"Sorry to drag you out, Dave, but the grandmother has been yelling at me over the phone all day," Helen said. "I made a couple of calls, and it looks like she's telling the truth. The girl's not the kind to take off and not tell anybody."
A black waitress had left the club with a white man the night before; she never returned home, nor did she report to work the next day. The grandmother worked as a cook in the club's kitchen and lived in a small frame house a hundred yards down the road. She was a plump, gray-haired woman with a strange skin disease that had eaten white and pink discolorations in her hands, and she was virtually hysterical with anger and grief.
"We'll find her. I promise you," Helen said as we stood in the woman's dirt yard, looking up at her on her tiny, lighted gallery.
"Then why ain't you looking right now? How come it takes all day to get y'all out here?" she said.
"Tell me what the man looked like one more time," I said.
"Got a brand-new Lincoln car. Got a pink face shaped like an egg. Got hair that ain't blond or red, somewhere in between, and he comb it straight back."
"Why did she go off with him?" I asked.
'"Cause she's seventeen years old and don't listen. 'Cause she got this on her hands, just like me, and reg'lar mens don't pay her no mind. That answer your question?"
Helen drove us back down the dirt road through the fields to the state highway. The night was humid, layered with smoke from stubble fires, and the stars looked blurred with mist in the sky. We passed the LaRose company store, then the plantation itself. All three floors of the house were lighted, the columned porch decorated with pumpkins and scarecrows fashioned from cane stalks and straw hats. In a back pasture, behind a railed fence, horses were running in the moonlight, as though spooked by an impending storm or the rattle of dry poppy husks in the wind.
"What's on your mind?" Helen asked.
"The description of the white man sounds like Mingo Bloomberg."
"I thought he was in City Prison in New Orleans."
"He is. Or at least he was."
"What would he be doing back around here?"
"Who knows why these guys do anything, Helen? I'll get on it in the morning."
I looked back over my shoulder at the LaRose house, the glitter of a chandelier through velvet curtains, a flood-lighted gazebo hooded with Confederate jasmine and orange trumpet vine.
"Forget those people. They wouldn't spit on either one of us unless we had something they wanted. Hey, you listening to me, Streak?" Helen said, and hit me hard on the arm with the back of her hand.
I got up early the next morning, left a message on Clete Purcel's answering machine, then drove back to the grandmother's house by the nightclub. The girl, whose name was Barbara Lavey, had still not returned home. I sat in my truck by the front of the grandmother's house and looked at the notes in my notebook. For some reason I drew a circle around the girl's name. I had a feeling I would see it on a case file for a long time.
The grandmother had gone back inside and I had forgotten her. Suddenly she was at the passenger door window. Her glasses fell down on her nose when she leaned inside.
"I'm sorry I was unpolite yestiday. I know you working on it. Here's somet'ing for you and the lady," she said. She placed a brown paper bag swollen with pecans in my hand.
The sun was still low in the eastern sky when I approached the LaRose plantation. I saw Buford, naked to the waist, in a railed lot by the barn, with a half dozen dark-skinned men who were dressed in straw hats coned on the brims and neckerchiefs and cowboy boots and jeans molded to their buttocks and thighs.
I knew I should keep going, not put my hand again into whatever it was that drove Karyn and Buford's ambitions, not fuel their anger, not give them a handle on an Internal Affairs investigation, but I was never good at taking my own counsel and I could feel the lie she had told turning in my chest like a worm.
I turned into the drive, passed a row of blue-green poplars on the side of the house, and parked by the back lot. A balmy wind, smelling of rain, was blowing hard across the cane acreage, and a dozen roan horses with brands burned deep into the hair were running in the lot, turning against one another, rattling against the railed fence, their manes twisted with fire in the red sunrise.
When I stepped out of the truck, Buford was smiling at me. His skin-tight white polo pants were flecked with mud and tucked inside his polished riding boots. His eyes looked serene, his face pleasant and cool with the freshness of the morning.
I almost extended my hand.
He looked at the sunrise over my shoulder.
'"Red sky at dawn, sailor be forewarned,'" he said. But he was smiling when he said it.
"I shouldn't be here, but I needed to tell you to your face the charges your wife made are fabricated. That's as kind as I can say it."
"Oh, that stuff. She's dropping it, Dave. Let's put that behind us."
"Excuse me?"
"It's over. Come take a look at my horses."
I looked at him incredulously.
"She slandered someone's name," I said.
He blew out his breath. "You and my wife were intimate. She probably still bears you a degree of resentment. The god Eros was never a rational influence, Dave. At the same time she doesn't want to see my campaign compromised because you've developed this crazy notion about Aaron Crown being railroaded. So she let both her imagination and her impetuosity cause her to do something foolish. We're sorry for whatever harm we've done you."
I cupped my hand on a fence rail, felt the hardness of the wood in my palm, tried to see my thoughts in my head before I spoke.
"I get the notion I'm in a therapy session," I said.
"If you were, you'd get a bill."
The back door of the house opened, and a slender, white-haired man with a pixie face, one wrinkled with the parchment lines of a chronic cigarette smoker, stepped out into the wind and waved at Buford. He wore a navy blue sports jacket with brass buttons and a champagne-colored silk scarf. I knew the face but I couldn't remember from where.
"I'll be just a minute, Clay," Buford called. Then to me, "Would you like to join us for breakfast?"
"No, thanks."
"How about a handshake, then?"
Two of the wranglers were yelling at each other in Spanish as the horses swirled around them in the lot. One had worked a hackamore over a mare's head and the other was trying to fling a blanket and saddle on her back.
"No? Stay and watch me get my butt thrown, then," Buford said.
"You were born for it."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The political life. You've got ice water in your veins," I said.
"You see that dead oak yonder? Two men were lynched there by my ancestors. When I went after Aaron Crown, I hoped maybe I could atone a little for what happened under that tree."
"It makes a great story."
"You're a classic passive-aggressive, Dave, no offense meant. You feign the role of liberal and humanist, but Bubba and Joe Bob own your heart."
"So long, Buford," I said, and walked back to my truck. The wind splayed and flattened the poplar trees against Buford's house. When I looked back over my shoulder, he was mounted on the mare's back, one hand twisted in the mane, the hackamore sawed back in the other, his olive-tan torso anointed with the sun's cool light, sculpted with the promise of perfection that only Greek gods know.
Later, Clete Purcel returned my call and told me Mingo Bloomberg had been sprung from City Prison three days ago by attorneys who worked for Jerry Joe Plumb, also known as Short Boy Jerry, Jerry Ace, and Jerry the Glide.
But even as I held the receiver in my hand, I couldn't concentrate on Clete's words about Mingo's relationship to a peculiar player in the New Orleans underworld. The dispatcher had just walked through my open door and handed me a memo slip with the simple message written on it: Call the Cap up at the zoo re: Crown. He says urgent.
It took twenty minutes to get him on the phone.
"You w
as right. I should have listened to you. A bunch of the black boys caught him in the tool shack this morning," the captain said.
He'd had to walk from the field and he breathed hard into the telephone.
"Is he dead?" I asked.
"You got it turned around. He killed two of them sonsofbitches with his bare hands and liked to got a third with a cane knife. That old man's a real shitstorm, ain't he?"
CHAPTER 7
bootsie alafair and I were eating supper in the kitchen that evening when the phone rang on the counter. Bootsie got up to answer it. Outside, the clouds in the west were purple and strung with curtains of rain.
Then I heard her say, "Before I give the phone to Dave, could you put Karyn on? I left her a couple of messages, but she probably didn't have time to call. . . I see . . . When will she be back? . . . Could you ask her to call me, Buford? I've really wanted to talk with her . . . Oh, you know, those things she said about Dave to the sheriff. . . Hang on now, here's Dave."
She handed me the phone.
"Buford?" I said.
"Yes." His voice sounded as though someone had just wrapped a strand of piano wire around his throat.
"You all right?" I said.
"Yes, I'm fine, thanks . . . You heard about Crown?" he said.
"A guard at the prison told me."
"Does this give you some idea of his potential?"
"I hear they were cruising for it."
"He broke one guy's neck. He drowned the other one in a barrel of tractor oil," he said.
"I couldn't place your friend this morning. He's Clay Mason, isn't he? What are you doing with him, partner?"
"None of your business."
"That guy was the P. T. Barnum of the acid culture."
"As usual, your conclusions are as wrong as your information."
He hung up the phone. I sat back down at the table.
"You really called Karyn LaRose?" I asked.
"Why? Do you object?" she said.
"No."
She put a piece of chicken in her mouth and looked at me while she chewed. My stare broke.
"I wish I hadn't gone out to see her, Boots."
"He's mixed up with that guru from the sixties?" she said.
"Who knows? The real problem is one nobody cares about."
She waited.
"Aaron Crown had no motivation to kill Ely Dixon. I'm more and more convinced the wrong man's in prison," I said.
"He was in the Klan, Dave."
"They kicked him out. He busted up a couple of them with a wood bench inside a Baptist church."
But why, I thought.
It was a question that only a few people in the Louisiana of the 1990s could answer.
His name was Billy Odom and he ran a junkyard on a stretch of state highway west of Lafayette. Surrounded by a floodplain of emerald green rice fields, the junkyard seemed an almost deliberate eyesore that Billy had lovingly constructed over the decades from rusted and crushed car bodies, mountains of bald tires, and outbuildings festooned with silver hubcaps.
Like Aaron Crown, he was a north Louisiana transplant, surrounded by papists, blacks who could speak French, and a historical momentum that he had not been able to shape or influence or dent in any fashion. His face was as round as a moonpie under his cork sun helmet, split with an incongruous smile that allowed him to hide his thoughts while he probed for the secret meaning that lay in the speech of others. A Confederate flag, almost black with dirt, was nailed among the yellowed calendars on the wall of the shed where he kept his office. He kept licking his lips, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes squinting as though he were staring through smoke.
"A fight in a church? I don't call it to mind," he said.
"You and Aaron were in the same klavern, weren't you?"
His eyes shifted off my face, studied the motes of dust spinning in a shaft of sunlight. He cocked his head philosophically but said nothing.
"Why'd y'all run him off?" I asked.
'"Cause the man don't have the sense God give an earthworm."
"Come on, Billy."
"He used to make whiskey and put fertilizer in the mash. That's where I think he got that stink at. His old woman left him for a one-legged blind man."
"You want to help him, Billy, or see him hung out to dry at Angola?"
His hands draped over his thighs. He studied the backs of them.
"It was 'cause of the girl. His daughter, what's her name, Sabelle, the one runs the bar down at the Underpass."
"I don't follow you."
"The meeting was at a church house. She wasn't but a girl then, waiting outside in the pickup truck. Two men was looking out the window at her. They didn't know Crown was sitting right behind them.
"One goes, 'I hear that's prime.'
"The other one goes, 'It ain't bad. But you best carry a ball of string to find your way back out.'
"That's when Crown put the wood to them. Then he tore into them with his boots. It taken four of us to hold him down."
"You kicked him out of the Klan for defending his daughter?" I said.
Billy Odom pried a pale splinter out of his grease-darkened desk and scratched lines in his skin with it.
"When they're young and cain't keep their panties on, the old man's in it somewhere," he said.
"What?"
"Everybody had suspicioned it. Then a woman from the welfare caught him at it and told the whole goddamn town. That's how come Crown moved down here."
"Aaron and his daughter?" I said.
The man who had seen the accident did not report it for almost three days, not until his wife was overcome with guilt herself and went to a priest and then with her husband to the St. Martin Parish sheriff's office.
Helen Soileau and I stood on the levee by a canal that rimmed Henderson Swamp and watched a diver in a wetsuit pull the steel hook and cable off the back of a wrecker, wade out into the water by a row of bridge pilings, sinking deeper into a balloon of silt, then disappear beneath the surface. The sky was blue overhead, the moss on the dead cypress lifting in the breeze, the sun dancing on the sandbars and the deep green of the willow islands. When a uniformed sheriff's deputy kicked the winch into gear and the cable clanged tight on the car's frame, a gray cloud of mud churned to the surface like a fat man's fist.
Helen walked up on the wood bridge that spanned the canal, rubbed her shoe on one unrailed edge, and walked back down on the levee again. The front tires of the submerged car, which lay upside down, broke through a tangle of dead hyacinths.
The man who had seen the accident sat on the levee with his wife at his side. He wore a greasy cap, with the bill pulled low over his eyes.
"Go through it again," I said.
He had to crane his head upward, into the sunlight, when he spoke.
"It was dark. I was walking back to the camp from that landing yonder. There wasn't no moon. I didn't see everything real good," he replied. His wife looked at the steel cable straining against the automobile's weight, her face vaguely ashamed, the muscles collapsed.
"Yes, you did," I said.
"He fishtailed off the levee when he hit the bridge, and the car went in. The headlights was on, way down at the bottom of the canal."
"Then what happened?" I asked.
He flexed his lips back on his teeth, as though he were dealing with a profound idea.
"The man floated up in the headlights. Then he come up the levee, right up to the hard road where I was at. He was all wet and walking fast." He turned his face out of the sunlight again, retreated back into the shade of his cap.
I tapped the edge of my shoe against his buttock.
"You didn't report an accident. If we find anything in that car we shouldn't, you'd better be in our good graces. You with me on this?" I said.
His wife, who wore a print-cotton dress that bagged on her wide shoulders, whispered close to his face while her hand tried to find his.
"He tole me to forget what I seen," the man said. "He put
his mout' right up against mine when he said it. He grabbed me. In a private place, real hard." The flush on the back of his neck spread into his hairline.
"What did he look like?" Helen said.
"He was a white man, that's all I know. He'd been drinking whiskey. I could smell it on his mout'. I ain't seen him good 'cause the moon was down."