"What?"
"Maybe Zerrang didn't head right for the Basin. Maybe there's another way to pull his plug."
"You don't look too happy about it, whatever it is," she said.
"How would you like to save Buford LaRose's career for him?" I said.
I called his house from the filling station pay phone. Through the glass I could see the willows on the banks of the Atchafalaya, where we were to meet two powerboats from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff's Department.
"Buford?" I said.
"What is it?"
"Sabelle Crown's dead."
"Oh man, don't tell me that."
"She was tortured, then left on a train track in her car by Mookie Zerrang."
I could hear him take the receiver away from his ear, hear it scrape against a hard surface. Then I heard him breathing in the mouthpiece again.
"You were right about Aaron Crown," I said. "He killed Ely Dixon. But it was a mistake. He went to the house to kill Jimmy Ray. He didn't know that Jimmy Ray had moved out and rented it to his brother."
"Why would he want to kill Jimmy Ray Dixon?"
"Jimmy Ray got Sabelle started in the life . . . You're vindicated, Buford. That means you get word to Persephone Green to call Mookie Zerrang off."
"Are you insane? Do you think I control these people? What in God's name is the matter with you?"
"No, they control you."
"Listen, I just had that ghoul beating on my front door. I ran him off my property with a pistol."
"Which ghoul?"
"Who else, Dock Green. His wife dumped him. He accused me and Karyn of being involved in a ménage à trois with her. I guess that's her style."
"It seems late to be righteous," I said.
"What's that mean?"
"You treated Sabelle Crown like shit."
He was silent for what seemed a long time. Then he said, "Yeah, I didn't do right by her . . . I wish I could change it . . . Good-bye, Dave."
He quietly hung up the phone.
Helen and I sat in the cabin of the St. Martin Parish sheriff's boat. The exhaust pipes idled at the waterline while a uniformed deputy smoked a cigarette in the open hatchway and waited for the boat skipper to return from his truck with a can of gasoline.
I could feel Helen's eyes on my face.
"What is it?" I said.
"I don't like the way you look."
"It hasn't been a good day."
"Maybe you shouldn't be in on this one," she said.
"Is that right?"
"Unless he deals it, Mookie Zerrang comes back alive, Streak."
"Well, you never know how things are going to work out," I said.
Her lips were chapped, and she rubbed them with the ball of her finger, her eyes glazed over with hidden thoughts.
We went down the Atchafalaya, with the spray blowing back across the bow, then we entered a side channel and a bay that was surrounded by flooded woods. Under the sealed sky, the water in the bay was an unnatural, luminous yellow, as though it were the only element in its environment that possessed color. Up ahead, in the mist, I could see the shiny silhouette of an abandoned oil platform, then a canal through the woods and inside the tangle of air vines and cypress and willow trees a shack built on wood pilings.
"That's it," I said to the boat pilot.
He cut back on the throttle, stared through the glass at the woods, then reversed the engine so we didn't drift into the shore.
"You want to go head-on in there?" he asked.
"You know another way to do it?" I said.
"Bring in some SWAT guys on a chopper and blow that shack into toothpicks," he replied.
A St. Martin Parish plainclothes homicide investigator who was on the other boat walked out on the bow and used a bullhorn, addressing the shack as though he did not know who its occupants were.
"We want to talk to y'all that's inside. You need to work your way down that ladder with one hand on your head. There won't nobody get hurt," he said.
But there was no sound, except the idling boat engines and the rain that had started falling in large drops on the bay's surface. The plain-clothes wiped his face with his hand and tried again.
"Aaron, we know you in there. We afraid somebody's come out here to hurt you, podna. Ain't it time to give it up?" he said.
Again, there was silence. The plainclothes' coat was dark with rain and his tie was blown back across his shirt. He looked toward our boat, shrugged his shoulders, and went inside the cabin.
"Let's do it, skipper," I said to the pilot.
He pushed the throttle forward and took our boat into the canal. The wake from our boat receded back through the trees, gathering with it sticks and dead hyacinths, washing over logs and finally disappearing into the flooded undergrowth. The second boat eased into the shallows behind us until its hull scraped on the silt.
Helen and I dropped off the bow into the water and immediately sank to our thighs, clouds of gray mud ballooning around us. She carried a twelve-gauge Remington shotgun, with the barrel sawed off an inch above the pump. I pulled back the slide on my .45, chambered the top round in the magazine, and set the safety.
A flat-bottom aluminum boat with an outboard engine was tied to a piling under the shack. Helen and I waded through the water, ten yards apart, not speaking, our eyes fixed on the shack's shuttered windows and the ladder that extended upward to an open door with a gunny sack curtain blowing in the door frame.
On my left, the St. Martin plainclothes and three uniformed deputies were spread out in a line, breaking their way through a stand of willows.
Helen and I walked under the shack and listened. I cupped my hand on a piling to feel for movement above.
Nothing.
Helen held the twelve-gauge at port arms, her knuckles white on the stock and pump. Her faded blue jeans were drenched up to her rump. The air was cold and felt like damp flannel against the skin, and I could smell an odor like beached gars and gas from a sewer main.
Then I felt something tick against my face, like a mild irritant, a wet leaf, a blowfly. Unconsciously, I wiped at it with my hand, then I felt it again, harder this time, against my eyebrow, my forehead, in my hair, directly in my face as I stared upward at the plank floor of the shack.
Helen's mouth was parted wide, her face white.
I wiped my face on my coat sleeve and stared at the long red smear across the cloth.
I felt a revulsion go through my body as though I had been spat upon. I tore off my coat, soaked it in the water at my knees, and wiped my face and hair with it, my hand trembling.
Above me, strings of congealed blood hung from the planks and lifted and fell in the wind.
I moved out from under the shack, slipped the safety off the .45, and began climbing the ladder, which was set at a gradual angle, almost like stairs. Helen moved out into the water, away from the shack, and aimed the twelve gauge at the door above my head, then, just before I went inside, swung the barrel away and followed me.
I reached the top rung and paused, my hand on the doorjamb. The gunny sack curtain billowed back on the nails it hung from, exposing a rusted icebox without power, a table and chair, a solitary wood bunk, a coon hide that someone had been fleshing with a spoon.
I pulled myself up and went inside, tearing away the curtain, kicking back the door against the wall.
Except it did not fly back against the wall.
I felt the wood knock into meat and bone, a massive and dense weight that did not surrender space.
I clenched the .45 in both hands and pointed it at the enormous black shape behind the door, my finger slick with sweat inside the trigger guard.
My eyes wouldn't assimilate the naked man in front of me. Nor the fact that he was upside down. Nor what had been done to him.
The fence wire that had been looped around his ankles and notched into the roof beam was buried so deeply in his ankles that it was nearly invisible.
Helen lumbered into the room, her sho
tgun pointed in front of her. She lowered it to her side and looked at the hanging man.
"Oh boy," she said. She propped open the shutter on a window and cleared her throat and spit. She looked back at me, then blew out her breath. Her face was discolored, as though she had been staring into a cold wind. "I guess he got his," she said. Then she went to the window again, with the back of her wrist to her mouth. But this time she collected herself, and when she looked at me again her face was composed.
"Come on, we can still nail him," I said.
The plainclothes homicide investigator and two of the uniformed deputies were waiting for us at the bottom of the ladder.
"What's up there?" the plainclothes said. His eyes tried to peel meaning out of our faces. "What, it's some kind of company secret?"
"Go look for yourself. Be careful what you step in," Helen said.
"Crown killed Mookie Zerrang. He couldn't have gone far," I said.
"He ain't gone far at all," the third deputy said, sloshing toward us from the opposite side of the woods. "Look up yonder through that high spot."
We all stared through the evenly spaced tree trunks at a dry stretch of compacted silt that humped out of the water like the back of a black whale. It was covered with palmettos and crisscrossed with the webbed tracks of nutria, and in the middle of the palmettos, squatting on his haunches, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, was Aaron Crown.
We waded toward him, our guns still drawn. If he heard or saw us, or even cared if we were in his proximity, he showed no sign.
His body and clothes were painted with blood from his pate to the mud-encrusted basketball shoes he wore. His eyes, which were finally drained of all the heat and energy that had defined his life, seemed to look out of a scarlet mask. We stood in a circle around him, our weapons pointed at the ground. In the damp air, smoke hung at the corner of his mouth like wisps of cotton.
"You know about Sabelle?" I asked.
"That 'un in yonder couldn't talk about nothing else before he died," he replied.
"You're an evil man, Aaron Crown," I said.
"I reckon it otherwise." He rubbed the cigarette's hot ash between his fingers until it was dead. "If them TV people is out there, I need to wash up."
He looked up at our faces, his lidless eyes waiting for an answer.
CHAPTER 37
ON CHRISTMAS MORNING I sat at the kitchen table and looked at a photograph in the Daily Iberian of Buford and Karyn dancing together at the country club. They looked like people who would live forever.
Bootsie paused behind me, her palm resting on my shoulder.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked.
"Jerry Joe Plumb. . .No journalist will ever mention his name in association with theirs, but he paid their dues for them. "
"He paid his own, too, Dave."
"Maybe."
The window was open and a balmy wind blew from my neighbor’s pasture and swelled the curtains over the sink. I filled a cup with coffee and hot milk and walked outside in the sunshine. Alafair sat at the redwood picnic table, playing with Tripod in her lap and listening to the tape she had made of the records on Jerry Joe’s jukebox. She flipped Tripod on his back and bounced him gently up and down by pulling his tail while he pushed at her forearm with his paws.
"Thanks for all the presents. It’s a great Christmas, " she said.
"Thanks for everything you gave me, too, " I said.
"Can Tripod have some more eggnog ice cream? "
"Sure."
"Those creeps are gone, aren’t they? "
"Yeah, the worst of the lot are. The rest get it somewhere down the road. We just don’t see it."
I thought perhaps I might have to explain my remarks, but I didn’t. She actually lived through more than I had in her young life, and her comprehension of the world was oftentimes far better than mine.
She went inside the house with Tripod under her arm, then came back out on the step.
"I forgot. We ate it all," she said.
"There’s some in the freezer down at the shop. I’ll get it," I said.
I walked down the slope through the leaves drifting out of the oak and pecan branches overhead. I had strung Christmas lights around the bait shop’s windows and hung wreaths fashioned from pine boughs and holly and red ribbon on the weathered cypress walls, and Alafair had glued a Santa Claus made from satin wrapping paper to the door. The bayou was empty of boats, and the sound of my shoes was so loud on the dock that it echoed off the water and sent a cloud of robins clattering out of the trees.
I had gotten the ice cream from the game freezer and was about to lock up again when I saw Dock Green park a black Lincoln by the boat ramp and walk toward me.
"It’s Christmas. We’re closed," I said.
"LaRose has got my wife up at his house," he said.
"I don’t believe that’s true. Even if it is, she’s a big girl and can make her own choices."
"I can give you that guy, diced and fried."
"Not interested."
"It ain’t right."
He sat down at a spool table and stared out at the bayou. His neck was as stiff as a chunk of sewer pipe. A muscle jumped in his cheek.
"I think you were involved with Jerry Joe’s death. I just can’t prove it. But I don’t have to talk to you, either. So how about getting out of here?" I said.
He rubbed the heel of his hand in one eye.
"I never killed nobody. I need Persephone back. It ain’t right he can steal my wife, pull a gun on me, I can’t do nothing about it. . .I told Seph this is how it'd be if we messed with people was born with money . . . They take, they don't give," he said.
Then I realized he was drunk.
"Get a motel room or go back to your camp, Dock. I'll get somebody to drive you," I said.
He rose to his feet, as though from a trance, and said, more to the wind than to me, "He controls things above the ground, but he don't hear the voices that's down in the earth . . . They can call me a geek, it don't matter, her and me are forever."
I went back into the shop and called for a cruiser. When I came outside again, he was gone.
That night Alafair and Bootsie and I went out to eat, then drove down East Main, through the corridor of live oaks, looking at the lights and decorations on the nineteenth-century homes along Bayou Teche. We passed the city hall and library, the flood-lit grotto, which contained a statue of Christ's mother, where the home of George Washington Cable had once stood, the darkened grounds and bamboo border around the Shadows, and in the center of town the iron-and-wood drawbridge over the Teche.
I drove past the old Southern Pacific station and up the St. Martinville road, and, without thinking, like a backward glance at absolved guilt, I let my eyes linger on the abandoned frame house where Karyn LaRose had grown up. The garage that had contained her father's boxes of gumballs and plastic monster teeth and vampire fingernails still stood at the front of the property, the doors padlocked, and I wondered when she drove past it if she ever saw the little girl who used to play there in the yard, her hands sticky with the rainbow seepage from the gum that mildewed and ran through the cracks inside.
"Look, up the road, y'all, it's a fire," Alafair said.
Beyond the next curve you could see the reddish orange bloom in the sky, the smoke that trailed back across the moon. We pulled to the side of the road for a firetruck to pass.
"Dave, it's Buford and Karyn's house," Bootsie said.
We came around the curve, and across the cleared acreage the house looked like it was lit from within by molten metal. Only one pump truck had arrived, and the firemen were pulling a hose from the truck toward the front porch.
I stopped on the opposite side of the road and ran toward the truck. I could already feel the heat from the house against my skin.
"Is anybody in there?" I said. The faces of the firemen looked like yellow tallow in the light from the flames.
"Somebody was at the window upstairs but they couldn't mak
e it out," a lieutenant said. "You're from the sheriff's department, aren't you?"
"Right."
"There's a trail of gasoline from the back of the house out to the stables. What the hell kind of security did y'all have out here?"
"Buford worried about Aaron Crown, not Dock Green," I said.
"Who?" he said.