“How many people, Dave, how many did you—“
“You never let yourself see a number in your mind, Alf. The day you do, the day it comes out of your mouth, that’s the day you start being someone else,” I said.
Sonny Boy called the bait shop at three o’clock that afternoon.
“You’ve got a serious hearing problem,” I said. “I want you out of my life. Don’t come around my house anymore, you understand? You want to be a guardian angel, go to New York, put on a red beret, and buy a lot of subway tokens.”
“What do you mean come around your house?” he said. I could hear waves breaking against rocks or a jetty, then the sound of a door on a telephone booth closing.
“Friday night,” I said.
“I was in New Orleans,” he said.
“Don’t give me that, Sonny.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“My daughter saw a guy in the trees. It wasn’t Emile Pogue, it wasn’t Patsy Dap, Patsy wants to do business and screw Johnny Carp, that leaves you.” But my words sounded hollow even to myself.
“They got lots of guys working for them, Streak, a lot of them in Florida. They get gooned-up like over-the-hill jarheads on a skivvy run, blow into town, give a guy a fatal accident, and catch the redeye back to Tampa the same night.”
I could hear myself breathing against the receiver. Outside the screen window, the sunlight’s reflection on the bayou was like a sliver of glass in the eye.
“Why’d you call?” I said.
“A rag-nose used to work for Johnny Carp told me Johnny’s in on a deal to get some land by a train track. He said he heard Johnny tell a guy on the phone the land’s got to be by a train track. That’s the key.”
“To what?” I said.
“I don’t know. You ought to see the rag-nose. He’s got nostrils that look like tunnels going straight into his brain. The real reason I called, if my string runs out, like I bounce back treys and boxcars, know what I’m saying, I wanted to tell you I’m sorry for the trouble I caused other people.”
“Come on, Sonny, you got your ticket punched a long time ago. You’ll be standing on Canal with a glass of champagne when they drive Johnny’s hearse by ... Sonny?”
I heard the phone booth door rachet back violently on its hinges, the receiver clattering back and forth on its cord, then, almost lost in the crash of waves against rocks or a jetty, a sound like a string of firecrackers popping.
Chapter 21
EARLY MONDAY MORNING the sheriff called and asked me to come to the department. I thought it was about Sonny. It wasn’t.
He was scraping out the bowl of his pipe over the wastebasket with a penknife when I walked into his office.
“Sit down,” he said. He wiped the blade of the penknife on a piece of paper and folded it against the heel of his hand. “This is a bad day, my friend ... I wish I could tell you it’s just a matter of IAD finding against you.”
I waited.
“You know the route,” he said. “It’s the kind of deal usually gets a guy a letter of reprimand in his jacket or a suspension.” He wadded up the piece of paper and tried to wipe the pipe’s ashes out of his palm. “This one’s different.”
“Too many times across the line?”
“The problem is you’re a police officer who doesn’t like rules. You kept yourself on the job while you were officially suspended, didn’t you?”
In my mind’s eye I saw Rufus Arceneaux’s face leaning across the seat inside Julia’s automobile, the green eyes lighted with ambition and long-held grievance.
“There’s something you’re not saying, Sheriff.”
“I couldn’t cover for you anymore, Dave. I told them about you and Purcel salting Sweet Pea’s Caddy and queering the warrant.”
“I’m fired?”
“You can submit your resignation. It needs to be on my desk by five.”
I bounced my palms on my thighs.
“About queering the warrant,” I said. “I made the connection between the scrap iron on the floater’s body and a junk pile next to Sweet Pea’s house. How’d that play out?”
“I’m afraid it’s not your concern any longer.”
It was a windy day outside, and I could see the flag snapping and popping on the steel pole without making any sound.
“I’ll box up my stuff,” I said.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said.
I nodded and opened the door to leave.
“Are you going to have that letter on my desk?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
On the way down the hall I picked up my mail and messages, found an empty cardboard box in a custodian’s closet, unlocked my office door, and went inside.
It was all that quick, as though a loud train had gone past me, slamming across switches, baking the track with its own heat, creating a tunnel of sound and energy so intense that the rails seem to reshape like bronze licorice under the wheels; then silence that’s like hands clapped across the eardrums, a field of weeds that smell of dust and creosote, a lighted club car disappearing across the prairie.
Or simply a man walking through glass doors into a sun-drenched parking lot, a box on his shoulder, and no one taking particular notice.
An electrical storm struck New Iberia that afternoon, and I sent Batist home and shut down the dock and watched a twenty-four-hour news station on the television set that I kept on top of the soda and lunch meat cooler. A lorry carrying three white men had gone into the black homelands of South Africa and had been shot up by black militia of some kind. The footage was stunning. One white man was already dead, crumpled over the steering wheel, his face pushed into a lopsided expression by the horn button; the two other men lay wounded on the pavement. One had propped his back against the tire and had his hands up, but he never spoke. The other man was on his stomach and having trouble raising his head so he could speak to the soldiers whose legs surrounded him. He was a large man, with a wild red beard, a broad nose, and coarse-grained skin, and he could hardly contain the rage in his throat.
“Will you call a fucking ambulance?” he said in a British accent. “My friend’s hurt. Did you hear me? We need the fucking ambulance. How do I say it to you? Call the fucking hospital for an ambulance ... Oh you have, have you? Well, thank you very much. Thank you fucking bloody very much.”
The militia shot him and his friend. Later, the replay of the tape did not show the bearded man getting in the face of his executioners. Instead, the newscaster said the victims had begged for their lives. That last line was repeated over and over throughout the afternoon. I kept waiting for it to be corrected. It never was, not to my knowledge. A brave man’s death was revised downward to a shameful and humiliating one, either for categorical or dramatic purposes. The truth had become an early casualty.
What’s the point?
I didn’t know myself.
The thunder finally stopped and the rain roared on the tin roof and drenched the dock and spool tables and blew through the screens in a fine mist. I waited for it to slack off, then I locked up the bait shop and ran up the slope with a raincoat over my head and told Bootsie of the change in our circumstances.
That evening, which was unseasonably cool and marked by strange lights in the sky, Helen Soileau came out to the house and sat with me on the front steps, her thick forearms propped on her thighs like a ballplayer in a dugout, and told me the story about Sonny’s phone call within earshot of waves bursting against a coastline.
The two shooters were pros, probably ex-military men, not the much-inflated contract wiseguys who undid their victims through treachery and had to press the muzzle into the hairline to ensure they didn’t miss. They had him triangulated from forty yards out, with either AR-15’s or .223 carbines. Had the target been anyone else, he would have been hurled backward, matted with shards of glass, and made to dance on invisible wires inside the phone booth. But one of the shooters probably blew it, shifted his sling to box t
he side of Sonny’s face more tightly in his sights, to lock cartilage and jawbone and the almost feminine mouth, which made soundless words the shooter hated without even hearing them, lock them all into a narrow iron rectangle that would splinter into torn watermelon with the slightest pull of the shooter’s finger.
But the inverted boat hull he was aiming across dented and made a thunking sound when he shifted the sling, and suddenly Sonny was on rock ‘n’ roll, his heart bursting with adrenaline, springing from the booth, his shoulders hunched, zigzagging through the boatyard, his hips swiveling like a football quarterback evading ladders, his skin twitching as though someone had touched a hot match to it.
A witness down by the collapsed pier said Sonny seemed painted with magic. He raced between cinder-block tool shops and dry-docked shrimp boats that were eaten with rot, while the shooters tried to lock down on him again and whanged rounds off a welding truck, blew glass out of a watchman’s hut, dissected the yawning door of a junked Coca-Cola machine, and stitched a row of bleeding holes across a corrugated tin paint shed.
Sonny bolted down the sandy slope to the riverbank and poured it on. But for some unexplainable reason he ran for the beach, the wheeling of gulls and other winged creatures, rather than back up the river to higher ground, and the sand became wetter and wetter under his feet, until his shoes sank up to the ankles in porridge.
Then they nailed him.
One shooter, a thick-bodied, truncated man, with knots of muscle through his back and skin-tight cutoffs rolled into his genitals, came over the riverbank in a breath-wheezing run, his rifle at port arms, and fired and fired until the breech locked open and shell casings littered the sand like broken gold teeth.
Sonny’s Hawaiian shirt jumped and puffed as though carrion birds were pecking at it. His gait broke, his torso twisted momentarily, and he became a man ingesting a chunk of angle iron. But a long time ago, perhaps back in the Iberville welfare project, Sonny had learned the fate of those who go down in front of their adversaries’ booted feet. He seemed to right himself, his face concentrating with a fragile inner balance, forcing a composed and single thought in front of his eyes; then he stumbled toward the surf and the crumpled pier that rang with the cries of frightened birds.
He waded through the breakers, his destroyed shirt billowing out into the tide like wings. The shooters fired twice more, wide and high, the rounds toppling and skipping across the water. But Sonny had become his own denouement. He struggled forward into the undertow, staining the world of fish and crabs and eels and stingrays with his blood, then simply stepped off into the depths, his red hair floating briefly beneath a wave like a windblown flower.
“You handling this, Dave?” Helen said.
“Sure.”
“He always lived on the edge. It was his way.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. My voice seemed outside of my skin, my words spoken by someone else. After a while I said, “Who pulled the body out?”
“They didn’t find it.” I could feel her eyes moving on the side of my face. “Forget it, Dave. He didn’t make it. The Fed I talked to said the blood spore looked like dogs had been chewing on him.”
I felt my teeth scrape against one another. “What was he doing in Mississippi?”
“The beach is full of casinos and grease balls Maybe he was tying another knot on his string. The Fed I talked to got pretty vague when I asked him the same thing.”
I bounced my forehead on my thumbs, looked at the sky that was metallic and burned-looking and flickering with lights. Helen stood up with her car keys in her hand.
“He pissed you off, he dragged his shit into your life, but you took his fall, anyway. Don’t you dare put this on your conscience,” she said. She aimed her index finger at me.
She walked toward her car, then stopped and turned.
“Did you hear me?” she said.
“Sure.”
Her eyes fixed on mine, then her breasts rose and she walked through the wet leaves and pools of water to the drive, her shoulders squared with a moral certitude that I could only envy.
I woke at four in the morning and sat on the edge of the bed. I couldn’t remember the details of the dream I’d just had, but in the center of my mind was an ugly and inescapable thought, like an angry man walking toward you in a darkened, wood-floored hallway.
We’d had him in custody. Then Johnny Giacano had put out the word he didn’t want Sonny bailed out.
Question: What was the best way to make sure I heard what Johnny wanted?
Answer: Feed the information to Clete Purcel.
Had Johnny sucked me in?
I didn’t know.
I couldn’t accept Sonny’s death. People like Sonny didn’t die. They stayed high on their own re bop heard Charlie Parker’s riffs in the friction of the spheres, thrived without sunlight in the neon glaze of Canal and St. Charles, fashioned sonnets out of street language, and proved to the rest of us that you could live with the full-tilt boogie in your heart and glide above the murderous fastenings of triviality.
They didn’t find a body, I told myself. The sea always gives back its dead, and they didn’t find Sonny’s body.
You’re dead when they unzip the bag, pry your dog tag out of your teeth, and drain your fluids through a grate in the bottom of a stainless steel trough. That’s dead.
I lay back on the pillow with my forearm across my eyes and fell asleep. I dreamed I saw Sonny rise like Triton from the sea, his body covered with fish scales, a wreathed horn in his hand, already transforming into a creature of air and spun light.
The next afternoon Batist answered the phone in the bait shop, then handed me the receiver. The weather was hot and muggy, and I pressed a sweating can of Dr. Pepper against my cheek and sat on a counter stool with the phone against my ear.
“Robicheaux?” the voice said.
There was no mistaking the thick, whiskey-and-cigarette-seared rasp, the words that rose like ash inside a chimney.
“Yes,” I said, and swallowed something stale and bitter in my throat.
“You must have run your thumb up somebody’s hole. You got eighty-sixed out of your own department?”
“What’s on your mind, Pogue?”
“I think you’re not a bad dude. We need local guys to make it work. You want to piece off Purcel, it’s copacetic with us.”
“Make what work? Who’s us?”
“The whole fucking planet. Get with the program, ace.”
“I don’t know what the program is.”
He laughed, his voice wheezing as though there were pinholes in his lungs.
“I like you, motherfucker,” he said. “I told them to cut you in. I’d rather see you front points for us than y’all’s resident cunt, what’s the name, Bertrand?”
“Moleen?”
“Got to get the locals humping for you. Ever light up a ville with Zippo tracks? Something about the stink of fried duck shit really gets their attention.”
The phone receiver was warm and moist against my ear. Someone slammed the screen door behind me like the crack of a rifle.
“You were one of the shooters,” I said.
“The Marsallus gig? He took out some good men. He had it coming.”
“You fucked it up.”
I heard him shift the phone in his hand, his breath fan the mouthpiece in a dry, heated exhalation.
“Fucked it up, huh?”
“The Feds didn’t find a body. I think Sonny’ll be back to piss on your grave,” I said.
“You listen—” A nail caught in his throat and he began again. “We busted his wheels, ace. I saw the bone buckle. That punk’s down in the slime where he belongs.”
“He shows up when you don’t expect him. Your buddy Jack got capped before he knew what hit him. Think about it,” I said, and hung up the receiver.
I hoped I left him with razors turning in his viscera.
Chapter 22
AT NOON TUESDAY a city cop picked up Ruthie
Jean outside a restaurant on Main Street and took her to the city jail, where she was booked for disturbing the peace and disorderly conduct. He even cuffed her, put his hand hard inside her arm before he sat her down in the back of the cruiser and threw her cane across her lap and slammed the door to indicate his sympathies to anyone watching. I heard the story from a half dozen people, all of whom told it with a sense of genteel dismay, but I suspected they were secretly pleased, as small-town people are, when the sins of another are exposed and they no longer have to be comp licit in hiding them.
People at first thought she was simply drunk, then they saw the feverish shine in the eyes, like someone still staring into the flame held to a crack pipe. An elderly woman who lived by Spanish Lake recognized and tried to counsel her, shushing her, patting her shoulders, trying to turn her away from Julia Bertrand, who had just parked her red Porsche at the curb in front of the Shadows and was walking cheerfully toward the restaurant, her mental fortifications in place, her long tan riding skirt whipping against her legs.
“Oh, it’s all right,” she said to the other white woman. “Ruthie Jean’s upset about a tenant problem Moleen had to settle on the plantation. Now, you go on about your business, Ruthie Jean, and don’t be bothering people. You want me to call somebody to drive you home?”
“You put me off the plantation, Julia. When you cut the balloon loose, it goes where it wants.”
“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t address me by my first name.”
“You cain’t hide from your thoughts. Not when he touches you in the dark, under the sheets, his eyes shut, and you know where his hand’s been on me, you know he’s thinking of me and that’s why he does it to you with his eyes shut, he hurries it so he doesn’t have to think about who he’s doing it with, about how he’s making a lie for both y’all, just like he hepped make my baby and kept pretending I could have it without a husband and live on the plantation like colored folks are suppose to do, like his ancestors did to us, like there wasn’t any sin on the child, ‘cause the child got Bertrand blood in him.”