“You want to sit down, Bertie?”
“You finally axed,” she said.
I helped her up the steps into the swing. She wrapped one hand around the support chain and pushed herself back and forth in a slowly oscillating arc.
“This is a nice place for your li’l girl to grow up in, ain’t it?” she said.
“Yes, it is.”
“How long your family own this?”
“The land was part of my grandfather’s farm. My father built the house in nineteen thirty.”
“How’d you like it if somebody just took it away from you, say you ain’t got no proof it was part of your gran’daddy’s farm? Run a dozer through the walls and scrape away the ground just like none of y’all was ever here?”
“You’ve got to give me some time, Bertie. I’m doing the best I can.”
She snapped open the big clasp on her bag and reached inside.
“You don’t believe Moleen after some treasure on our land, so I brought you something,” she said. “I dug these out of my li’l garden early this spring.”
One at a time she removed a series of thin eight- or nine-inch objects individually wrapped in tissue paper and bound with rubber bands. Then she rolled the rubber bands off one and peeled back the paper and flattened it against the swing.
“What you think of that?” she said.
The spoon was black as a scorched pot with tarnish, but she had obviously rubbed the metal smooth and free of dirt with rags so you could clearly see the coat of arms and the letter S embossed on the flanged head of the handle.
“That’s pretty impressive,” I said. “How deep was this in the soil?”
“From my elbow to the tip of my finger.”
“Have you shown this to anybody else?”
“No, and I ain’t going to. Not till I get a piece of paper that say that’s my land.”
“There’s an antique gun and coin store in New Orleans, Cohen’s, it’s on Royal Street. Can I take one of these spoons there if I don’t tell them where I got it?”
“You give me your word on that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How long that gonna take?” she said, fanning herself with a flowered handkerchief.
Chapter 14
I CHECKED OUT of the office early Tuesday afternoon and drove across the Atchafalaya Basin through Baton Rouge into New Orleans. I went first to Cohen’s on Royal, whose collection of antique guns and coins and Civil War ordnance could match a museum’s, then I met Clete at his office on St. Ann and we walked through Jackson Square to a small Italian restaurant down from Tujague’s on Decatur.
We sat in back at a table with a checkered cloth and ordered, then Clete went to the bar and came back with a shot glass of bourbon and a schooner of draft. He lowered the shot into the schooner with his fingertips and watched it slide and clink down the side to the bottom, the whiskey corkscrewing upward in an amber cloud.
“Why don’t you pour some liquid Drano in there while you’re at it?” I said.
He took a deep hit and wiped his mouth with his hand.
“I had to pull a bail jumper out of a motel on the Airline Highway this afternoon. He had both his kids with him. I got to lose this PI gig,” he said.
“You did it when you had your shield.”
“It doesn’t work the same way, mon. Bondsmen dime one guy just to bring in another. The shit bags are just money on the hoof.”
He took another drink from his boilermaker and the light began to change in his eyes. “Your ME matched up the blood on the floater?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s the guy named Jack. We got the media to sit on the story, though.” He reached across the table and pulled the tissue-paper-wrapped spoon given me by Bertie Fontenot from my shirt pocket. He worked the paper off the embossed tip of the handle.
“What’d they tell you at Cohen’s?” he said.
“It’s eighteenth-century silverware, probably cast in Spain or France.”
He rubbed the ball of his thumb on the coat of arms, then stuck the spoon back in my pocket. “This came off the Bertrand plantation, you say?” he said.
“Yep.”
“I think you’re pissing up a flagpole, Streak.”
“Thanks.”
“You don’t see it.”
“See what?”
“I think you’ve got a hard-on for this guy Bertrand.”
“He keeps showing up in the case. What am I supposed to do?”
“That’s not it. He’s the guy whose shit don’t flush.”
“He’s dirty.”
“So is the planet. Your problem is Marsallus and the meres and maybe Johnny Carp. You got to keep the lines simple, mon.”
“What do you hear about Patsy Dapolito?” I said, to change the subject.
“I thought I told you. He’s in jail in Houston. He told the plastic surgeon he’d put his eye out if he messed up the job.”
“The ME said the guy named Jack was probably terrified when he caught the two nine-millimeters.”
“You mean terrified of Sonny Boy?” he said.
“That’s the way I’d read it.”
“There’s another side to that guy, Streak. I saw him make a couple of captured army dudes, I mean they were real grease balls guys with children’s blood splattered on their boots, so they probably had it coming, but you don’t get something like that out of your memory easy—he made them scoop out a grave in the middle of a trail with pie plates and kneel on the edge, then from six inches he blew their brains all over the bushes with a .44 Magnum.”
Clete shook the image out of his face, then held up his empty shot glass at the bartender.
He’d had six boilermakers by the time we finished dinner. He started to order another round. His throat was red and grained, as though it were wind chafed.
“Let’s get some coffee and beignets at the Cafe du Monde,” I said.
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Yeah, you do.”
“Ole Streak, swinging through town like a wrecking ball, pretending everything’s under control. But I love you anyway, motherfucker,” he said.
We walked under the colonnade of the French Market, then had coffee and pastry at the outdoor tables. Across the street, in Jackson Square, the sidewalk artists were still set up along the walkway, and at the end of the piked fence that surrounds the park you could see a gut-bucket string band playing adjacent to the cathedral. I walked with Clete back to his office and sat with him on the edge of a stone well in the courtyard while he told me a long-winded story about riding with his father on the father’s milk delivery route in the Garden District; then the lavender sky began to darken and swallows spun out of the shadows and when the lights in the upstairs apartments came on I could see the alcohol gradually go out of Clete’s eyes, and I shook hands with him and drove back to New Iberia.
When I got home from the office the next afternoon, Alafair was sitting in the swing on the gallery, snapping beans in a pot. Her face was scratched, and there were grass and mud stains on her Levi’s.
“You look like you rode Tex through a briar patch, Alf,” I said.
“I fell down the coulee.”
“How’d you do that?” I leaned against the rail and a post on the gallery.
“A dog got after Tripod. I ran over in Mr. LeBlanc’s yard and tripped on the bank. I fell in a bunch of stickers.”
“The coulee’s pretty steep over there.”
“That’s what that man said.”
“Which man?”
“The one who got me out. He climbed down the side and got all muddy. He might buy Mr. LeBlanc’s house.”
I looked over into the neighbor’s yard. A realtor I knew from town had just walked from the far side of the house with a clipboard in his hand. He was pointing at some features in the upstairs area, talking over his shoulder, when my eyes locked on the man behind him.
“Did this man say anything to you?” I said.
“He said I s
hould be careful. Then he got Tripod out of the willow tree.”
“Where’s Bootsie?” I said.
“She had to go to the store. Is something wrong, Dave?”
“No. Excuse me a minute.”
I went inside and called the dispatcher for a cruiser. Then I went back out on the gallery.
“I’m going next door. But you stay on the gallery, understand?” I said.
“He didn’t do anything wrong, Dave.”
I walked across the grass toward my neighbor’s property and the man with miniature buttocks and ax-handle shoulders and chunks of lead for eyes.
He was dressed in a pale blue summer sports coat, an open-collar white shirt with ballpoint pens in the pocket, gray slacks, shined brown wingtips that were caked with mud around the soles; except for the stains on his clothes, he could have been a working man on his way to a fine evening at the track.
The realtor turned and looked at me.
“Oh hello, Dave,” he said. “I was just showing Mr. Pogue the properly here.”
“I’d like to thank the gentleman for helping my daughter out of the coulee,” I said.
“It was my pleasure,” the man with the buckshot eyes said, his mouth grinning, his head nodding.
“Mr. Andrepont, could I talk with him in private a minute?” I said.
“I beg your pardon?” he said.
“It’ll take just a minute. Thank you,” I said.
“I see, well, let me know when you’re finished, sir.” He walked toward his car, averting his eyes to hide the anger in them.
“You’re Emile Pogue,” I said.
“Why not?” The voice sounded like it came from rusted pipe.
“You get around a lot. Exercising out at Pecan Island, showing up at the house next door. What’s your interest, Mr. Pogue?”
“I’m retired, I like the weather, I like the price on this house.”
“Why is it I think you’re full of shit?”
“Be fucked if I know.” He grinned.
“I’d like to ask a favor of you, take a ride down to our jail with me, we had a little problem there.”
“I was planning on having an early dinner with a lady friend,” he said.
“Change it to candlelight. Put your hands behind your head, please.”
“You got to have a warrant, don’t you, chief?”
“I’m not big on protocol. Turn around.”
When he laced his fingers behind his neck his muscles almost split his coat. I rotated his left hand counterclockwise to the center of his back and pushed it into a pressure position between his shoulder blades. His upper arm had the tension and resistance of a wagon spring.
“Move your right hand higher, no, no, up behind your ear, Mr. Pogue. That’s right,” I said.
I cuffed his right wrist and moved it clockwise to his spine and then hooked it up to his left. I could see the cruiser coming up the road under the oak trees. I walked him down the sloping lawn to meet it, past the realtor, who stared at us open-mouthed.
“Is it true Sonny Marsallus popped a cap on your brother?” I said.
“Sounds like you left your grits on the stove too long,” he answered.
I rode in the back of the cruiser with him to the department, then took him down to my office and hooked him to the D-ring inset in the floor. I called the sheriff and Kelso, the jailer, at their homes. When I hung up the phone, Pogue was staring at me, his eyes taking my measure, one shoulder pulled lopsided by the D-ring. He gave off a peculiar smell, like testosterone in his sweat.
“We’re going to have to wait a little bit,” I said.
“For what?”
I took out my time sheet from my desk drawer and began filling it in.
We’d had a power failure earlier and the air-conditioning had been off for two hours.
“Wait for what?” he said.
I heard him shift in his chair, the handcuff clink against the steel D-ring. Five minutes later, he said, “What’s this, Psy Ops down in Bumfuck?” His sports coat was rumpled, his face slick with heat.
I put away my time sheet and opened a yellow legal pad on my desk blotter. I uncapped my fountain pen and tapped it idly on the pad. Then I wrote on several lines.
“You were an instructor at an Israeli jump school?” I said.
“Maybe. Thirty years in, a lot of different gigs.”
“Looks like you managed to stay off the computer.”
He worked his wrist inside the cuff.
“I’m maxing out here on this situation, chief,” he said.
“Don’t call me that again.”
“You ever fish with a Dupont special, blow fish up into the trees? You cut to the chase, that’s how it gets done. Who you think runs this country?”
“Why don’t you clear that up for me?”
“You’re a smart guy. Don’t make like you ain’t.”
“I see. You and your friends do?”
He smiled painfully. “You got you a good routine. I bet the locals dig it.”
Through my window I saw the sheriff, Kelso, and the night man from the jail out in the hall. They were watching Emile Pogue. Kelso’s eyes were distorted to the size of oysters behind his thick glasses. He and the night man shook their heads.
“We selling tickets? What’s going on?” Pogue said.
“You ever work CID or get attached to a federal law enforcement agency?” I said.
“No.”
“Somebody with insider experience kidnapped a man out of our jail. They murdered him out at Lake Martin.”
His laugh was like the cough of a furnace deep under a tenement building.
“Don’t tell me, the black guy looking out of the fishbowl has got to be the jailer,” he said.
Kelso and the night man went down the hall. The sheriff opened my door and put his head inside.
“See me on your way out, Dave,” he said, and closed the door again.
“It doesn’t look like you’re our man,” I said.
“I got no beef, long as we get this thing finished ... What you writing there?”
“Not much. Just a speculation or two.” I propped the legal pad on the edge of the desk and looked down at it. “How’s this sound? You probably enlisted when you were a kid, volunteered for a lot of elite units, then got into some dirty stuff over in “Nam, the Phoenix Program maybe, going into Charlie’s ville at night, slitting his throat in his sleep, painting his face yellow for his wife to find in the morning, you know the drill.”
He laughed again, then pinched the front of his shirt with his fingers and shook it to cool himself. I could see the lead fillings in his molars, a web of saliva in his mouth.
“Then maybe you went into poppy farming with the Hmongs over in Laos. Is that a possibility, Emile?”
“You like cold beer? At the White Rose they had it so cold it’d make your throat ache. You could get ice-cold beer and a blow job at the same time, that’s no jive. You had to be up for it, though, know what I’m saying?”
“You should have gone out to Washington State,” I said.
“I’m a little slow this evening, you got to clue me.”
“That’s where your kind end up, right, either in a root cellar in the Cascades or fucking up other people’s lives in Third World countries. You shouldn’t have come here, Emile.” I tore off the page on my legal pad, which contained a list of items I needed for the bait shop and couldn’t afford, and threw it in the wastebasket. Then I unlocked his cuffed wrist from the D-ring.
He rose from the chair and his nostrils flared.
“I feel like I’m wrapped in stink,” he said.
“If you need a ride, a deputy will take you wherever you want,” I said.
“Thanks, I’ll get a cab. Can I use your John? I got to wash up.”
I pointed toward the men’s room, then I said, “Let me ask a favor of you, Emile.”
“You got it.”
“You’re a pro. Don’t come through the wrong man’s perimete
r.”
“The house next to yours? Who the fuck wants to live on a ditch full of mosquitoes?”
He went down the hall and pushed through the men’s room door. The light from inside framed him like a simian creature caught in the pop of a flashbulb.
I worked open the window to rid the office of the peculiar odor that Pogue left behind, like the smell of a warm gym that’s been closed for days. Then I called home and went inside the men’s room. It was usually clean and squared away, but around one basin soap and water were splashed on the mirror and walls and crumpled paper towels were scattered all over the floor. I walked down the darkened hall to the sheriff’s office.
“Where’s Pogue?” he said.
“Gone.”
“Gone? I asked you to see me before—“
“That’s not what you said.”
“I was going to put a tail on the guy. I just called the FBI in Lafayette.”
“It’s a waste of time.”
“Would you care to explain that?” he said.
“His kind don’t disappear on you. I wish they would.”
“What are you talking about, Dave?”
“He’s evil incarnate, Sheriff.”
Bootsie and Alafair and I had a cold supper of chicken salad sandwiches, bean salad, and mint tea on the redwood table in the backyard. The new cane in my neighbor’s field was pale green and waving in the sun’s afterglow; he had opened the lock in his irrigation canal and you could smell the heavy, wet odor of the water inching through the rows.
“Oh, I forgot, Dave. A man named Sonny called while you were gone,” Alafair said. She had showered and put on makeup and baby powder on her neck and a dark pair of blue jeans and a lavender blouse with primroses sewn on the sleeves.
“What’d he have to say?”
“Nothing. He said he’d call back.”
“He didn’t leave a number?”
“I asked him to. He said he was at a pay phone.”
Bootsie watched my face.
“Where you going tonight?” I said to Alafair.
“To study. At the library.”
“You’re going fifteen miles to study?” I said.
“Danny’s picking me up.”