by Day Keene
Jean Avart had seemed to feel almost as bad as Latour.
“I’m sorry, so sorry, Andy,” Jean had told him. “But according to the geologists I’ve consulted, it seems such things do happen. The drillers are stopping work and dismantling their rigs today. With oil all around you, they’ve hit a dry pocket.”
Latour covered the lower part of his body with the top sheet. It seemed to give Olga a sadistic kick to flaunt herself in front of him, smugly secure in the knowledge that except for the infrequent occasions when his need overcame his pride, she was safe from further unpleasant intimacies.
She fastened her hair in a pony’s tail and came over to the bed. The revolver on the night stand puzzled her.
“Why do you put your gun there?”
Latour told her. “Someone tried to kill me today.”
“That shot I heard this morning?”
“That’s right. And again this afternoon.”
For a moment he could swear there was quick concern in her blue eyes, then decided he was mistaken.
“Oh,” she said quietly. “Oh.”
Latour waited for the next scene in the farce. He felt that Olga despised him because in her eyes he’d cheated her, but she’d been born and raised in Japan, in the old Japan where a girl was taught from her cradle that her first duty was to please her husband, that no matter how distasteful the act might be to her, her body belonged to her husband to do with as he pleased.
One hand on the switch of the lamp, she asked, “Is there anything you require of me before I go to sleep?”
“No,” Latour lied. “Not a thing.”
Olga switched off the lamp and lay beside him. “Then I will say good night.”
Latour had never been less sleepy. First the red-haired girl, now Olga. He wondered how much a man was supposed to be able to take.
He lay reviewing the day and thought of his meeting with Jean Avart. “Oh, by the way.”
Olga’s voice was small and low in the darkness. “Yes?”
“I ran into Jean Avart today.”
“So?”
“In the café where I ate. He wants to meet Georgi. So he invited the three of us to have supper with him some evening next week.”
Olga was pleased, as he’d known she would be. “How nice.”
“You decide what night you want to go.”
The blonde girl made a production of the simple matter of naming a night, and decided the following Tuesday would be fine.
Latour wondered why Tuesday. They weren’t going anywhere Monday or Wednesday or Thursday or Friday or Saturday. They seldom went anywhere except to the drive-in movie when they could squeeze the price of admission out of their tight budget. “O.K. Tuesday it is,” he said. “I’ll tell Jean in the morning.”
He turned on his side and tried to sleep. The knowledge that Olga was lying beside him, her nude body almost touching his, his if he wanted her, added to the heat of the night.
He thought she’d gone to sleep when she asked, “You say someone tried to kill you today?”
Latour turned on his back. “That’s right.”
“How?”
“They shot at me with a rifle.”
“But they did not hurt you?”
“No.”
“I’m glad.”
Latour wished he knew more about women than he did. Olga’s concern could be guilty knowledge. She could mean what she said. If he hadn’t known better, he could have sworn she sounded lonely, that she wanted him to turn to her and take her in his arms.
Of all the animals of the species in the human jungle in which mankind lived, women were the least predictable and the most unfathomable.
“Go to sleep,” he told her.
Chapter Six
THE NIGHT grew older and hotter. A mosquito found its way through a hole in one of the screens and droned monotonously around the room, never alighting long enough to be swatted.
In an attempt to put Olga’s nearness out of his mind, Latour forced himself to think about Rita. The more he thought about having an affair with her, the less he liked the idea.
If he had really wanted her, he wouldn’t have stalled the way he had. He’d have taken her on the sofa in the trailer or in the back seat of his car, and to hell with Jacques Lacosta.
From the little he knew about her and what she’d told him about herself, the red-haired girl was a good kid in a tough spot. He had done her a favor. His attraction for her was purely physical. Any man could give her what she wanted, what she needed. He doubted that she was basically cheap. She was merely starved for the sexual satisfaction that old Jacques Lacosta was unable to give her.
Latour was honest with himself. What relief he could give her would be transitory. What she needed was some husky young oil-field worker to fill her need night after night.
If he really wanted to help her, the thing for him to do was to figure out some way to make her financially independent of Jacques.
She was young. She was attractive. She had a lovely body. If he could get her a job, say waiting on tables for Portugee Joe, he felt that in a month some worker, possibly even an independent wild-catter, impressed by the fact that she didn’t put out for money, would offer to pay for her divorce from Lacosta if she would marry him.
On the other hand, he didn’t owe her anything. She was a stranger to him. Until he’d walked up Lafitte Street and stopped to listen to Lacosta’s pitch, he hadn’t known she existed. She was young and pretty and passionate and his if he wanted her. And even a tumble on the well-beaten mattress of some motel would be better than lying in torment night after night.
He turned on his side. It was a mistake. Olga was lying facing him. Their bodies met as he turned and the points of contact were fevered.
“You can’t sleep?” she asked.
“No,” Latour admitted.
He tried to move away from her and couldn’t. Her out-jutting coral-tipped breasts held him as if at gunpoint The contour of her body was a magnetic furnace.
“Neither can I,” she said. “Perhaps for the same reason.” She was practical. “So why don’t we stop being foolish?”
She pressed closer to him, her satin-soft flesh insistent and demanding, her parted lips searching for his.
Latour moaned and took her, eagerly, almost brutally, ashamed of his willingness to capitulate so easily, but unable to help himself.
It went on for what seemed a long time, normally, rhythmically, at first purely a marital affair of mutual convenience. Then, caught up in this thing she had started, Olga was as frenzied and as demanding as he was. Her body was a searing flame. Her voice was no longer cultured or gentle as she spat guttural Russian into his mouth.
Even occupied as he was, Latour wished he knew what she was calling him. It was probably the Russian word for bastard. It had been almost two years since Olga had let herself go like this. And she probably hated him for the effect he was having on her, for being able to transform her from a gracious, if impoverished, gentlewoman into just another close-coupled female animal.
In his frenzied effort to bring it to an end he beat his way too close to the edge and felt their bodies slipping off the bed. Then they were falling through what seemed to be endless space.
At the peak of her ecstasy, Olga cried out convulsively. It was a high, thin, reedy cry, not unlike the wail of the clarinet he’d heard in the sheriff’s office. She muffled it, tardily, by burying her small white teeth in his chest. Then the heat of the moment was gone and he felt delightfully cool with Olga’s body lying quiet and relaxed under his.
They lay for a long time, her eyes luminous, catlike, in the dark as she looked at him. She seemed to be waiting for him to say something.
He wondered what she expected him to say. “I’m sorry”? “It won’t happen again”?
He was damned if he would. He hadn’t started it. She had.
Olga pushed up at his chest. “Please. You are hurting me.” Her voice was normal again, even and noncommittal. S
he might have been asking for a cigarette. “Let me up. And please don’t turn on the light.”
Latour got up and sat on the bed. He used the rumpled sheet to wipe the perspiration from his face and upper body. It sounded as if Olga were crying in the bathroom. He wondered what she had to cry about. She’d proved to both his and her satisfaction that she could still snap her fingers and her personal peasant would forget his pride.
He discarded the sheet. Anyway, one thing was settled: Jacques Lacosta’s red-haired young wife would have to find another lover. What Olga did she did well.
She came out of the bathroom and Latour heard her open one of the drawers in the dresser. A moment later she said, “You may turn on the light now if you wish.”
Latour turned on the lamp by the bed. If Olga had been crying, she had washed away any signs of tears. The nightgown she’d slipped over her head was satin and not diaphanous. Except for a few blonde hairs that had escaped their mooring, it was as if nothing had happened.
“I’d better straighten up the bed,” she said.
Latour got up and walked to the window and looked out into the night. The relief he’d known was dissipated by her matter-of-fact manner. His taut nerves tightened again. Olga had deliberately needled him from the moment she’d come into the room, hoping that what had happened would happen. She’d humbled his pride so she could play the gracious lady. Now all she had to say was the bald words:
“I’d better straighten the bed.”
Without turning his head, he asked, “You didn’t hurt yourself? I mean when we fell.”
“No,” Olga said evenly. “I didn’t hurt myself.”
Latour continued to look out the window. In the mood he was in, he thought the shrubs, the bushes, the trees silhouetted against the night sky, even the placid purple of the Gulf, looked sinister.
For some reason, perhaps because he was physically replete, the night made him think of Rita as he’d last seen her, standing small, lonely, and helpless in the isolated clearing.
He wondered if he’d been wise in driving her to the house trailer. It might have been better if he’d thrown Lacosta in the drunk tank and checked her into a hotel.
Given sufficient motivation, and sex was the most impelling motivation of them all, all men were animals. He’d just proved that. Even knowing how Olga felt about him, once he’d turned on his side, once his flesh had touched hers, he’d had to have her.
Latour pursued his trend of thought.
At least fifty men had witnessed the scene in front of the Tarpon Bar. Viewed from a practical angle, Lacosta’s drunken admission of his inability to satisfy his young wife and his expressed doubt as to her fidelity were an open invitation for every randy young buck in town to try his luck with the red-haired girl.
“How was she?” Jack Pringle had asked him.
Pringle thought he’d stayed with Rita. Probably every man in the crowd who’d seen him drive away with her thought the same thing.
To keep from going back to bed and having to face Olga, Latour stayed where he was, looking out into the night.
Most of the men in French Bayou were good joes. They worked hard and they played harder, but they paid for their fun and they kept it inside the established romantic or commercial channels. As in every town, however, there were a few heels.
During the two years he’d served as a deputy sheriff, there’d been three cases of criminal rape, one perpetrated on the person of a pretty young Negress, the other two on attractive girls of high-school age. Fortunately all three girls had lived. In addition to being raped, all three girls had been beaten unmercifully and forced to endure unspeakable indignities. One of them, in fact, was still in a mental hospital.
Latour gave the sheriff’s office the credit due it. In all three cases Sheriff Belluche and First Deputy Tom Mullen had reverted to being capable and conscientious officers of the law.
They and the deputies under them had worked around the clock, following up every lead, however remote. The cell block had been filled with suspects. Every known sex offender had been brought in and his movements on the night in question had been gone into minutely. But the rapist, suspected to be the same man in all cases, had never been apprehended. Unfortunately, the assaults had taken place in the dark, and the terrified girls were unable to give even a vague description of the man.
Latour was suddenly brought back to the present.
“What are you looking at?” Olga asked.
He turned from the window. “The night.”
He gathered his clothes from the chair and dressed. It might be wise to drive out to the trailer and make certain that Rita was all right. With Lacosta lying in a drunken stupor, she would be vulnerable. Few women could fight off a man who didn’t care how rough he became.
Olga pleated her nightdress. “You are going out again?”
“Yes.”
“At this time of night?”
“I just happened to think of something.”
He sat beside her to lace his shoes. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. He could kill two birds with one stone. It was unlikely that the party who’d shot at him from the cane brake had bothered to pick up the ejected shell casings. Jack Pringle was money-hungry, but he was also an F.B.I.-trained expert in ballistics. With the shell casings in his possession, Pringle could easily establish the make and model of the rifle from which the shots had been fired. That would narrow the field considerably.
Olga stopped pleating the fabric of her gown. “Where are you going, if I am privileged to ask?”
Latour looked for his hat and realized he’d left it in the living room. “On police business.”
Olga made a futile gesture. Then, fluffing her pillow, she said something in her native tongue and lay back and composed herself for sleep.
Latour turned in the doorway of the bedroom. “What does that mean? What you just said?”
Olga told him. “In this country — I give up.”
Latour closed the door of the bedroom behind him. She gave up? After the way she’d treated him for two years?
Georgi had turned off the television set and was standing in the den, regarding the small amount of whisky left in the bottle.
Latour studied the youth’s face. Georgi was as blond as his sister, but huge and muscled like a professional athlete. What he did with his time or what he hoped to do in the United States, besides sponging off Latour, was an unknown factor.
I ought to throw him out on his can, Latour thought.
Georgi heard him in the hallway and turned. There was a hurt tone to his voice. “The whisky is almost gone,” he complained.
“Take it up with the U.N.,” Latour said. “Or, better still, break down and buy a few bottles.” He glanced at the rifle on the wall. “And while we’re at it, did you use my rifle today?”
Georgi drank what was left of the whisky. “As a matter of fact, I did. I took the gun down to that marshy place and killed several large water rodents. What is it you call them in this country? Muskrats?” He added virtuously, “But I cleaned the gun after I shot it.”
“So I noticed.” Latour took a four-cell flashlight from his neatly stacked hunting equipment and walked through the house, across the open gallery to his car.
Georgi was still the candidate for the honor of being the man who’d shot at him four times. Georgi hated his guts and his hate showed like a red flag every time they had occasion to speak to each other.
Georgi would be very pleased to light a candle for him.
Chapter Seven
LATOUR FORCED HIMSELF to think logically. True, with him dead, Olga would be free to marry again. But Georgi couldn’t be the man who’d fired the shots. The man in the cane brake would have to know the back country around French Bayou. He had to know that Latour would pass the Lacosta land on his return from smashing Lant Turner’s still. It had to be someone who’d known he was serving a warrant on Turner.
He parked his car across the street from the Pl
anters’ Hotel and climbed the carpeted stairs off the lobby. As he’d hoped, Tom Mullen was sitting in the high-stake poker game in Suite IA.
The other players were local businessmen and oil-company officials. Several pretty girls, most of them in their slips, were kibitzing the game. One was the little brunette who’d laughed at him on the walk.
Latour imagined that from time to time, to change his luck, a player would take a girl into the bedroom provided for that purpose. It was much more satisfactory than walking around a chair.
When the brunette saw Latour she squealed with delight. “Jiggers, it’s that man. The joint is pinched.”
The players were too intent on the game even to look up from their cards. Latour waited until Mullen, faced with a raise he didn’t want to meet, tossed in his hand, then asked him if he could speak to him privately.
The first deputy pushed back his chair. “Of course.” Mullen led the way into the temporarily unoccupied bedroom. “What’s on your mind, Andy?” He motioned to a chair. “Sit down.”
Latour straddled the chair. “I was just wondering if, after I left the office this afternoon to pick up Turner, anyone happened to drop in and ask where I was.”
Mullen lighted his dead cigar. “Frankly, I don’t remember. We were fairly busy this afternoon. Why?”
“I’m still thinking about those shots someone took at me.
Mullen was impatient with him. “For God’s sake, Andy, are you still off on that kick? When you push people around the way you do, you can’t expect everyone to like you.”
“I’m just doing what I’m paid to do.”
“You don’t have to be so enthusiastic about it. Take Lant Turner, for example. I tried to give you a break. I tried to let you make yourself a few dollars. I said it was up to you whether or not you brought him in. I made it clear that all I was interested in was putting him out of business. Am I right so far?”
“You are.”
“So what do you do? You bring him in. And now one of the young punks in Jean Avart’s office, one of those eager young beavers that Jean brought down from New Orleans to take some of the paper work off his shoulders, has bailed him out. For two hundred dollars cash. Jean probably got another hundred for drawing up the writ. And the odds are ten to one that the case will never even go to trial and you’re out whatever you could have screwed out of Lant for a pass.” Mullen’s weather-beaten face softened. “Look, kid. Take a tip from an old hand in this business. Like I told you in the office, walk a little lighter. So it isn’t according to Hoyle. This isn’t the first town that’s been allowed to run wide open. It won’t be the last. Right now you don’t think much of the old man or me, do you?”