The bayou seemed to dance with yellow light in the rain. I wiped down the counter, carried out the trash, stocked the cooler in back, then finally quit a foolish dialogue inside myself and dialed Buford's answering service in Lafayette so I wouldn't have to call him at home.
"This is Dave Robicheaux. Tell Mr. LaRose I'll be in my office at eight Monday morning."
He was in at ten, with Ciro Tauzin from the state police at his side. The St. Martin Parish sheriff's report on a body recovered from Henderson Swamp lay on my desk.
"You starting to get a better picture of Aaron Crown now?" Buford said.
"Not really," I said.
"Not really? The victim's stomach was slit open and filled with rocks. What kind of human being would do something like that?" Buford said.
"I have a better question, Buford. What was a New Orleans gum-ball, a hit man for the Giacano family, doing at Henderson Swamp?" I said.
"He celled with Crown," Buford said.
"So why would Crown want to kill his cell partner?" I asked.
"Maybe he was gonna turn Aaron in. The guy had some weapons charges against him. Criminals ain't big on loyalty, no," Tauzin said, and smiled.
"I think he was there to whack Crown and lost. What's your opinion on that, Mr. Tauzin?" I asked.
The coat of his blue suit looked like it was buttoned crookedly on his body. There were flecks of dandruff inside the oil on his black hair. He rubbed the cleft in his chin with his thumb.
"Men like Crown will kill you for the shoes on your feet, the food in your plate. I don't believe they're a hard study, suh," he said.
"You get in touch with him through his daughter," Buford said. "If he'll surrender to me, I'll guarantee his safety and I promise he won't be tried for a capital offense . . ." He paused a moment, then raised his hands off the arms of the chair. "Maybe down the road, two or three years maximum, he can be released because of his age."
"Pretty generous," I said.
Buford and Ciro Tauzin both waited. I picked up a paper clip and dropped it on my blotter.
"Dave?" Buford said.
"He bears you great enmity," I answered.
"You've talked with him." He said it as a statement, not as a question. I could almost hear the analytical wheels turning in his head. I saw a thought come together in his eyes. There was no denying Buford's level of intelligence. "He wants a meet? He's told you he'll try to kill me?"
"Make peace with his daughter. Then he might listen to you."
Buford's eyes wrinkled at the corners as he tried to peel the meaning out of my words.
"A short high school romance? That's what you're talking about now?" he said.
But before I could speak, Ciro Tauzin said, "Here's the deal, Mr. Robicheaux. You can hep us if you want, or you can tell everybody else what their job is. But if Aaron Crown don't come in, I'm gonna blow his liver out. Is that clear enough, suh?"
I held his stare.
"Should I pass on your remarks, Mr. Tauzin?" I answered.
"I'd appreciate it if you would. It's quite an experience doing bid-ness with you, suh. Your reputation doesn't do you justice."
I made curlicues with a ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad until they had left the room.
Two minutes later, Buford came back alone and opened the door, his seersucker coat over his shoulder, his plaid shirt rolled on his veined forearms. His curly hair hung on his forehead, and his cheeks were as bright as apples.
"You'll never like me, Dave. Maybe I can't blame you. But I give you my solemn word, I'll protect Aaron Crown and I'll do everything I can to see him die a free man," he said.
For just a moment I saw the handsome, young L.S.U. quarterback of years ago who could be surrounded by tacklers, about to be destroyed, his bones crushed into the turf, his very vulnerability bringing the crowd to its feet, and then rocket an eighty-yard pass over his tacklers' heads and charm it into the fingers of a forgotten receiver racing across the goal line.
Some Saturday-afternoon heroes will never go gently into that good night. At least not this one, I thought.
Probably over 90 percent of criminal investigations are solved by accident or through informants. I didn't have an informant within Buford's circle, but I did have access to a genuine psychotic whose dials never failed to entertain if not to inform.
I called his restaurant in New Orleans and two of his construction offices and through all the innuendo and subterfuge concluded that Dock Green was at his camp on the Atchafalaya River.
The sky was gray and the wide expanse of the river dimpled with rain when I pulled onto the service road and headed toward the cattle guard at the front of his property. I could see Dock, in a straw hat and black slicker, burning what looked like a pile of dead trees by the side of the house. But that was not what caught my eye. Persephone Green had just gotten into her Chrysler and was roaring down the gravel drive toward me, dirt clods splintering like flint from under the tires. I had to pull onto the grass to avoid being hit.
A moment later, when I walked up to the trash fire, I saw the source of Persephone's discontent. Two stoned-out women, oblivious to the weather, floated on air mattresses in a tall, cylindrical plastic pool, fed by a garden hose, in the backyard.
"Unexpected visit from the wife, Dock?" I asked.
"I don't know why she's got her head up her hole. She's filing for divorce, anyway."
He poked at the fire with a blackened rake. The wind shifted and suddenly the smell hit me. In the center of burning tree limbs and a bed of white ash was the long, charred shape of an alligator.
"It got stuck in my culvert and drowned. A gator don't know how to back up," he said.
"Why don't you bury it?"
"Animals would dig it up. What d' you want here?"
"You've been out in front of me all the time, Dock. I respect that," I said.
"What?"
"About the body on the LaRose plantation and any number of other things. It's hard to float one by you, partner."
His face was smeared by charcoal, warm with the heat of the fire. He watched me as he would a historical enemy crossing field and moat into his enclave.
"I spent some time in the courthouse this afternoon. You've got state contracts to build hospitals," I said.
"So?"
"The contracts are already let. You're going to be a rich man. Eventually Buford's going to take a fall. Why go down with him?"
"Good try, no cigar."
"Tell me, Dock, you think he'll have Crown popped if I set up Crown's surrender?"
"Who gives a shit?"
"A grand jury."
He brushed at his nose with one knuckle, huffed air out a nostril, flicked his eyes off my face to the women in the pool, then looked at nothing, all with the same degree of thought or its absence.
"You're dumb," he said.
"I see."
"You're worried about a worthless geezer and nigger-trouble that's thirty years old. LaRose'll put a two-by-four up your ass."
"How?"
"He wants company."
"Sorry, Dock, I don't follow your drift."
His thick palm squeezed dryly on the hoe handle.
"Why don't people want to step on graves? Because they care about the stiffs that's down there? If he gets his hand on your ankle, he'll pull you in the box with him," he said.
My lips, the skin around my mouth, moved wordlessly in the wind.
Bootsie and I did the dishes together after supper. It had stopped raining, and the sky outside was a translucent blue and ribbed with purple and red clouds.
"You're going to set it up?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I want to cut the umbilical cord."
"What's the sheriff say?"
'"Do it.'"
"What's the problem, then?"
"I don't trust Buford LaRose."
"Oh, Dave," she said, her breath exhaling, her eyes closing then opening. She put her hands on my arms and la
y her forehead awkwardly on my shoulder, her body not quite touching mine, like someone who fears her embrace will violate propriety.
In the morning I called Sabelle Crown and told her of Buford's offer. Two hours later the phone on my desk rang.
"I can be out in two or three years?" the voice said.
"Aaron?"
"Is that the deal?" he asked.
"I'm not involved. Use an attorney."
"It's lawyers sold my ass down the river."
"Don't call here again. Understand? I've got nothing more to do with your life."
"You goddamn better hope you don't," he said, and hung up.
The rest of the workweek passed, and I heard nothing more about Aaron Crown. Friday had been a beautiful December day, and the evening was just as fair. The wind was off the Gulf, and you could smell salt and distant rain and night-blooming flowers and ozone in the trees, and you had to remind yourself it was winter and not spring. Bootsie and I decided to go Christmas shopping in Lafayette, and I asked Batist to close the bait shop and stay up at the house with Alafair until we returned.
It wasn't even necessary. She was playing at the neighbor's house next door. When we drove away, Batist was standing in our front yard, his overalls straps notched into his T-shirt, the smooth, saddle-gold texture of his palm raised to say good-bye.
CHAPTER 28
The man in the floppy hat and black rubber big-button raincoat came at sunset, from a great distance, where at first he was just a speck on the horizon, walking across my neighbor's burned sugarcane acreage, ash powdering around his boots, the treeline etched with fire behind him. He could have been a fieldhand looking for a calf stuck in the coulee, a tenant fanner shortcutting home from his rental acreage, or perhaps a hobo who had swung down from a S.P. freight, except for the purpose in his gait, the set of his jaw, the switch in his gloved hand that he whipped against his leg. When clouds covered the sun and lightning struck in the field, the man in the raincoat never broke stride. My neighbor's cows swirled like water out of his path.
Batist had been watching television in the living room. He went back into the kitchen to refill his coffee cup, burned his lips with the first sip, then poured it into the saucer and blew on it while he looked out the kitchen window at the ash lifting in the fields, the rain slanting like glass across the sun's last spark in the west.
The window was open and he heard horses running on the sod and cattle lowing in the coulee, and only when he squinted his eyes did he see the hatted and coated shape of the man who whipped the switch methodically against his leg.
Batist rubbed his eyes, went back into the living room for his glasses, returned to the window and saw a milky cloud of rain and dust rising out of the field and no hatted man in a black coat but a solitary Angus heifer standing in our yard.
Batist stepped out into the yard, into the sulfurous smell blowing out of the fields, then walked to the duck pond and down the fence line until he saw the fence post that had been wedged sideways in the hole and the three strands of barbed wire that had been stomped out of the staples into the ground.
"Somebody out here?" he called.
The wind was like a watery insect in his ears.
He latched the screen door behind him, walked to the front of the house and stepped out on the gallery, looked into the yard and the leaves spinning in vortexes between the tree trunks, the shadows of overhead limbs thrashing on the ground. Down by the bayou, one of our rental boats clanked against its chain, thumping against the pilings on the dock.
He thought about his dogleg twenty gauge down in the bait shop. The bait shop looked small and distant and empty in the rain, and he wished he had turned on the string of electric lights over the dock, then felt foolish and embarrassed at his own thoughts.
He stood in the center of the living room, the wind seeming to breathe through the front and back screens, filling the house with a cool dampness that he couldn't distinguish from the sheen of sweat on his skin.
He pulled aside a curtain and looked across the driveway at the neighbor's house. The gallery was lighted and a green wreath and pinecones wrapped with scarlet ribbon hung on the front door; a Christmas tree, a blue spruce shimmering with tinsel, stood in a window. A sprinkler fanned back and forth in the rain, fountaining off the tree trunks in the yard.
He picked up the phone and started to dial a number, then realized he wasn't even certain about whom he was dialing. He set the receiver back in the cradle, ashamed of the feeling in his chest, the way his hands felt stiff and useless at his sides.
He wiped his face on his sleeve, smelled a sour odor rising from his armpit, then stood hesitantly at the front door again. In his mind's eye he saw himself walking down to the bait shop and returning up the slope with a shotgun like a man who finally concedes that his fears have always been larger than his courage. He unlatched the screen and pushed it open with the flat of his hand and breathed the coolness of the mist blowing under the gallery eaves, then stepped back inside and blew out his breath.
Batist never heard the intruder in the black rubber raincoat, not until he cinched his arm under Batist's throat and squeezed as though he were about to burst a walnut. He wrenched Batist's head back into his own, drawing Batist's body into his loins, a belt buckle that was as hard-edged as a stove grate, impaling him against his chest, his unshaved jaw biting like emery paper into the back of Batist's neck.
The intruder's floppy hat fell to the floor. He seemed to pause and look at it, as he would at a distraction from the linear and familiar course of things and the foregone conclusion that had already been decided for him and his victim.
From the corner of his eye Batist saw a gold-tipped canine tooth that the intruder licked with the bottom of his tongue. Then the arm snapped tight under Batist's chin again, and through the front screen Batist saw the world as a place where trees torn from their roots floated upside down in the rain.
"I'm fixing to pinch off your pipe for good, old man. That mean you don't get no more air. You'll just gurgle on the floor like a dog been run over across the t'roat. . . Where Robicheaux at?" the intruder said.
When Batist woke up, he was on his side, in the middle of the living room floor, his knees drawn up before him. The house was quiet, and he could see rain blowing through the screen, wetting the cypress planks in the floor, and he thought the hatted man in the rubber coat was gone.
Then he felt the intruder's gloved hand close on the bottom of his chin and tilt his face toward him, as though the intruder were arranging the anatomical parts on a store dummy.
"You went to sleep on me, old man. That's 'cause I shut off the big vein that goes up to your brain," the intruder said. He was squatted on his haunches, sipping from a half-pint bottle of apricot brandy. His eyes were turquoise, the scalp above his ears shaved bare, the color of putty.
"You best get out of here, nigger, while you still can," Batist said.
The intruder drank from the bottle, let the brandy roll on his tongue, settle in his teeth, as though he were trying to kill an abscess in his gum.
Batist raised himself into a sitting position, waiting for the intruder to react. But he didn't. He sipped again from the brandy, nestled one buttock more comfortably against the heel of his boot. His shirt and the top of his coat were unbuttoned, and a necklace of blue shark's teeth was tattooed across his collarbones and around his upper chest. Cupped in his right hand was a banana knife, hooked at the tip, the edge filed into a long silver thread.
"Fishing any good here?" he asked.
He reached out with one finger and touched Batist on the end of his nose, then tilted the brandy again, his eyes closing with the pleasure the liquor gave him.
Batist drove the bottle into the intruder's mouth with the flat of his hand, shattering the glass against the teeth, bursting the lips into a torn purple flower.
The intruder's face stiffened with shock, glistened with droplets of brandy and saliva and blood. But instead of reeling from the room in p
ain and rage, he rose to his feet and his right foot exploded against the side of Batist's head. He cleaned bits of glass out of his mouth with his fingers, spitting, as though there were peanut brittle on his tongue, his gashed lips finally reforming into a smile.
He bent over, the hooked point of the banana knife an inch from Batist's eye. He started to speak, then paused, pressed his mouth against his palm, looked at it, and wiped his hand on his raincoat.
"Now you made me work for free. You ain't got nowhere to go for a while, do you?" he said, and thumbed the buttons loose on his coat.
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