“Everything all right, sir?” I said.
“We’ve got a shit storm coming down on us because of the Nightingale indictment,” he said. “Plus a lot of criticism about an in-house matter.”
He looked at me to make sure I got the point.
“I’m the in-house matter?” I said.
“We’ll talk about that later,” he replied.
I felt a constriction behind my left eye that caused my eye to water and sent a signal to my brain that has always scared me and that I have never understood.
“Nightingale’s constituency thinks we’re political,” Lala said. “The problem is, to some degree, they’re right. He’s a demagogue and a liar, and I want to put him out of business before he turns the state into a sewer. We can’t let them get away with it.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Helen said. “Get away with what?”
“His hacks and hucksters. He has an army of them. He’s got backers in Vegas. I think they’re grooming him for bigger things.”
“I don’t think this conversation is taking a good turn,” I said.
Lala looked at me again. “Rephrase that so I don’t get the wrong inference.”
“Nightingale is guilty of sexual assault and battery or he isn’t,” I said.
“Dave is right,” Helen said. “We do our job and stay out of the consequences.”
“I don’t think I’ve expressed myself very well,” he said. “Nightingale and his family are associated with criminals. They’ve gotten a free pass for years. Iberia Parish voted down casino gambling. That will always be to our credit. We’re not going to allow this son of a bitch to besmirch us.”
“You’re not alone in your feelings,” Helen said.
Lala wasn’t listening. His attention was fixed on me. “In your report I get a sense of hesitancy,” he said.
“There’s some elements in the case that aren’t clear,” I said. “Why would Rowena delay reporting the rape? Why did she destroy evidence? She’s educated and intelligent. So is her husband.”
“Traumatized people don’t behave rationally,” he said.
“The family physician indicates she may have been a neglected wife,” I said.
“Neglected wives have drinks with another man, or even affairs, but that doesn’t mean they invite rape into their lives,” he said.
“I’m with you on that.”
The room was silent. Helen cleared her throat. A tree limb brushed against the window.
“What are you holding back?” he asked me.
“The last time I talked to Levon, he didn’t mention Nightingale not being in jail; that was the kind of thing I expected him to say. It was almost like he didn’t care.”
“That’s perception, not evidence,” he said.
“How many sexual assault cases are not about perception?” I said.
“Levon Broussard spat in Nightingale’s face at Iberia General. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“That was then. This is now.”
“You’re muddying the water, Dave,” he said. “I don’t understand why. Helen, could I speak to Dave alone, please?”
“Powder my nose?” she said.
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Your ass,” she said, and left the room.
Score one for Helen Soileau.
After she was gone, Lala put the pages of my report back into a folder and leaned forward, his face bladed with color, his nose cut out of tin. “The investigation into the Dartez homicide has been the most unusual in my career.”
“Really?” I said.
“Don’t be clever with me, Dave. There’s a cloud over your head, and nothing we do seems to get rid of it. The department and my office have been taking your weight.”
“Then stop doing it.”
“It’s not a time to be gallant. Labiche lifted your prints on the broken glass from the driver’s side of the truck. That detail will not go away. Unless you’re willing to make it go away.”
“What are you hinting at?”
“You were at the Dartez house and could have touched his truck. Or maybe on another occasion.” He paused, then said, “Am I right?”
“I could have.”
“You did or you didn’t?”
I could hear a motorboat on the bayou. I wanted to get up and walk to the window and float away, above the picnic shelters and trees and children playing on swing sets and seesaws. “I did not touch Dartez’s vehicle at his home. I cannot explain the presence of my fingerprints on the glass.”
I could hear myself breathing in the silence. I counted the seconds. I got up to fourteen, then restarted the count, my heart twisting.
“You think you did it?” he asked. “Just say it. Let’s end this crap.”
“I think I’m capable of it.”
“You truly mean that? You would kill a man with your bare hands?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you done with your drinking?”
I could feel my control slipping, my old enemy, childhood rage, surfacing once again. “It’s not my drinking—” I began. I saw a red glow behind my eyes and heard a popping sound in my ears. I started over. “No, sir, I cannot swear that I’m done. No drunk can.”
He leaned back in his chair. He shook his head as though in bewilderment. “Best of everything to you.”
“Want to translate that?”
“You’re an honorable man. But others have to pay your tab.”
I have to say, the cut went deep. “Anything else?”
He didn’t answer. When I opened the door to leave, he was standing at the window, a hand on his hip, staring at the park, his shirt pinched inside his suspenders.
“I never popped a cap on somebody who didn’t ask for it,” I said. “Even in a free-fire zone.”
“Ooh-rah,” he said without turning around.
AT ONE TIME St. Mary Parish was a fiefdom ruled by an oligarchical family who owned everything and everyone in the parish, bar none. In the 1970s, when a group of activist Catholic nuns tried to organize the cane workers, they found themselves at mortal risk in an area that was more than ninety percent Catholic. Enforcement of the law was situational. Every public servant knew which ring to kiss. The people at the bottom of the pile were not necessarily abused, but they weren’t necessarily protected from abuse, either.
Sexual exploitation is not a subject most police departments like to deal with. But it’s often there. A cop picks up a hippie runaway hitchhiking. Maybe she’s holding, maybe she’s got a warrant on her, maybe she’s sixteen and her teeth are chattering. It’s twilight. She’s in the backseat, wrists cuffed behind her, trying to see where they’re going as the cop swings around on the shoulder and heads down a two-lane away from town. The cop has already dropped his badge inside his pocket so she won’t get his number.
His name was Jude McVane. Before he was a deputy sheriff, he was a chaser in a navy brig, a hack in a women’s prison, and a collector for a loan company. He had big hands and smelled of manly odors and was good at his paperwork because he did as little of it as possible. There were never any complaints about him. But his colleagues did not hang out with him after work hours, particularly those who were protective of their wives’ sensibilities.
At sunrise Thursday, he was driving his cruiser on a two-lane back road that followed the curves along Bayou Teche. The primroses were blooming on the edge of the cane fields, the sun spangling inside the tunnel of live oaks. He passed two antebellum homes built in the early nineteenth century, then crossed the drawbridge and turned in to a trailer village that belonged in Bangladesh. He stopped in front of a trailer occupied by a young black single mother. Without speaking, she exited the trailer, locked the door behind her, and got into the back of the cruiser.
“Good morning, sunshine,” McVane said.
She looked wanly out the window. He drove out of the trailer park and back across the drawbridge and past a closed sugar refinery. Then he hooked back in to the confines
of the refinery on a dirt road and parked in the shade of a rusted-out tin shed.
“Nobody does it like you,” he said, getting in back.
When she was finished, she walked away from the cruiser and cleared her mouth and spat.
“I always heard it tastes like watermelon rind,” he said.
She refused to speak. He drove her back to her home and watched her get out and go inside. He shifted into gear and drove out of the trailer park and back over the Teche and headed toward Franklin. A solitary figure was walking around the edge of the road, dragging a wheeled case behind him, a beach bag hanging from his shoulder. McVane pulled alongside and rolled down the passenger window. “Where you going, partner?”
The man wore red tennis shoes and khakis that probably came from Target and a green T-shirt with Bugs Bunny eating a carrot on the front. “I’m touring the countryside. I got off the bus at the wrong place.”
“Where are you from?”
“New Or-yuns, originally. My name is Chester. Sometimes people call me Smiley.”
“Chester what?”
“Wimple. What’s yours?”
“Get in.”
“Why?”
“I’ll take you where you’re going.”
Chester leaned his head in the window and sniffed. “There’s been a woman in here.”
“Get in the cruiser, please.”
“I like walking.”
“I guess it’s going to be one of those days,” McVane said.
“All right. If you want to act like that. I don’t want to make anybody mad.” The man got inside and inhaled. “Icky.”
“What is?”
“Like somebody has been doing something he shouldn’t.”
“Buckle up,” McVane said. He drove down the road until he reached an oak grove. He turned inside it and cut the engine. “I have a feeling you got loose from an institution, Chester.”
“I did no such thing.”
“Let’s see your identification.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’re being impolite and talking to me in a hurtful way.”
“I think you’re from Crazy Town, Chester. Crazy Town people have to be housed and fed and medicated. They also create shit piles of paperwork. Now get rid of the baby talk and show me your fucking ID.”
“I knew people like you in the orphanage. They were bullies and loudmouths and had no manners.”
“You’re really starting to piss me off. Smart-mouth me again and I’ll slap you upside the head, boy.”
“I’m going to walk. You need to clean out this car. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“That’s it, you little geek. You’re under arrest.”
“For what?”
“Deliberately creating a dangerous situation on a state highway.”
“That’s silly.”
McVane got out and came around the front of the cruiser and ripped open the passenger door. Chester was putting on a pair of cotton gloves.
“What are you doing with those gloves?” McVane said.
“I don’t want to touch anything in your nasty car.”
McVane reached for him. Then, for the first time, he saw the absence of light in Chester’s eyes. He’d seen it before, once in a lockdown unit at Miramar in the eyes of a female prisoner who had murdered her children; and once in the eyes of a woman he’d sodomized in the back of a liquor store. The revolver was a .357 Magnum, the bullets in the cylinder fat and round and hollow-pointed. The words he wanted to say were trapped inside a gaseous and foul bubble in his throat, the release of his sphincter like wet newspaper tearing apart, his fear so intense he pulled his weapon crookedly from the holster and fumbled it onto the grass.
He tried to smile at his ineptitude, giving up all pretense at manliness, hoping for mercy. The slug hit him in the upper lip like a sledgehammer, and the back of his skull exploded in a gush of bone and brain matter, similar to a grapefruit bursting.
Chester walked around to the driver’s side and picked up McVane’s hat from the dashboard and put it on, then straightened it in the side mirror. The engine was still running. He climbed in and drove away, remembering the ten-two position on the steering wheel that he had learned in driving school.
My, what a fine morning it was. He hit the whoop-whoop button a couple of times and wondered if he shouldn’t apply for the police force somewhere. He’d probably be pretty good at it, he thought. It was time someone did something about the number of criminals and no-goods overrunning the countryside.
* * *
THE BODY WAS located right by the St. Mary/Iberia Parish line. The cruiser had been driven through New Iberia, past City Hall and my house and out to Spanish Lake, and left half submerged in the water. The wind was blowing at thirty knots; no fishermen were on the lake. A black kid who worked in the bait shop said he’d seen the cruiser drive on top of the levee to the north end of the lake, but he’d paid little attention, because sometimes policemen stopped at the lake to eat lunch or take a smoke. He said he’d seen a man walking past the bait shop a half hour later; the man was pulling a small suitcase, but he didn’t remember what the man looked like.
Helen and I watched the wrecker pull the cruiser from the cattails, the doors gushing water and mud. We had already been to the crime scene on the parish line, but we had gone in separate vehicles and had talked little among ourselves.
“Somebody shoots a deputy, steals the cruiser, drives through town, and dumps it in a lake in broad daylight?” she said.
“We get them all, don’t we?”
I walked down the embankment and looked through the driver’s window. A deputy sheriff’s hat was floating on the floor. The cut-down twelve-gauge pump was still locked in place on the dash. “You ever meet this guy?”
“McVane?” she said.
“Yeah, you ever meet him?”
“No. What’s the story?” she said.
“He had a bad rep with his colleagues.”
“For what?”
“Black women didn’t always go to jail.”
“You think it was one of them?” she asked.
“How many poor black women carry a firearm that can blow a hole the size of a tangerine in a guy’s head? Also, he was shot at close range outside the cruiser. There were no other car tracks in the oak grove. Either he met somebody who was on foot, or the person was in his cruiser and the two of them got out and the shooter made his move.”
“Our guy didn’t see it coming, either,” she said.
“Probably not.”
“It’s your baby, Streak.”
“I’ve got enough on my desk, Helen.”
“Sorry, Pops.”
“I don’t get along well with the guys in St. Mary Parish.”
“Boo-hoo,” she replied.
She got into her vehicle and drove away. I returned to the crime scene on the parish line. Everyone was gone. I stepped inside the tape. The wind was still up, bending the grass inside the grove, some of it stiff with blood. The spray pattern of the wound pointed toward the bayou. I stood next to the place the body had been and pressed my hands together and formed a V, like the needle on a compass. Then I aimed between my thumbs as though through iron sights, trying to see where the bullet could have gone. The trees were widely spaced, which was not helpful.
I tried to see the shooter inside my head. Nobody likes cop killers, even when they kill a guy like McVane. Most of them go out smoking. Usually, they’re almost hysterical with fear and get as stoned and drunk as they can before they check out. Sometimes they take their families with them. A cop killer on the loose is like a tiger prowling a school yard. You’re going to hear a lot from him until someone pulls his plug.
The size and character of the entrance and exit wounds indicated the bullet was of large caliber and fired from a serious gun. The round was probably a hollow-point or a dum-dum or a soft-nose that had been notched. The shooter was probably a man, big enough to carry the weapon
on his person without McVane noticing it. But why did McVane pull in to the grove? The St. Mary cops said he didn’t smoke. The grove was too visible for a tryst or even for harmless goofing off on the job. Maybe he was doing his paperwork when a hitchhiker walked up on him. But why would an armed hitchhiker walk up on a cop he didn’t know and shoot him in cold blood?
Maybe the shooter was a fugitive. Maybe he did something suspicious on the road and McVane questioned him. But McVane didn’t call in the encounter, and he hadn’t been alarmed to the point of drawing his weapon, at least not until it was too late.
I looked at the serenity inside the grove, the wind scudding on the bayou, the moss straightening in the trees. It was the kind of spot you associate with rest, peace of mind, withdrawal from the fray. It was an unlikely place for a violent confrontation, a disruption caused by two disparate personalities trying to kill each other, one succeeding.
Why was McVane late in pulling his gun? He was outside the cruiser, at some point obviously aware that he was in mortal danger. Why did he let his defenses down? This wasn’t consistent with the image of a cop who, according to his colleagues, cut suspects no slack and cuffed and searched them roughly and hooked them to a D-ring on the cruiser’s floor.
I didn’t believe the shooter was local. Aside from two antebellum homes, there were only a few trailers and abandoned shacks spaced along the two-lane, and they were not occupied by the kind of people who would chat up a cop like McVane.
It had to be a hitchhiker. Did McVane pick him up? An armed and dangerous man?
No, he must have known and trusted the shooter. But where did the gun come from? The weather was warm, and a hiker on the road wouldn’t have been wearing a coat. Perhaps he was carrying a bag or backpack. He was probably white. Someone so innocuous in appearance that McVane had no fear of him; someone he held in contempt. What kind of person would that be?
I began to see an image of the stroller or hitchhiker, a seemingly harmless character made of Play-Doh, one with a soft mouth and girlish hips and buttocks that waddled, the perfect target for a virile and strong and sadistic male.