“Guess who?” Martha had been generous with the Old Crow.
“I’m very busy, Mr. Cole. Is there some way I can help you?” Some people just weren’t around when they handed out laugh buttons.
“Can your office run a license plate check for me?”
“Of course.”
I gave her the Mustang’s number and told her about the red-haired man. She said, “He was also asking about a child?”
“Yes.”
You could hear her fingernails clicking on her desk. Thinking. “That’s odd. I wonder why he would be following you?”
“When he tells me, I’ll pass it along.”
“It’s very important that this not be associated with Jodi Taylor.” She sounded concerned.
“I’m telling people that I’m searching for a marrow donor. In a case like this, you have to ask questions. People talk. This kind of thing can be exciting to folks, and they like to share their excitement.”
“And people with secrets want to protect them.”
“That’s the point. But I’ve no reason to believe that anyone I’ve yet seen has secrets.”
“Except, perhaps, for your red-haired man.”
“Well, there is that. Yes.”
She told me that she would have the information on the Mustang’s owner by ten the next morning, and then she hung up. I stared at the phone and felt strangely incomplete now that the connection was broken, but maybe that was just all the Raid I had breathed. Sure. You spend most of the afternoon breathing Raid and drinking Old Crow, it heightens your sense of dissociation. It also puts you to sleep.
At eighteen minutes after nine the next morning, the phone rang and Lucy Chenier said, “Your Mustang is registered to someone named Jimmie Ray Rebenack.” She read two addresses, both in Ville Platte.
“Okay.”
“Mr. Rebenack lists his occupation as a private investigator. He was licensed two and a half years ago.”
I was grinning. “If this guy’s for real, he has to be the world’s worst detective.”
“Prior to licensing, he was employed as a full-time auto mechanic at an Exxon station in Alexandria. His tax records indicate that he continues to derive the majority of his income from part-time mechanic work.”
“Wow. You guys work fast.”
“The firm is well positioned. You’ll keep me informed?”
“Of course, Ms. Chenier.” Elvis Cole, Professional Detective, discourses in a professional manner.
I located Rebenack’s addresses on my map of Ville Platte, then went to find him. One was a business address, the other a residence. The residential address put Jimmie Ray Rebenack in a small frame duplex on the east side of town, four blocks north of a switching station for the Southern-Pacific Railroad. It was an older neighborhood, and it wasn’t particularly proud, with small unkempt houses and spotty lawns and cars and trucks that were mostly Detroit gas guzzlers in need of paint. Jimmie’s Mustang was not in evidence.
I cruised the block twice, then drove to Jimmie Ray Rebenack’s office two blocks north of Main above a fresh-seafood market. The seafood market was set between a barber shop and a secondhand clothes store, and there was a little stairwell between the seafood and the clothes, and a black felt and glass directory for the offices up the stairs.
I circled the block, looking for the Mustang, but as with the house the Mustang was not there. I parked around the corner, then walked back to the little directory. There were five businesses listed, and Rebenack Investigations was the third. You had to shake your head. Jimmie Ray Rebenack in his brand-new Mustang, thinking he wouldn’t be noticed as he followed me all over town.
I crossed the street to a little coffee shop opposite the fish market. There was a counter and a half-dozen Formica tables spread around the place sporting overweight men in thin cotton shirts drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. A napkin dispenser sat on each of the tables, alongside a bottle of Tabasco sauce. I sat at a table in the window, watching the fish market until a sturdy woman with about a million miles on her clock came over with a coffeepot. She poured without asking, and said, “You wan’ some breakfast, sugah?”
“How about a couple of hard poached eggs, toast, and grits?”
“Wheat or white?”
“Wheat.”
She walked away without writing anything and left me to sip at the coffee. It was heavy with flavor and about a million times stronger than the coffee people drink in the rest of the world, sort of like espresso that’s been cooked down to a sludge. Mississippi mud. I tried to pretend that I enjoyed it, and I think I did a pretty good job. Maybe the Tabasco was on the tables for the coffee. I sneaked glances at the men with their papers. Okay. If they could drink it, I could drink it.
When the waitress brought the food, I said, “Mm-mm, that coffee’s some kinda strong!”
She said, “Uh-huh.”
I smushed the eggs into the grits and mixed in a little butter and ate it between bites of the toast. The grits were warm and smooth and made the awful coffee easier to drink. I watched the fish market. People came and went, and a couple of times people climbed the stairs, but none of them was Jimmie Ray Rebenack. The front of the fish market was covered with hand-lettered signs saying CATFISH and LIVE CRABS and GASPERGOO $1.89. The people who patronized the fish market came out with brown paper bags that I took to be the catfish and the crabs, and, as I watched them, I wondered what a gaspergoo was and why someone might want to eat it. Another little sign had been painted on the door. WE HAVE GAR BALLS! These Cajuns know how to live, don’t they?
I was halfway along my third cup of sludge when Jimmie Ray Rebenack’s Mustang rumbled down the street and pulled into a metered spot outside the clothing store. Jimmie Ray fed some money into the meter, then trotted up the stairs. He was wearing blue jeans and a red western shirt and gray snakeskin boots. His pompadour looked a foot high and must’ve taken most of the morning to shellac into place.
I gave it a few minutes, then paid at the counter, left a hefty tip, and crossed the street to Jimmie Ray Rebenack’s office.
The building was dingy and low class, with crummy linoleum floors and water-stained paint. The smell of fish was strong, and seemed a part of the fiber of the building. Three offices overlooked the front street, and three overlooked the alley behind the fish market. Rebenack had the middle office over the alley. I listened for a second, didn’t hear anything, then let myself in.
Jimmie Ray Rebenack was sitting behind a plain wooden desk, feet up, staring at some papers when he heard the door. He saw me, then came out of the chair as if somebody had poured hot oatmeal into his lap. “Hey.”
“Nice boots, Jimmie Ray. You going for that Joey Buttafucco look?”
“Who?” Out of the cultural loop, down here in Ville Platte. “What do you want?” He slid the papers into his desk drawer. Surreptitious.
Jimmie Ray Rebenack had sharp features and pockmarks on his neck and the pink skin of a natural redhead. Maybe an inch shorter than me, but muscular in a rawboned kind of way. Grease from his part-time mechanic’s job was embedded in the thick skin of his knuckles and fingers. He’d tried to wash it off, but the grease was in deep and probably a part of him. A lowboy gray metal file cabinet sat in one corner of the little room, and a couple of padded dinette chairs sat against the wall opposite his desk. Both of the chairs looked like they had been out in the rain, and the padding on one had been patched with duct tape. Classy. Everything in the place looked like it had been picked up at a yard sale, or maybe bought secondhand from the Louisiana public school system. There was a framed picture of Tom Selleck as Magnum sitting on top of the file cabinet.
I said, “I want to know why you’re following me, Jimmie Ray.”
“Man, what d’ hell you talkin’ ’bout? I ain’t follow-in’ you.” The accent was somewhere between Cajun and French Quarter New Orleans.
I crossed his office and looked out the window. He had a view of the Dumpster behind the fish market and, beyo
nd that, a backyard with a little tomato garden. A mayonnaise jar with a two-headed turtle floating in alcohol was on his windowsill. Keepsake, no doubt. I said, “You’re Jimmie Ray Rebenack. You drive this year’s Mustang, license number 213X455, and you possess Louisiana State investigator’s license number KAO154509.”
You could see him relax. I hadn’t shot him or thrown a punch, so the surprise of my entry was wearing off and he was getting himself together. He put together a pretty good smile, sort of a Jack Nicholson number, part sneer and part smirk. He sat again, leaning back and trying to look expansive. “You made me, huh? You must be pretty good.”
“Jimmie, a twelve-year-old could’ve made you. Why are you following me?”
“I heard you was in town and I wanted to find out why, you know? Like there might be some money in it, thas all.”
“Why were you talking to Martha Guidry and Claire Fontenot and Evelyn Maggio last year?”
He frowned and dug at the inside of his teeth with his tongue. Nervous. “I don’t know whatchu talkin’ ’bout, man.”
“C’mon, Jeffrey.”
He stared at me like he was trying to think of something to say, but couldn’t. I grinned at him. “Gotcha.”
He frowned, not happy about it. “They got me confused with somebody else.”
“With hair like that?”
He leaned forward. “Hey, podnuh, this is my town. I ain’t gotta tell you dick. I know your name is Elvis Cole, and you’re from Los Angeles. I know you’re stayin’ at the motel over here.” He pointed his thumb at me and smirked. “You see? I ain’t no goddamned slouch in the detectin’ department, either.”
“Wow. You think we could have a detect-off? You think we could duke it out for the world middleweight detective championships?” I looked at the picture of Tom Selleck. Jesus Christ.
He said, “Maybe my business is knowing your business. Maybe I figured that since you was workin’ in my town, I could cut myself in.” He leaned back again, grinning at me like I was supposed to believe it. “These coonies won’t open up to a stranger, and I know my way around. Figured that might be worth some cash. Whatchu think?”
“I think you’re full of shit.”
Jimmie Ray shrugged like what I thought didn’t matter, and then I heard steps coming up the linoleum stairs. The steps came closer and then the door opened and a guy in his mid-forties stepped in. Something large filled the hall behind him.
Jimmie Ray kept grinning at me and said, “This my podnuh, LeRoy.” He nodded at the shape in the hall. “That there’s René, behind him.”
LeRoy’s eyes narrowed and he looked at Jimmie Ray as if Jimmie was the world’s largest turd. LeRoy was maybe five-eight, with dark weathered skin just beginning to loosen and eyes like a couple of hard black marbles. He was in a thin short-sleeved plaid shirt and worn denim pants, and there was a tattoo on his forearm so obscured by wiry hair that I couldn’t make it out. Anchor, maybe. Or a bulldog. He looked surprised to see me, and not particularly happy about it. “Who d’fuck dis?” He said it with a heavy Cajun accent.
Jimmie Ray’s smile lost some of its confidence. “Just some guy. He’s leaving. Let’m pass, René.”
René moved into the room behind LeRoy, and when he did I stepped back the way you might when something large passes very close to you, say a mobile home, or some great African beast. René was only six-three or six-four, but his body possessed size in the way a dirigible possesses size, as if there were a quality to its bulk that could block out the sun. He had a tiny round head and thin, sandy hair and fingers as thick as my wrists. He wore humongously thick glasses that made his eyes seem tiny and far away, and the lenses were speckled with white flecks of matter. There were liver-colored blotches on his forearms and ears that looked like birthmarks, and a large misshapen lump riding the top of his right shoulder like a second head. His skin looked like tree bark. I said, “Jesus Christ.”
Jimmie Ray said, “That René is somethin’, idin’ he? Had him a job in a carnival down ’round Bossier City. Useta bill him d’ Swamp Monster.” Jimmie Ray liked René the same way he liked the two-headed turtle. Something in a jar.
LeRoy still had the narrow eyes on Jimmie Ray. “Jus’ some guy? You callin’ names wi’ jus’ some guy? How goddamn stupid you are?”
Jimmie Ray raised his hands like what’s the big deal? “It’s nothin’, man. Eve’body cool here.” The sharp smile fell away and you could see that Jimmie was scared.
LeRoy said something in French.
Jimmie Ray nodded. “Hey, Cole, there’s nothin’ I can tell ya, all right? Now, I got business. Go on.”
LeRoy had put the narrow eyes on me. “Whatchu lookin’ at, podnuh?”
Rebenack came around the desk and took my arm. “C’mon, Cole. Out. I gotta go.” Now he was trying to get me out of there and damned anxious to do it.
I said, “Are you okay with this?”
Jimmie Ray Rebenack looked at me with wide, surprised eyes. “Hey, yeah, no problem.”
LeRoy squinted at me, then at Rebenack. “Who dis guy?” Then back at me. “You his boyfrien’, what?”
I said, “If you’re in trouble with these guys, Rebenack, don’t go with them.”
Rebenack waved me toward the door, making a big deal out of showing me that everything was fine. “Hey, these are just a couple of pals. It’s not your business, man. Now, c’mon, I gotta lock up.”
I let myself get shown out, and then I went down the stairs and back across to the little coffee shop. In a couple of minutes, LeRoy and René and Jimmie Ray came down and climbed into a rusty, gold Polara double-parked at the curb. When René got in, the Polara groaned and settled on its springs. They eased away down the street, did a slow K-turn, then headed back to Main Street and swung left.
I ran hard around the corner to my car, jumped in, pushed it hard through the little alley behind the fish market to Main, then jumped out of the car, climbed onto the hood, and looked both ways to find them. The gold Polara was moving south, just winding a bend in the street maybe three blocks and a dozen cars away. I followed them.
Jimmie Ray might be a turd, but he was my turd.
7
They were easy to follow. I trailed them south of Ville Platte, staying four to six cars back. LeRoy drove slowly, and a train of cars piled up behind them, unable to pass because of the narrow road.
Six miles south of Ville Platte we crossed a little bayou, and the line of traffic slowed as LeRoy turned west. I didn’t turn after him because no one else had, and the land was wide and flat and empty of trees. Sweet potato fields, maybe. I pulled onto the shoulder and waited until the Polara was out of sight, and only then did I turn. If Jimmie Ray was doing the following, he’d be tooling along a couple of car lengths behind, thinking he was invisible because he was playing the radio. Hmm. If I was the world’s greatest detective and Jimmie Ray was the world’s worst, maybe this was some kind of karmic coming together.
Maybe a mile off the main road another road branched away, this one going through a gate with a big sign that said ROSSIER’S CRAWFISH FARM, MILT ROSSIER, PROP. The farm was hidden from the road by a heavy windbreak of hardwood trees, and I couldn’t see beyond the windbreak into the farm. I could see pretty far up the tarmac road, and the gold Polara wasn’t visible. No dust trail, either. Hmm, again. I drove a hundred yards past the gate, pulled onto the shoulder, then trotted back into the trees.
The windbreak was maybe a hundred yards deep, with more fields beyond cut through by a regular crosswork of shell roads. The gold Polara was parked on the far side of a large rectangular pond about the size and shape of a football field. There was another pond of identical size and shape beyond it, and another one after that, and a couple of long, low cinder block buildings. The Polara was parked beside a white Cadillac Brougham and an Evangeline Parish Sheriff’s department highway car. Jimmie Ray and LeRoy and René were standing at the edge of the pond with a guy in a tan sheriff’s uniform. The sheriff was maybe in his
fifties, and everybody seemed to be talking to a heavy guy with baggy trousers and a cheap white short-sleeved shirt and a straw field hat on his head. He looked about the same age as the sheriff, but he might have been older, and he carried himself with the unmistakable bearing of an overseer. He gestured out toward the pond, and everybody looked. He gestured in the opposite direction, and everybody looked there, too. Then he leaned against the Cadillac and crossed his arms. Milt Rossier, no doubt. Proprietor.
I watched for another few minutes, and then I made my way back through the trees, drove back to town, and let myself into Jimmie Ray Rebenack’s office. It was as we had left it, quiet and smelling of raw shrimp, the sounds of the alley and backyards below drifting nicely through the open window. A lawn mower was growling a few houses away, and the rich smell of cut St. Augustine grass mixed nicely with the shrimp. The two-headed turtle was milky in its jar on the sill, and Tom Selleck looked bored in his frame atop the file cabinet. I could see Jimmie Ray Rebenack, watching Magnum reruns, watching Tom Selleck drive the fast car and mug with the beautiful women. Jimmie sitting in his little duplex in Ville Platte, thinking, yeah, I could do that, then taking some mail order course, How to Be a Private Eye!
I opened his desk to see what he had been reading, and suddenly the lawn mower sounds faded and the office was very quiet. Jodi Taylor smiled up at me from the cover of Music magazine. The cover and an accompanying article had been clipped from the magazine and stapled together. The People article was under it. I took a breath and let it out. Sonofagun. I went through the rest of the desk, but the rest of the desk was empty. I moved to the file cabinet. Two cans of Dr Pepper were hiding in the bottom drawer, and a single roll of prank toilet paper, the kind with Jerry Falwell’s face printed on each of the sheets. Office-warming gift. The second drawer was empty, and the third was nicely outfitted with hanging file folders in various colors, only the folders were as empty and as clean as the day Jimmie Ray had installed them. There were eight hanging files in the top drawer. One of them held a Polaroid snapshot of a nude woman with a Winn-Dixie shopping bag over her head. A lot of blond hair peeked out beneath the bag, and she was cheap-looking, wearing rings on her third and fourth fingers. Girlfriend, no doubt. Another held a surveillance report that Jimmie Ray Rebenack had written for a Mrs. Philip R. Cantera, who was convinced that her husband was playing around. Jimmie Ray’s report said that he had observed Mr. Cantera in intimate embrace on several different occasions with (a) a young woman who worked at Cal’s Road House and (b) another young woman who sold beer at the Rebel Stock Car Oval. The next three files contained case notes from similar jobs, two of them involving suspected infidelity, and the remaining being a grocery store owner who suspected an employee of stealing houseware products. The fifth folder contained more pictures of Jodi Taylor clipped from magazines and newspapers and what looked like studio press release sources, only sandwiched in with the articles were the Xeroxed copies of the first two pages of a document relinquishing the care and trust of one Marla Sue Johnson, a baby girl, to the State of Louisiana from her natural parents, Pamela E. Johnson and Monroe Kyle Johnson, on 11 July, thirty-six years ago. The document was incomplete and bore no signatures. Jodi Taylor’s birth certificate was paper-clipped to the document along with a second birth certificate, this one stating that Marla Sue Johnson had been born to Pamela E. Johnson and Monroe Kyle Johnson on 9 July. Jodi Taylor’s birthday.