We took paper plates loaded with red beans, rice, and links of sausage to a plank table under a live-oak tree. The cafe owner didn't have a beer license, and Clete went to the trunk of his car and came back with a sweating six-pack of Jax. It was warm in the shade of the trees, and smoke from a barbecue fire floated in a blue haze through the overhead limbs.
"I did some checking on Joey's business connections around town," Clete said. "I'm talking about his legitimate businesses-a linen service, a movie house up on Prytania, a bunch of dago restaurants, places where he launders his drug money for the IRS. Anyway, the word is Joey and his people are putting up big gelt for Bobby Earl's U.S. Senate campaign. In other words, the greaseballs are into PACs now."
I nodded. "Yeah?"
"That's it."
"So what's new in that? It's what we thought all along."
You're reading it wrong, noble mon."
"How's that?"
"If Joey Meatballs was piecing off his drug action to Bobby Earl, he wouldn't have to give him money through a bunch of PACs. He'd already own the guy."
"Maybe that's the way he launders Earl's cut."
"They don't do it that way, Streak. They give the guy something he can't resist, they bring him in on one of their deals, their shylocks lend him money, they set him up with some hot-ass broad on video tape. But they don't go into the drug business with the guy, then create a lot of public records to show everybody they got the guy's tallywacker tied around their neighborhood fireplug."
"You drove all the way to New Iberia to tell me Bobby Earl is clean?"
"Oh, they know all the same people, and Joey would like to put a U.S. senator in his pocket, but there's no law against that, mon."
"Bobby Earl's dirty."
"Maybe so. I'm just telling you what I found out and what I think. The guy's a sonofabitch but so are half the politicians in Louisiana."
"I get the feeling something else is bothering you, Clete."
He ripped open another beer and lit a cigarette, his food unfinished.
"It comes with the territory. It's nothing new," he said.
"What is it?"
"I might get my PI ticket pulled."
"What for?"
He bit one of his fingernails and shrugged.
"I've had two or three beefs since I opened my office. It's my own fault," he said.
"You're always in a beef, Clete. Why is somebody giving you trouble about your ticket now?"
"That's what I asked this bozo who called me up from Baton Rouge."
"Which bozo?"
"With the state regulatory agency." His eyes moved around on my face.
"It's Bobby Earl, isn't it?" I said.
"Maybe."
"There's no 'maybe' about it."
"Anyway, they got these complaints and they're talking about a hearing before their board."
"What complaints?"
"Well, there was this button man, a real bag of shit out of Miami, a guy who whacked out two Cuban girls who were going to send this greaseball dealer up to Raiford. He jumped a two-hundred-thou bond, and word had it he was hiding out in Ascension or St. James Parish. So the bondsman in Miami calls me and tells me he'll pay me a five grand finder's fee if I can bring in this guy before the bondsman has to come up with the two hundred thou. But the only lead he can give me on the shit bag is that he's somewhere between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, he loves pink Cadillacs, smoking dope, and being a big man around lowlife broads.
"So I spend two weeks cruising these dumps along Airline Highway. Just when I'm about to give up, I see this beautiful, flamingo-pink Cadillac convertible, with Georgia plates, parked in front of this club that's got both white and mulatto broads on stage. I go inside, and the place is filled with smoke and about two hundred geeks that look like somebody beat up on them with an ugly stick. But I don't see my man. So I go back out to the parking lot and pop the door lock on the Caddy with a slim jim. The inside smells like somebody rubbed hash oil into the upholstery. In the glove compartment I find a box of rubbers, a match cover from a Fort Lauderdale bar, an ice pick, and a dozen loose.38 shells. What does that tell me? This has got to be the shit bag's car.
"Except I look all over the bar and I can't find the guy, which means he's probably wearing a disguise. Then it's three in the morning, still no shit bag, and I'm bone-tired.
So I kind of hurried things along by setting fire to the pink Caddy."
"You did what?"
"What was I supposed to do, spend the rest of the week there? I was working on spec. Anyway, the Caddy was burning beautifully in the parking lot, and the geeks came pouring out of the building to watch it, happy as pigs rolling in slop, except of course for the guy who owned the Caddy. Guess what?"
"He wasn't your guy."
"Right. He was a traveling sporting-goods salesman from Waycross. But guess what again? There, standing in the crowd, is my shit bag. In two minutes I had him in cuffs and locked to a D-ring in the back of my car. So it all worked out all right, except somebody saw me messing around the Caddy and told the cops and the firemen, and I had to come back the next day and answer some questions that made me a little bit uncomfortable. Then Nig got me into a scrape-"
"Nig?" I had finished eating and was glancing at my watch.
"Yeah, Nig Rosewater, the bondsman. I'm sorry to bore you with this stuff, Dave, but I don't get a regular paycheck. I depend upon guys like Nig to keep me afloat."
I took a breath and let him continue.
"Nig decides to go into the saloon business," Clete said.
"So he opens a bar on Magazine right next to a black neighborhood. What kind of sign does he put in his window? HAPPY HOUR 5 to 7-HAVE A SWIG WITH NIG." So the first night somebody Rings a burning trash can through the plate glass. Then they did it two more nights, even after Nig got rid of the sign. Who did it, you ask. The fucking Crips, not because they're big on civil rights but because it impresses the other punks in the neighborhood. Have you dealt with any of these guys? They knocked off a kid on Calliope, then, to make sure everybody got the message, they walked into the mortuary, in front of his family, and blew his coffin full of holes. They're a real special bunch.
"So I found out the kid who had been remodeling Nig's bar was named Ice Box. They call him that because he pushed a refrigerator on top of his grandmother. I'm not making this up. This kid could blow out your light like he was turning a page in a comic book. Anyway, I had a talk with Ice Box while I held him by his ankles off a fire escape, five stories up from the pavement. I think he's back in California these days. But his grandmother, can you dig it, with dents still in her head, filed charges against me.
"Anyway, somebody in Baton Rouge wants to cut a piece out of my butt. Like I say, I brought it on myself. I learned in the corps you don't mess with the pencil pushers. You stay invisible. You piss off some corporal in personnel and two weeks later you're humping it with an ambush patrol outside Chu Lai."
"Give me the name of the guy in Baton Rouge who's after you."
"Leave it alone. It'll probably go away."
"Bobby Earl won't."
"That's the point, mon. Earl's got no handles on him. We sent the shit bags up the road because they were born to take a fall. Earl's part of the system. There're people who love him. You think I'm giving you a shuck? Did you see him on The Geraldo Rivera Show? Some of those broads were ready to throw their panties at him. It's me and you who've got the problem. We're the geeks, Dave, not this guy. He's a fucking hero."
His breath was heavy with the smell of beer and cigarettes.
He crushed a beer can in his palm and dropped it on the table, then studied the tops of his big, coarse, red hands. He had tried to comb his sandy hair back over the divots where his stitches had been, but I could still see crusted lesions like thin black worms on his scalp.
"Oh, hell, what do I know?" he said, and looked down the street at the traffic in the hot sunlight, as though it somehow held the answer to his question.
Back in
my office, I got hold of Lyle Sonnier at his church.
"Hey, Loot, I'm glad you called," he said. "I've been thinking about throwing a big dinner here at the church, actually more like a family reunion, and I wanted to ask you and Bootsie."
"Thanks, Lyle, but right now I'm looking for Vic Benson, the fellow you think might be your father."
"What do you want him for?"
"He's part of an investigation."
"You don't have to look far, then. He's right here."
"What?"
"We had lunch together just a little while ago. He's out back painting some furniture for our secondhand store right now."
How long has he been there?"
"He came in this morning."
"I think he tried to take your brother's head off last night with a piece of piano wire."
"Get real, Dave. He's a wino, a bundle of sticks. He has to wear lead shoes on a windy day."
"Tell that to Weldon."
"I already talked to Weldon. He says it was a Joey Gouza hit."
"Believe me, Lyle, Joey has no desire for more trouble in Iberia Parish."
"So if it wasn't Gouza, it was probably one of the walking brain-dead who follow Bobby Earl around. But no matter how you cut it, it wasn't the old man. Good God, Dave, what's the matter with you? Weldon could beat that poor old drunk to death with his shoe."
"Why do you think Bobby Earl might be involved in it?"
"He's bad news, that's why. He stirs up grief and hatred among the very people that's sitting out there in my flockpoor white and black folk. I'm tired of that character. Somebody should have stuffed his butt in a garbage can a long time ago."
"That may be true, Lyle, but that doesn't mean he's trying to whack out your brother."
I waited for him to say something, to offer me the linkage to Bobby Earl.
"Lyle?"
"Well, anyway, in my opinion the old man's harmless. You gonna arrest him?"
"No, I don't have enough for a warrant."
"Then what's the big deal?"
"I'll be over there later today or at least by Monday to talk to him. Tell him that for me, too. In the meantime you might ask yourself why he's shown up after all these years? Does he seem like a man of goodwill to you?"
"Maybe he wants to atone but he hasn't learned the words yet. It takes a while sometimes."
"Like we used to say out in Indian country, don't let them get behind you."
"That's what somebody said at My Lai, too. Give all that Vietnam stuff to the American Legion, Dave. It's a drag."
"Whatever you say, Lyle. Hang loose."
"Hey, I'll get back to you with a date for that dinner. I want your butt there, with no excuses. I'm proud to be your friend, Dave. I look up to you, I always did."
What do you say to someone who talks to you like that?
In order to get a jump-start on the day I used to go on dry drunks that were the equivalent of inserting my head in a microwave for ten minutes. I had come to learn that a conversation with any one of the Sonniers worked just as well.
It was Friday afternoon, and it was too late and I was too tired for a round-trip to Baton Rouge to interview Vic Benson, who was probably Verise Sonnier, particularly in view of the fact that I had no tangible evidence against him and talking to him was like conversing with a vacant lot, anyway.
The heat broke temporarily with a thirty-minute rain shower that evening, then the wind came up cool out of the south, scattering dead pecan leaves up on my gallery, and the late sun broke through the layered clouds as red and molten as if it had been poured flaming from a foundry cup.
We had a short-lived crisis at the bait shop. I was filling up the bowls in the rabbit hutches by the side of the house when I heard a loud yell in the shop, then saw Tripod racing out the door, his loose chain slithering across the planks, with Alafair right behind him. Then Batist came through the door with a broom raised over his head.
Alafair caught Tripod up in her arms at the end of the dock, then turned to face down Batist, whose black, thick neck was pulsing with nests of veins.
"I gonna flatten that coon like a bicycle patch, me," he said. "I gonna wipe up that bait shop wit' him."
"You leave him alone!" Alafair shouted back.
"I cain't be runnin' a sto', no, with that nasty coon wreckin' my shelves. You set him down on that dock and I gonna golf him right over them trees."
"He ain't did anything! Clean up your own mess! Clean up your own nasty cigars!"
In the meantime, Tripod was trying to climb over her shoulder and down her back to get as much geography between him and Batist as possible.
Oh Lord, I thought, and walked down to the dock.
"It's too late, Dave," Batist said. "That coon headed for coon heaven."
"Let's calm down a minute," I said. "How'd Tripod get into the bait shop again, Alf?"
"Batist left the screen open," she said.
"I left the screen open?" he said incredulously.
"You were fishing out back, too, or he wouldn't have gotten up on the shelf," she said. Her face was flushed and heated, her eyes as bright as brown glass.
"Look his face, look his mouth," Batist said. "He eat all the sugar in the can and two boxes them Milky Ways."
Tripod, whose fur was almost black except for his silver ringed tail and silver mask, didn't make a good witness for the defense. His muzzle and whiskers were slick with chocolate and coated with grains of sugar. I picked up the end of his chain. The clip that we used to fasten him to the clothesline was broken.
"I'm afraid we've got Tripod on a breaking-and-entering rap, Alf," I said.
"What?" she said.
"It looks like he's going to have to go into lockdown," I said.
"What?"
"That means let's put him in the rabbit hutch until tomorrow when I can fix his chain. In the meantime, Batist, let's close down the shop and think about going to the drive-in movie."
"It ain't my sto', it ain't my Milky Way. I just work here all day so I can clean up after some fat no-good coon."
Alafair was about to fire off another shot when I turned her gently by the shoulder and walked her back through the pecan trees in front of the house.
"He was mean, Dave,' she said. "He was gonna pod."
"No, he's not mean, little guy," I said. "To Batist, running the bait shop is an important job. He just doesn't want anything to go wrong while he's in charge."
"You didn't see what he looked like." Her eyes were moist in the deep shade of the trees.
"Alafair, Batist grew up poor and uneducated and never learned to read and write. But today he runs a business for a white man. He wants to do everything right, but he has to make an X when he signs for a delivery and he can't count the receipts at the end of the day. So he concentrates on things that he can do well, like barbecuing the chickens, repairing the boat engines, and keeping all the inventory squared away. Then Tripod gets loose and makes a big mess of the shelves. So in Batist's mind he's let us down."
I saw her eyes blinking with thought.
"It's kind of like the teachers at school giving you a job to do, then someone else comes along and messes it up and makes you look bad. Does that make sense?"
She shifted Tripod in her arms, so that he lay on his back with his three paws in the air, his stomach swollen with food.
"I guess so. We going to the show?"
"You bet."
"Batist is going, too?"
"I don't know, you think he should go?"
She thought about it.
"Yeah, he should go with us," she said, as though she had just reached a profound metaphysical conclusion.
"You're the best, little guy."
"You are, too, big guy."
We popped Tripod into the hutch, then I swung Alafair up on my back and we walked beneath the sparking of fireflies onto the gallery and into the lighted house, where Bootsie was deep-frying sac-a-lait and listening to a Cajun song that was playing on the radio pro
pped in the kitchen window.
The western sky looked like a blood-streaked ink wash, and I could hear the cicadas in a distant woods, all the way across the waving field of green sugarcane at the back of my property.
The next morning Alafair helped Batist and me open the bait shop. She earned her weekly allowance of five dollars by seining the dead shiners out of the bait tailks, seasoning the chickens that we barbecued on a split oil drum for our midday customers, draining the coolers, and pouring fresh ice over the beer and soda pop. But her favorite Saturday morning job was sitting on a tall stool behind the cash register, her Astros baseball cap low on her head, ringing up worm and shiner sales with a loud bang on the keys.
It was a wonderful morning to fish. The air was still cool and windless, the early pink light muted in the cypress trees, the moon still visible in one soft blue corner of the sky. After we had rented most of our boats, I started the barbecue fire in the oil drum, then fixed coffee and hot milk and bowls of Grape-Nuts for the three of us, and we ate breakfast on one of the telephone-spool tables under an umbrella out on the dock. I had managed to push the Sonnier case completely out of my mind when the phone rang inside the shop and Alafair got up and answered it.
I could see only the side of her face through the screen window as she held the receiver to her ear, but I had no doubt that she was listening to something that she had never expected to come through our telephone. Her eyes were blinking rapidly and her tan cheeks were filled with white discolorations, and I saw her look at me with her mouth parted as though a childish bad dream had become real in the middle of her day.
I went quickly inside the shop and behind the counter and took the receiver from her hand.
"Dave, he called you real bad names," Alafair said. She was breathing hard through her mouth.
"Who is this?" I said into the receiver.
"You know who it is. Don't act stupid," a high, metallic voice, like that of a midget, said. "You cut a deal with Joey Meatballs, didn't you?"
"You're not shy about frightening a little girl. How about giving me your name?"
"You don't know my name?"
I picked up a pencil and scribbled across the top of a lined notepad: "Boots, call office, tell them to trace call in shop." Then I put the pad in Alafair's hands and pushed her toward the door.
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