“Who dozered the cemetery by your house Friday night?”
“I done tole you, I don’t know about no graves on that plantation. I grew up in town.”
“Okay, partner. Here’s my business card. I’ll see you around.”
He slipped it in his shirt pocket and began rinsing glasses in a tin sink.
“I ain’t meant to be unpolite,” he said. “Tell that to that old man work for you, too. I just ain’t no hep in solving nobody’s problems.”
“I pulled your jacket, Luke. You’re a hard man to read.”
He raised his hand, palm outward, toward me.
“No more, suh,” he said. “You want to ax me questions, come back with a warrant and carry me down to the jail.”
When I got into my pickup the sky was steel gray, the air humid and close as a cotton glove. Raindrops were hitting in flat drops on the cane in the fields.
Ruthie Jean came through the side door and limped toward me. She rested one hand on my window jamb. She had full cheeks and a mole by her mouth; her teeth were white against her bright lipstick.
“You saw something out here you gonna use against him?” she said. The curtains were blowing in the windows and doors of the tin trailers in back.
“I was never a vice cop,” I said.
“Then why you out here giving him a bunch of truck?”
“Your brother’s got a ten-year sheet for everything from concealed weapons to first-degree murder.”
“You saw on there he stole something?”
“No.”
“He hurt somebody didn’t bother him first, didn’t try cheat him out of his pay, didn’t take out a gun on him at a bouree table?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“But y’all make it come out like you want.”
“I’d say your brother’s ahead of the game. If Moleen Bertrand hadn’t pulled him out of the death house, with about three hours to spare, Luke would have been yesterday’s toast.”
I felt myself blink inside with the severity of my own words.
“Y’all always know, always got the smart word,” she said.
“You’re angry at the wrong person.”
“When y’all cain’t get at the people who really did something, y’all go down into the quarters, find the little people to get your hands on, put inside your reports and send up to Angola.”
I started my truck engine. Her hand didn’t move from the window jamb.
“I’m not telling the troot, no?” she said.
Her gold skin was smooth and damp in the blowing mist, her hair thick and jet black and full of little lights.
“Who supplies your girls?” I said.
Her eyes roved over my face. “You’re not very good at this, if you ax me,” she said, and limped back toward the front door of the juke.
That afternoon, just before five, I received a call from Clete Purcel. I could hear seagulls squeaking in the background.
“Where are you?” I said.
“By the shrimp docks in Morgan City. You know where a cop’s best information is, Streak? The lowly bail bondsman. In this case, with a fat little guy named Butterbean Reaux.”
“Yeah, I know him.”
“Good. Drive on down, noble mon. We’ll drink some mash and talk some trash. Or I’ll drink the mash while you talk to your buddy Sonny Boy Marsallus.”
“You know where he is?”
“Right now, handcuffed to a D-ring in the backseat of my automobile. So much for all that brother-in-arms bullshit.”
Chapter 8
Clete gave me directions in Morgan City, and an hour later I saw his battered Cadillac convertible parked under a solitary palm tree by an outdoor beer and hot dog stand not far from the docks. The sky was sealed with gray clouds, and the wind was blowing hard off the Gulf, capping the water all the way across the bay. Sonny sat in the backseat of the Cadillac, shirtless, a pair of blue suspenders notched into his white shoulders. His right wrist was extended downward, where it was cuffed to a D-shaped steel ring inset in the floor.
Clete was drinking a beer on a wood bench under the palm tree, his porkpie hat slanted over his forehead.
“You ought to try the hot dogs here,” Clete said.
“You want to be up on a kidnapping charge?” I said.
“Hey, Sonny! You gonna dime me?” Clete yelled at the car. Then he looked back at me. “See, Sonny’s stand-up. He’s not complaining.”
He brushed at a fleck of dried blood in one nostril.
“What happened?” I said.
“He’d rat-holed himself in a room over a pool hall, actually more like a pool hall and hot pillow joint. He said he wasn’t coming with me. I started to hook him up and he unloaded on me. So I had to throw him down the stairs.”
He rubbed the knuckles of his right hand unconsciously.
“Why do you have it in for him, Clete?”
“Because he was down in Bongo-Bongo Land for the same reasons as the rest of us. Except he pretends he’s got some kind of blue fire radiating around his head or something.”
I walked over to the car. Sonny’s left eye was swollen almost shut. He grinned up at me. His sharkskin slacks were torn at the knee.
“How’s the man, Streak?” he said.
“I wish you had come in on your own.”
“Long story.”
“It always is.”
“You going to hold me?”
“Maybe.” I turned toward Clete. “Give me your key,” I called.
“Ask Sonny if I need rabies shots,” he said, and pitched it at me.
“You’re not going to get clever, are you?” I said to Sonny.
“With you guys? Are you kidding?”
“You’re the consummate grifter, Sonny,” I said, opened the door, and unlocked his wrist. Then I leveled my finger at his face. “Who were the guys who killed Delia Landry?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Don’t you lie to me, Sonny.”
“It could be any number of guys. It depends who they send in. You didn’t lift any prints?”
“Don’t worry about what we do or don’t do. You just answer my questions. Who’s they?”
“Dave, you’re not going to understand this stuff.”
“You’re starting to piss me off, Sonny.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“Get out of the car.” I patted him down against the fender, then slipped my hand under his arm and turned him toward my truck.
“Where we going?” he said.
“You’re a material witness. You’re also an uncooperative material witness. That means we’ll be keeping you for a while.”
“Mistake.”
“I’ll live with it.”
“Don’t count on it, Dave. I’m not being cute, either.”
“He’s a sweetheart,” Clete said from the bench. Then he rubbed the knuckles on his right hand and looked at them.
“Sorry I popped you, Cletus,” Sonny said.
“In your ear, Sonny,” Clete said.
We drove past boatyards then some shrimp boats that were knocking against the pilings in their berths. The air was warm and smelled like brass and dead fish.
“Can I stop by my room and pick up some things?” Sonny asked.
“No.”
“Just a shirt.”
“Nope.”
“You’re a hard man, Streak.”
“That girl took your fall, Sonny. You want to look at her morgue pictures?”
He was quiet a long time, his face looking straight ahead at the rain striking the windshield.
“Did she suffer?” he said.
“They tore her apart. What do you think?”
His mouth was red against his white skin.
“They were after me, or maybe the notebook I gave you,” he said.
“I’ve got it. You’ve written a potential best-seller and people are getting killed over it.”
“Dave, you lock me up, those guys are going to get to me.”
“That’s the breaks, partner.”