“I don’t get you,” she said.
“What’s to get? I love movies and New Orleans and horse tracks and Caddy convertibles with fins and eating large amounts of food. My viscera alone probably weighs two hundred pounds. When I go into a restaurant, I get seated at a trough.”
“You really like movies?”
“I go to twelve-step meetings for movie addiction.”
“You have cable?”
“Sure. I’ve got insomnia. I watch movies in the middle of the night.”
“James Dean’s movies are showing all this week. I think he was the greatest actor who ever lived.”
He restarted the Caddy and turned back onto the road, his brow furrowed, remembering the red windbreaker worn by the person he watched murder Bix Golightly. “What do you know about guns?”
“Enough so I don’t want to be on the wrong side of them.”
“We’ll stop at Henderson Swamp. I want to show you a few things about firearms.”
“I found your Beretta and disarmed it on your premises. I don’t need a gun lesson, at least not now. I’m a little tired, okay? The numbers tattooed on that old man’s forearm, they’re from the death camp?”
“Yeah, I guess. Why?”
“He made me feel dirty all over. Like when I was a little girl. I don’t know why,” she replied. “I’m not feeling too good. Can we go back to the motor court? I need to take a nap and start the day over.”
T
HE ONLY LEAD
I had on the men who had tried to kill me outside Bengal Gardens was the name of Ronnie Earl Patin, a strong-arm robber I had helped put away a decade ago. Though there are instances when a felon goes down for some serious time and nurses a grudge over the years and eventually gets out and does some payback, it’s very rare that he goes after a cop or judge or prosecutor. Payback is usually done on a fall partner or a family member who snitched him off. Ronnie Earl was a sweaty glutton and a porn addict and a violent alcoholic who knocked around old people for their Social Security checks, but he had been jailing all of his adult life, and most of his crimes grew out of his addictions and were not part of vendettas. That said, would he do a contract job on a cop if the money was right? It was possible.
The driver of the freezer truck was too short to have been Ronnie Earl, and the shooter who had almost taken my head off with the cut-down had an ascetic face similar in design to a collection of saw blades. Could ten years in Angola, most of it on Camp J, have melted down the gelatinous pile that I helped send up there?
I called an old-time gunbull at Angola who had shepherded Ronnie Earl through the system for years. “Yeah, he was one of our Jenny Craig success stories,” the gunbull said. “He stayed out of segregation his last two years and worked in the bean field.”
“He went out max time?”
“He earned two months good time before his discharge. This was on a ten-bit. He could have been out in thirty-seven months.”
“What kept him in segregation?”
“Making pruno and raping fish and being a general shithead. What are you looking at him for?”
“Somebody tried to pop me with a shotgun.”
“It doesn’t sound like Ronnie Earl.”
“Why not?”
“He’s got two interests in life: sex and getting high. The guy’s a walking gland. The only reason he got thin was to get laid when he got out. Cain’t y’all send us a higher grade of criminals?”
“You think he’s capable of a contract hit?”
“You ever know a drunkard who wasn’t capable of anything?” Then he evidently thought about what he had just said. “Sorry. You still off the juice?”
“I go to a lot of meetings. Thanks for your time, Cap,” I said.
I began making phone calls to several bars in North Lafayette. A person might wonder how a sheriff’s detective in Iberia Parish would be presumptuous enough to believe he could find a suspect in Lafayette, twenty miles away, when the local authorities could not. The answer is simple: Every alcoholic knows what every other alcoholic is thinking. There is only one alcoholic personality. There are many manifestations of the disease, but the essential elements remain the same in every practicing drunk. CEO, hallelujah-mission wino, Catholic nun, ten-dollar street whore, academic scholar, world boxing champion, or three-hundred-pound blob, the mind-set never varies. It is for this reason that practicing alcoholics wish to avoid the company of drunks who have sobered up, and sometimes even get them fired from their jobs, lest there be anyone in proximity who can hear their most secret thoughts.
One bartender told me Ronnie Earl had been in his place two months back, right after his release from Angola. The bartender said Ronnie Earl looked nothing like the fat man the court had sent up the road.
“But he’s the same guy, right?” I said.
“No,” the bartender said. “Not at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s worse. You know how it works,” the bartender said. “A sick guy like that gets even sicker when he doesn’t drink. When he gets back on the train, he’s carrying a furnace with him instead of a stomach.”
The bartender had not seen Ronnie Earl since and did not know where he had gone.
The last bartender I called had picked me up out of an alley behind a B-girl joint in Lafayette’s old Underpass area, a one-block collection of buildings that was so stark and unrelieved, whose inhabitants were so lost and disconnected from the normal world, that if you found yourself drinking there, you could rest assured you had finally achieved the goal you long ago set for yourself: the total destruction of the innocent child who once lived inside you. The bartender’s name was Harvey. For me, Harvey had always been a modern-day Charon who turned me away from the Styx. “Every afternoon there’s a guy who comes in here who goes by Ron,” he said. “He drinks like he’s making up for lost time. One mug of beer, four shots lined up. Same order every time. He likes to flash his money around and invite the working girls over to his table. The whole rainbow, know what I mean?”
“I’m not sure.”
“He’s definitely multicultural.”
“What does Ron look like?”
“Neat dresser, good haircut. Maybe he’s been working outdoors. I remember him telling a joke. It was about Camp J or something. Does that mean anything?”
“A lot.”
“He just walked in. He’s got three broads with him. What do you want me to do?”
I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter to five. “Keep him there. I’m on my way. If he leaves, get his tag and call the locals.”
“I don’t need a bunch of cops in here, Dave.”
“Everything is going to be fine. If you have to, give Ron and his friends an extra round or two. It’s on me.”
My truck was still at the glazier’s. I checked out an unmarked car and tore down the two-lane past Spanish Lake toward Lafayette, a battery-powered emergency light clamped on the roof.
T
HE CLUB WAS
a windowless box with a small dance floor and vinyl booths set against two walls. The light from the bathrooms glowed through a red-bead curtain that hung from a rear doorway. Outside, the sky was still bright, but when I entered the bar, I could barely make out the people sitting in the booths. I saw Harvey look up from the sink where he was rinsing glasses. I didn’t acknowledge him but went to the corner of the bar, in the shadows, and sat down on a stool. I was wearing my sport coat and a tie, and the flap of my coat covered the holstered .45 clipped onto my belt. The duckboards bent under Harvey’s weight as he walked toward me. His face was round and flat, his Irish mouth so small it looked like it belonged to a goldfish. “What are you having?” he asked.
“A Dr Pepper on ice with a lime slice.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a black woman in a short skirt and a low-cut white blouse sitting on a barstool. I looked back at Harvey. “You still serve gumbo?”
“Coming up,” he said. He began fixing my drink, letting his gaze rest on a booth by the entrance. I glanced over and saw a blade-faced man and three females. Harvey placed my drink in front of me and picked up a stainless steel dipper and lowered it into a cauldron of chicken gumbo and filled a white bowl and set it and a spoon and a paper napkin in front of me. He picked up the twenty I had placed on the bar. “I’ll bring your change back in a minute. I got an order waiting over here.”
He took a frosted mug from the cooler and filled it until foam ran over the lip, then poured four shot glasses to the brim and placed the mug and all the glasses on a round tray. The work Harvey did behind a bar was not part of a mystique or of a kind most normal people would notice. But I could not take my eyes off his hands and the methodical way he went about filling the glasses and placing them on the cork-lined tray; nor could I ignore the smell of freshly drawn beer and whiskey that had not been cut with ice or fruit or
cocktail mix. I could see the brassy bead in the beer, the strings of foam running down through the frost on the mug. The whiskey had the amber glow of sunlight that might have been aged inside yellow oak, its wetness and density and latent power greater than the sum of its parts, welling over the brim of the shot glasses as though growing in size. I felt a longing inside me that was no different from the desire of a heroin or sex addict or a candle moth that seeks the flame the way an infant seeks its mother’s breast.
I drank from my Dr Pepper and swallowed a piece of shaved ice and tried to look away from the tray Harvey was carrying to the booth by the front door.
“You ever see a li’l boy looking t’rew the window at what he cain’t have?” the black woman in the short skirt said.
“Who you talking about?” I said.
“Who you t’ink?”
“This is my job,” I said. “I check out dead-end dumps that serve people like me.”
“Ain’t nothing that bad if you got a li’l company.”
“You’re too pretty for me.”
“That’s why you looking at them other ladies in the mirror? They ain’t pretty?”
“You want a bowl of gumbo?” I asked.
“Honey, what I got don’t come in no bowl. You ought to try some.”
I winked at her and lifted a spoonful of gumbo to my mouth.
“Darlin’?” she said. Her stool squeaked as she turned toward me. She
was
pretty. Her skin was as darkly brown as chocolate and unmarked with scars or blemishes, her hair thick and black and freshly washed and blow-dried. “Your slip is showing.”
I pulled the flap of my coat over my .45, my eyes still on the reflections in the bar mirror.
“One of the girls in the boot’ you’re looking at is my li’l sister. I’m gonna walk over there and ax her to go outside wit’ me. We ain’t gonna have no trouble over that, are we?”
“What’s your name?”
“Lavern.”
“You need to stay where you are, Miss Lavern. I’m going to speak
to an old acquaintance over there. You and your friends are going to be just fine. Maybe I can buy y’all a drink a little later. But right now y’all need to take your mind off world events. That’s Ronnie Earl Patin in the booth, isn’t it?”
“You ain’t wit’ Lafayette PD.”
“You’ve got that right.”
“Then why you come in here making t’ings hard for people who ain’t done you nothing?”
In reality, her question was not an unreasonable one. But wars are not reasonable, and neither is most law enforcement. In Vietnam, we killed an estimated five civilians for every enemy KIA. Law enforcement is not much different. The people who occupy the underside of society are dog food. Slumlords, zoning board members on a pad, porn vendors, and industrial polluters usually skate. Rich men don’t go to the injection table, and nobody worries when worker ants get stepped on.
I picked up a loose chair from a table and carried it and my drink to the booth where the man named Ron was sitting with a young white woman and one black woman and one Hispanic girl who probably wasn’t over seventeen. “What’s the haps, Ronnie Earl?” I said, setting down the chair hard.
“You’ve mistaken me for somebody else. My name is Ron Prudhomme,” the man said. He was smiling, his cheekbones and chin forming a V in his lower face, his eyes warm with alcohol.
“No, I think you and I go back, Ron. Remember when you bashed that old man with a hammer for his veteran’s check? You put a hole in his skull. I don’t think he was ever right again.”
“I don’t know who you are,” he said.
“I’m Dave Robicheaux,” I said to the two women and the girl. “I think Ronnie put a load of buckshot through my windshield.”
The man who called himself Ron Prudhomme picked up a shot glass and drank it slowly to the bottom, savoring each swallow, his expression sleepy. He took a sip from his beer mug, a sliver of ice sliding across his thumb. “If I’d done something like that, would I be hanging around town?” he asked.
“Yeah, I have to admit that one doesn’t fit,” I replied.
“It doesn’t fit because I’m not your guy.”
“Oh, you’re my huckleberry, all right. I just haven’t figured out if you’re doing contract hits now or if you’re a minor player in a group that includes Jesse Leboeuf, a retired homicide roach. You know Jesse Leboeuf? He used to put the fear of God in guys like you.”
He eased one of his full shot glasses toward me. “You want a beer back on that? If I remember, you got the same kind of taste buds I do. I think we got eighty-sixed from the same joints. The only reason you were allowed in some of the clubs was because you carried a shield.”
“I think I figured out why you’re hanging around, Ronnie. You didn’t blow town because you weren’t the hitter in the freezer truck. But you boosted the truck at the motel where you were staying. Which means you boosted it for somebody else. It seems to me you had a brother, but y’all didn’t look alike. You looked like a helium balloon with stubs for arms and legs, but your brother was trim. The way you look now. Have I got my hand on it?”
“This is all Greek to me. Unless you’re that cop who lied on the stand and sent me up the road for a ten-bit I didn’t deserve.”
“No, I’m the cop who made sure there was a short-eyes notation in your jacket,” I said. “Ladies, y’all should be especially careful about this man. His weight loss is huge, and it occurred in a very short amount of time. I suggest you make him use industrial-strength condoms, or you stay completely away from him and spread the word to your sisters. He was both a predator and a cell-house bitch in Angola and stayed in lockdown for years because he was involved in at least two gang rapes. Do y’all get tested regularly for AIDS?”