Cajun Waltz

by Robert H. Patton

  She was preparing to spread a tarp over him when her niece’s son came in from outside, where he’d been listening to the trapper describe his big find. Tarzy studied the body with chagrin. “Why you gone kilt your dog, too?”

  “Who you talkin’ to, child?” Sallie said. The locker’s open front door had let out cold air and the compressor came on with a diesel cough. “That man he can’t hear you.”

  “Kilt his dog.”

  “His name was R. J. Bainard, and jus’ you remember times he nice to you. Not for us to understan’ what make a soul go down.”

  Tarzy studied the remaining face. What was his great-aunt talking about? He’d never seen this guy before.

  Sallie covered the body and stepped back. “God’s will not ours be done.” She shut her eyes. “Tarzy?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Give a prayer. Even ’bout his dog’s okay. Good Lord love His creatures, too.”

  Tarzy closed his eyes. “I’m sorry you dead,” he said aloud, adding in his mind, whoever you are.

  * * *

  THE LAKE CHARLES American reported R. J. Bainard’s suicide the day after his body was found. The next afternoon a sputtering brown Oldsmobile pulled up at Sallie’s place. A fat man in a linen suit clambered out looking like a food critic lost in Provence. The rest of the world might buy the suicide story, but Abe Percy dearly hoped it was wrong. He’d come to Hancock Bayou to investigate.

  Tarzy was there alone, his mother and great-aunt doing errands in town. His chore today was to clean the plucking machine behind the cold locker. He pulled feathers by the fistful from the exhaust vent and stuffed them into burlap sacks, the feathers itching to his elbow and clinging like a furry rash. The locker loomed nearby with the loaded presence of a room someone died in, presence conferred by an actual corpse. Tarzy was curious for another peek. When the visitor waved a dollar bill and asked if he might look inside, the boy led him around back with an air of authority.

  Abe walked with a cane and breathed in a musical wheeze. He grimaced at the smell of feathers and offal and held a handkerchief over his nose. Tarzy unbolted the door and swung it open. The locker was an eight-by-eight box with a six-foot ceiling. Entering, Abe started to shut the door behind them to keep cold air from escaping. Tarzy leaped to prevent it from closing. “Of course,” Abe said. “No light.”

  “No air!” Tarzy said. “No gettin’ out either.” He indicated the locker’s latch mechanism—it opened only from the outside.

  “Good heavens! That’s a frightful hazard.”

  “Ready see’m now?” Like a magician unveiling his showstopper, Tarzy yanked off the tarp with flourish.

  There were bloodstains on the collar of the canvas jacket; otherwise it wasn’t as gruesome as Abe had feared. Weeks outdoors under freezing rain had cleansed the gore. The blast had penetrated the forehead above and slightly to one side of the bridge of the nose, suggesting R.J. had faltered at the last instant before leaning on the trigger. Abe examined the result. “Grew a beard, I see.”

  “’Kay,” the boy said.

  “Yes?”

  “Gotta go.”

  “My time is up?”

  “Family comin’ today. Take him home.”

  “Really?”

  “My aunt said. She be mad we in here.”

  Abe sighed. For this he’d paid a dollar? “Pity the beard. It hides a man’s finer features, which I suppose was the intent.”

  “He had a beard, same.”

  Abe regarded the boy. “Who had a beard?”

  Tarzy went quiet.

  “Did you know R. J. Bainard?”

  “He brung his birds.”

  “And this is he?”

  Tarzy sensed snares being set. “Who else?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Kilt his dog.”

  “I heard. Perfectly vile.”

  “I like dogs.”

  “So do I.”

  The boy drew the tarp back over the dead man’s face out of respect for this sacred new topic. “Never had m’own.”

  “Never had a dog? Every little boy should have a dog.”

  Tarzy nodded. The old lawyer said to him gently, “I believe you and I are in sympathy, young fellow. I believe if you gave full vent to your distress at the death of this man’s dog, you might consent to help me catch the animal’s true murderer.”

  “Help how?”

  “Just leave me alone with this … evidence for a moment. Guard the door, and take care I’m not entombed by that latch.”

  Tarzy hesitated. “Man kilt his dog. Then hisself.”

  “As you say. I wish merely to confirm the fact so that no dogs will suffer from our negligence in the future.”

  Tarzy stepped outside the locker, leaving the door partway open to let in light. Abe, with the lofty disdain of an English butler confronting a clogged toilet, unbuttoned the fly of the dead man’s woolen trousers. He then fished out the penis with a charcoal pencil and examined it, poking it with the pencil as if separating mushrooms from peas on a dinner plate. He looked up to see Tarzy gaping at him through the doorway.

  “Oughtn’t be spying, boy!” He had another thought. “Come. Your testimony could prove useful.”

  Tarzy entered, his expression full of misgiving.

  Abe lifted the penis, pale as pasta but intact thanks to its frigid confinement in the man’s undershorts. “Are you familiar with term circumcision?”

  Tarzy was not.

  Abe unzipped his pants. “Circumcised.” He indicated the table. “Uncircumcised. Do you understand?”

  Tarzy’s eyes went back and forth. He nodded.

  Abe put himself in order, repositioned the dead man’s organ and buttoned the fly. He put his pencil back in his pocket. “I realize that was nasty,” he said to the boy. “Just remember, I’m an attorney.”

  * * *

  ABE WATCHED FROM a distance up the road when Bonnie Bainard and her chauffeur arrived at Sallie Hooker’s later that day in the company of two Cameron Parish sheriff’s deputies and a Lake Charles hearse. The chauffeur, an imposing fellow with hands like slabs of meat, opened Bonnie’s door, glaring at the deputies when their vehicle splashed through a puddle and almost soiled her.

  Alvin had seen the original damage done, so inside the cold locker knew to hold his breath and tighten his anus before the tarp was removed. But how could Bonnie have prepared for the ravaged thing she was expected to call her kin? She didn’t flinch. She sniffled once before instructing the funeral parlor attendants to load the body. “Cremate,” she added. “Tonight.”

  From there, the deputies escorted her and Alvin to the single room above a saloon that their investigation had turned up as R.J.’s hideout in Hancock Bayou. Bonnie wanted none of her brother’s effects but Alvin said take his guitar at least, the old steel resonator that Richie had bought from Joe Falcon. “It’ll be sentimental one day, you watch.”

  “Sentimental? Me?” The quip was high humor for Bonnie. “Sure, throw it in the car.” Thus did Alvin fulfill R.J.’s one order when they’d parted ways after Freddy—don’t forget the National.

  R.J.’s burial urn was interred at Orange Grove near his mother, stepmother, and grandfather. Reporters had been advised that Richie Bainard was unable to attend due to extreme grief. In reality, Bonnie had told him nothing about her brother’s death; she wanted to limit to one at a time the family traumas she had to juggle. A photographer got some distant shots of her bending to the earth in white gloves as the pastor and a stocky attendant looked on. The pictures ran in the Sunday paper and were condemned by many as invasive of the Bainards’ bereavement. Rumors circulated that the photographer worked for a publicity firm in the family employ.

  The limousine windows were dark-tinted, denying snoopers at the graveyard gate any glimpse of the passengers inside. One of the snoopers was Abe Percy. He would have been intrigued by Bonnie’s look of pinched amusement as the limo pulled away, though what conclusion he might have drawn is debatable
. Everyone mourns in his own way.

  * * *

  CORINNE MEERS VISITED her son Joey at the hospital annex every other day. She dressed smartly for these outings—today, a camel waistcoat and skirt with a matching pillbox hat—on the chance that she might meet a young medical man who would ask her to join him for coffee. She’d never been unfaithful to her husband, but her discontent with Donald had carved a hollow inside her that rather than fill with PTA or charity work Corinne had left optimistically empty.

  She was annoyed to find her son absent. There came a tap on the door as she stood in the empty room. “If you want Joey, he’s out,” she griped.

  The visitor entered. “I’m looking for Mr. Hooker.”

  “He’s out walkin’ with my son evidently.”

  “Ah. Taking advantage of our warm spell.”

  “Mus’ be a sight, coupla gimps on a sidewalk.”

  “At least they won’t get far.”

  She laughed. “I shouldn’t laugh.”

  “Got to sometimes, in a hospital.”

  “You a medical man?”

  “Lord, no. Too dumb.”

  “Business with Mr. Hooker, then?” She saw the man’s reaction. “Was that nosy?”

  “I’d say.”

  Corinne blushed, more perturbed than embarrassed now that he’d confessed he was no doctor.

  “But since you ask,” he went on, “I’m here to beat his brains in.”

  “A fistfight?”

  “Was thinking a boot or a chair.”

  “The man is blind.”

  “Didn’t say I’d fight fair.”

  Next, to her surprise, she said what she felt. “You got a scary way, kinda.”

  “Not once you know me.” He arched an eyebrow. “Cuppa coffee?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Seeing as how you’ve been stood up.”

  “I have not been stood up! I am waitin’ on my son.”

  “And I’m waiting on you. Coffee or no? It’s not gonna change the world either way.”

  He wore loafers, chinos, and a pinstripe fedora cocked to one side like a salesman who loves his job. His beard was crisply sculpted, giving him the look of an evil duke. Extending her hand, she realized it was damp with nerves. “My name’s Corinne Meers. Mrs. Corinne Meers.”

  “Freddy Baez.”

  “Oh, is that … Portuguese?”

  “Mexican. My mother’s name. She was a famous whore, I’m told.”

  She yanked her hand away. “That’s no way to talk to me!”

  With no little presumption he took her chin in his fingers and drew her face toward him. His blue eyes were vibrant but their low-slung lids looked woeful as a bloodhound’s. “Don’t lie, Corinne,” he said. “You like it just fine.”

  * * *

  JOEY AND SETH hobbled along a tree-lined road at the outskirts of the hospital grounds, testing Joey’s upgrade from walker to cane. Joey had healed enough in mind and body to question his prospects for further improvement. Was this it? The sag in his face, the hitch in his gait—was this his life from now on? “Could be,” Seth said.

  “Jeez. Can’t you just lie like my mother?”

  “I can be honest because I believe you’ll recover completely. I’m afraid your mother doesn’t.”

  “You noticed.”

  “Your cousin, on the other hand, believes it, too. She’d make a good counselor.”

  “Delly? Why, ’cause she’s rude as you?”

  Seth grabbed Joey’s arm with an awkward flail. “Don’t be calling her rude. That girl’s got spirit to burn.”

  “She’s stone crazy.”

  “She’s red hot.”

  Joey began in singsong, “Se-eth likes Del-lee / Se-eth likes Del-lee…”

  Seth took a playful swipe at the boy with his cane. A car approached. They moved to the shoulder to let it pass. A bearded man was at the wheel.

  The car, a red convertible, braked and U-turned, holding crossways in the road. Joey felt idiotic standing there, as if his and Seth’s lame conditions were mocked by the vigor of the vehicle and the man driving it. In a cocky gesture befitting the athlete he’d been, he gave his new cane a whirl, as if he had no idea how he’d come to be holding it. The car gunned forward, zooming past them with a wallop of wind. “Loser,” Joey muttered.

  “Who?”

  “Me. For bein’ a goddamn cripple.”

  “Don’t blaspheme.”

  “That a joke?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “You and Delly, who knows what you’re thinkin’ half the time?”

  “You’re a little spotty yourself.”

  “Only since she busted my skull.”

  “I’m warning you. Criticize her, you’re gonna have a fight on your hands.”

  “From you? There’s a joke.”

  “You don’t know chivalry? You don’t know honor?” Seth raised his fists like a bare-knuckle boxer and punched comically at the air.

  Joey forced up a scowl. “Shit. I knew you and her was made for each other.”

  * * *

  DELLY WAS HOME at the little ranch house she shared with Fiona when Abe Percy called. She wasn’t surprised to hear from him, what with R.J.’s name in all the papers for his universally praised suicide. “Guess that ends the case,” she said.

  “Maybe not.” Abe then asked an unusual question.

  She didn’t hang up. “It was a long time ago. And dark.”

  “I realize it’s distasteful.”

  “Why do you care? They already buried him.”

  “Which must have been welcome news.”

  “That he’s dead? I have my doubts. Would’ve liked to seen the body.”

  “I saw it. And I have doubts.”

  “So your question—”

  “Pertains. Please don’t think I’m enjoying this.” But Abe was enjoying it. He hadn’t spoken to any women other than phone operators and waitresses for years. He used to enjoy their company more than was proper. He liked trashy ones best, ones like Delly, though at twenty-two she was older than his preference. He asked why she was still skeptical.

  “The timing. Like when my father shot himself. I didn’t want to believe it was suicide.”

  “Well, if not that—”

  “Murder, okay? Not logical, but that’s what I thought. Because I loved him and couldn’t picture him giving up that way.”

  “But who?”

  “He admitted to you about him and Angel Bainard. And then R.J. going wild when he found out.”

  “You think R. J. Bainard killed your father?”

  “Did then. I blamed R.J. for everything bad there was, because of what he did to me. But Daddy was just trying to set things right in his own mind, I know that now.”

  They chatted. Delly’s cousin Joey was recovering from his injuries, she said; her stepdaughter Fiona was still so mad at her that she was spending, of all things, more time with her father, from whom Delly was now separated. Abe was moved by this outpouring. It was reminiscent of the trust Delly had shown him in the run-up to R.J.’s trial, and trust always attracted him powerfully. “Would you join me for dinner sometime?” he asked.

  “Like a date?”

  “Oh no,” he stammered. “Just to talk. I’m far too ancient for you.” The comment begged her rebuttal. He despised himself for hoping she would.

  “I’m seeing someone pretty regular.”

  “Wonderful! Who?” Who? His pushiness shamed him.

  “Um,” she improvised, “a doctor at Joey’s hospital. Loadsa class.”

  “And not an old fat man like me.”

  Sharply she said, “Mr. Percy, I don’t mind fat and I don’t mind old. It’s just I’m involved.” She offered some consolation. “What you asked before? About R.J.’s thing?”

  “I shouldn’t have put you through that.”

  “It was…” She took a breath. “I know because my husband’s isn’t—it was circumcised.”

  “You’re certain?”


  “He made me get close, okay?”

  There it was: The dead man wasn’t R. J. Bainard. “That’s helpful to know.”

  “Gonna tell me why?”

  “No.” It was Abe’s surest assertion today. “It’s for your safety. And mine.”

  * * *

  ABE’S NEXT STOP was the neatly kept and pricey home of Lake Charles’s former police chief, Hollis Jenks. The old lawman was sloshing gasoline down mole holes along his front walk when Abe pulled up. “You got balls comin’ here,” Jenks said.

  “On the contrary,” Abe said from his car. “I’ve acted with forbearance by not going straight to the authorities. But what use would that serve? To see you disgraced and myself empaupered? Surely there’s a better way.”

  “Lord, I hate a man talks like that.”

  “I’m raising my price.” The rattle of Abe’s car motor proclaimed the wretchedness he sought to disguise. “Twenty thousand dollars. Inform the Bainards.”

  “Got nothin’ to do with me.”

  “You’re a fraud, Chief Jenks. A wanted man thrived thanks to you. Now an innocent man has been murdered.”

  “Gobbledygook.”

  “Expect a visit from the sheriff in that case.”

  Jenks shook his head. “I did some homework. The big-hearted lawyer with a bedroom to spare? All them poor little children and you.”

  Abe’s face blanched only a little—his scandal in New Orleans had happened so long ago, it seemed another man’s life, another man’s shame. Jenks noticed it anyway:

  “Ring a bell, does it?”

  “A grave error on my part. But as well-meaning as it was inappropriate.”

  “Still pretty spicy. Front page, I’d say. Even now.”

  “They had nowhere to go, nowhere to sleep! I gave them a home.”

  “And got what back?”

  Abe saw the futility here. “I say again: ten thousand dollars cash…” He’d dropped the price without realizing it. “… or all this…” He waggled his finger to delineate Bo’s retirement haven. “… will be gone.”

  “Your shit against mine,” Jenks said.

  “Possibly. Or it could be the basis for mutual benefit.” The proposition disgusted Abe, though he prayed it might be accepted. Jenks did: