though he were looking at an object rather than a man.
"I heard you been knocking the furniture around," he said finally. "But I don't know you. I never heard of you, either."
"I think you're a liar," I said.
"That's your right. What else you want to tell me today?"
"Your people killed a nineteen-year-old girl named Lovelace Deshotels."
"Let me tell you something, what's-your-name," he said. "I'm an American citizen. I'm a citizen because a United States senator introduced a bill to bring me here. I got a son in West Point. I don't kill people. I don't mind Purcel and his people bothering me sometimes. You got la mordida here just like in Nicaragua. But you don't come out here and tell me I kill somebody." He nodded to one of the dark men, who got up and walked to the house. "I tell you something else, too. You know why Purcel is out here? It's because he's got a guilty conscience and he blames other people for it. He took a girl out of a massage parlor in the French Quarter and seduced her in the back of his car. That's the kind of people you got telling me what morality is."
"How'd you like your teeth kicked down your throat?" Clete asked.
"I got my attorneys coming out right now. You want to make threats, you want to hit people, you'll make them rich. They love you."
"You're a pretty slick guy, Julio," I said.
"Yeah? Maybe you're a cute guy, like your partner," he answered.
"Slick as Vaseline, not a bump or a handle on you," I said. "But let me tell you a story of my own. My daddy was a trapper on Marsh Island. He used to tell me, 'If it's not moving, don't poke it. But when it starts snapping at your kneecaps, wait till it opens up real wide, then spit in its mouth.' What do you think of that story?"
"You're a mature man. Why you want to be a fool? I didn't do nothing to you. For some reason you're finding this trouble for yourself."
"What's the worst thing you've ever seen happen to somebody, Julio?" I asked.
"What're you talking about?" he said. His brow was furrowed, and the tiny balls of skin in the creases looked like strings of purple BBs.
"I hear you have some cruel guys working for you. Probably some of Somoza's old national guardsmen, experts in garroting journalists and murdering Catholic priests."
"You don't make no sense."
"Sure I do," I said. "You probably got to visit the basement in some of Somoza's police stations. You saw them hung up by their arms, with a cloth bag soaked in insecticide tied over their heads. They screamed and went blind and suffocated to death, and even a piece of shit like yourself had a few nightmares about it. You also knew about that volcano where the army used to drop the Sandinistas from a helicopter into the burning crater. It's pretty awful stuff to think about, Julio."
"They really sent us a pair today. A vice cop with puta in his head and another one that talks like a Marxist," he said. Some of the people around the pool laughed.
"You're not following my drift," I said. "You see, to you a bad fate is what you've seen your own kind do to other people. But once you got away from the horror show down there in Managua, you figured you were safe. So did Somoza. He got out of Dodge with all his millions, then one day his chauffeur was driving him across Asuncion in his limo, with a motorcycle escort in front and back, and somebody parked a three-point-five bazooka rocket in his lap. It blew him into instant lasagna. Are you following me, Julio?"
"You going to come after me, big man?" he asked.
"You still don't get it. Look, it's almost biblical. Eventually somebody eats your lunch, and it always comes from a place you didn't expect it. Maybe a redneck cop puts a thumbbuster forty-five behind your ear and lets off a hollow-point that unfastens your whole face. Or maybe they strap you down in the Red Hat House at Angola and turn your brains into fried grits."
"You ought to get a job writing comic books," he said.
"Then maybe you're sitting by your pool, secure, with your prostitutes and these trained monkeys around you, and something happens out of sequence," I said, and picked up his tropical drink full of ice and fruit and poured it into his lap.
He roared back from the table, raking ice off his cream-colored slacks, his face full of outrage and disbelief. The squat, dark man seated across from him started from his chair. Clete slammed him back down.
"Start it and we finish it, Paco," he said.
The dark man remained seated and gripped the wrought-iron arms of his chair, staring at Clete with a face that was as flat and latently brutal as a frying pan.
"There, that's a good fellow," Clete said.
"You get out of here!" Segura said.
"This is just for openers. The homicide people are a creative bunch," I said.
"You're spit on the sidewalk," he said.
"We've got a whole grab bag of door prizes for you, Julio. But in the end I'm going to send you back to the tomato patch," I said.
"I got guys that can cut a piece out of you every day of your life," Segura said.
"That sounds like a threat against a police officer," Clete said.
"I don't play your game, maricón," Segura said. "You're amateurs, losers. Look behind you. You want to shove people around now?"
Two men had parked their canary-yellow Continental at the end of the drive and were walking across the grass toward us. Both of them looked like upgraded bail bondsmen.
"Whiplash Wineburger, up from the depths," Clete said.
"I thought he'd been disbarred for fixing a juror," I said.
"That was his brother. Whiplash is too slick for that," Clete said. "His specialty is insurance fraud and ripping off his own clients."
"Who's the oilcan with him?"
"Some dago legislator that's been peddling his ass around here for years."
"I heard you were wired into some heavy connections. These guys need lead in their shoes on a windy day," I said to Segura.
"Me cago en la puta de tu madre, " he replied.
"You hotdogs got two minutes to get out of here," the lawyer said. He was lean and tan, like an aging professional tennis player, and he wore a beige sports jacket, a yellow open-necked shirt, and brown-tinted glasses.
"We were just on our way. It looks like the neighborhood is going to hell in a hurry," Clete said.
"By the way, Wineburger," I said, "bone up on your tax law. I hear the IRS is about to toss Segura's tax records."
"Yeah? You got a line to the White House?" he said.
"It's all over the Federal Building. You haven't been doing your homework," I said.
We walked back to our car and left Segura and his lawyer staring at each other.
We headed back down the lake road toward the Pontchartrain Expressway. The palm trees were beating along the shore, and small waves were whitecapping out on the lake. Several sailboats were tacking hard in the wind.
"You think we stuck a couple of thumbtacks in his head?" Cletus asked. He drove without looking at me.
"We'll see."
"That touch about the IRS was beautiful."
"You want to tell me something, Clete?"
"Am I supposed to go to confession or something?"
"I don't like to see a guy like Segura trying to jerk my partner around."
"It was three years ago. My wife and I had broke up, and I'd been on the shelf for six weeks."
"You let the girl walk?"
"She never got busted. She was a snitch. I liked her."
"That's why you put your fist through that guy's stomach?"
"All right, so I don't feel good about it. But I swear to you, Dave, I never got any free action because of my badge, and I never went on the pad." He looked across at me with his poached, scarred face.
"So I believe you."
"So buy me a beignet and a coffee at the Café du Monde."
An afternoon thundershower was building out over Lake Pontchartrain. The sky on the distant horizon had turned green, and waves were scudding all across the lake now. The few sailboats still out were drenched with spray and foam as they pounded into the wind and headed for their docks. It started to rain in large, flat drops when we turned onto the Expressway, then suddenly it poured down on Clete's car in a roar of tackhammers.
The city was soaked and dripping when I went to pick up the social worker, whose name was Annie Ballard, by Audubon Park. The streetlamps lighted the misty trees along the esplanade on St. Charles; the burnished streetcar tracks and the old green streetcar glistened dully in the wet light, and the smoky neon signs, the bright, rain-streaked windows of the restaurants and the drugstore on the corner were like part of a nocturnal painting out of the 1940s. This part of New Orleans never seemed to change, and somehow its confirmation of yesterday on a rainy summer night always dissipated my own fears about time and mortality. And it was this reverie that made me careless, let me ignore the car that parked behind me, and let me walk up her sidewalk with the vain presumption that only people like Julio Segura had things happen to them out of sequence.