But he was now stuck behind a desk; a recession was in full swing; and the familiar phrase “fix the damn thing”—be it a parking ticket or an illegal hunt—was once more in vogue. Poaching was on the rise again. When you could make an easy five grand a night hunting gators, it wasn’t hard to see why. Besides, nobody had ever bothered to pay much attention to the law down here. People who were smart didn’t try to enforce it. The bayous of southern Louisiana followed rules all their own.
As I sped by the sign for Morgan City, the countryside took a turn for the worse, making Houma look like a shining jewel. Morgan City had a story all its own as the onetime Jumbo Shrimp Capital of the World. The discovery of offshore oil had brought good times to the town for a while, as it had in Houma. But now deserted offshore platforms dotted the landscape, and rusty shrimp trawlers rotted from disuse in murky swamps. The boom times were long gone, taking with them all the money and employment that had infused the area for a few good years.
Ply Charlie with a couple of drinks and, before you knew it, he was off and running on one of his favorites topics: how all the “goddamn” oil companies had left nothing but ten thousand miles of canals large enough for barges to plunder across, ripping through the fragile freshwater marshes of southern Louisiana, and taking with them the Cajun way of life. No longer able to make their money from the oil industry, the Cajuns had been left to keep a death watch as both shrimping and crabbing disappeared. All that remained of the marsh as it had been were the petrified trunks of dead cypress trees, standing like headstones in ghostly remembrance, marking the area as a watery grave.
Following Charlie’s directions, I drove past Morgan City toward Bayou Vista. Marie’s place wasn’t hard to find. Tucked away down a dirt road, the house was nothing more than a ramshackle hut. A parcel of screaming, half-dressed kids played out front in what resembled a junkyard, with an ancient icebox and a broken-down old pickup truck falling apart piece by piece where it stood. As I parked and got out of the car, silence descended. Six kids, ranging from twelve months to fourteen years, froze in place to stare at me as if I were some foreign creature. All except the diaperless baby, who continued to crawl among rusty pieces of metal. None of the children looked like they ever bothered to bathe.
All six pairs of eyes followed me up the steps of the porch as I knocked on the screen door and looked inside. Piles of dirty laundry lay strewn about the hall floor, and a rancid odor wafted through the screen. Walking inside, I stepped over mounds of clothes and litter until I reached the kitchen, where dirty dishes were piled high in the sink, and pots encrusted with dried food sat on a table. A heap of bones with scraps of raw flesh and fur still attached lay in a corner of the floor, as large roaches moved slowly through the heat and filth, unconcerned by my presence. The house made my skin crawl.
Stepping back outside, I took a deep breath and approached the eldest boy, who watched me with a sullen stare. Golden hair stuck out in knotted clumps above a face blotched with freckles; his eyes followed my every move.
“Is your mother around?”
The silence I received for an answer was so deep, I felt sure I had hallucinated the sound of children screaming just moments before. As I took another deep breath, a pungent smell that I knew could only be gator skins drifted my way. When I turned to follow the odor that came from the backyard, the boy suddenly streaked past me, screaming at the top of his lungs as though he’d been threatened with murder.
“Ma! Watch out! Stranger coming!”
I reached the backyard in time to see all four feet and eight inches of Marie Tuttle whip around inside a wooden shed, with a shotgun in her hands pointed directly at me. Coming out, she kicked the door closed with the back of her foot. Wiry and small, she looked ferocious, and I was more than sure that, if given the slightest reason, she would happily blast me off the face of the earth.
“Who the hell are you and what the hell do you want?”
Dressed in a sleeveless pink calico smock dotted with blue cornflowers, she wore a pair of red high-top Reeboks on her feet. Strands of light brown hair fell in greasy strings about her shoulders, having pulled loose from the bun pinned to the top of her head. Her face was small and pinched, and there were gaps where there should have been teeth.
The sound of my voice was stronger and more confident than I felt at the moment. “I’m with Fish and Wildlife. I was called in on a murder in New Orleans last night. The girl was Valerie Vaughn. I was told she was your niece.”
Marie stared at me, never lowering the gun.
“Yeah. She’s my kin. And I already heard the news. What else you want?”
“I’m trying to find anything that might help us learn who could have killed Valerie.”
Breaking into a malicious grin, Marie let loose a cackle I had only heard in Disney films, transforming herself into a short, Cajun version of Cruella De Vil—a cartoon character from my childhood who makes me cringe to this day.
“Now I remember hearin’ ’bout you. You’re that new duck cop whose ass has been fermentin’ in duck shit and water. Ev’body knows ’bout you. You tryin’ ta make some points comin’ on down here stickin’ your nose in where it don’t belong?”
Discovering new flesh, a swarm of mosquitoes attacked me with a gung ho vengeance, but I didn’t dare make a move to swat them away.
“I saw Valerie last night. I saw what was done to her. I want to catch whoever was responsible. She was your niece—don’t you care about that?”
Maybe it was the fact that if she didn’t care, who else would? Marie wavered.
“You gotta gun on you?”
I only wished I had. Instead, my Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum was locked away in the glove compartment of my car.
“No.”
With the barrel of her gun, Marie motioned to the sullen boy covered in freckles.
“Check her out, Reginald.”
Reginald? The kid had to be tough to get through life in the bayou with a name like that. What he did have were fast and efficient hands. In a quick thirty seconds, I felt as if I’d just been groped on a date back in high school. Reginald backed away, but Marie kept the gun leveled at me.
“Lucky for you you’re a woman. If you’d been that asshole Hickok, I’d have blown you away by now.” Marie grinned as she moved a step closer. “You know, it’s mighty easy for someone to disappear back here in these swamps. It’s been known to happen.”
It seemed likely that Marie was responsible for more than a few people who had met with such an end.
“Were you in touch with Valerie at all recently?”
A muscle near the side of Marie’s mouth twitched.
“I cut myself off from that child the day she left for N’Awlins. I knew she would come to no good in that town. I told her so. But she was flyin’ high with a bunch of no-good trash.”
“When Valerie was found, so was an alligator. Do you know how she got hold of it?”
Marie looked at me as though I had just come off the moon. “Don’t take much brains to get hold of a gator round here. How long you been down in Louisiana now, girl?”
“Was Valerie involved with poaching gators?”
Marie’s hand tightened on the stock of the shotgun.
“You know, child, you got a lot of questions for an outsider. You don’t know shit about the bayou. How you think we livin’ back here? How’m I ’posed to feed this gang of kids? You think only the rich folk got a right to these here gators? You wanna deal some justice, you should be taking a look at those ol’ boys in your office or those state goons. I ain’t gonna say what I’m doin’ or ain’t doin’. If that’s what you want to know, you’re wasting your time. Haul ass outta here now.”
Complaints about the alligator tagging system were rampant. While it allowed for hunting during a thirty-day season, it benefited wealthy landowners with vast holdings of property that held plenty of gators. The bayou folks, who had always gotten by living off the land, ended up with few, if any, gators to hunt and
sell. It was politics and money as usual in the land of Huey Long, and I told Marie so. Scrutinizing me a moment as if to pass judgment on whether or not I’d told her the truth, she lowered her gun.
“Reginald, go into the house and bring out two beers.”
I wondered just how close I had come to being gator bait as Reginald came back out with the bottles. Marie pulled off the cap of one with her teeth and slugged down her beer, throwing me the other cold Dixie. She lowered herself onto a pile of logs with the shotgun at her feet, as a large black spider began the climb up her leg. But Marie was no Miss Muffet. Plucking off the spider as it reached the parapet of her knee, she threw it to Reginald, who lunged as if it were a reward. Tearing off one leg at a time as the spider squirmed in his grasp, he glanced over at me and grinned, aware it was something I probably hated.
I sat on the ground and leaned my back against a forlorn fender, my shirt and pants plastered to my skin as a trickle of sweat ran down my back. A baby gurgled behind me and I turned to see all of Marie’s kids quietly congregated in the backyard, enjoying the free entertainment. The cold wetness of the beer seared my throat as I took a sip.
“So, you came all the way out here thinkin’ I could tell you why Valerie was murdered, huh? Let me ask you. What you think it’s all about?”
“Maybe she cheated on a jealous boyfriend.”
Marie snorted. “Who’s gonna be jealous of some drugged-out stripper? You tell me that.”
“Could it have been a pimp that she worked for?”
Marie shook her head. “I didn’t bring up no child to give their hard-earned money to some lazy pimp bastard. Valerie didn’t have a lot of brains, but she was smart enough to work for herself.”
“Was she hooked on drugs when she lived here with you?”
Finishing her beer, Marie sent her empty bottle whizzing past my head, missing me by only a matter of inches, to land on a trash pile at the back of the house.
“Reginald, bring out two more!”
Resentful of the chore, the boy glared in my direction before sauntering back to the house.
“Where you from?” Marie hoisted one leg on the woodpile, allowing me an unwanted view up her dress.
“I’m from New York.”
“You got drugs up there?”
I chuckled at the thought as Reginald dropped a beer in my lap.
But Marie didn’t wait for an answer. “Well, where the hell you think that stuff comes in from?”
I relied on Hollywood for my information on this subject. “The south coast of Florida has always seemed the logical place to me.”
“Shit, no. The smart ones bring it in through here. Who the hell’s gonna tramp across some swamp to find ’em? Of course Valerie was snortin’ and doin’ every other damn thing. Hell, it’s easier to get that shit back here than it is to catch gators.”
Reginald bent down next to Marie’s foot, intent on grabbing another spider that had carelessly crossed his path. But before he could reach it, Marie grabbed the boy by the ear and pulled him toward her, slapping him hard across the face as he let out a howl. He scowled at her in silence.
“You don’t know much now, do you, Miss Fish and Wildlife? Well, I’m gonna make you just a little bit smarter.” Finishing the second beer, she rammed the bottle down on a passing bug. “Valerie had a boyfriend, all right. You ever hear of a fella by the name of Hillard Williams?”
Scanning my memory, I recalled seeing posters around town. His name was being touted for a hotly contested political race against the incumbent Democratic mayor, who had failed to pull the city out of its economic slump. Williams was basing his campaign on the politics of discontent, pumping up both blue-collar anger and middle-class fear by hitting on violent crime, a skyrocketing murder rate, the rocketing increase in AIDS, and an influx of illegal immigrants. Calling for antigay measures to “take back our city,” Williams was considered the worst thing to hit gays since the outbreak of AIDS.
“He’s running for mayor of N’Awlins. That sonofabitch was also screwing my niece. But what I bet you don’t know is that Hillard used to poach gators for a living. The bastard made a fortune offa it. And you wanna know how?”
Marie spit out a wad of thick yellow phlegm.
“He made it big by cheatin’ everyone around here on gator deals. Had himself some rich Dago partner from up your way. They trucked those skins outta here like no tomorrow. The day I learned Valerie was letting him get his jollies off on her was the day I cut that girl off forever.”
The idea of a stripper being hooked up with the man most likely to be New Orleans’s next mayor wasn’t all that farfetched. America’s own banana republic, the state’s political history had long been fraught with corrupt politicians, from the infamous Huey Long all the way up to the present former klansman and neo-Nazi, David Duke. Louisiana loved a good rascal, and they now had another in Hillard Williams. Following in the footsteps of those before him, Williams was gaining in the polls by creating alarm bordering on hysteria among the folks of New Orleans. It was down-home politics at its most insidious.
“Hillard Williams a gator poacher?” I was still working on digesting the fact.
“You bet your ass. Big-time.”
“If he was so busy cheating all of you, why wasn’t he one of those who just disappeared?”
“It ain’t a smart idea to go round knocking off the head of the local Nazi party. Besides, his partner was a big-time hoodlum. We don’t need that kind of trouble.”
“Is he still a Nazi?”
Marie’s mouth resembled a checkerboard, with black spaces and yellow teeth evenly matched, as she broke out in laughter.
“He found God, doncha know. Sweet Lord Jesus has saved him.” She stopped laughing as she wiped the spittle from the corners of her mouth with the back of her hand. “Don’t you believe it. You couldn’t trust that bastard nohow. He’d skin the hide off anyone who wasn’t looking sharp. That sack of shit tried to cheat me more times than I can remember. He’s lucky he got outta here with his dick in his hand. Thinkin’ back on it now, I shoulda cut it off. Maybe Valerie would still be around today.”
The air was quiet but for the rattling of tins and glass settling on Marie’s trash pile.
“Do you think Hillard Williams killed her?”
Marie stood up, not bothering to brush off the wood chips and bugs that clung to her dress. Picking up her shotgun, she threw the second bottle of beer onto the heap, somehow missing the tangle of children who were playing among the refuse.
“You best be going now.”
Lifting her shotgun, she aimed it straight at me. There would be no more questions today. Digging in my pocket, I pulled out a card and pen, and scribbled my home address and number on the back.
“If there’s anything else you think of, I can be reached here.”
Marie didn’t waver as I put the card down on the ground and backed away, keeping my eye on her until I felt safe enough to turn around. The children moved aside to clear a path, then fell in line, following me in silence as I walked to my car, started the motor, and pulled away. Then all hell broke loose in the yard once more, as if I had never been there. I rounded the corner and caught a glimpse of Marie as she disappeared into the wooden shed, closing the door firmly behind her.
Four
Dry lightning crackled in the late-morning heat as I headed back toward the office. With the rain coming quickly, day turned to night around noon. Along with thunderclouds, a thick white fog rolled in, and driving along the road became a more daring game of chicken than usual. Cypress trees appeared out of nowhere, gaunt skeletons beckoning me into the nearest ditch. A phantom bridge with no beginning or end floated above a field of sugarcane, held up by invisible hands. The world flickered in front of me to the tune of worn-out wipers as I thought about Marie on my slow crawl toward Slidell.
Picking up Charlie’s bad habits, I grabbed a candy bar and Coke for lunch on my way back to the office. My health food days in New York s
eemed a lifetime ago, when I had worked out six times a week and wouldn’t touch anything made with sugar. But I figured as long as I didn’t start hitting the Old Grand-Dad, I was still okay.
Walking down the hall at work, I heard the usual duck calls ring out loud and clear from behind. The pile of paperwork had grown on top of my desk; it needed to be taken care of… someday. Clipped to my phone were pink slips with messages. One of them was from Jake Santou. Not wanting to admit it, even to myself, I was pleased he’d phoned. There was something about the man I found intriguing.
Pushing the other messages aside for the moment, I returned Santou’s call. He picked up before I’d heard the first ring.
“Yeah. Santou here.”
For a southern guy, he reminded me a lot of New York.
“It’s Rachel Porter.”
Before I had a chance to add anything else, Santou cut in.
“Yeah, Porter. I’m glad you called back. Remember the offer I made last night? Well, I’ve got a meeting scheduled with the political hot dog who’s gonna win the next mayoral election, Hillard Williams. It’s for later this afternoon. Want to come along? It’ll give you a good dose of the local color. You might even pick up a pointer or two on the case.”
The name set off a fireman’s parade of alarm bells in my brain. If Williams was one of the first on Santou’s whodunit list, it seemed obvious that what Marie had told me was true. It also appeared that Valerie and Hillard Williams had been more than just a well-kept secret. I decided to play fair and fill Santou in on my meeting with Marie, and in what context Hillard Williams’s name had come up.
“Yeah, it’s something I’m checking out. This is a small town, chère. Lots of rumors float around here. Hell, I’ve already heard some about you.”
I skipped the bait. “What about Marie Tuttle? Why hasn’t anyone been there to question her yet?”
“You just covered that for me, Porter.” Santou gave a flat laugh. “Besides, she’s small potatoes. I haven’t got the time to waste.”
Gator Aide (Rachel Porter Mysteries) Page 4