“You’re sure Theo wasn’t part of Fat Sammy’s action?” I said.
“Ever see one of Fat Sammy’s films?”
“No.”
“You don’t want to,” he said. “Let’s go inside. Clete needs to drive me and my daughter to the airport in Lafayette. I’m buying a Mexican restaurant in San Antonio. You get to town, have a free dinner on me.”
“You’re a stand-up guy, Phil.”
“I’m out of the life. I’m a millionaire. What’s a few bucks to show some gratitude?”
I started to say something else, but he cut me off.
“I got your drift. Give it a rest,” he said.
I drove back to my house on East Main and tried to put the LeJeune family and Junior Crudup out of my mind, but I couldn’t rest. I did not believe Max Coll killed Will Guillot, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that Castille LeJeune had been unduly happy when I went to his home, as though with a broad sweep of a broom he had gotten rid of a large problem in his life. In fact, I believed Castille LeJeune was about to get away with at least one if not two additional homicides.
And I also felt I had a problem of conscience about Theo Flannigan. I had falsely accused her of involvement in the shooting of the daiquiri-store operator and the production of pornographic films.
In fact, I rued the day I had ever heard of the LeJeunes or Junior Crudup.
On top of my more elevated level of problems, Batist stopped by the house with another one, namely Tripod, Alafair’s three-legged raccoon, whom Batist carried up on the gallery inside Tripod’s wood-frame hutch.
“Cain’t keep him at my house no mo’,” he said.
“Why can’t you?” I asked, looking down at Tripod, who was standing up in the hutch, his claws hooked on the wire screen, his whiskered snout pointed at me.
“He’s old, like me. He went to the bat’room on the kitchen flo’,” Batist said.
“Thanks, Batist.”
“You welcome,” he replied, and drove off.
I opened the wire door on Tripod’s hutch and he stepped out on the floor and looked up at me. “How’s it hangin, ’Pod?” I said.
He responded by running into the kitchen and eating Snuggs’s food out of the pet bowl.
But I could not distract myself from my problems with the world of play and innocence represented by animals. I wanted to believe I’d been dealt a bad hand. There was even some truth in my self-serving conclusion. But unfortunately I had dealt the hand to myself, beginning with the day I stepped into the unsolved disappearance of Junior Crudup, a man who had probably sought self-immolation all his life.
I called Theo at her house and apologized for my accusation.
“Drunks are always sorry. But they do it over and over again,” she said.
“Could you define ‘it,’ please?”
“Acting like an asshole.”
“I see.”
“Have you apologized to my father?” she asked.
“Are you serious?” I said.
She hung up.
I called Helen Soileau at the department and told her I’d been wrong about Theo.
“How’d you clear her?” she asked.
“A porn actor told me a guy named Ray, as in William Raymond Guillot, was responsible for lifting material from Theo’s books for Sammy Figorelli’s movies. Theo had nothing to do with it.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
“Can you get another warrant to search Castille LeJeune’s property?”
“No.”
“I want to resign from the department, Helen. I’ll have a formal letter on your desk by tomorrow.”
“That’s the way you want it?”
“Absolutely.”
“I love you, bwana, but I don’t trust you. And I…”
“What?”
“Want to kill you sometimes.”
I got in my truck and backed into East Main. The bamboo and gardens in front of the Shadows breathed with mist that blew into the street, and as I looked at the old, massive brick post office on the corner, where a Creole man sold sno’balls and chunks of sugarcane off a canopy-shaded wagon when I was a kid, and as I watched the traffic turn at the next light onto the drawbridge, just past the Evangeline Theater where my father, mother, and I went to see cowboy movies in the 1940s, I had the feeling, not imagined, not emotional in nature, that I would never see any of these places or things again.
Chapter 28
As I approached Fox Run I could see sleet marching across the barren cane fields on the far side of the Teche, the same fields where Junior and Woodrow Reed labored a half century ago under the watchful eyes of Boss Posey and the other mounted gunbulls, all of them, one way or another, controlled by the man who lived across the bayou in the great white house that resembled a Mississippi paddle-wheeler.
I parked by the carriage house. The automobiles were gone and even though the sky was dark, no lights burned inside the main house. I dropped my cell phone in the pocket of my raincoat and walked down the slope toward the bayou, where the yellow bulldozer sat, huge, mud smeared, and clicking with soft white hail.
Helen had said we were looking for Dagwood and Blondie, whose advantage was they did not feel guilty and hence hid in plain sight. But amateur criminals have another kind of problem, one that professionals do not. They’re arrogant and they presume. They’re psychologically incapable of believing the system was not constructed to benefit them, and consequently they cannot imagine themselves standing in front of a law-and-order judge who can send them away for decades.
The bulldozer blade was partially raised, the tractor-treads pressed deeply into the earth, fanning back off the rear of the dozer in patterns like horse tails, as though the operator had been involved intensely with one particular area of repair rather than the entire environment. The keys were hanging from the ignition. I turned over the engine, revved the gas once, and clanked the transmission into reverse. As I backed up the dozer, a different kind of topography began to emerge from under the suspended blade—an unevenly filled depression, one that had not been graded and tamped down, so that the surface was spiked with severed tree roots and ground-up divots of grass.
I dropped the blade, shifted into forward gear, and raked off the top layer of the depression, then backed up again so I could see where the blade had cut. The dirt was loose, sinking where there were air pockets, water oozing from the subsoil that had been compressed by the weight of the tractor-treads. I dropped the blade lower, this time cutting much deeper into the hole, trundling up a huge, curled pile of mud, blue clay, and feeder roots that looked like torn cobweb. But this time, when I backed off the hole, I saw something I hoped I would not find.
I cut the engine, pulled loose a shovel that was behind the seat, and walked around the front of the blade to a spot where a human arm, shoulder, and the curved back of a hand protruded from the soil, the hail rolling down the sides of the depression, pooling around them.
I pushed the shovel under the back of the person and wedged the torso and the face free from the soil. The skin had turned a bluish gray, either in the water or because of the clay in the alluvial fan of the bayou, but his eyes were open and still emerald green, his small ears tight against the scalp, his shoulders somehow far too narrow for the violent and dangerous man he had once been.
There were entrance wounds in his face, under one arm, and in his left temple.
I speared the shovel blade into the clay and reached for the cell phone in my raincoat pocket, just as the cell phone began ringing. I flipped it open and placed it against my ear. “Dave Robicheaux,” I said.
“Are you trying to avoid me?” a woman’s voice said.
The hail was hitting hard on my hat and the steel frame of the bulldozer and I could hardly hear her. “Ms. Parks, I’m no longer with the sheriff’s department. You need to call—”
“I found a diary under Lori’s mattress. There were hearts all over the last page and drawings of a man’s face. It wasn’t some kid?
??s face, either. There was a phone number, too.” Her voice was starting to crack. “You know who that number belongs to?”
“No, I don’t.”
“A pipeline company in Lafayette. It’s owned by that man who lives in that phony piece of medieval shit across from the junk yard.”
“Say his name, Ms. Parks.”
“Flannigan. Merchie Flannigan. I’m filing charges for statutory rape.”
“Ms. Parks, Lori might have known someone who simply worked at the pipeline company.”
“This number goes into Flannigan’s office. It’s his extension. Why are you covering up for him? I hate you people,” she said.
She was obviously still drunk, but I couldn’t fault her for her rage. Her daughter had burned to death in an automobile after being sold liquor illegally, and her husband, who had survived a tour as a combat medic, had been killed with impunity by Will Guillot, the investigation written off by a cop on a pad. But family survivors of homicide victims are seldom mentioned in follow-up news stories, even though the grief they carry is like the daily theft of sunlight from their lives.
The window on my cell phone cleared. Donna Parks was off the line now, but either because of the weather or my location I was losing service as I tried to punch in a 911 call. I heard someone’s feet crunch on the hailstones behind me.
“You must have been a Marine, Mr. Robicheaux. I think you’re the most determined man I’ve ever met.”
I turned and looked into the face of Castille LeJeune. He wore a silver shooting jacket, one with ammunition loops sewn on the sleeves, a flat-brimmed, pearl-gray Stetson hat, and khaki trousers tucked inside fur-lined, half-topped boots. In his right hand he held a blue-black revolver with walnut grips. But he did not point it at me. Up on the slope, by the carriage house, I could see Merchie Flannigan’s Mercedes.
“You got the jump on me, Mr. LeJeune. You and your son-in-law just pull in?” I said.
“The question is what do I do with you, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“You didn’t just pop ole Max, did you? You executed him.”
“Could I see your search warrant?”
“Don’t happen to have it with me.”
“Ah.”
“Merchie has been screwing both you and your daughter, Mr. LeJeune. He stole a single-action Army colt from Will Guillot and used it to kill the daiquiri store operator. Then he threw the gun down so we’d put it on Guillot and by extension on you and your enterprises.”
“Why would he kill a liquor salesman?”
“Merchie was banging a seventeen-year-old girl by the name of Lori Parks. She died in a car wreck after she bought booze from a drive-by store you own.”
I could see the connections coming together in LeJeune’s eyes. Behind him Merchie Flannigan was walking down the slope, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, his shoulders hunched under an Australian flop hat.
LeJeune glanced over his shoulder, then focused on my face again. “You uncovered evidence in a homicide without a warrant, which destroys the probative value of the discovery,” he said. “But you’re not a stupid man. Something else is going on here. You quit the sheriff’s department, didn’t you?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “We’ve got your ass in the bear trap, Mr. LeJeune. How’s it feel?” I said, and actually laughed.
Up on the slope I saw Theodosha Flannigan park her Lexus and walk into the front of the house, carrying a guitar case.
“Open your coat,” LeJeune said, raising his pistol toward my chest. “Use your left hand, unsnap the strap on your sidearm, and drop it on the ground.”
“Nope,” I said.
“Say again?”
“A police officer never surrenders his weapon.”
“You’re not a police officer anymore.”
“Old habits die hard.”
I’d like to say my behavior was brave, my principles inviolate, but in reality I didn’t feel personally threatened by Castille LeJeune. He didn’t care enough about me or the social class I represented to hate or fear me, and in all probability he still retained some of the fatalistic views that had allowed him to survive the Korean War as a decorated combat pilot. The system had served him for a lifetime—why should it fail him now?
But on another level I misjudged him. He could abide a professional enemy such as myself, but treachery inside the castle walls was another matter. He pulled back my coat, removed my .45 from the clip-on holster I wore, and tossed it in the mud.
Merchie Flannigan was standing now on the rim of the depression, his face disjointed as he stared down at the half-exhumed body of Max Coll. “Who’s this dead guy? What’s happening here?” he said.
“You were having an affair with a seventeen-year-old girl?” LeJeune said.
“Hold on, there, Castille,” Merchie said.
“I always told Theo you were trash, with your blow-dried hair and Thesaurus vocabulary. You shot my sales person at the drive-by window?”
“I think I’m going to boogie and let you and Dave work it out. Maybe y’all can tell each other war stories. But I’d say from the looks of things here, you’re genuinely fucked, Castille,” he said, and began walking back up the slope.
The temperature had dropped, and the air was bitter, like the taste of copper coins, the tin roofs of the old convict cabins speckled with frost. I could see a lump of cartilage working in LeJeune’s jaw. Merchie was halfway up the slope when LeJeune raised the revolver and fired three times, pop, pop, pop.
Either his hand shook from cold or anger or he was simply not a good shot, because he missed with all three rounds, and I heard the bullets break glass in the French doors that gave onto his patio.
Merchie ran past the carriage house and down the drive, hunkered low, the brim of his Australian flop hat angled down over his neck. I walked up behind LeJeune, slipping my hand down his forearm, removing the revolver from his grasp.
“You killed Will Guillot and were going to put it on Max Coll?” I said.
“I have nothing more to say,” he replied.
“Guillot killed both Bernstine and Sammy Figorelli and took a shot at me, didn’t he?”
“Can’t help you, sir,” he replied.
Up at the house there was no sound or any movement behind a window or the French doors. I snicked open the cylinder on LeJeune’s revolver, ejected all the shells into my palm, then retrieved my .45 from the mud.
“My vision isn’t very good anymore. You know I tied Ted Williams’ gunnery record? Highest ever set by a Marine or Navy aviator. That’s God’s honest truth,” he said.
“I believe you. Better take a walk with me,” I said, punching in 911 on my cell with my thumb.
“Of course. We’re going up to my house. I’ll fix coffee for us. I have no personal feelings about this,” he said.
He walked up the slope beside me, his chin lifted, his hands stuck in the pockets of his silver shooting jacket, his nostrils flaring as he breathed in the fresh coldness of the afternoon. I studied the back of the house, but still there was no movement inside. I felt LeJeune’s attention suddenly refocus itself on the side of my face.
“Why are you so somber, Mr. Robicheaux? It should be a red-letter day for you,” he said.
“My father taught me to hunt, Mr. LeJeune. He used to say, ‘Don’t be shooting at nothin’ you cain’t see on the other side of, no.’ He was a simple man, but I always admired his humanity and remembered his words.”
“As always, your second meaning eludes me.”
“Is that Theo’s car in the driveway?”
He stared at the rear end of the Lexus that protruded just past the edge of the carriage house. His eyes began to water and he rushed across the patio through a cluster of winter-killed potted plants and tore open the French doors.
Theodosha Flannigan sat in an antique chair, with a crimson pad inset in the back, her guitar perched on her lap, her trimmed fingernails like shavings from seashell, her knees close together, at a slight ladylike angle, her mou
th parted in mild surprise, a hole with a tiny trickle running from it in the center of her forehead.
Through the front window I saw a half dozen emergency vehicles turn off the state road and come roaring up the drive through the long tunnel of live oaks, their flashers beating with light and color, their sirens muted, as though the drivers were afraid they might wake the dead.
Epilogue
My daughter Alafair and I flew to Key West for Christmas and hired a charter boat I could scarcely afford and scuba-dived Seven Mile Reef. The water was green, like lime Jell-O, with patches of hot blue floating in it, the reef swarming with baitfish and the barracuda that fed off them. At sundown we set the outriggers and trolled for a stray marlin or wahoo as we headed back into port, the gulls wheeling and squeaking over our wake, the sun bloodred as it descended into the Gulf.
Alafair looked beautiful in her wetsuit, her body as sleek and hard and tapered as a seal’s, her Indian-black hair flecked with seaweed. As she stood in the stern, watching our baited hooks skip over our wake, she reminded me of Theo Flannigan and all the innocent victims of violence everywhere, here, in this country, where friends clasped hands and leaped from flaming windows into the bottomless canyons of New York City, or in the Mideast, where a storm of ballistic missiles and guided bombs would rain down upon people little different from you and me.
But it was the season of Christ’s birthday and I did not want to dwell upon all the corporate greed and theological fanaticism that had rooted itself in the modern world. We attended Mass in a church James Audubon had sat in, strolled Duval Street among revelers with New York accents, ate dinner at a Cuban cafe by the water under a ficus tree threaded with Christmas lights, and visited the home of Ernest Hemingway down on Whitehead Street. The sun was gone, the sky full of light, the incoming tide wine dark against the horizon, and bottle rockets fired from Mallory Square were popping in pink fountains high above the waves. How had Hemingway put it? The world was a fine place, and well worth the fighting for.