"Give us a minute, please," he said. He was an older, heavyset man, with thinning cropped red hair, who wore seersucker suits and clip-on bow ties.
The deputy nodded and stepped back by the side door to the courtroom.
"It's the pictures," he said.
"Vidrine's entrails are hanging out in the bathtub. It's mean stuff to look at, Mr. Robicheaux. And they've got your knife with your prints on it."
"It must have fallen out of my pocket. Both of those guys were all over me."
"That's not what Mapes says. The bartender had some pretty bad things to say, too. What'd you do to him?"
"Told him he was going to be busted for procuring."
"Well, I can discredit him on the stand. But Mapes-" He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
"There's the fellow we have to break down. A man with chain burns all over his face and back can make a hell of a witness. Tell me, what in God's name did you have in mind when you went through that door?"
My palms were damp. I swallowed and wiped them on my trousers.
"Mapes knew Vidrine was a weak sister," I said.
"After I was gone, he picked up my knife and took him out. That's what happened, Mr. Gautreaux."
He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, made a pocket of air in his jaw, cleared his throat and started to speak, then was silent. Finally, he stood up, patted me on the shoulder, and walked out the side door of the courtroom into the sunlight, into the wind ruffling the leaves of the oak trees, the noise of black kids roaring by on skateboards. The deputy lifted my arm and crimped one cuff around my wrist.
Batist and his wife kept Alafair with them the day I was arrested, but the next day I arranged for her to stay with my cousin, a retired schoolteacher in New Iberia. She was taken care of temporarily, Batist was running the dock, and my main worry had become money. Besides needing a huge unknown sum for the lawyer, I had to raise $15,000 for the bondsman's fee in order to make bail. I had $8,000 in savings.
My half brother, Jimmie, who owned all or part of several restaurants in New Orleans, would have written a check for the whole amount, but he had gone to Europe for three months, and the last his partners heard from him he was traveling through France with a group of Basque jaz players. I then discovered that bankers whom I had known for years were not anxious to lend money to a. man who was charged with first-degree murder and whose current address was the parish jail. I had been locked up nine days, and Batist was still visiting banks and delivering loan papers to me.
Our cells were unlocked at seven A.M. when a trusty and the night screw wheeled in the food cart, which every morning was stacked with aluminum containers of grits, coffee, and fried pork butts. Until lockup at five in the afternoon, we were free to move around in an area called the bull run, take showers, play cards with a deck whose missing members had been replaced with cards fashioned out of penciled cardboard, or stare listlessly out the window at the tops of the trees on the courthouse lawn. But most of the time I stayed in my cell, filling out loan applications or reading a stiffened, water-stained issue of Reader's Digest.
I was sitting on the side of my iron bunk, which hung from the wall on chains, printing across the top of an application, when a shadow moved across the page. Silhouetted in the open door of my cell was the biker who had nailed his girl's hands to a tree. He was thick-bodied and shirtless, his breasts covered with tattooed birds, and his uncut hair and wild beard made his head look as though it were surrounded by a mane. I could feel his eyes move across the side of my face, peel away tissue, probe for the soft organ, the character weakness, the severed nerve.
"You think you can cut it up there?" he said.
I wet my pencil tip and kept on writing without looking up.
"What place is that?" I said.
" Angola. You think you can hack it?"
"I'm not planning on being there."
"That's what I said my first jolt. Next stop, three years up in the Block with the big stripes. They got some badass dudes there, man."
I turned to the next page and tried to concentrate on the printed words.
"The night screw says you're an ex-cop," he said.
I set my pencil down and looked at the opposite wall.
"Does that make a problem for you?" I said.
"Not me, man. But there's some mean fuckers up on that farm… There's guys that'll run by your cell and throw a gasoline bomb in on you. Melt you into grease."
"I don't want to be rude, but you're standing in my light."
He grinned, and there was a malevolent light in his face. Then he stretched, yawned, laughed outright as though he were witnessing an absurdity of some kind, and walked away to the window that gave onto the courthouse lawn.
I did push-ups, I did curls by lifting the bunk with my fingertips, I took showers, and I slept as much as I could. At night I could hear the others breaking wind, talking to themselves, masturbating, snoring. The enormous Negro sometimes sang a song that began, "My soul is in a paper bag at the bottom of your garbage can." Then one night he went crazy in his cell, gripping the bars with both hands and bashing his head against them until blood and sweat were flying out into the bull run and we heard the screw shoot the steel lock bar on the door. " ' On the thirteenth day I received two visitors I wasn't prepared for. A deputy escorted me down the spiral metal stairs to a window; less room that was used as a visiting area for those of us who were charged with violent crimes. Sitting at a wood table scarred with cigarette burns were Dixie Lee Pugh, one arm in a sling, his yellow hair crisscrossed with bandages, and my old homicide partner, Cle-tus Purcel. As always, Clete looked too big for his shirt, his sport coat, the tie that was pulled loose from his throat, the trousers that climbed above his socks. His cigarette looked tiny in his hand, the stitched scar through his eyebrow a cosmetic distraction from the physical confidence and humor in his face.
Clete, old friend, why did you throw it in?
They were both smiling so broadly they might have been at a party. I smelled beer on Dixie 's breath. I sat down at the table, and the deputy locked a barred door behind me and sat on a chair outside.
"You made your bail all right, huh, Dixie?" I said.
He wore a maroon shirt hanging outside his gray slacks, and one foot was bandaged and covered with two athletic socks. His stomach made a thick roll against the bottom of his shirt.
"Better than that, Dave. They cut me loose."
"They did what?"
"I'm out of it. Free and clear. They dropped the possessions charge." He was looking at the expression on my face.
"They lost interest," Clete said.
"Oh? How's that?"
"Come on, Dave. Lighten up. You know how it works," Clete said.
"No, I think my education is ongoing here."
"We already have a firm on retainer in New Orleans, and I hired the best in Lafayette. You know these local guys aren't going to get tied up in court for months over a chickenshit holding bust."
"Who's this 'we' you're talking about? What the hell are you doing with Dixie Lee?" I said.
"He's got a friend. I work for the friend. The friend doesn't like to see Dixie Lee suffering a lot of bullshit he doesn't deserve. You don't deserve it, either, Dave."
"You work for this character Dio?"
"He's not such a bad guy. Look, there's not a lot of jobs around for a cop who had to blow the country, uh, with a few loose ends lying around."
"How'd you get out of it? I thought there was still a warrant on you."
"You've never learned, partner. First, they didn't have dog-doo to go on. Second, and this is what you don't understand, nobody cares about a guy like that. The best part of that guy ran down his daddy's leg. He met a bad fate. He should have met it earlier. The world goes on."