He didn't answer. I took a pen flashlight out of my shirt pocket and shone it on the lever-action .30-.30 rifle. The bluing was worn off and the stock was wrapped with copper wire.
"Walk down here a little ways with me," I said.
He followed me out to the edge of the lighted area, out of earshot of the Vermilion Parish deputies.
"We want to catch the guy who did this," I said. "I think you'd like to help us do that, wouldn't you?"
"Yes, suh, I sho' would."
"But there's a problem here, isn't there? Something that's preventing you from telling me everything you want to?"
"I ain't real sho' what you—"
"Are you selling fish to restaurants?"
"No, suh, that ain't true."
"Did you bring that .30-30 along to shoot frogs?"
He grinned and shook his head. I grinned back at him.
"But you might just poach a 'gator or two?" I said.
"No, suh, I ain't got no 'gator. You can look."
I let my expression go flat.
"That's right. So you don't have to be afraid," I said. "I just want you to tell me the truth. Nobody's going to bother you about that gun, or your headlamp, or what you might be doing with your fish. Do we have a deal?"
"Yes, suh."
"When'd you first notice that barrel?"
"Maybe t'ree, fo' weeks ago. It was setting up on dry ground. I didn't have no reason to pay it no mind, no, but then I started to smell somet'ing. I t’ought it was a dead nutria, or maybe a big gar rotting up on the bank. It was real strong one night, then t'ree nights later you couldn't smell it 'less the wind blow it right across the water. Then it rained and the next night they wasn't no smell at all. I just never t'ought they might be a dead girl up there."
"Did you see anyone up there?"
"Maybe about a mont' ago, at evening, I seen a car. I 'member t’inking it was new and why would anybody bring his new car down that dirt road full of holes."
"What kind of car?"
"I don't remember, suh."
"You remember the color?"
"No, sun, I'm sorry."
His face looked fatigued and empty. "I just wish I ain't been the one to find her," he said. "I ain't never gonna forget looking inside that barrel."
I put my business card in his shirt pocket.
"Call me if you think of anything else. You did just fine, podna," I said, and patted him on the arm.
I turned my truck around in the middle of the levee and headed back toward New Iberia. Up ahead the glow of the red and blue emergency lights on the ambulance sped across the tops of the sawgrass, cattails, and bleached sandspits where the husks of dead gars boiled with fire ants.
What had I learned from it all?
Not much.
But maybe in his cynical way my friend the sleepless coroner had cut right to the heart of the problem: How do you go inside the head of a homicidal sadist who prowls the countryside like a tiger turned loose in a schoolyard?
I've seen films that portray detectives who try to absorb the moral insanity of their adversaries in order to trap them inside their own maniacal design. It makes an interesting story. Maybe it's even possible.
But four years ago I had to go to Huntsville, Texas, to interview a man on death row who had confessed to almost three hundred murders throughout the United States. Suddenly, from all over the country, cops with unsolved homicide cases flocked to Huntsville like flies on pig flop. We were no exception. A black woman in New Iberia had been abducted out of her house, strangled to death, and thrown in the Vermilion River. We had no suspects, and the man in Huntsville, Jack Hatfield, had been through Louisiana many times in his red tracings across the map.
He turned out to be neither shrewd nor cunning; there was no malevolent light in his eyes, nothing hostile or driven about his behavior. His accent was peckerwood, his demeanor finally that of a simpleton. He told me about his religious conversion and glowing presences that appeared to him in his cell; it was quickly apparent that he wanted me to like him, that he would tell me anything I wanted to hear. All I had to do was provide him the details of a murder, and he would make the crime his own.
(Later, an unemployed oil-field roughneck would confess to murdering the black woman after being given title to a ten-year-old car by her husband.)
I asked Jack Hatfield if he was trying to trade off his cooperation for a commutation of his sentence. He answered, "Naw, I got no kick comin' about that, long as it's legal."
With a benign expression on his face, he chronicled his long list of roadside murders from Maine to southern California. He could have been talking about a set of embossed ceramic plates that he had collected from each state that he had visited. If he had indeed done what he told me, he was completely without remorse.
"My victims didn't suffer none," he said.
Then he began to talk about his mother and an incredible transformation took place in him. Tears streaked down his homely face, he trembled all over, his fingers left white marks on his arms. Evidently she had been not only a prostitute but perverse as well. When he was a little boy she had made him stand by the bed and watch her copulate with her johns. When he had tried to hide in the woods, she beat him with a quirt, brought him back to the house, and made him watch some more.
He spent fifteen years in the Wisconsin penitentiary for her murder.
Then he paused in his story, wiped his face with his hand, pulled his T-shirt from his chest with his finger, and smelled himself.
"I killed three more people the day I come out of prison. I told them I was gonna do it, and I done it," he said, and began cleaning his fingernails with a toothpick as though I were not there.
When I walked back out into the autumn sunshine that afternoon, back into the smell of east Texas piney woods and white-uniformed convicts burning piles of tree stumps on the edge of a cottonfield, I was convinced that Jack Hatfield's story about his mother was true but that almost everything else he had told me would remain as demonstrably elusive as a psychotic dream. Perhaps the answer to Jack Hatfield lay with others, I thought. Perhaps we should ask those who would eventually strap him to the gurney in the execution room, poke the IV needle into the vein, tape it lovingly to the skin, and watch him through the viewing glass as the injection dulled his eyes then hit his heart like a hammer. Would his life, his secret and dark knowledge, be passed on to them?
I'd had little sleep when I set out for the office the next morning. The sun had come up red and hot over the trees, and because I had left the windows down the night before, the inside of my truck was full of mosquitoes and dripping with humidity. I stopped at a traffic light on the east side of town and saw a purple Cadillac limousine, with tinted black windows, pull into a yellow zone by a restaurant and park squarely in front of the fire plug.
Cholo Manelli stepped out of the driver's door, stretched, rotated a crick out of his neck, looked up and down the street a couple of times, then walked around to the other side of the limo and opened the back door for Julie Balboni. Then the rest of Julie's entourage—three men and the woman named Margot—stepped out onto the sidewalk, their faces dour in the heat, their eyes sullen with the morning's early hour.
Cholo went up the sidewalk first, point man and good soldier that he was, his head turning slightly from side to side, his simian shoulders rolling under his flowered shirt. He opened the front door of the restaurant, and Julie walked inside, with the others in single file behind him.
I didn't plan any of the events that followed.
I drove through the light and went almost two blocks before I made a U-turn, drove back to the restaurant, and parked under a live-oak tree across the street from the limo. The early sun's heat was already rising from the cement, and I could smell dead water beetles in the curb gutters.
My eyes burned from lack of sleep, and though I had just shaved, I could feel stubble, like grit, along the edge of my jaw. I got out of the truck, put my seersucker coat over my arm, and
walked across the street to the limo. The waxed purple surface had the soft glow of hard candy; the tinted black windows swam with the mirrored images of oak trees and azalea bushes moving in the breeze.
I unfolded the blade of my Puma knife, walked from fender to fender, and sawed the air stems off all four tires. The limo went down on the rims like it had been dropped from a chain. A black kid who had been putting circulars on doors stopped and watched me as he would a fascinating creature inside a zoo cage.
I walked to the filling station on the corner, called the dispatcher, and told him to have a wrecker tow the limo into the pound.
Then I went inside the restaurant, which gleamed with chrome and silverware and Formica surfaces, and walked past the long table where two waitresses were in the process of serving Julie and his group their breakfast. Cholo saw me first and started to speak, but I looked straight ahead and continued on into the men's room as though they were not there.
I washed my face with cold water, dried it with paper towels, and combed my hair in the mirror. There were flecks of white in my mustache now, and lines around my eyes that I hadn't noticed only a week before. I turned on the cold water and washed my face again, as though somehow I could rinse time and age out of my skin. Then I crumpled up the damp paper towel in my hand, flung it into the trash can, fixed my tie, put on my coat and sunglasses, and walked back into the restaurant.
Showtime, Julie, I thought.
Even sitting down, he towered above the others at the head of the table, in a pink short-sleeve shirt, suspenders, and gray striped slacks, his tangled black hair ruffling on his brow in the breeze from the fan, his mouth full of food while he told the waitress to bring more coffee and to reheat Margot's breakfast steak. Cholo kept trying to smile at me, his false teeth as stiff as whale bone in his mouth. Julie's other hoods looked up at me, then at Julie; when they read nothing in his face, they resumed eating.
"Hey, lieutenant, I thought that was you. You here for breakfast?" Cholo said.
"I was just passing by," I said.
"What's going on, Dave?" Julie said, his mouth chewing, his eyes fixed on the flower vase in front of him.
"I had a long night last night," I said.
"Yeah?" he said.
"We found a girl in a barrel down in south Vermilion Parish."
He continued to chew, then he took a drink of water. He touched his mouth with his napkin.
"You want to sit down, or are you on your way out?" he said.
Just then I heard the steel hook of the wrecker clang somewhere on the limo's frame and the hydraulic cables start to tighten on the winch. Cholo craned his head to look beyond the angle of the front window that gave onto the street.
"I always thought you were standup, Feet," I said.
"I appreciate the compliment, but that's a term they use in a place I've never been."
"That's all right, I changed my mind. I don't think you're standup anymore, Feet."
He blew up both his cheeks.
"What are you trying to say, Dave?"
"The man I work for got a bunch of phone calls yesterday. It looks like somebody dropped the dime on me with the Kiwanis Club."
"It ain't a bunch I got a lot of influence with. Talk with Mikey Goldman if you got that kind of problem."
"You use what works, Julie."
"Hey, get real, Dave. When I want to send a message to somebody, it don't come through Dagwood Bumstead."
Outside, the driver of the wrecker gunned his engine, pulled away from the curb, and dragged the limo past the front window. The limo's two front tires, which were totally deflated and still on the asphalt, were sliced into ribbons by the wheel rims.
Cholo's mouth was wide with unchewed scrambled eggs.
"Hey, a guy's got our car! A guy's driving off with the fucking limo, Julie!" he said.
Julie watched the wrecker and his limo disappear up the street. He pushed his plate away an inch with his thumb. One corner of his mouth drooped, and he pressed against it with his napkin.
"Sit down," he said.
Everyone had stopped eating now. A waitress came to the table with a pitcher of ice water and started to refill the glasses, then hesitated and walked back behind the counter. I pulled out a chair and sat at the corner of the table, a foot from Julie's elbow.
"You're pissed off about something and you have my fucking car towed in?" he said.
"Don't park in front of fire plugs."
"Fire plugs?"
"Right."
"I'm getting this kind of dog shit because of a fucking fire plug?"
"No, what I'm wondering, Julie, is why you and Cholo have to hit on a small-town teenage hooker. Don't y'all have enough chippies back in New Orleans?"
"What?"
"Cherry LeBlanc," I said.
"Who the fuck is Cherry LeBlanc?"
"Give it a break and stop acting like you just popped out of your mama's womb."
He folded his napkin, placed it carefully by the side of his plate, pulled a carnation out of the flower vase, and pinched off the stem.
"You calling me a pimp?" he said. "You trying to embarrass me in public. That's what this is about?"
"You didn't listen to what I said. We just found another murdered girl. Cholo knew about the murder of the LeBlanc girl, and he said you did, too. Except you lied about it when I mentioned her to you."
His eyes drifted lazily to Cholo's face. Cholo squeezed his hands on his wrists.
"I'm all lost here. I'm—" he began.
"You know what the real trouble is, Dave?" Julie said. He flipped the carnation onto the tablecloth. "You never understood how this town worked. You remember anybody complaining about the cathouses on Railroad and Hopkins? Or the slot machines that were in every bar and restaurant in town? Nobody complained 'cause my old man delivered an envelope to certain people at the end of every month. But those same people treated our family like we were spit on the sidewalk.
"So you and that FBI broad went around town stirring up the Bumstead crowd, shoving a broomstick up their ringus, and your boss man called you in to explain the facts of life. But it's no fun finding out that the guys you work for don't want to scare a few million dollars out of town. So you fuck my car and get in my face in a public place. I think maybe you should go back to work in New Orleans. I think maybe this shithole is starting to rub off on you."
The manager had come from behind the glass cashier's counter and was now standing three feet from me and Julie, his clip-on bow tie askew, his tongue wetting his lips.
"Sir, could you gentlemen lower your, I mean, could you not use that language in—" he began.
Julie's eyes, which were filled with a black light, flipped up into the manager's face.
"Get the fuck away from my table," he said.
"Sir—" the manager said.
"It's all right, Mr. Meaux. I'm leaving in just a second," I said.
"Oh, sad to hear it," the woman Margot, said. Except Cholo, the other hoods at the table smiled at her humor. She wore a sundress, and her hair, which was bleached the color of ash, was pulled back tightly on her head. She smoked a cigarette and the backs of her arms were covered with freckles.
"You want to come down to the office and look at some morgue pictures? I think that'd be a good idea," I said. "Bring your girlfriend along if you like."
"I'm going to say this just once. I don't know none of these girls, I don't have nothing to do with your problems, you understand what I'm saying? You said some ugly things to me, Dave, but we're old friends and I'm going to let it slide. I'll call a couple of cabs, I'll pay the fine on my car, I'll buy new tires, and I'll forget everything you been saying to me. But don't you never try to get in my face in a public place again."
One of his hoods was getting up, scraping back his chair, to use the restroom.
I folded my sunglasses, slipped them into my shirt pocket, and rubbed the burning sensation in my eyes with my thumb and forefinger.
"Feet, you're full
of more shit than a broken pay toilet," I said quietly.
The hood rested his hand on my shoulder. He was perhaps twenty-eight or thirty, lithe and olive-skinned, his dark hair boxed on his neck. A long pink scar, as thick as a soda straw, ran down the inside of one arm.
"Everybody's been pretty polite here," he said.
I looked at his hand and at his face. I could smell the faint hint of his sweat through his deodorant, the nicotine on the backs of his fingers.
"But you keep offending people," he said. He raised his palm slightly, then set it on my shoulder again.
"Don't let your day get complicated," I said.
"It's time to let people alone, Mr. Robicheaux," he said. Then he began to knead my shoulder as a fellow ballplayer might out on the pitcher's mound.
I felt a balloon of red-black color rise out of my chest into my head, heard a sound behind my eyes like wet newspaper tearing, and for some reason saw a kaleidoscopic image of the blond girl in the black body bag, a long strand of algae-streaked hair glued to the gray flesh of her forehead.
I hit him so hard in the stomach that my fist buried itself up to the wrist right under his sternum and spittle flew from his mouth onto the tabletop. Then I came up out of the chair and hooked him in the eye, saw the skin break against the bone and well with blood. He tried to regain his balance and swing a sugar shaker at my face, but I spun him sideways, caught him in the kidney, and drove him to his knees between two counter stools. I didn't remember hitting him in the mouth, but his bottom lip was drooling blood onto his shirt front.
I didn't want to stop. I heard the roar of wind in sea shells, the wheels of rusted engines clanging cog against cog. Then I saw Cholo in front of me, his big square hands raised in placation, his mouth small with sound.
"What?" I said.
"It ain't your style, Loot," he was whispering hoarsely. "Ease off, the guy's new, he don't know the rules, Loot. Come on, this ain't good for nobody."
My knuckles were skinned, my palms ringing. I heard glass crunch under the sole of my shoe in the stunned silence, and looked down numbly at my broken sunglasses on the floor like a man emerging from a blackout.
Julie Balboni scraped back his chair, took his gold money clip from his slacks, and began counting out a series of ten-dollar bills on the table.