“I’m not sure.”
“He’s definitely multicultural.”
“What does Ron look like?”
“Neat dresser, good haircut. Maybe he’s been working outdoors. I remember him telling a joke. It was about Camp J or something. Does that mean anything?”
“A lot.”
“He just walked in. He’s got three broads with him. What do you want me to do?”
I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter to five. “Keep him there. I’m on my way. If he leaves, get his tag and call the locals.”
“I don’t need a bunch of cops in here, Dave.”
“Everything is going to be fine. If you have to, give Ron and his friends an extra round or two. It’s on me.”
My truck was still at the glazier’s. I checked out an unmarked car and tore down the two-lane past Spanish Lake toward Lafayette, a battery-powered emergency light clamped on the roof.
THE CLUB WAS a windowless box with a small dance floor and vinyl booths set against two walls. The light from the bathrooms glowed through a red-bead curtain that hung from a rear doorway. Outside, the sky was still bright, but when I entered the bar, I could barely make out the people sitting in the booths. I saw Harvey look up from the sink where he was rinsing glasses. I didn’t acknowledge him but went to the corner of the bar, in the shadows, and sat down on a stool. I was wearing my sport coat and a tie, and the flap of my coat covered the holstered .45 clipped onto my belt. The duckboards bent under Harvey’s weight as he walked toward me. His face was round and flat, his Irish mouth so small it looked like it belonged to a goldfish. “What are you having?” he asked.
“A Dr Pepper on ice with a lime slice.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a black woman in a short skirt and a low-cut white blouse sitting on a barstool. I looked back at Harvey. “You still serve gumbo?”
“Coming up,” he said. He began fixing my drink, letting his gaze rest on a booth by the entrance. I glanced over and saw a blade-faced man and three females. Harvey placed my drink in front of me and picked up a stainless steel dipper and lowered it into a cauldron of chicken gumbo and filled a white bowl and set it and a spoon and a paper napkin in front of me. He picked up the twenty I had placed on the bar. “I’ll bring your change back in a minute. I got an order waiting over here.”
He took a frosted mug from the cooler and filled it until foam ran over the lip, then poured four shot glasses to the brim and placed the mug and all the glasses on a round tray. The work Harvey did behind a bar was not part of a mystique or of a kind most normal people would notice. But I could not take my eyes off his hands and the methodical way he went about filling the glasses and placing them on the cork-lined tray; nor could I ignore the smell of freshly drawn beer and whiskey that had not been cut with ice or fruit or cocktail mix. I could see the brassy bead in the beer, the strings of foam running down through the frost on the mug. The whiskey had the amber glow of sunlight that might have been aged inside yellow oak, its wetness and density and latent power greater than the sum of its parts, welling over the brim of the shot glasses as though growing in size. I felt a longing inside me that was no different from the desire of a heroin or sex addict or a candle moth that seeks the flame the way an infant seeks its mother’s breast.
I drank from my Dr Pepper and swallowed a piece of shaved ice and tried to look away from the tray Harvey was carrying to the booth by the front door.
“You ever see a li’l boy looking t’rew the window at what he cain’t have?” the black woman in the short skirt said.
“Who you talking about?” I said.
“Who you t’ink?”
“This is my job,” I said. “I check out dead-end dumps that serve people like me.”
“Ain’t nothing that bad if you got a li’l company.”
“You’re too pretty for me.”
“That’s why you looking at them other ladies in the mirror? They ain’t pretty?”
“You want a bowl of gumbo?” I asked.
“Honey, what I got don’t come in no bowl. You ought to try some.”
I winked at her and lifted a spoonful of gumbo to my mouth.
“Darlin’?” she said. Her stool squeaked as she turned toward me. She was pretty. Her skin was as darkly brown as chocolate and unmarked with scars or blemishes, her hair thick and black and freshly washed and blow-dried. “Your slip is showing.”
I pulled the flap of my coat over my .45, my eyes still on the reflections in the bar mirror.
“One of the girls in the boot’ you’re looking at is my li’l sister. I’m gonna walk over there and ax her to go outside wit’ me. We ain’t gonna have no trouble over that, are we?”
“What’s your name?”
“Lavern.”
“You need to stay where you are, Miss Lavern. I’m going to speak to an old acquaintance over there. You and your friends are going to be just fine. Maybe I can buy y’all a drink a little later. But right now y’all need to take your mind off world events. That’s Ronnie Earl Patin in the booth, isn’t it?”
“You ain’t wit’ Lafayette PD.”
“You’ve got that right.”
“Then why you come in here making t’ings hard for people who ain’t done you nothing?”
In reality, her question was not an unreasonable one. But wars are not reasonable, and neither is most law enforcement. In Vietnam, we killed an estimated five civilians for every enemy KIA. Law enforcement is not much different. The people who occupy the underside of society are dog food. Slumlords, zoning board members on a pad, porn vendors, and industrial polluters usually skate. Rich men don’t go to the injection table, and nobody worries when worker ants get stepped on.
I picked up a loose chair from a table and carried it and my drink to the booth where the man named Ron was sitting with a young white woman and one black woman and one Hispanic girl who probably wasn’t over seventeen. “What’s the haps, Ronnie Earl?” I said, setting down the chair hard.
“You’ve mistaken me for somebody else. My name is Ron Prudhomme,” the man said. He was smiling, his cheekbones and chin forming a V in his lower face, his eyes warm with alcohol.
“No, I think you and I go back, Ron. Remember when you bashed that old man with a hammer for his veteran’s check? You put a hole in his skull. I don’t think he was ever right again.”
“I don’t know who you are,” he said.
“I’m Dave Robicheaux,” I said to the two women and the girl. “I think Ronnie put a load of buckshot through my windshield.”
The man who called himself Ron Prudhomme picked up a shot glass and drank it slowly to the bottom, savoring each swallow, his expression sleepy. He took a sip from his beer mug, a sliver of ice sliding across his thumb. “If I’d done something like that, would I be hanging around town?” he asked.
“Yeah, I have to admit that one doesn’t fit,” I replied.
“It doesn’t fit because I’m not your guy.”
“Oh, you’re my huckleberry, all right. I just haven’t figured out if you’re doing contract hits now or if you’re a minor player in a group that includes Jesse Leboeuf, a retired homicide roach. You know Jesse Leboeuf? He used to put the fear of God in guys like you.”
He eased one of his full shot glasses toward me. “You want a beer back on that? If I remember, you got the same kind of taste buds I do. I think we got eighty-sixed from the same joints. The only reason you were allowed in some of the clubs was because you carried a shield.”
“I think I figured out why you’re hanging around, Ronnie. You didn’t blow town because you weren’t the hitter in the freezer truck. But you boosted the truck at the motel where you were staying. Which means you boosted it for somebody else. It seems to me you had a brother, but y’all didn’t look alike. You looked like a helium balloon with stubs for arms and legs, but your brother was trim. The way you look now. Have I got my hand on it?”
“This is all Greek to me. Unless you’re that cop who lied on the stand and sent me
up the road for a ten-bit I didn’t deserve.”
“No, I’m the cop who made sure there was a short-eyes notation in your jacket,” I said. “Ladies, y’all should be especially careful about this man. His weight loss is huge, and it occurred in a very short amount of time. I suggest you make him use industrial-strength condoms, or you stay completely away from him and spread the word to your sisters. He was both a predator and a cell-house bitch in Angola and stayed in lockdown for years because he was involved in at least two gang rapes. Do y’all get tested regularly for AIDS?”
The white woman and the black woman looked at each other, then at the Hispanic girl. The three of them rose from the booth and, without speaking a word, went out the front door of the club.
“I guess this means we’re not gonna be drinking buddies,” Ronnie Earl said.
“I can hook you up now and take you to the Lafayette PD. Or I can call them and have them pick you up. Or you can give up the hitter in the freezer truck. I think the hitter was your brother.”
“I haven’t seen my brother since I went inside. I heard he was dead or living in western Kansas. I cain’t remember which it was.”
“Stand up and put your hands behind you.”
“No problem. I’ll be out in two hours. I read about that shooting. I was playing bridge in Lake Charles the day it happened. I’ve got twenty witnesses you can call.”
“I’ve got a flash for you, Ronnie Earl. It’s not me who wants to hang you out to dry. It’s Lafayette PD. They’ve got a special hard-on for child molesters around here. They don’t care how they put you away. What you’re doing is five-star dumb,” I said.
“So is everything in my life. Do what you’re gonna do, but one thing I want to clear up: I never harmed a child. The other stuff I did. The short-eyes charge was a bum beef. Y’all sent me up wit’ a bad jacket. I paid a big price for that, man.”
“That’s the breaks, Ronnie.”
“How’d you know I got AIDS?”
“I didn’t.”
“I got a cut on my wrist. When a cut doesn’t heal, does that mean something?”
My hands froze.
“Got you, motherfucker,” he said.
Sometimes the perps, even the worst of them, have their moments.
A strange phenomenon occurred while I was hooking up Ronnie Earl Patin and patting him down for weapons and jailhouse contraband. I saw the entirety of the club as though it had been freeze-framed inside a camera lens. I saw my friend Harvey, beetle-browed and head-shaved, his big arms propped on the bar, looking wanly at an Iberia cop he had picked up from a greasy pool of water, a cop who might now cost him his job; I saw the prostitute in the low-cut blouse and short skirt talking on her cell phone as she went out a side exit; I saw a handicapped man whose arms were too short for his truncated body trying to push coins into the jukebox, his fingers as inept as Vienna sausages; I saw all the sad burnt-out ends of the days and nights I had spent in bars from Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley to the backstreets of Manila to a poacher’s community in the Atchafalaya Basin, where I traded my army-issue wristwatch, one that survived the detonation of a Bouncing Betty, for a half-pint bottle of bourbon and a six-pack of hot beer. I saw all the detritus and waste and wreckage of my misspent life laid out before me, like a man flipping through his check stubs and realizing that the reminders of one’s moral and psychological bankruptcy never go away.
“You gonna bust me or not?” Patin said.
“Right now I’m not sure what I’m going to do with you,” I said. “It’s not a time for you to shoot off your mouth.”
“I’ve still got two full shot glasses on the table. You drink one, I’ll drink the other. Who’s the wiser? Come on, you know you want it. You’re just like me. I’ve cut my intake in half by getting laid every day. What do you do? And don’t lie to me. You’re one thirsty son of a bitch.”
I pushed him through the front door into the parking lot and took out my cell phone. The battery was dead. “Is your cell phone in your car?”
“I walked here. And I don’t have a cell phone. I think they’re for people who need to beat off more. I cain’t believe this is happening. You got to bum a phone off the guy you’re busting?” He started laughing uncontrollably, tears running down his cheeks.
I unlocked the manacle on one of his wrists. The sun was red and as big as a planet and starting to set behind the trees on the western side of the highway that led to Opelousas. I threaded the loose manacle through the rear bumper on my unmarked car and relocked it on Ronnie Earl Patin’s wrist, forcing him to kneel on the asphalt. “I’m going to use the phone inside. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I said.
“You’re leaving me out here?”
“What does it look like?”
“Take me in.”
“You did eight years in Camp J, Ronnie. You probably could have snitched your way out, but you didn’t. Not many guys can say that. You’re a stand-up guy, but for me that means you’re probably a dead end. So now you’re Lafayette PD’s problem.”
“I got bad knees. I used to do floor work without pads,” he said.
“I believe it,” I said. I got my raincoat off the back floor and folded it into a square and squatted down and slipped it under his shins.
He looked up at me, his mouth twisted with discomfort. “You gonna drink my booze?”
“You never can tell,” I said.
I went back inside the club. Maybe I should have transported him down to Lafayette PD in the back of the unmarked car, even though there was no D-ring on the back floor. Maybe I should have kicked him loose and tried to follow him to his next destination. Maybe I should have pulled in the three hookers. Maybe I shouldn’t have let my cell phone battery go down, even though I later discovered the recharger problem lay in the dash-lighter connection. I dialed 911 on a pay phone and watched the handicapped man dancing with an imaginary woman in front of the jukebox. I looked for the prostitute I had offered to buy a bowl of gumbo, but she was nowhere in sight. I watched Harvey washing glasses in a sink of dirty water and wondered what would have happened if he had left me lying behind the B-girl joint at the Underpass. Would I have been a feast for jackals? Would I have been jackrolled or even beaten to death? Would I have begged for my life if someone had pointed a switchblade under my chin? All of these things were part of the menu when you were a gutter drunk.
I lifted my hand in a silent thank-you to Harvey as my 911 call was transferred to a Lafayette PD detective. The low ceiling and painted-over cinder-block walls of the club and the stink of cigarettes and urine from the restrooms seemed to squeeze the oxygen out of the room. I pulled loose my tie and unbuttoned my collar and took a deep breath. I closed and opened my eyes, the veins shrinking across one side of my head, my old problems with vertigo returning for no apparent reason. My gaze wandered to the shot glasses of whiskey that had been abandoned on Ronnie Earl’s table. Then I stared at the cigarette burns on the floor. All of them looked like the calcified bodies of water leeches. My hand made a wet noise against the phone receiver when I squeezed it.
My 911 call to the dispatcher and my conversation with the detective could not have taken over three minutes. The handicapped man was dancing to the same song that had been playing on the jukebox when I entered the club. But I knew I had swung on a slider, one that had Vaseline all over it. The black prostitute at the bar had been too cool after making me for a cop. She had realized it, too, and had become petulant and turned herself into a victim in order to muddy my perception of her behavior. You dumb bastard, I said to myself. I hung up the phone and flung open the front door.
The shot came from far down the street, from either the backseat of an automobile on the corner or a shut-down filling station behind it, one whose broken windows and empty bays lay deep in the shadow of a giant live oak. The report was a single loud crack, probably that of a scoped, high-powered rifle. Maybe the bullet struck another surface before it found its target, or maybe the powder was wet or old and ha
d degraded in the casing. Regardless of the cause, the pathologist would later conclude that the round had started to topple when it cut a keyhole through Ronnie Earl Patin’s face and ripped out part of his skull and spilled most of his brains onto the trunk of the unmarked car.
When I got to him, my .45 in my hand, the cooling of the late afternoon marred by dust and road noise and the smell of rubber and exhaust fumes, he was slumped sideways on his knees, like a child who fell asleep while at prayer. I stared at the traffic and at the smoke from trash fires rising into the red sun and wondered if Ronnie Earl Patin’s soul had taken flight from his body. I also wondered if his life would have been different had I not made sure he went up the road with a short-eyes in his jacket. The answer was probably no. But it’s hard to hate the dead, no matter what they have done. That’s the power they hold over us.
CLETE GAVE HIS bed to Gretchen and made a bed for himself on the sofa in his cottage at the motor court. “I can get my own place,” she said.
“All the cottages are rented up. A decent motel here is at least sixty a night. You want to watch James Dean, don’t you? Maybe the motel service doesn’t have the same selections. I have all the channels.”
To say she wanted to watch James Dean was an understatement. After she had watched Giant, Clete thought she would turn off the set and go to sleep. Instead, she used the bathroom and went immediately back to the bed, lying on her stomach, her head at the foot of the mattress, her chin propped up on both hands. Clete tried to stay with East of Eden, then pulled two pillows over his face while the patriarchal voice of Raymond Massey seemed to thud inside his head with the regularity of stones falling down a well. When he woke at four A.M., the bed was empty, the volume on the set barely audible. The bathroom door was open, the light off, the chain in place on the front door. He gathered the sheet around him and stood up so he could see on the far side of the bed. Gretchen lay on the floor in front of the set like a little girl, still on her stomach, her arms hooked around a pillow, her chin raised, the soles of her bare feet in the air. She was watching the last scene in Rebel Without a Cause, a glazed look in her eyes. He sat down in a stuffed chair, the sheet wadded in his lap. As he watched her, he knew he should not speak, in the same way you know not to speak to someone during certain moments inside a church.