As I sat in the outboard on the bayou and looked at the red sky and the purple clouds in the west, the breathless air as warm as the whiskey that I raised to my lips, I knew what my father had meant.
A coon can chew through sinew and bone in a few minutes. I had a whole night to work on dismantling myself. I found a good place to do it, too—a Negro bar made of Montgomery Ward brick, set back from a dusty yellow road in a grove of oak trees, a place where they carried barber's razors, mixed bourbon in Thunderbird, and played zydeco music so loud it shook the cracked and taped glass windows in front.
Two days later a big-breasted Negro woman in a purple dress picked up my head from a puddle of beer. The sun was low in the east and shining through the window like a white flame.
"Your face ain't no mop, honey," she said, looking down at me with her hand on her hip, a lighted cigarette between her fingers.
Then her other hand went into my back pocket and took out my wallet. I reached for it impotently while she splayed it open.
"I ain't got to steal white men's money," she said. "I just waits for y'all to give it to me. But it's trick, trade, or travel, honey, and it looks like you got to travel."
She put my wallet in my shirt pocket, mashed out her cigarette in the ashtray in front of me, and dialed the phone on the bar while I remained slumped in the chair, the side of my face wet with beer, red balls of light dancing in my brain. Ten minutes later a St. Martin Parish sheriff's car drove me back to the bayou where I had tied my boat and left me standing sick and alone, like a solitary statue, in the wet weeds on the bank.
After I finally got back to the boat dock that afternoon, I asked Batist to keep Alafair until that evening and I slept for three hours on the couch under an electric fan, then got up and shaved and showered and thought I could return a degree of normalcy to my day. Instead, I went into the shakes and the dry heaves and ended up on my knees in front of the wash basin.
I got back into the shower again, sat under the cold water for fifteen minutes, brushed my teeth, dressed in a pair of clean khakis and a denim shirt, and forced myself to eat a bowl of Grape-Nuts. Even in the breeze from the electric fan, my denim shirt was spotted with sweat.
I picked up Alafair at Batist's house and took her to the home of my cousin, a retired schoolteacher, in New Iberia. I had already deserted Alafair for two days while I was on a drunk, and I felt bad about moving her again to another home, but both Batist and his wife worked and could not watch her full-time, and at that moment I wasn't in sufficient physical or emotional condition to be responsible even for myself, much less anyone else, and also the possibility existed that the killers would come back to my house again.
I asked my cousin to keep Alafair for the next two days, then I drove to the courthouse to find the sheriff. But when I parked my truck I was sweating heavily, my hands left wet prints on the steering wheel, the veins in my brain felt like twisted pieces of cord. I drove to the poolroom on Main Street, sat in the coolness of the bar under the wood-bladed fans, and drank three vodka Collinses until I felt the rawness of yesterday's whiskey go out of my chest and the tuning fork stop trembling inside me.
But I was mortgaging today for tomorrow, and tomorrow I would probably postpone the debt again, and the next day and the next, until I would be very far in arrears with a debt that would eventually present itself like an unfed snake given its choice of a wounded rabbit's parts. But at that point I guess I didn't care. Annie was dead because I couldn't leave things alone. I had quit the New Orleans police department, the bourbon-scented knight-errant who said he couldn't abide any longer the political hypocrisy and the addictive, brutal ugliness of metropolitan law enforcement, but the truth was that I enjoyed it, that I got high on my knowledge of man's iniquity, that I disdained the boredom and predictability of the normal world as much as my strange alcoholic metabolism loved the adrenaline rush of danger and my feeling of power over an evil world that in many ways was mirrored in microcosm in my own soul.
I bought a bottle of vodka to take home and didn't touch it again until the next morning.
The four inches I drank for breakfast sat in my stomach like canned heat. I had to keep wiping my face with a towel for a half hour, until I stopped sweating, then I brushed my teeth, showered, put on my cream-colored slacks, charcoal sports shirt, and gray and red striped tie, and an hour later I was sitting in the sheriff's office while he listened indecisively to what I had to say and looked peculiarly at my face.
"Are you hot? You look flushed," he said.
"Go outside. It must be ninety-five already."
He nodded absently. He scratched the blue and red lines in his soft cheek with a fingernail and pushed a paper clip around on his desk blotter. Through the glass window of the closed office door I could see his deputies doing paperwork at their desks. The building was new and had the cool, neutral, refrigerated smell of a modern office, which was the image it was intended to convey, but the deputies still looked like the raw-boned rednecks and coonasses of an earlier time and they still kept cuspidors by their desks.
"How'd you know the department had an opening?" the sheriff said.
"It was in the paper."
"It's detective rank, Dave, but eighteen thousand isn't near what you made in New Orleans. It seems to me you'd be going back to the minor leagues."
"I don't need a lot of money. I've got the boat-and-bait business, and I own my house free and clear."
"There's a couple of deputies out there who want that job. They'd resent you."
"That's their problem."
He opened his desk drawer, dropped the paper clip in it, and looked at me. The soft edges of his face flexed with the thought that had been troubling him since I had told him I wanted the job.
"I'm not going to give a man a badge so he can be an executioner," he said.
"I wouldn't need a badge for that."
"The hell you wouldn't."
"I was a good cop. I never popped a cap unless they dealt the play."
"You don't have to convince me about your past record. We're talking about now. Are you going to tell me you can investigate your own wife's murder with any objectivity?"
I licked my tongue across my lips. I could feel the vodka humming in my blood. Ease up, ease up, ease up, you're almost home, I thought.
"I was never objective in any homicide investigation," I said. "You see the handiwork and you hunt the bastards down. Then, as my old partner used to say, 'You bust 'em or grease 'em.' But I didn't cool them out, Sheriff. I brought them in when I could have left them on the sidewalk and sailed right through Internal Affairs. Look, you've got some deputies out there who probably give you the cold sweats sometimes. It's because they're amateurs. One day they'll own bars or drive trucks or just go on beating up their wives. But they're not really cops."
His eyes blinked.
"They tell you a guy resisted arrest or fell down when they put him in the car," I said. "They're supposed to bring in a hooker, but they can't ever seem to find her. You send them into a Negro neighborhood and you wonder if the town is going to be burning by midnight."
"There's another problem, too. It comes in bottles."
"If I go out of control, fire me."
"Everybody around here likes and respects you, Dave. I don't like to see a man go back to his old ways because he's trying to fly with an overload."
"I'm doing all right, Sheriff." I looked him steadily in the eyes. I didn't like to run a con on a decent man, but most of the cards in my hands were blanks.
"You look like you've been out in the sun too long," he said.
"I'm dealing with it. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. If I come in here blowing fumes in your face, pull my plug. That's all I can tell you. Where do you think those killers are now?"
"I don't know."
"They're doing a few lines, getting laid, maybe sipping juleps at the track. They feel power right now that you and I can't even guess at. I've heard them describe it as being like a h
eroin rush."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because I know how they think. I don't believe you do. Those other guys out there don't, either. You know what they did after they murdered Annie? They drove to a bar. Not the first or the second one they saw, but one way down the road where they felt safe, where they could drink Jack Daniel's and smoke cigarettes without speaking to one another, until that moment when their blood slowed and they looked in each other's eyes and started laughing."
"Look at it another way. What evidence do you have in hand?"
"The lead we dug out of the walls, the shotgun shells off the floor, the pry bar they dropped on the porch," he said.
"But not a print."
"No."
"Which means you have almost nothing. Except me. They were out to kill me, not Annie. Every aspect of the investigation will eventually center around that fact. You'll end up interviewing me every other day."
He lit a cigarette and smoked it with his elbow on the desk blotter. He looked through the door glass at the deputies in the outer office. One of them leaned to the side of his desk and spit tobacco juice into a cuspidor.
"I'll have to run it by a couple of other people, but I don't think there'll be any trouble," he said. "But you don't work on just this one case, Dave. You carry a regular load just like the other detectives and you go by the same rules."
"All right."
He puffed on his cigarette and widened his eyes in the smoke, as though dismissing some private concerns from his mind, then he watched my expression closely and said, "Who do you think did it?"
"I don't know."
"You told me that the day after it happened, and I accepted that. But you've had a lot of time to think in the last ten days. I can't believe you haven't come to some conclusion. I wouldn't want to feel you're being less than honest here, and that maybe you're going to try to operate on your own after all."
"Sheriff, I gave motive to any number or combination of people. The bartender at Smiling Jack's is the kind of vicious punk who could blow out your light and drink a beer while he was doing it. I not only ran his head into a window fan and cocked a .45 between his eyes, I turned Bubba Rocque loose on him and made him get out of New Orleans. I messed up Eddie Keats with a pool cue in front of his whores, and I went into Bubba Rocque's house and told him I was going to put my finger in his eye if I found out he sent Keats and the Haitian after me."
"Maybe it was Toot and a guy I don't know. Maybe it was two contract men Bubba or Keats brought in from out of state. Maybe it's somebody out of the past. Once in a while they get out of Angola and keep their promises."
"New Orleans thinks the bartender went to the Islands."
"Maybe, but I doubt it. He's a rat, and a rat goes into a hole. He's more afraid of Bubba than he is of cops. I don't believe he'll be walking around on a beach anywhere. Besides, he's a mama's boy. He probably won't run far from home."
"I'll be truthful with you, Dave. I don't know where to start on this one. We just don't have this kind of crime around here. I sent two deputies to question Keats, and he picked his nose in front of them and told them to bust him or beat feet. His bartender and one of his hookers said he was in the club when Annie was killed."
"Did they question the bartender and the hooker separately?"
He looked away from me. "I don't know," he said.
"That's all right. We can talk to them again."
"I went out to Bubba Rocque's myself. I don't know what to think about a guy like that. You could scratch a match on those eyes and I don't think they'd blink. I remember thirty years ago when he was a kid and he dropped a fly ball in the city park and lost the game for his side. After the game he was eating a snowcone and his daddy slapped it out of his hand and hit him across the ear. His eyes didn't show any more feeling than a couple of zinc pennies."
"What did he tell you?"
"He was home asleep."
"What'd his wife say?"
"She said she was in New Orleans that night. So Bubba doesn't have an alibi."
"He knows he doesn't need one yet. Bubba's a lot smarter than Eddie Keats."
"He said he was sorry about Annie. I think maybe he meant it, Dave."
"Maybe."
"You think he's bad through and through, don't you?"
"Yep."
"I guess I just don't have your mileage."
I started to tell him that any cop who gave the likes of Bubba Rocque an even break would probably not earn much mileage, but fortunately I kept my own counsel and simply asked when I could get a badge.
"Two or three days," he answered. "In the meantime, take it easy. We'll get these guys sooner or later."
As I said, he was a decent man, but the Rotary Club had a larger claim on his soul than the sheriff's department. The fact is that most criminals are not punished for their crimes. In New York City only around two percent of the crimes are punished, and in Miami the figure is about four percent. If you want to meet a group of people who have a profound distrust of, and hostility toward, our legal system, don't waste your time on political radicals; interview a random selection of crime victims, and you'll probably find that they make the former group look like Utopian idealists by comparison.
I shook hands with him and walked out into the hazy noon-day heat and humidity. In the meadows along the road, cattle were bunched in the hot shade of the oak trees, and white egrets were pecking in the dried cow flop out in the grass. I pulled my tie loose, wiped my forehead on my shirt sleeve, and looked at the long wet streaks on the cloth.
Fifteen minutes later I was in a dark, cool bar south of town, a cold, napkin-wrapped collins glass in my hand. But I couldn't stop perspiring.
Vodka is an old friend to most clandestine drunks. It has neither odor nor color, and it can be mixed with virtually anything without the drinker being detected. But its disadvantage for a whiskey drinker like me was that it went down so smoothly, so innocuously, in glasses filled with crushed ice and fruit slices and syrup and candied cherries, that I could drink almost a fifth of it before I realised that I had gone numb from my hairline to the soles of my feet.
"Didn't you say you had to leave here at four?" the bartender asked.
"Sure."
He glanced up at the illuminated clock on the wall above the bar. I tried to focus my eyes on the hands and numbers. I pressed my palm absently to my shirt pocket.
"I guess I left my glasses in my truck," I said.
"It's five after."
"Call me a cab, will you? You mind if I leave my truck in your lot awhile?"
"How long?" He was washing glasses, and he didn't look at me when he spoke and his voice had the neutral tone that bartenders use to suppress the disdain they feel for some of the people whom they serve.
"I'll probably get it tomorrow."
He didn't bother to answer. He called a cab and went back to washing glasses in the aluminum sink.
Ten minutes later my cab arrived. I finished my drink and set it on the bar.
"I'll send somebody for my truck, podna," I said to the bartender.
I rode back to my house in the cab, packed two changes of clothes in my suitcase, got Batist to drive me to the airport in Lafayette, and by six-thirty I was aboard a commercial flight to Key West, by way of Miami, the late red sun reflecting like pools of fire among the clouds.
I sipped from my second double Beam and soda and looked down at the dark blue and turquoise expanse of water off the western tip of the island, where the Gulf and the Atlantic met, and at the waves sliding across the coral reefs below the surface and breaking against the beaches that were as white as ground diamond. The four-engine plane dipped, made a wide turn out over the water, then flattened out for its approach to the airport, and I could see the narrow strip of highway that ran from Key West to Miami, the coconut palms along the beaches, the lagoons full of sailboats and yachts, the kelp rising in the groundswell, the waves bursting in geysers of foam at the ends of the jetties, and t
hen suddenly the tree-lined and neon-lit streets of Key West in the last red wash of sunset.
It was a town of ficus, sea grape, mahogany and umbrella trees, coconut and royal palms, hanging geraniums, Confederate jasmine, and bougainvillea that bloomed as brightly as blood. The town was built on sand and coral, surrounded by water, the wooden buildings eventually made paintless and gray by salt air. At one time or another it has been home to Indians, Jean Lafitte's pirates, salvagers who deliberately lured commercial ships onto the reefs so they could gut the wrecks, James Audubon, rum runners, Cuban political exiles, painters, homosexuals, dope smugglers, and burnt-out street people who had been pushed so far down in the continent now that they had absolutely no place else to go.
It was a town of clapboard and screened-in beer joints, raw-oyster bars, restaurants that smelled of conch fritters and boiled shrimp and deep-fried red snapper, clearings in the pine trees where fishermen stacked their lobster traps, nineteenth-century brick warehouses and government armories, and shady streets lined with paintless shotgun houses with wooden shutters and sagging galleries. The tourists were gone now because of the summer heat, and the streets were almost empty in the twilight; the town had gone back into itself. The cabdriver had to buy gas on the way to the motel, and I looked out the window at some elderly Negro men sitting on crates in front of a tiny grocery store, at the ficus roots that cracked the sidewalks into concrete peaks, at the dusky purple light on the brick streets and the darkening trees overhead, and for just a moment it was as though I had not left New Iberia, had not taken another step deeper into my problems.
But I had.
I checked into a motel on the southern tip of the island and had a fifth of Beam and a small bucket of ice sent to the room. I had a couple of hits with water, then showered and dressed. Through my window I could see the palm trees thrashing on the deserted beach and the light dying on the horizon. The water had turned as dark as burgundy, and waves were pitching upward against a coral reef that formed a small harbor for a half-dozen sailboats. I opened the glass jalousies wide to let the cool breeze into the room, then I walked downtown to Duval Street and my friend's restaurant where Robin worked as a waitress.