I walked down on the bank of the bayou and sailed the chain out into the middle of the current. Then I stooped by the cattails in the shallows and scrubbed my palms with water and sand. Dragonflies hovered over the cattails, and I saw a cottonmouth slide off a log and swim into the lily pads. I pushed my hands into the sand, and water, clouded around my wrists. I walked back up onto the bank with my hands dripping at my sides and wiped them on the grass, then I took a cloth out of the toolbox and wiped them again.
The ramshackle general store at the four corners was dark and cool inside, the wood-bladed ceiling fan turning over the counter. I bought a sack of apples for Alafair's horse, some sliced ham, cheese, and French bread for our lunch, and two soda pops to drink out on the gallery. The sun was brilliant on the white shale parking lot, and through the trees across the road I could see a Negro man cane fishing in a pirogue close in to the cypress roots.
We went back to the house, and Alafair helped me weed my hydrangea and rose beds. Our knees were wet and dirty, our arms covered with fine grains of black dirt. My flower beds were thick with night crawlers, all of them close to the surface after the rain, and when we ripped weeds from the soil, they writhed pale and fat in the hard light. I knew almost nothing of Alafair's life before she came to Annie and me, but work must have been a natural part of it, because she treated almost any task that I gave her as a game and did it enthusiastically in a happy and innocent way. She worked her way through the rosebushes on all fours, pinging the weeds and Johnsongrass loudly in the bucket, a smear of dirt above one eye brow. The smell of the hydrangeas and the wet earth was so strong and fecund it was almost like a drug. Then the breeze came up and blew through the pecan trees in the front yard; out on the edge of the trees' shade my neighbor's water sprinkler spun in the sunlight and floated across my fence in a rainbow mist.
They came just before noon. The two Lafayette plainclothes detectives were in an unmarked car, followed by the Iberia Parish sheriff, who drove a patrol car. They parked next to my truck and walked across the dead pecan leaves toward me. Both of the plain-clothes were big men who left their coats in the car and wore their badges on their belts. Each carried a chrome-plated revolver in a clip-on holster. I rose to my feet, brushing the dirt off my knees. Alafair had stopped weeding and was staring at the men with her mouth parted.
"You've got a warrant?" I said.
One of the plainclothes had a matchstick in his mouth. He nodded without speaking.
"Okay, no problem. I'll need a few minutes, all right?"
"You got somebody to take care of the little girl?" his partner said. A Marine Corps emblem was tattooed on one of his forearms and a dagger with a bleeding heart impaled upon it on the other.
"Yes. That's why I need a minute or so," I said. I took Alafair by the hand and turned toward the house.
"You want to come in with me?"
"Lean up against the porch rail," the man with the matchstick said.
"Can't you guys show some discretion here?" I said. I looked at my friend the sheriff, who stood in the background, saying nothing.
"What the fuck are you talking about?" the tattooed man said.
"Watch your language," I said.
I felt Alafair's hand close tightly in mine. The other detective took the matchstick out of his mouth.
"Put your hands on the porch rail, spread your feet," he said, and took Alafair by her other hand and began to pull her away from me.
I pointed my finger at him.
"You're mishandling this. Back off," I said.
Then I felt the other man shove me hard in the back, pushing me off-balance through the hydrangeas into the steps. I heard his pistol come out of his leather holster, felt his hand clamp down on my neck as he stuck the barrel of the revolver behind my ear.
"You're under arrest for murder. You think being an ex-cop lets you write trie rules?" he said.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Alafair staring at us with the stunned, empty expression of a person wakened from a nightmare.
They booked me into the parish jail on top of the old courthouse in the middle of Lafayette 's original town square. The jail was an ancient one, the iron doors and bars and walls painted battleship gray. The words "Negro Male" were still faintly visible on the door of one of the tanks. During the ride from New Iberia I had sat handcuffed in the back of the car, asking the detectives who it was I had killed. They responded with the silence and indifference with which almost all cops treat a suspect after he's in custody. Finally I gave up and sat back against the seat cushion, the cuffs biting into my wrists, and stared at the oak trees flicking past the window.
Now I had been fingerprinted and photographed, had turned over my wallet, pocket change, keys, belt, even my scapular chain, to a deputy who put them in a large manila envelope, realizing even then that something important was missing, something that would have a terrible bearing on my situation, yes, my Puma knife; and now the jailer and the detective who chewed on matchsticks were about to lock me in a six-cell area that was reserved for the violent and the insane. The jailer turned the key on the large, flat iron door that contained one narrow viewing sbt, pulled it open wide, and pushed lightly on my back with his fingers.
"Who the hell was it?" I said to the detective.
"You must be a special kind of guy, Robicheaux," he said.
"You cut a guy from his sc rot to sternum and don't bother to get his name. Dalton Vidrine."
The jailer clanged the door behind me, turned the key, shot the steel lock bar, and I walked into my new home.
It was little different from any other jail that I had seen or even been locked in during my drinking years. The toilets stank, the air smelled of stale sweat and cigarette smoke and mattresses that had turned black with body grease. The walls were scratched with names, peace signs, and drawings of male and female genitalia. More enterprising people had climbed on top of the cells and burned their names across the ceiling with cigarette lighters. On the floor area around the main door was a "deadline," a white line painted in a rectangle, inside of which no one had better be standing when the door swung open or while the trusties were serving out of the food cart.
But the people in that six-cell area were not the ordinary residents of a city or parish prison. One was an enormous demented Negro by the name of Jerome who had smothered his infant child. He told me later that a cop had worked him over with a baton; although he had been in jail two weeks, there were still purple gashes on his lips and lumps the size of birds' eggs on his nappy head. I would come to know the others, too: a biker from New Orleans who had nailed a girl's hands to a tree; a serial rapist and sodomist who was wanted in Alabama; a Vietnamese thug who, with another man, had garroted his business partner with jump cables for a car battery; and a four-time loser, a fat, grinning, absolutely vacant-eyed man who had murdered a whole family after escaping from Sugarland Farm in Texas.
I was given one phone call and I telephoned the best firm in Lafayette. Like all people who get into serious trouble with the law, I became immediately aware of the incredible financial burden that had been dropped upon me. The lawyer's retainer was $2,000, his ongoing fee $125 an hour. I felt as though my head were full of spiders as I tried to think in terms of raising that kind of money, particularly in view of the fact that my bail hadn't been set and I had no idea how high it would be.
I found out at my arraignment the next morning: $150,000. I felt the blood drain out of my face. The lawyer asked for bail reduction and argued that I was a local businessman, an ex-police officer, v a property owner, a war veteran, and the judge propped his chin on one knuckle and looked back at him as impassively as a man waiting for an old filmstrip to run itself out.
We all rose, the judge left the bench, and I sat dazed and light-headed in a chair next to the lawyer while a deputy prepared to cuff me for the trip back to the jail. The lawyer motioned to the deputy with two fingers.