"You want to make a statement about Cherry LeBlanc?" I said.
"Yeah. I've given it some thought. I remember busting a whore by that name three years ago. So now y'all can tell me why I'd wait three years to kill somebody who'd been in my custody."
"We think you're a pimp for Julie Balboni, Mr. Doucet," Rosie said. "We also think you're supplying girls for his pornography operation."
His eyes went up and down her body.
"Affirmative action?" he said.
"There's something else you don't know about, Murph," I said. "We're checking all the unsolved murders of females in areas around highways during the time you were working for the state police. I have a feeling those old logs are going to put you in the vicinity of some bodies you never thought would be connected to you."
"I don't believe this," he said.
"I think we've got you dead-bang," I said.
"You've got a planted knife. This girl here knows it, too. Look at her face."
"We've not only got the weapon and the photo of you with the victim, we know what happened and why."
"What?"
"Cherry LeBlanc told Julie he was a tub of guts and walked out on him. But people don't just walk out on Julie. So he got on the phone and called you up from the motel, didn't he, Murph? You remember that conversation? Would you like me to quote it to you?"
His eyebrows contracted, then his hand went into his pocket for a cigarette.
"No. You can't smoke in here," I said.
"I got to use the can."
"It's unavailable now," I said.
"She's here for another reason. It ain't because of a dead hooker," he said.
"We're all here because of you, Murph. You're going down hard, partner. We haven't even started to talk about Kelly Drummond yet."
He bit a piece of skin off the ball of his thumb.
"What's the bounce on the pimp beef?" he said.
"You think you're going to cop to a procuring charge when you're looking at the chair? What world are you living in?" I said.
"Ask her. She's here to make a case on Balboni, not a security guard, so clean the shit out of your mouth. What kind of bounce am I looking at?"
"Mr. Doucet, you're looking at several thousand volts of electricity cooking your insides. Does that clarify your situation for you?" Rosie said.
He looked into her face.
"Go tell your boss I can put that guinea away for twenty-seven years," he said. "Then come back and tell me y'all aren't interested in a deal."
The sheriff opened the door.
"His lawyer's here," he said.
"We're going to your house now, Murph," I said. "Is there anything else you want to tell us before we leave?"
The attorney stepped inside the room. He wore his hair shaved to the scalp, and his tie and shirt collar rode up high on his short neck so that he reminded you of a light-brown hard-boiled egg stuffed inside a business suit.
"Don't say anything more to these people, Mr. Doucet," he said.
I leaned on the table and stared into Murphy Doucet's face. I stared at his white eyebrows, the jittering of his eyeballs, the myriad lines in his skin, the slit of a mouth, the white scar on his throat that could have been layered there with a putty knife.
"What? What the fuck you staring at?" he said.
"Do you remember me?" I said.
"Yeah. Of course. When you were a cop in New Orleans."
"Look at me. Think hard."
His eyes flicked away from my face, fastened on his attorney.
"I don't know what he's talking about," he said.
"Do you have a point, detective?" the attorney said.
"Your hired oil can doesn't have anything to do with this, Murph," I said. "It's between me and you now. It's 1957, right after Hurricane Audrey hit. You could smell dead animals all over the marsh. You remember? Y'all made DeWitt Prejean run with a chain locked around his chest, then you blew his leg out from under him. Remember the kid who saw it from across the bay? Look at my face."
He bit down on his lip, then fitted his chin on top of his knuckles and stared disjointedly at the wall.
"The old jailer gave you guys away when he told me that DeWitt Prejean used to drive a soda pop truck. Prejean worked for Twinky Lemoyne and had an affair with his wife, didn't he? It seems like there's always one guy still hanging around who remembers more than he should," I said. "You still think you're in a seller's market, Murph? How long do you think it's going to be before a guy like Twinky cracks and decides to wash his sins in public?"
"Don't say anything, Mr. Doucet," the attorney said.
"He doesn't have to, Mr. Bonin," I said. "This guy has been killing people for thirty-five years. If I were you, I'd have some serious reservations about an ongoing relationship with your client. Come on, Rosie."
The wind swirled dust and grit between the cars in the parking lot, and I could smell rain in the south.
"That was Academy Award stuff, Dave," Rosie said as we got in my truck.
"It doesn't hurt to make the batter flinch once in a while."
"You did more than that. You should have seen the lawyer's face when you started talking about the lynching."
"He's not the kind who's in it for the long haul."
As I started the truck a gust of wind sent a garbage can clattering down the sidewalk and blew through the oak grove across the street. A solitary shaft of sunlight broke from the clouds and fell through the canopy, and in a cascade of gold leaves I thought I saw a line of horsemen among the tree trunks, their bodies as gray as stone, their shoulders and their horses' rumps draped with flowing tunics. I pinched the sweat out of my eyes against the bridge of my nose and looked again. The grove was empty except for a black man who was putting strips of tape across the windows of his barbecue stand.
"Dave?" Rosie said.
"Yes?"
"Are you all right?"
"I just got a piece of dirt in my eye."
When we pulled out on the street I looked into the rearview mirror and saw the detailed image of a lone horseman deep in the trees, a plum-colored plume in his hat, a carbine propped on his thigh. He pushed up the brim of his hat with his gun barrel and I saw that his face was pale and siphoned of all energy and the black sling that held his left arm was sodden with blood.
"What has opened your wounds, general?"
"What'd you say?" Rosie asked.
"Nothing. I didn't say anything."
"You're worried about what Doucet said, aren't you?"
"I'm not following you."
"You think the Bureau might cut a deal with him."
"It crossed my mind."
"This guy's going down, Dave. I promise you."
"I've made a career of discovering that my priorities aren't the same as those of the people I work for, Rosie. Sometimes the worst ones walk and cops help them do it."
She looked out the side window, and now it was she whose face seemed lost in an abiding memory or dark concern that perhaps she could never adequately share with anyone.
Murphy Doucet lived in a small freshly-painted white house with a gallery and a raked, tree-shaded lawn across from the golf course on the north side of Lafayette. A bored Iberia Parish deputy and a Lafayette city cop sat on the steps waiting for us, flipping a pocket knife into the lawn. The blue Mercury was parked in the driveway under a chinaberry tree. I unlocked it from the key ring we had taken from Doucet when he was booked; then we pulled out the floor mats, laid them carefully on the grass, searched under the seats, and cleaned out the glove box. None of it was of any apparent value. We picked up the floor mats by the corners, replaced them on the rugs, and unlocked the trunk.
Rosie stepped back from the odor and coughed into her hand.
"Oh, Dave, it's—" she began.
"Feces," I said.
The trunk was bare except for a spare tire, a jack, and a small cardboard carton in one corner. The dark blue rug looked clean, vacuumed or brushed, but twelve inches back
from the latch was a dried, tea-colored stain with tiny particles of paper towel embedded in the stiffened fabric.
I took out the cardboard carton, opened the top, and removed a portable spotlight with an extension cord that could be plugged into a cigarette lighter.
"This is what he wrapped the red cellophane around when he picked up the girl hitchhiking down in Vermilion Parish," I said.
"Dave, look at this."
She pointed toward the side wall of the trunk. There were a half-dozen black curlicues scotched against the pale blue paint. She felt one of them with two fingers, then rubbed her thumb against the ends of the fingers.
"I think they're rubber heel marks," she said. "What kind of shoes was Cherry LeBlanc wearing?"
"Flats with leather soles. And the dead girl in Vermilion didn't have on anything."
"All right, let's get it towed in and start on the house. We really need—"
"What?"
"Whatever he got careless about and left lying around."
"Did you call the Bureau yet?"
"No. Why?"
"I was just wondering."
"What are you trying to say, Dave?"
"If you want a handprint set in blood to make our case, I don't think it's going to happen. Not unless there's some residue on that utility knife we can use for a DNA match. The photograph is a bluff, at least as far as indicting Doucet is concerned. Like you said earlier, everything else we've got so far isn't real strong."
"So?"
"I think you already know what your boss is going to tell you."
"Maybe I don't care what he says."
"I don't want you impairing your career with Fart, Barf, and Itch because you think you have to be hard-nosed on my account, Rosie. Let's be clear on that."
"Cover your own butt and don't worry about mine," she said, took the key ring out of my hand, and walked ahead of me up the front steps of the house and unlocked the door.
The interior was as neat and squared away as a military barracks. The wood floors were waxed, the stuffed chairs decorated with doilies, the window plants trimmed and watered, the kitchen sink and drainboards immaculate, the pots and pans hung on hooks, the wastebaskets fitted with clean plastic liners, his model planes dusted and suspended on wires from the bedroom ceiling, his bedspread tucked and stretched so tightly that you could bounce a quarter off it.
None of the pictures on the walls dealt with human subjects, except one color photograph of himself sitting on the steps of a cabin with a dead eight-point deer at his feet. Doucet was smiling; a bolt-action rifle with iron sights and a sling lay across his lap.
We searched the house for an hour, searched the garage, then came back and tossed the house again. The Iberia Parish deputy walked through the front door with an icecream cone in his hand. He was a dark-haired, narrow-shouldered, wide-hipped man who had spent most of his five years with the department as a crosswalk guard at elementary schools or escorting misdemeanor prisoners to morning arraignment. He stopped eating and wiped the cream out of his mustache with the back of his wrist before he spoke.
"Jesus Christ, Dave, y'all tore the place apart," he said.
"You want to stay behind and clean it up?" I said.
"Y'all the ones done it, not me."
"That's right, so you don't have to worry about it," I said.
"Boy, somebody didn't get enough sleep last night," he said. When I didn't answer he walked into the center of the room. "What y'all found in that trunk?"
When I still didn't answer, he peered over my shoulder.
"Oh man, that's a bunch of little girl's underwear, ain't it?" he said.
"Yes, it is," I said.
The deputy cleared his throat.
"That fella been doin' that kind of stuff, too, Dave?"
"It looks like it."
"Oh, man," he said. Then his face changed. "Maybe somebody ought to show him what happens when you crawl over one of them high barb-wire fences."
"I didn't hear you say that, deputy," Rosie said.
"It don't matter to me," he said. "A fella like that, they's people 'round here get their hands on him, you ain't gonna have to be worryin' about evidence, no. Ax Dave."
In the trunk we had found eleven small pairs of girls' underwear, children's socks, polka-dot leotards, training bras, a single black patent-leather shoe with a broken strap, a coloring book, a lock of red hair taped to an index card, torn matinee tickets to a local theater, a half-dozen old photographs of Murphy Doucet in the uniform of a Jefferson Parish deputy sheriff, all showing him with children at picnics under moss-hung trees, at a Little League ball game, at a swimming pool filled with children leaping into the air for the camera. All of the clothing was laundered and folded and arranged in a neat pink and blue and white layer across the bottom of the trunk.
After a moment, Rosie said, "It's his shrine."
"To what?" I said.
"Innocence. He's a psychopath, a rapist, a serial killer, a sadist, maybe a necrophiliac, but he's also a pedophile. Like most pedophiles, he seeks innocence by being among children or molesting them."
Then she rose from her chair, went into the bathroom, and I heard the water running, heard her spit, heard the water splashing.
"Could you wait outside a minute, Expidee?" I said to the deputy.
"Yeah, sure," he said.
"We'll be along in a minute. Thanks for your help today."
"That fella gonna make bail, Dave?"
"Probably."
"That ain't right," he said, then he said it again as he went out the door, "Ain't right."
The bathroom door was ajar when I tapped on it. Her back was to me, her arms propped stiffly on the basin, the tap still running. She kept trying to clear her throat, as though a fine fish bone were caught in it.
I opened the door, took a clean towel out of a cabinet, and started to blot her face with it. She held her hand up almost as though I were about to strike her.
"Don't touch me with that," she said.
I set the towel on the tub, tore the top Kleenex from a box, dropped it in the waste can, then pulled out several more, balled them up, and touched at her face with them. She pushed down my wrist.
"I'm sorry. I lost it," she said.
"Don't worry bout it."
"Those children, that smell in the trunk of the car."
She made her eyes as wide as possible to hold back the tears, but it didn't work. They welled up in her brown eyes, then rolled in rivulets down her cheeks.
"It's okay, Rosie," I said, and slipped my arms around her. Her head was buried under my chin. I could feel the length of her body against mine, her back rising and falling under my palms. I could smell the strawberry shampoo in her hair, a heated fragrance like soap in her skin.
The window was open, and the wind blew the curtain into the room. Across the street on a putting green, a red flag snapped straight out on a pole that vibrated stiffly in the cup. In the first drops of rain, which slanted almost parallel to the ground, I saw a figure standing by a stagnant reed-choked pond, a roiling myrtle bush at his back. He held himself erect in the wind with his single crutch, his beard flying about his face, his mouth an O, his words lost in distant thunder. The stump of his amputated right leg was wrapped with fresh white bandages that had already turned scarlet with new bleeding.
"What are you trying to warn me of, general? Why has so much pain come back to you, sir?"
I felt Rosie twist her face against my chest, then step away from me and walk quickly out the door, picking up her handbag from a chair in one smooth motion so I could not see her face. The screen door slammed behind her.
I put everything from Doucet's trunk into evidence bags, locked the house, and got into the pickup just as a storm of hailstones burst from the sky, clattered on the cab, and bounced in tiny white geysers on the slopes of the golf course as far as the eye could see.
That night the weatherman on the ten o'clock news said that the hurricane was moving again in a nort
hwesterly direction and would probably make landfall sometime late tomorrow around Atchafalaya Bay, just to the east of us. Every offshore drilling rig in the Gulf had shut down, and the low-lying coastal areas from Grand Isle to Sabine Pass were being evacuated.
At eleven the sheriff called.
"Somebody just torched Mikey Goldman's trailer out at Spanish Lake. A gallon milk bottle of gasoline through the window with a truck flare right on top of it," he said. "You want to go out there and have a look?"
"Not really. Who's that yelling in the background?"
"Guess. I can't convince him he's lucky he wasn't in the trailer."
"Let me guess again. He wants Julie Balboni in custody."
"You must be psychic," the sheriff said. He paused. "I've got some bad news. The lab report came in late this evening. That utility knife's clean."
"Are they sure?"
"They're on the same side as we are, Dave."
"We can use testimony from the pathologist about the nature of the wounds. We can get an exhumation order if we have to."
"You're tired. I shouldn't have called tonight."
"Doucet's a monster, sheriff."
"Let's talk about it in the morning."
A sheet of gray rain was moving across my neighbor's sugarcane field toward the house, and lightning was popping in the woods behind it.
"Are you there?" he said through the static.
"We've got to pull this guy's plug in a major way."
"We'll talk with the prosecutor in the morning. Now go to bed, Dave."
After I replaced the receiver in the cradle I sat for a long time in the chair and stared out the open back door at the rain falling on the duck pond and cattails at the foot of my property. The sky seemed filled with electric lights, the wind resonant with the voices of children.
Chapter 19
The rain was deafening on the gallery in the morning. When I opened the front door, islands of pecan leaves floated in muddy pools in the yard, and a fine, sweet-smelling, cool mist blew inside the room. I could barely make out the marsh beyond the curtain of rain dancing in a wet yellow light on the bayou's surface. I put on my raincoat and hat and ran splashing through the puddles for the bait shop. Batist and I stacked all the tables, chairs, and umbrellas on the dock in the lee of the building, roped them down, hauled our boats out of the water, and bolted the shutters on the windows. Then we drank a cup of coffee and ate a fried pie together at the counter inside while the wind tried to peel the tin roof off the joists.