The sheriff was in the Intensive Care unit when Helen and I visited him at Iberia General in the morning. Tubes dripped into his veins, fed oxygen into his nose; a shaft of sunlight cut across his forearm and seemed to mock the grayness of his skin. He looked not only stricken but also somehow diminished in size, shrunken skeletally, the eyes hollow and focused on concerns that floated inches from his face, like weevil worms.
I sat close to his bed and could smell an odor similar to withered flowers on his breath.
“Tell me about Hooker,” he whispered.
“It’s time to let other people worry about these guys, skipper,” I said.
“Tell me.”
I did, as briefly and simply as possible.
“Say the last part again,” he said.
“He used the term ‘nine-Mike’ for a nine-millimeter,” I said. “ ‘Mike’ is part of the old military alphabet. This guy came out of the same cookie cutter as Emile Pogue and the guy named Jack.”
He closed and opened his eyes, wet his lips to speak again. He tilted his head until his eyes were looking directly into mine. He was unshaved, and there were red and blue veins, like tiny pieces of thread, in the hollows of his cheeks.
“Last night I saw star shells bursting over a snowfield filled with dead Chinese,” he said. “A scavenger was pulling their pockets inside out.”
“It was just a dream,” I said.
“Not just a dream, Dave.”
I heard Helen rise from her chair, felt her hand touch my shoulder.
“We should go,” she said.
“I was wrong. But so were you,” he said.
“No, the fault was mine, Sheriff, not yours,” I said.
“I squared it with the prosecutor’s office. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”
He lifted his hand off the sheet. It felt small and lifeless inside mine.
But I didn’t go back to the office the next day. Instead, Batist and I took my boat all the way down Bayou Teche, through the vast green splendor of the wetlands, where blue herons and cranes glided above the flooded gum trees and the rusted wrecks of oil barges, into West Cote Blanche Bay and the Gulf beyond, while a squall churned like glazed smoke across the early sun.
My father, Aldous, was an old-time oil field roughneck who worked the night tower on the monkey board high above the drill platform and the sliding black waves of the Gulf of Mexico. The company was operating without a blowout preventer on the wellhead, and when the bit punched into a natural gas dome unexpectedly, the casing geysered out of the hole under thousands of pounds of pressure, a spark danced off a steel surface, and the sky blossomed with a flame that people could see from Morgan City to Cypremort Point.
My father clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and jumped into the darkness, but the derrick folded in upon itself, like coat hanger wire melting in a furnace, taking my father and nineteen other men with it.
I knew the spot by heart; I could even feel his presence, see him in my mind’s eye, deep below the waves, his tin hat cocked at an angle, grinning, his denim work clothes undulating in the tidal current, one thumb hooked in the air, telling me never to be afraid. Twice a year, on All Saints’ Day and the anniversary of his death, I came here and cut the engines, let the boat drift back across the wreckage of the rig and quarter boat which was now shaggy with green moss, and listened to the water’s slap against the hull, the cry of seagulls, as though somehow his voice was still trapped here, waiting to be heard, like a soft whisper blowing in the foam off the waves.
He loved children and flowers and women and charcoal-filtered bourbon and fighting in bars, and he carried the pain of my mother’s infidelity like a stone bruise and never let anyone see it in his eyes. But once on a duck hunting trip, after he got drunk and tried to acknowledge his failure toward me and my mother, he said, “Dave, don’t never let yourself be alone,” and I saw another dimension in my father, one of isolation and loneliness, that neither of us would have sufficient years to address again.
The water was reddish brown, the swells dented with rain rings. I walked to the stern with a clutch of yellow roses and threw them into the sun and watched a capping wave break them apart and scatter their petals through the swell.
Never alone, Al, I said under my breath, then went back into the cabin with Batist and hit it hard for home.
That night I had an old visitor, the vestiges of malaria that lived like mosquito eggs in my blood. I woke at midnight to the rumble of distant thunder, felt the chill on my skin and heard the rain tin king on the blades of the window fan, and thought a storm was about to burst over the wetlands to the south. An hour later my teeth were knocking together and I could hear mosquitoes droning around my ears and face, although none were there. I wanted to hide under piles of blankets even though my sheet and pillow were already damp with sweat, my mouth as dry as an ashtray.
I knew it would pass; it always did. I just had to wait and, with luck, I would wake depleted in the morning, as cool and empty as if I had been eviscerated and washed out with a hose.
Sometimes during those nocturnal hours I saw an electrified tiger who paced back and forth like a kaleidoscopic orange light behind a row of trees, hung with snakes whose emerald bodies were as supple and thick as an elephant’s trunk.
But I knew these images were born as much out of my past alcoholic life as they were from a systemic return to the Philippines, just another dry drunk, really, part of the guignol that a faceless puppeteer in the mind put on periodically.
But tonight was different.
At first I seemed to see him only inside my head. He walked out of the swamp, his upper torso naked, with seaweed clinging to his ankles like serpents, his skin as bloodless as marble, his hair the same brightness and metamorphic shape as fire.
The storm burst over the swamp and I could see the pecan and oak trees flickering whitely in the yard, the tin roof on the bait shop leaping out of the darkness, wrenching against the joists in the wind. The barometer and the temperature seemed to drop in seconds, as though all the air were being sucked out of our bedroom, drawn backward through the curtains, into the trees, until I knew, when I opened my eyes, I would be inside a place as cold as water that had never been penetrated by sunlight, as inaccessible as the drop-off beyond the continental shelf.
What’s the haps, Streak? he said.
You know how it is, you get deep in Indian country and you always think somebody’s got iron sights on your back, I replied.
How about that Emile Pogue? Isn’t he a pistol?
Why’d you play their game, Sonny? Why didn’t you work with me?
Your heart gets in the way of your head, Dave. You ‘ve got a way of wheeling the Trojan horse through the gates.
What’s that mean?
They want my journal. After they get it, somebody close to you will snap one into your brain pan.
Rough way to put it.
He picked my hand up by the wrist, drew it toward his rib cage.
Put your thumb in the hole, Dave. That’s the exit wound. Emile caught me four times through the back.
I apologize, Sonny. I let you down.
Lose the guilt. I knew the score when I smoked Emile’s brother.
We should have kept you in lockdown. You ‘d be alive now.
Who says I’m not? Stay on that old-time R and B, Streak. Don’t stray where angels fear to tread. Hey, that’s just a joke.
Wait, I said.
When I reached out to touch him, my eyes opened as though I had been slapped. I was standing in front of the window fan, whose blades were spinning in the mist that blew into the room. My hand was extended, lifeless, as though it were suspended in water. The yard was empty, the trees swollen with wind.
The sheriff had dreamed of star shells popping above the frozen white hills of North Korea. I had lied and sought to dispel his fear, as we always do when we see death painted on someone’s face.
Now I tried to dispel my own.
&nbs
p; At my foot was a solitary strand of brown seaweed.
Chapter 29
I SLEPT UNTIL seven, then showered, dressed, and ate breakfast in the kitchen. I could feel the day slowly come into focus, the predictable world of blue skies and wind blowing through the screens and of voices on the dock gradually becoming more real than the experience of the night before.
I told myself the gargoyles don’t do well in sunlight.
Vanity, vanity.
Involuntarily I kept touching my wrist, as though I could still feel Sonny’s damp fingers clamped around it.
“Were you walking around last night?” Bootsie said.
“A little touch of the mosquito.”
“You have anxiety about going back, Dave?”
“No, it’s going to be just fine.”
She leaned over the back of my chair, folded her arms under my neck, and kissed me behind the ear. Her shampoo smelled like strawberries.
“Try to come home early this afternoon,” she said.
“What’s up?”
“You never can tell,” she said.
Then she pressed her cheek against mine and patted her hand on my chest.
A half hour later Clete Purcel sat across from me in my office at the department.
“A strand of seaweed?” he said.
“Yep.”
“Dave, you were out on the Gulf yesterday. You tracked it into the house.”
“Yeah, that’s probably what happened,” I said, and averted my eyes.
“I don’t like this voodoo stuff, mon. We keep the lines simple. You got your shield back. It’s time to stick it to Pogue and the grease balls ... Are you listening?”
“The problem’s not coming from outside. It was already here.”
“This guy Bertrand again?”
“He’s the linchpin, Clete. If he hadn’t provided the opportunity, none of these others guys would be here.”
“He’s a marshmallow. I saw him in the grocery the other day. His old lady was talking to him like he was the bag boy.”
“That doesn’t sound right.”
“Maybe he has a secret life as a human poodle. Anyway, I got to deedee Just keep gliding on that old-time R and B, noble mon.”
“What did you say?”
“Oh, that’s just something Sonny Boy was always saying down in Guatemala,” he said, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “I never thought I’d say this, but I miss that guy ... What’s wrong?”
I spent the next two hours doing paperwork and trying to update my case files, half of which I had to recover from Rufus Arceneaux’s office.
“I got no hard feelings,” he said as I was about to go back out the door.
“Neither do I, Rufus,” I said.
“We gonna work that double homicide at Cade together?” he said.
“No,” I said, and closed his door behind me.
I cleared off my desk, then covered it with all the case material I had on Johnny Giacano, Patsy Dapolito, Sweet Pea Chaisson, Emile Pogue, Sonny Boy Marsallus, the man named Jack whose decapitated body we pulled out of the slough, even Luke Fontenot—faxs, mug shots, crime scene photographs, National Crime Information Center printouts (the one on Dapolito was my favorite; while in federal custody at Marion he had tried to bite the nose off the prison psychologist).
What was missing?
A file on Moleen Bertrand.
It existed somewhere, in the Pentagon or at Langley, Virginia, but I would never have access to it. Neither, in all probability, would the FBI.
But there was another clerical conduit into the Bertrand home, a case file I should have looked at a long time ago.
Julia Bertrand’s.
Helen Soileau and I spent the next hour sorting through manila folders and string-tied brown envelopes in a storage room that was stacked from the floor to the ceiling with cardboard boxes. Many were water damaged and tore loose at the bottom when you picked them up.
But we found it.
Halloween of 1983, on a dirt road between two cane fields out in Cade. Three black children, dressed in costumes, carrying trick or treat bags and jack-o’-lanterns, are walking with their grandfather toward the next house on the road. A blue Buick turns off the highway, fishtails in the dirt, scours a cloud of dust into the air. The grandfather hears the engine roar, dry clods of dirt rattling like rocks under the fenders, the tires throbbing across the baked ruts. The headlights spear through him and the children, flare into the cattails in the ditches; the grandfather believes the driver will slow, surely, pull wide toward the other side of the road, somehow abort what cannot be happening.
Instead, the driver accelerates even faster. The Buick flies by in a suck of air, a mushrooming cloud of sound and dust and exhaust fumes. The grandfather tries to close his ears as his grandchild disappears under the Buick’s bumper, sees a still-lighted and grinning jack-o’-lantern tumble crazily into the darkness.
I worked through lunch, read and reread the file and all the spiral notebook pages penciled by the original investigator. Helen came back from lunch at 1 P.M. She leaned on her knuckles on top of my desk and stared at the glossy black-and-white photos taken at the scene. “Poor kid,” she said.
The original accident report was brown and stiffen the edges from water seepage, the ink almost illegible, but you could still make out the name of the deputy who had signed it.
“Check it out,” I said, and inverted the page so Helen could read it.
“Rufus?”
“It gets more interesting,” I said, turning through the pages. “A plainclothes named Mitchell was assigned the investigation. The grandfather remembered three numbers off the license plate, and the plainclothes made a match with Julia’s Buick. Julia admitted she was driving her car out by Cade on Halloween night, but there was no apparent physical damage to link the car to the accident scene. The real hitch is in the old man’s statement, though.”
“What?”
“He said the driver was a man.” She rubbed the corner of her mouth with one finger, her eyes narrowing. “The investigator, this guy Mitchell, was confused, too,” I said. “His last note says, “Something sucks about this.”
“Mitchell was a good cop. I remember, it was about eighty-three he went to work for the Feds,” she said.
“Guess who replaced him on the case?” I said.
She studied my face. “You’re kidding?” she said.
“Our man Rufus again. Tell me, why would a cop who investigated a woman for hit-and-run vehicular homicide end up as her friend and confidant inside the department?”
“Dave, this really stinks.”
“That’s not all. Later the grandfather said he didn’t have on his glasses and wasn’t sure about the numbers on the license plate. End of investigation.”
“You want to haul that sonofabitch in here?”
“Which one?” I said.
“Rufus. Who’d you think I meant?”
“Moleen Bertrand.”
He wasn’t at his office. I drove to his home on Bayou Teche. A crew of black yardmen were mowing the huge lawn in front, raking leaves under the oaks, pruning back the banana trees until they were virtual stubs. I parked by the side garage and knocked. No one seemed to be inside. The speedboat was in the boathouse, snugged down under a tarp, wobbling in the bladed gold light off the water’s surface.
“If you looking for Mr. Moleen, he’s out at Cade,” one of the black men said.
“Where’s Miss Julia?” I asked.
“Ain’t seen her.”
“Y’all look like you’re working hard.”
“Mr. Moleen say do it right. He ain’t gonna be around for a while.”
I took the old highway out to Spanish Lake, past the restored antebellum homes on the shore and the enormous moss-strung oak trees that rippled in the breeze off the water. Then I turned down the corrugated dirt lane, under the rusted iron trellis, into the Bertrand plantation. Whoever Moleen’s business partners were, they had been busy.
Bulldozers had cut swaths through the sugarcane, flattened old corn cribs and stables, splintered wild persimmon trees into torn root systems that lay exposed like pink tubers in the graded soil. I saw Moleen on horseback by the treeline, watching a group of land surveyors drive wood stakes and flagged laths in what appeared to be a roadway that led toward the train tracks.
I drove across the field, through the flattened cane, and got out of my truck. The sun was white in the sky, the air layered with dust.
Moleen wore riding pants and boots and military spurs, a blue polo shirt, a bandanna knotted wetly around his neck, a short-brimmed straw hat with a tropical band. His right hand was curled around a quirt, his face dilated in the heat that rose from the ground.
“A hot day for it,” I said.
“I hadn’t noticed,” he said.
A man operating a bulldozer shifted into reverse, made a turn by the treeline, and snapped a hackberry off at ground level like a celery stalk.
“I hate looking up at a man on horseback, Moleen,” I said.
“How about just saying what’s on your mind?”
“After all these years, I finally figured you out.”
“With you, it always has to be an unpleasant moment. Why is that, sir?” he said, dismounting. He led his horse into the shade of the trees, turned to face me, a line of clear sweat sliding down his temple. Behind him, in the shadows, was the corn crib, strung with the scales of dead morning glory vines, where he and Ruthie Jean had begun their love affair years ago.
“I think Julia took your weight, Moleen.”
He looked back at me, uncomprehending. “When the child was run down, on Halloween night in eighty-three. You were the driver, not she.”
“I think you’ve lost your sanity, my friend.”
“It was a slick scam,” I said. “A successful lie always has an element of truth in it. In that way, the other side can never figure out what’s true and what’s deception. Julia admitted to having driven the car that night, but y’all knew the witness said the driver was a man. So what appeared to be her honesty threw his account into question.”