Then I thought I heard feet running, a shadow flowing between trees, dipping down into a dry coulee bed, racing past the black marble crypt in the center of the LaRose cemetery. But in the muted pink softness of the morning, in the rain that continued to tumble like crystal needles out of the sunlight, I looked again and saw only red horses turning among the tree trunks, divots of impacted layered leaves exploding from their hooves, their backs auraed with vapor from their bodies.
I took a Ziploc bag from my coat pocket and began picking up the torn cigarette papers and the Vienna sausage can with the tip of a ballpoint pen just as Buford came out his back door, dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, charcoal suede jacket, and gray Stetson hat, his face raised toward the dawn and the special portent that it seemed to contain.
I wondered if he had ever envisioned his face locked down inside a telescopic sight, just before a toppling .303 round was about to scissor a keyhole through the middle of it.
Maybe he had. Or maybe my fantasy indicated a level of abiding resentment that I did not want to recognize.
* * *
That afternoon Clete parked his Cadillac by the boat ramp and walked down the dock and into the bait shop, where I was stacking the chairs and mopping the floor. He poured a cup of coffee for himself at the counter and drank it.
“You looked like you got rained on today,” I said.
“I did.”
“You catch anything?”
“Nope. The water’s getting too cool. I found Brandy Grissum, though.”
I fitted a chair upside down on a table and put down my mop.
“My main meal ticket is still running down bail skips for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine,” he said. “So I checked in with Nig this afternoon to see if he had anything for me, and out of nowhere he tells me a black broad named Brandy Grissum skipped on a prostitution charge and left Nig and Willie holding the bond. But because most of the lowlifes consider Nig a fairly decent guy for a bondsman, Brandy calls him up from a halfway house in Morgan City and says she’s scared shitless to come back to New Orleans, and can Nig square her beef with the court and renew her bond.
“Can you imagine the faith these people put in a bondsman? I used to miss my shield. Now I think I’ll get me one of those little cinder block offices with a neon sign down by the City Prison.”
“She’s in a halfway house?” I said.
“Not for long. She’s about to get kicked out. Y’all got a snitch fund?”
“We’re lucky to pay the light bill.”
“I wouldn’t put that on the top of the discussion.”
* * *
The two-story halfway house was painted canary yellow and decorated with flower boxes on a shell road that paralleled a canal lined with banana trees and wild elephant ears. The leaves of the elephant ears were withered and streaked white from the water splashed out of potholes by passing automobiles. A rotted-out shrimp boat was half submerged on the far side of the canal, and gars were feeding on something dead that streamed off one of the scuppers. The gallery of the halfway house was cluttered with green plants and straight-back wood chairs, on which both black and white people sat, most of them in mismatched clothes, and smoked cigarettes and looked at nothing or at their shoes or watched the passing of an automobile, until it finally turned onto the highway that led back into Morgan City, which seemed painted with an electric glow against the evening sky.
Brandy Grissum sat with us at a picnic table strewn with children’s toys under a Chinaberry tree. She wore lip gloss and rouge high on her cheekbones and a hair net with sequins in it, and jeans and purple cloth slippers and a long-sleeve denim shirt with lace sewn on the cuffs. The whites of her eyes were threaded with blood vessels.
“You can get me some money?” she said.
“Depends on what you’ve got, Brandy,” I said.
“They gonna put me out tomorrow. I ain’t got nowhere to go. He know where my family’s at.”
“The shooter?” I said.
“He found me twice. He took me out in the woods . . . he made me do things in the back of his car.” Her eyes flicked away from my face.
“Who’s the guy, Brandy?” Clete said.
“He call himself Mookie. He says he’s from Miami. But he talks French and he know all about fishing in the bayous up I-10.”
“Mookie what?” I said.
“I don’t want to even be knowing his first name. I just want to get my li’l boy from my mother’s house and go somewheres else.”
“Why are they putting you out?”
She kneaded the top of her forearm and looked out at the shell road in the twilight.
“They said my urine was dirty when I come back to the house the other day. I say you can look at my arm, I ain’t got no new tracks. The proctor, she says I’m skin popping in my thighs, the other women halfways seen it in the shower. I ain’t skin popped, though, that’s the troot, and I ain’t smoked no rock in thirty-seven days.”
“How’d you U.A. dirty, then?” Clete said.
She picked at her earlobe and raised her eyebrows. “Don’t ax me,” she said.
“Why’d Mookie kill your John?” I asked.
“He said he was doing it to hep out some friends. He said the guy didn’t have no bidness messing around with black women, anyway.”
“You work for Dock Green, Brandy?” I asked.
“I got a street manager.”
“You got a Murphy artist,” Clete said.
Her jawbone flexed along one cheek.
“Why’d Mookie let you slide?” I asked.
“He said he liked me. He said I could have China white, all the rock, all the tar I want, all I gotta do is ax. He was smoking rock in his car. He got a look in his face that makes me real scared. Suh, I gotta get out of Lou’sana or he’s gonna find me again.”
“You’ve got to give me more information, Brandy,” I said.
“You the po-liceman from New Iberia?”
“That’s right.”
“He know all about you. He know about this one wit’ you, too.”
Clete had started to light a cigarette. He took it out of his mouth and looked at her.
“He was saying, now this is what he say, this ain’t my words, ‘If the fat one come around again where he ain’t suppose to be, I got permission to burn his kite.’ ”
“When was this?” I said.
“A week ago. Maybe two weeks ago. I don’t remember.”
“Is there a way I can get a message to this guy?” Clete asked.
“I don’t know no more. I ain’t axed for none of this. Y’all gonna give me train fare for me and my li’l boy?”
I pulled an envelope from my back pocket and handed it to her.
“This ain’t but two hundred dollars,” she said.
“My piggy bank’s tapped out,” I said.
“That means it’s out of the man’s pocket,” Clete said.
“It don’t seem very much for what I tole y’all.”
“I think I’ll take a walk, throw some rocks at the garfish. Blow the horn when you’re ready to boogie. Don’t you love being around the life?” Clete said.
* * *
The night before the election I lay in the dark and tried to think my way through the case. Why had the gargantuan black man with the conked hair hung around New Orleans after the hit on the screenwriter? Unless it was to take out Mingo Bloomberg? Or even Clete?
But why expect reasonable behavior of a sociopath?
The bigger question was who did he work for? Brandy Grissum had said the black man had made a threat on Clete one or two weeks ago, which was before we visited Dock Green. But Dock had probably already heard we’d been bumping the furniture around, so the time frame was irrelevant.
Also, I was assuming that Brandy Grissum was not lying. The truth is, most people who talk with cops—perps, lowlifes of any stripe, traffic violators, crime victims, witnesses to crime, relatives of crime victims, or irritable cranks who despise their
neighbors’ dogs—feel at some point they have to lie, either to protect themselves, somebody else, or to ensure that someone is punished. The fact that they treat you as a credulous moron seems to elude them.
I was still convinced the center of the case lay on the LaRose plantation. The three avenues into it led through Jimmy Ray Dixon, Dock Green, and Jerry Joe Plumb. The motivation that characterized all the players was greed.
It wasn’t a new scenario.
But the presence of power and celebrity gave it a glittering mask. The LaRoses were what other people wanted to be, and their sins seemed hardly worthy of recognition.
Except to one man, whose ankles were marbled with bruises from leg chains and whose thoughts flared without respite like dry boards being fed into a furnace.
CHAPTER
16
Buford won.
The northern portion of the state was split by a third-party racist candidate, while the southern parishes voted as a bloc for one of their own, a Catholic bon vivant football hero who descended from Confederate cavalry officers but whose two Ph.D.’s and identification with the New South would never allow his constituency to be embarrassed.
The celebration that night in Baton Rouge received the kind of network coverage that one associates with Mardi Gras.
Wednesday night the celebration moved to the LaRose plantation in New Iberia. The moist air smelled of flowers and meat fires, and as if the season had wanted to cooperate with Buford’s political ascendancy, a full yellow moon had risen above the bayou and the cleared fields and the thoroughbreds in the pasture, all that seemed to define the LaRose family’s historical continuity. First a Dixieland, then a zydeco band played on top of a flatbed truck in the backyard. Hundreds of guests ate okra and sausage gumbo and barbecued chicken wings off of paper plates and lined up at the crystal bowls filled with whiskey-sour punches. They behaved with the cheerful abandon of people who knew their time had come; the crushed flowerbeds, the paper cups strewn on the grass, the red-faced momentary coarseness, were just part of the tribute they paid to their own validation.
Helen Soileau and I walked the treeline along the back fields, talked to two state policemen who carried cut-down pump shotguns, shined our flashlights in storage sheds and the barn and the stables, and then walked back down the drive toward our cruiser in front. It was going to be a long night.
Clay Mason was smoking a cheroot cigar between two parked automobiles, one booted foot propped on a bumper, looking wistfully at the cleared fields and the yellow moon that had filled the branches of a moss-hung oak.
“Ah, Mr. Robicheaux, how are you?” he asked.
“Are you visiting, sir?” I said.
“Just long enough to extend congratulations. By God, what an event! I’m surprised Buford’s father didn’t get up out of the grave for it.”
“I hear he was quite a guy.”
“If that’s how you spell ‘sonofabitch,’ he was.”
“How’d you know his father?”
“They owned the ranch next to my family’s, out west of the Pecos.”
“I see.”
“My father used to say it takes sonsofbitches to build great countries. What do you think about a statement like that?” He puffed on his cigar.
“I wouldn’t know.” I saw Helen get in the cruiser and close the door in the dark.
“Son, there’s nothing more odious than an intelligent man pretending to be obtuse.”
“I’d better say good night, Dr. Mason.”
“Stop acting like a nincompoop. Let’s go over here and get a drink.”
“No, thanks.”
He seemed to study the silhouette of the oak branches against the moon.
“I understand y’all matched the fingerprints of that Klansman, Crown, is that his name, to some tin cans or cigarette papers you found in the woods,” he said.
“That’s right.”
He flipped his cigar sparking into a rosebed. “You catch that racist bastard, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“I don’t think Aaron Crown’s a racist.”
He placed his hand, which had the contours of a claw, on my arm. An incisor tooth glinted in his mouth when he grinned.
“A Ku Klux Klansman? Don’t deceive yourself. A man like that will rip your throat out and eat it like a pomegranate,” he said.
The breeze blew his fine, white cornsilk hair against his scalp.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later I had to use the rest room.
“Go inside,” Helen said.
“I’d like to avoid it.”
“You want to take the cruiser down the road?”
“Bad form.”
“I guess you get to go inside,” she said.
I walked through the crowds of revelers in the yard, past the zydeco musicians on the flatbed truck, who were belting out “La Valse Negress” with accordion and fiddle and electric guitars, and with one man raking thimbles up and down a replicated aluminum washboard that was molded like soft body armor to his chest. The inside of the house was filled with people, too, and I had to go up the winding stairs to the second floor to find an empty bathroom.
Or one that was almost empty.
The door was ajar. I saw a bare male thigh, the trousers dropped below the knee, a gold watch on a hairy wrist. Decency should have caused me to step back and wait by the top of the stairs. But I had seen something else too—the glassy cylindrical shape between two fingers, the thumb resting on the plunger, the bright squirt of fluid at the tip of the needle.
I pushed open the door the rest of the way.
When Buford connected with the vein, his eyes closed and opened and then glazed over, his lips parted indolently and a muted sound rose from his throat, as though he were sliding onto the edge of orgasm.
Then he heard me.
“Oh . . . Dave,” he said. He put the needle on the edge of the lavatory and swallowed dryly, his eyes flattening, the pupils constricting with the hit.
“Bad shit, Buford,” I said.
He buttoned his trousers and tried to fix his belt.
“Goat glands and vitamins. Not what you think, Dave,” he said.
“So that’s why you shoot it up in your thighs?”
“John Kennedy did it.” He smiled wanly. “Are you going to cuff the governor-elect in his home?”
“It wouldn’t stick. Why not talk to somebody you trust about this, before you flame out?”
“It might make an interesting fire.”
“I never met a hype who was any different from a drunk. I’m talking about myself, Buford. We’re all smart-asses.”
“You missed your historical period. You should have sat at the elbow of St. Augustine. You were born for the confessional. Come on, a new day is at hand, sir, if you would just lend me yours for a moment.”
I helped him sit down on top of the toilet seat lid, then I watched, almost as a voyeur would, as the color came back in his face, his breathing seemed to regulate itself, his shoulders straightened, his eyes lifted merrily into mine.
“We glide on gilded wings above the abyss,” he said. “The revelers wait—”
I shattered his syringe in the toilet bowl.
“Mark one off to bad manners,” I said.
* * *
Early the next morning the sheriff called me into his office.
“Lafayette P.D. wants us to help with security at the Hotel Acadiana on Pinhook Road,” he said.
“Buford again?”
“The guy’s turned the governor’s office into a roiling party. We’re probably going to be stuck with it a little while.”
“I want off it, skipper.”
“I want my old hairline back.”
“He’s a hype.”
“You’re telling me we just elected a junkie?”
I told him what had happened the night before. He blew out his breath.
“You’re sure he’s not diabetic or something like that?” he asked.
“I think it’s speed.
”
“You didn’t want to take him down?”
“Busting a guy in his bathroom with no warrant?”
He rubbed his temple.
“I hate to say this, but I’m still glad he won rather than one of those other shitheads,” he said. He waited. “No comment?”
“He’s bad news. We’ll pay for it down the line.”
“God, you’re a source of comfort,” he said.
* * *
I picked up my morning mail and went into my office just as my phone rang. Dock Green must have hit the floor running.
“You tell that Irish prick he wants to get in my face, I’ll meet him in the street, in an alley, out on a sandbar in the middle of the Atchafalaya. Somebody should have busted his spokes a long time ago,” he said.
“Which Irish prick?” I said.
“Dun,” he answered. “He caused a big scene at my casino. Customers were going out the doors like it was a fire drill. He threw a pool ball into a guy’s head at my restaurant.”
“Tell him yourself.”
“I would. Except I can’t find him. He’s too busy wiping his shit all over the city.”
“Clete’s a one-on-one type guy, Dock.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m a civilized human being. Jimmy Ray Dixon ain’t. Your friend’s been down in Cannibal Town, saying they give up this black ape been making threats against him or he’s going to staple somebody’s dork to the furniture. I hope they cook him in a pot.”
“The shooter we want is a guy named Mookie. He’s telling people he has permission to take Purcel out. Who’d give him that kind of permission, Dock?”
“Try to fit this into your head, Robicheaux—”
Then I heard a woman’s voice and hands scraping on the receiver, as though someone were pulling it from Dock’s grasp.
“Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Yes.”
“This is Persephone Green. I met you years ago when my name was Giacano.”
“Yes, I remember,” I said, although I didn’t.
“Are you sure? Because you were drunk at the time.”
I cleared my throat.
“My husband is trying to say, we don’t have anything to do with problems in New Orleans’ black community,” she said. “You leave us alone. You tell your friend the same thing.”