He got in the front passenger's seat of the van, slid a metal sheath over the knife blade attached to his stump, then unscrewed the blade and drank from a bottle of Carta Blanca, his throat working smoothly until the bottle was empty. The bottle made a dull, tinkling sound when it landed in the weeds by the roadside.
The next day I got the warrant to search the grounds of the LaRose plantation. Helen Soileau parked the cruiser in the driveway, and I got out and knocked on the front door.
Karyn was barefoot and wore only a pair of shorts and a halter, with a thick towel around her neck, when she opened the door. In the soft afternoon light her tan took on the dark tint of burnt honey. The momentary surprise went out of her face, and she leaned an arm against the doorjamb and brushed back her hair with her fingers.
"What are we here for today?" she said.
"Here's the warrant. We'll be looking at some things back on the bayou."
"How did you—" she began, then stopped.
"All I had to do was tell the judge the state police warned me off y'all's property. He seemed upset about people intruding on his jurisdiction."
"Then you should scurry on with your little errand, whatever in God's name it is."
"Does Jerry Joe's death bother you at all?"
Her mouth grew small with anger.
"There're days when I wish I was a man, Dave. I'd honestly love to beat the living shit out of you." The door clicked shut.
Helen and I walked through the coolness of the porte cochere into the backyard. The camellias were in bloom and the backyard was filled with a smoky gold light. I could see Karyn inside the glassed-in rear corner of the house, touching her toes in a crisscross motion, her thighs spread, the back of her neck slick with a necklace of sweat.
"You ever read anything about the Roman Coliseum? When gladiators fought on lakes of burning oil, that kind of stuff?" Helen said.
"Yeah, I guess."
"I have a feeling Karyn LaRose was in the audience."
We walked past the stables and through the hardwoods to the sloping bank of the Teche. A heavyset black state trooper sat in a folding chair, back among the trees, eating cracklings from a jar. His scoped rifle was propped against a pine trunk. He glanced at my badge holder hanging from my coat pocket and nodded.
"Crown hasn't tried to get through your perimeter, huh?" I said, and smiled.
"You ax me, he's been spooked out," he answered.
"How's that?" I asked.
"Man's smart. See the mosquitoes I been swatting all day?"
"They're bad after a rain," I said.
"They're bad in these trees anytime. Man don't see nobody out yonder on the bank, he knows what's waiting for him inside the woods. That, or somebody done tole him."
"You take it easy," I said.
Helen and I walked along the bank toward the spot where I had thrown the oar lock. I could feel her eyes on me, watching.
"You're damn quiet," she said.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to be."
"Dave?"
"What's up?"
"I'm getting a bad sense here."
"What's that?" I said, my eyes focused on the gazebo that two carpenters were hammering and sawing on around the bayou's bend.
"What that trooper said. Did you warn Crown?"
"We don't execute people in Iberia Parish. We want the man in custody, not in a box."
"We didn't have this conversation, Streak."
The carpenters were on all fours atop the gazebo's round, peaked roof, their nail bags swinging from their stomachs.
"That's quite a foundation. Y'all always pour a concrete pad under a gazebo?" I said.
"High water will rot it out if you don't," one man answered.
"What did y'all do with the dirt you excavated?"
"Some guy hauled it off for topsoil."
"Which guy?"
"Some guy work for Mr. LaRose, I guess."
"Y'all did the excavation?"
"No, sir. Mr. LaRose done that hisself. He got his own backhoe."
"I see. Y'all doin'all right?"
"Yes, sir. Anyt'ing wrong?"
"Not a thing," I said.
I walked down on the grassy bank, which was crisscrossed with the deep prints of cleated tires and dozer tracks. A fan of mud and torn divots of grass lay humped among the cattails at the bayou's edge. I poked at it with a stick and watched it cloud and drift away in the current.
"You want to bag some of it?" Helen said.
"It's a waste of time. Buford beat us to it."
"It was a long shot," Helen said. "You've got to consider the source, too, Dave. Dock Green's nuts."
"No, he's not. He's just different."
"That's a new word for it."
I didn't say anything. We walked up the slope and through the trees toward the house. The air was filled with gold shafts of light inside the trees, and you could smell the water in the coulee and the fecund odor of wet fern and the exposed root systems that trailed in the current like torn cobweb.
"Can I get out of line a minute?" Helen said.
I looked at her and waited. She kept walking up the incline, her face straight ahead, her shoulders slightly bent, her masculine arms taut-looking with muscle.
"The homicides you're worried about took place out of our jurisdiction. The Indian guy who tried to mess you over with the machete is dead. We don't have a crime connected with the LaRoses to investigate in Iberia Parish, Dave," she said.
"They're both dirty."
"So is the planet," she said.
We took a shorter route back and exited the woods by a cleared field and passed the brick stables and an adjacent railed lot where a solitary bay gelding stood like a piece of stained redwood in a column of dust-laden sunlight. The brand on his flank was shaped in the form of a rose, burned deep into the hair like calcified ringworm.
"They sure leave their mark on everything, don't they?" I said.
"What should they use, spray cans? Give it a break," Helen said.
"I'll tell them we're leaving now," I said.
"Don't do it, Dave."
"I'll see you in the car, Helen."
She continued on through the field toward the driveway. I walked through the backyard toward the porte cochere, then glanced through a screen of bamboo into the glassed-in rear of the house where Karyn had been doing her aerobic exercises. We stared into each other's face with a look of mutual and surprised intimacy that went beyond the moment, beyond my ability to define or guard against, that went back into a deliberately forgotten image of two people looking nakedly upon each other's faces during intercourse.
I had caught her unawares in front of a small marble-topped bar with a champagne glass and a silver ice bucket containing a green bottle of Cold Duck on it. But Karyn was not one to be undone by an unexpected encounter with an adversary. With her eyes fastened on my face, a pout on her mouth like an adolescent girl, she unhooked her halter and let it drop from her breasts and unbuttoned her shorts and pushed them and her panties down over her thighs and knees and stepped out of them. Then she pulled the pins from her platinum hair and shook it out on her shoulders and put the glass of Cold Duck to her mouth, her eyes fixed on mine, as empty as death.
CHAPTER 26
Jimmy Ray Dixon was one of those in-your-face people who insult and demean others with such confidence that you always assume they have nothing to hide themselves.
It's a good ruse. Just like offering a lie when no one has challenged your integrity. For example, lying about how you lost a hand in Vietnam.
After Jimmy Ray and his entourage had left the dock, I'd called a friend at the Veterans Administration in New Orleans.
The following day, when I got back to the department from the LaRose plantation, my friend called and read me everything he had pulled out of the computer on Jimmy Ray Dixon.
He didn't lose a hand clearing toe-poppers from a rice paddy outside Pinkville. A gang of Chinese thieves, his business partners in selling
stolen PX liquor on the Saigon black market, cut it off.
A cross-referenced CID report also indicated Jimmy Ray may have been involved in smuggling heroin home in GI coffins.
So he lied about his war record, I thought. But who wouldn't, with a file like that?
That was not what had bothered me.
At the dock Jimmy Ray had said somebody had shot into his home and had killed his brother.
His home.
I went to the public library and the morgue at the Daily Iberian and began searching every piece of microfilm I could find on the assassination of Ely Dixon.
Only one story, in Newsweek magazine, mentioned the fact that Ely was killed in a two-bedroom house he rented for fifty dollars a month from his brother, Jimmy Ray, to whom the article referred as a disabled Vietnam war veteran.
I drove back to the department and went into the sheriff's office.
"What if the wrong man was killed?" I said.
"I have a feeling my interest is about to wane quickly," he said.
"It was the sixties. Church bombings in Birmingham and Bogalusa, civil rights workers lynched in Mississippi. Everybody assumed Ely Dixon was the target."
"You're trying to figure out the motivation on a homicide that's twenty-eight years old? Who cares? The victim doesn't. He's dead just the same."
He could barely contain the impatience and annoyance in his voice. He turned his swivel chair sideways so he wouldn't have to look directly at me when he spoke.
"I like you a lot, Dave, but, damn it, you don't listen. Leave the LaRoses alone. Let Aaron Crown fall in his own shit."
"I told Helen we don't execute people in Iberia Parish."
"Don't be deluded. That's because the electric chair doesn't travel anymore."
He began fiddling with a file folder, then he put it in his desk drawer and rose from his chair and looked out the window until he heard me close the door behind me.
Batist went home sick with a cold that evening, and before supper Alafair and I drove down to his house with a pot of soup. His wife had died the previous year, and he lived with his three bird dogs and eight cats on a dirt road in an unpainted wood house with a sagging gallery and a peaked corrugated roof, a truck garden in a side lot and a smokehouse in back. The sparse grass in his yard was raked clean, his compost pile snugged in by chicken wire, his crab traps stacked next to a huge iron pot in the backyard where he cooked cracklings in the fall.
Over the years, in early spring, when he broke the thatched hard-pan on his garden, his single-tree plow had furrowed back bits of square nails, the rusted shell of a wagon spring, .58 caliber minié balls, a corroded tin of percussion caps, a molded boot, a brass buckle embossed with the letters CSA, the remains from a Confederate encampment that had probably been overrun by federals in 1863.
I first met Batist when I was a little boy and he was a teenager, a blacksmith's helper in a rambling, red barnlike structure on a green lot out on West Main. Batist worked for a frail, very elderly man named Mr. Antoine, one of the last surviving Confederate veterans in the state of Louisiana. Every day Mr. Antoine sat in the wide doors of his smithy, to catch the breeze, in red suspenders and straw hat, the skin under his throat distended like an inverted cock's comb.
Anyone who wished could drop by and listen to his stories about what he called "the War."
Few did.
But I'll never forget one he told me and Batist.
It was during Jubal Early's last assault on the federals before the surrender at Appomattox. A fourteen-year-old drummer boy from Alabama was the only unwounded survivor of his outfit. Rather than surrender or run, he tied a Confederate battle flag to an empty musket and mounted a horse and charged the union line. He rode two hundred yards through a bullet-cropped cornfield littered with southern dead, his colors raised above his head all the while, his eyes fixed on the stone wall ahead of him where five thousand federals waited and looked at him in disbelief.
Not one of them fired his weapon.
Instead, when the boy's horse labored up the slope and surged through a gap in the wall, three federal soldiers pulled him from the saddle and took his colors and pinioned him to the ground. The boy flailed and kicked until one soldier in blue said, "Son, you ain't got to study on it no more. You're over on the Lord's side now."
Mr. Antoine slapped his thigh and howled at the implications of his story, whatever they were.
Later, I would read a similar account about Cemetery Ridge. Maybe it was all apocryphal. But if you ever doubted Mr. Antoine's authority as a veteran of the Civil War, he would ask you to feel the cyst-encrusted pistol ball that protruded like a sparrow's egg below his right elbow.
The irony was the fact that the man who probably knew more firsthand accounts of Mr. Antoine's War, and the man who grew food in the detritus of a Confederate encampment, was a descendant of slaves and did not know how to read and write and consequently was never consulted as a source of information by anyone.
He sat down with the soup at the kitchen table in a pair of slippers and surplus navy dungarees and a denim shirt buttoned at the throat. The sun glimmered off the bayou through the trees behind his house.
"Fat Daddy Babineau brought me some poke chops, but they ain't good for you when you got a stomach upsetness. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, though," he said.
"You going to be all right by yourself?" I said.
"I'm gonna be fine." He looked at Alafair, who was examining some minié balls on his kitchen shelf. Then he looked back at me.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Fat Daddy just left. I was fixing to call you." He kept his eyes on my face.
"Alf, you want to take the truck to the four corners and get a half gallon of milk?" I said.
"Pretty slick way of getting rid of me. But. . . okay," she said, one palm extended for the keys, the other on her hip.
"Fat Daddy seen this man bring his pirogue out of the swamp," Batist said after Alafair had gone out the door. "Him and his wife was fishing on the bank, and this big nigger wit' one side of his head shaved paddled out of the trees. It was the same morning you seen that man wit' a light out past our dock, Dave.
"Fat Daddy said this big nigger had gold teet' and arms thick as telephone poles. There was a gun up in the bow, and when Fat Daddy seen it, the nigger give him such a mean look Fat Daddy's wife wanted to get in the car. It's the same man come to our shop, ain't it?"
"It sounds like him."
"That ain't all of it, no. Fat Daddy and his wife was walking down the levee when they seen the same nigger again, this time busting out the bottom of the pirogue with his foot. He smashed big holes all over it and sunk it right in the canal. Why he want to do somet'ing like that?"
"Who knows? Maybe he didn't want to leave his fingerprints around."
"That ain't all of it. He seen them watching him and he walked up on the levee and got between Fat Daddy and Fat Daddy's car and says, 'Why you following me around?'
"Fat Daddy says, 'We come here to fish, not to mind nobody else's bidness.'
"The nigger says, 'You gonna tell somebody you seen a man poaching gators? Because if you do, you a goddamn liar.'
"Fat Daddy goes, 'We don't know nothing about no gators. So you leave us alone. We ain't give you no truck.'"
"The nigger smiles then. He says, 'You a nice fat man. You know why I bust up my pirogue? 'Cause it got leaks in it.' All the time he was squeezing his hand on his privates, like he got an itch, like he didn't care there was a woman there. Fat Daddy said when you looked into that nigger's face, you didn't have no doubt what was on his mind. He wanted you to say just one t'ing wrong so he could let out all his meanness on you.
"Fat Daddy's wife got in the car, not moving an inch, not hardly breathing she was so scared, praying all the time Fat Daddy would just come on and get them out of there.
"Then the nigger takes Fat Daddy's pole and his bucket out of his hand and puts them in the backseat and opens the front door and heps Fat Da
ddy get behind the wheel. He says, 'I'm gonna show y'all somet'ing I ain't sure I can still do. Y'all watch, now.'
"He hooked his hands under the front bumper and Started straining, like all the veins in his face was gonna pop out of his skin, grinning with them gold teet', snuff running out of his mout'. Then the car come up in the air, and the back wheels started rolling off the levee, just befo' he let it crash on the ground again.