“That’s not the way I read it,” I said. “You guys thought you’d be cowboys and you got your faces shoved into the sheepdip. What was it going to be, a day or so in the tank, or maybe some serious patty-cake in the backseat on the way to the jail?”
They didn’t reply. Their faces were hot and angry and pained by the rocks that cut their knees.
“Put the cuffs through the bumper and lock your wrists,” I said. “You didn’t answer me, which makes me wonder if I was going to make the jail. Are you guys into it that big?”
“Kiss my ass,” the younger deputy said.
“Tell me, are y’all that dumb? You think you can pop a New Orleans cop and walk out of it?”
“We’ll see who walks out of what,” the older deputy said. He had to twist sideways on his knees and squint up into the sun to talk to me.
“The sheriff is letting you clean up his shit for him, isn’t he?” I said. “It looks like lousy work to me. You ought to get him to spread the juice around a little more. You guys probably rip off a little change now and then, maybe get some free action in the local hot-pillow joint, but he drives a Cadillac and raises Arabians.”
“For a homicide cop you’re a stupid bastard,” the older deputy said. “What makes you think you’re so important you got to be popped? You’re just a hair in somebody’s nose.”
“I’m afraid you boys have limited careers ahead of you.”
“Start figuring how you’re going to get out of here,” the younger deputy said.
“You mean my fiat tire? That is a problem,” I said thoughtfully. “What if I just drive your car down the road a little ways with you guys still cuffed to it?”
For the first time their faces showed the beginnings of genuine fear.
“Relax. We have our standards in New Orleans. We don’t pick on the mentally handicapped,” I said.
In the distance I saw a maroon car approaching. The two deputies heard it and looked at each other expectantly.
“Sorry, no cavalry today,” I said, then squatted down at eye level with them. “Now look, you pair of clowns, I don’t know how far you want to take this, but if you really want to get it on, you remember this: I’ve got more juice than you do, more people, more brains, more everything that counts. So give it some thought. In the meantime I’m going to send somebody back for my car, and it had better be here. Also, tell that character you work for that our conversation was ongoing. He’ll get my drift.”
I flagged down the maroon car with my badge and got in the passenger’s seat before the driver, a blond woman in her late twenties with windblown hair and wide eyes, could speak or concentrate on the two manacled deputies. Her tape player was blaring out Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto, and the backseat was an incredible litter of papers, notebooks, and government forms.
“I’m a New Orleans police officer. I need you to take me to the next town,” I shouted above the music.
Her eyes were blue and as round as a doll’s with surprise and fear. She began to accelerate slowly, her eyes sliding past the handcuffed cops but then riveting on them again in the rearview mirror.
“Are those men locked to the car bumper?” she said.
“Yes. They were bad boys,” I yelled back. “Can I turn this down?”
“I’m sorry, but I have to do this. You can go ahead and shoot if you want to.”
And with that she slammed on the brakes, dropped the transmission into reverse, and floorboarded the car backwards in a screech of rubber and a cloud of black smoke. My head hit the windshield, then I saw my old Chevrolet coming up fast. “Watch it!” I shouted.
But it was too late. Her bumper caught my front fender and raked both doors. Then she careened to a stop, flipped off the stereo, leaned across me, and yelled at the deputies, “This man says he’s a police officer. Is that true?”
“Call the Cataouatche sheriff’s office, lady,” the older deputy said. He was squatting on one knee, and his face was strained with discomfort.
“Who is this man in my car?”
“He’s a piece of shit that’s going to get ground into the concrete,” the younger deputy said.
The woman yanked the car into low, pushed the accelerator to the floor, and roared past my car again. I felt her back bumper carom off my front fender. She drove like a wild person, papers blowing in the backseat, the lake and flooded woods streaking past us.
“I’m sorry about your car. I have insurance. I think I still do, anyway,” she said.
“That’s all right. I’ve always wanted to see the country from inside a hurricane. Are you still afraid, or do you always drive like this?”
“Like what?” Her hair was blowing in the wind and her round blue eyes were intent over the wheel.
“Do you still think I’m an escaped criminal?” I said.
“I don’t know what you are, but I recognized one of those deputies. He’s a sadist who rubbed his penis all over one of my clients.”
“Your clients?”
“I work for the state handicapped services.”
“You can put him away.”
“She’s scared to death. He told her he’d do it to her again, and then put her in jail as a prostitute.”
“God, lady, look out. Listen, there’s a restaurant on stilts just across the parish line. You pull in there, then we’re going to make a phone call and I’m going to buy you lunch.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re wired and you don’t believe who I am. By the way, what you did back there took courage.”
“No, it didn’t. I just don’t give rides to weird people. There’s a lot of weirdness around these days. If you’re a police detective, why are you driving a wreck of an automobile?”
“A few minutes ago it wasn’t entirely a wreck.”
“That’s what I mean by weirdness. Maybe I saved your life, and you criticize my driving.”
Don’t argue with God’s design on a sun-spangled morning in a corridor of oak trees, Robicheaux, I thought. Also, don’t argue with somebody who’s doing eighty-five miles an hour and showering rocks like birdshot against the tree trunks.
The restaurant was a ramshackle board place with screen windows, built up on posts over the lake. Metal Dixie 45 and Jax beer signs were nailed all over the outer walls. Crawfish were out of season, so I ordered fried catfish and small bowls of shrimp gumbo. While we waited for the food, I bought her a drink at the bar and used the phone to call my extension at First District headquarters in New Orleans. I put the receiver to her ear so she could hear Clete answer, then I took the receiver back.
“I’m having lunch with a lady who would like you to describe what I look like,” I told him, and gave the phone back to her. I saw her start to smile as she listened, then her eyes crinkled and she laughed out loud.
“That’s outrageous,” she said.
“What’d he say?”
“That your hair is streaked like a skunk’s and that sometimes you try to walk the check.”
“Clete’s always had satirical ambitions.”
“Is this how you all really do things? Chaining up other cops to cars, terrifying people on the highway, playing jokes over the phone?”
“Not exactly. They have a different set of rules in Cataouatche Parish. I sort of strayed off my turf.”
“What about those deputies back there? Won’t they come after you?”
“I think they’ll be more worried about explaining themselves to the man they work for. After we eat, can you take me back to the city?”
“I have to make a home call at a client’s house, then I can.” She sipped from her Manhattan, then ate the cherry off the toothpick. She saw me watching her, and she looked out the window at the lake, where the wind was blowing the moss in the cypress trees.
“Do you like horse racing?” I said.
“I’ve never been.”
“I have a clubhouse pass. Would you like to go tomorrow night, provided I have my car back?”
She paused, and her electric blue eyes wandered over my face.
“I play cello with a string quartet. We have practice tomorrow night,” she said.
“Oh.”
“But we’ll probably finish by eight-thirty, if that’s not too late. I live by Audubon Park,” she said.
See, don’t argue with design and things will work out all right after all, I told myself.
But things did not go well back at the District the next day. They never did when I had to deal with the people in vice, or with Sergeant Motley in particular. He was black, an ex-career enlisted man, but he had little sympathy for his own people. One time a black wino in a holding cell was giving Motley a bad time, calling him “the white man’s knee-grow, with a white man’s badge and a white man’s gun,” and Motley covered him from head to foot with the contents of a can of Mace before the turnkey slapped it out of his hand.
But there was another memory about Motley that was darker. Before he made sergeant and moved over to vice, he had worked as a bailiff at the court and was in charge of escorting prisoners from the drunk tank to morning arraignment. He had seven of them on a wrist-chain in the elevator when a basement fire blew the electric circuits and stalled the elevator between floors. Motley got out through the escape door in the elevator’s roof, but the seven prisoners were asphyxiated by the smoke.
“What do you want to know about her?” he said. He was overweight and had a thick mustache, and his ashtray was full of cigar butts.
“You busted her three times in a month—twice for soliciting, once for holding. You must have had an interest in her,” I said.
“She was a ten-dollar chicken, a real loser.”
“You’re not telling me a lot, Motley.”
“What’s to tell? She was freebasing and jacking guys off in a massage parlor on Decatur. She was the kind a john cuts up or a pimp sets on fire. Like I say, a victim. A country girl that was going to make the big score.”
“Who went her bail?”
“Probably her pimp. I don’t remember.”
“Who was he?”
“I don’t remember. There’s a new lowlife running that joint every two months.”
“You know anybody who’d have reason to give her a hotshot?”
“Ask me her shoe size. When’d she become your case, anyway? I heard you fished her out of the bayou in Cataouatche Parish.”
“It’s a personal interest. Look, Motley, we cooperate with you guys. How about being a little reciprocal?”
“What is it you think I know? I told you she was just another brainless whore. They all come out of the same cookie cutter. I lost contact with her, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“We busted the massage parlor a couple of times and she wasn’t working there anymore. One of the other broads said Julio Segura moved her out to his place. That don’t mean anything, though. He does that all the time, then he gets tired of them, gives them a few balloons of Mexican brown, and has that dwarf chauffeur of his drive them to the bus stop or back to the crib.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“You think a guy like him is interested in snuffing whores? Write it off, Robicheaux. You’re wasting your time.”
Fifteen minutes later, Captain Guidry walked into the office I shared with Clete. He was fifty and lived with his mother and belonged to the Knights of Columbus. But recently he had been dating a widow in the city water department, and we knew it was serious when the captain began to undergo a hair transplant. His gleaming bald scalp was now inlaid with tiny round divots of transplanted hair, so that his head looked like a rock with weeds starting to grow on it. But he was a good administrator, a straight arrow, and he often took the heat for us when he didn’t have to.
“Triple-A called and said they towed in your car,” he said.
“That’s good,” I said.
“No. They also said somebody must have broken all the windows out with a hammer or a baseball bat. What went on over there with the sheriff’s department, Dave?”
I told him while he stared at me blankly. I also told him about Julio Segura. Cletus kept his face buried in our file drawer.
“You didn’t make this up? You actually cuffed two sheriff’s deputies to their own car?” the captain said.
“I wasn’t holding a very good hand, Captain.”
“Well, you probably had them figured right, because they haven’t pursued it, except for remodeling your windows. You want to turn the screws on them a little? I can call the state attorney general’s office and probably shake them up a bit.”
“Clete and I want to go out to Segura’s place.”
“Vice considers that their territory,” Captain Guidry said.
“They’re talking about killing a cop. It’s our territory now,” I said.
“All right, but no cowboy stuff,” he said. “Right now we don’t have legal cause to be out there.”
“Okay.”
“You just talk, let him know we’re hearing things we don’t like.”
“Okay, Captain.”
He rubbed his fingernail over one of the crusted implants in his head.
“Dave?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Forget what I said. He’s threatening a New Orleans police officer and we’re not going to tolerate it. Put his head in the toilet. Tell him it came from me, too.”
Oleander, azalea, and myrtle trees were planted thickly behind the scrolled iron fence that surrounded Segura’s enormous blue-green lawn. Gardeners were clipping the hedges, watering the geranium and rose beds, cutting away the dead brown leaves from the stands of banana trees. Back toward the lake I could see the white stucco two-story house, its red tile roof gleaming in the sun, the royal palms waving by the swimming pool. Someone sprang loudly off a diving board.
A muscular Latin man in slacks and a golf shirt came out the front gate and leaned down to Clete’s window. There were faded tattoos under the black hair on his forearms. He also wore large rings on both hands.
“Can I help you, sir?” he said.
“We’re police officers. We want to talk to Segura,” Clete said.
“Do you have an appointment with him?”
“Just tell him we’re here, partner,” Clete said.
“He’s got guests right now.”
“You got a hearing problem?” Clete said.
“I got a clipboard with some names on it. If your name’s on it, you come in. If it ain’t, you stay out.”
“Listen, you fucking greaseball…” Without finishing his sentence, Clete got out of the car and hit the man murderously in the stomach with his fist. The man doubled over, his mouth dropped open as though he had been struck with a sledgehammer, and his eyes looked like he was drowning.