He was quiet again, his eyes focused inward.
“Are we talking about some kind of CIA involvement?” I said.
“Not directly. But you start sending the wrong stuff through the computer, through your fax machines, these guys will step right into the middle of your life. I guarantee it, Dave.”
“How’s the name Emile Pogue sit with you?” I said.
He let out his breath quietly. Under his suspenders his stomach was flat and corded with muscle.
“Another officer ran him all kinds of ways and came up empty,” I said.
He rubbed the ball of his thumb across his lips. Then he said, “I didn’t eat yet. What time they serve at the lockup?”
Try to read that.
Two hours later Clete called me at home. It was raining hard, the water sluicing off the gutters, and the back lawn was full of floating leaves.
“What’d you get out of him?” Clete said.
“Nothing.” I could hear country music and people’s voices in the background. “Where are you?”
“In a slop chute outside Morgan City. Dave, this guy bothers me. There’s something not natural about him.”
“He’s a hustler. He’s outrageous by nature.”
“He doesn’t get any older. He always looks the same.”
I tried to remember Sonny’s approximate age. I couldn’t. “There’s something else,” Clete said. “Where I hit him. There’s a strawberry mark across the backs of my fingers. It’s throbbing like I’ve got blood poisoning or something.”
“Get out of the bar, Clete.”
“You always know how to say it.”
I couldn’t sleep that night. The rain stopped and a heavy mist settled in the trees outside our bedroom window, and I could hear night-feeding bass flopping back in the swamp. I sat on the edge of the bed in my skivvies and looked at the curtains puffing in the breeze.
“What is it, Dave?” Bootsie said behind me in the dark.
“I had a bad dream, that’s all.”
“About what?” She put her hand on my spine.
“A captain I knew in Vietnam. He was a stubborn and inflexible man. He sent a bunch of guys across a rice field under a full moon. They didn’t come back.”
“It’s been thirty years, Dave.”
“The dream was about myself. I’m going into town. I’ll call you later,” I said.
I took two paper bags from the kitchen pantry, put a clean shirt in one of them, stopped by the bait shop, then drove up the dirt road through the tunnel of oak trees and over the drawbridge toward New Iberia.
It was still dark when I reached the parish jail. Kelso was drinking a cup of coffee and reading a comic book behind his desk. His face looked like a walrus’s in the shadows from his desk lamp, the moles on his neck as big as raisins.
“I want to check Marsallus out,” I said.
“Check him out? Like a book from the library, you’re saying?”
“It’s the middle of the night. Why make an issue out of everything?”
He stretched and yawned. His thick glasses were full of light. “The guy’s a twenty-four kick-out, anyway, isn’t he?”
“Maybe.”
“I think you ought to take him to a shrink.”
“What’d he do?”
“He’s been having a conversation in his cell.”
“So?”
“There ain’t anybody else in it, Robicheaux.”
“How about bringing him out, Kelso, then you can get back to your reading.”
“Hey, Robicheaux, you take him to the wig mechanic, make an appointment for yourself, too.”
A few minutes later Sonny and I got in my truck and drove down East Main. He was dressed in his sharkskin slacks and a jailhouse denim shirt. There were low pink clouds in the east now and the live oaks along the street were gray and hazy with mist.
“There’s a shirt in that bag by the door,” I said.
“What’s this in the other one? You carrying around a junkyard, Dave?”
He lifted the rusted chain and ankle cuff out of the bag.
I didn’t answer his question. “I thought you might enjoy some takeout from Victor’s rather than eat at the slam,” I said, parking in front of a small cafeteria on Main across from the bayou. “You want to go get it?”
“You’re not afraid I’ll go out the back door?”
“There isn’t one.” I put eight one-dollar bills in his hand. “Make mine scrambled eggs, sausage, grits, and coffee.”
I watched him walk inside, tucking my borrowed tropical shirt inside his rumpled slacks. He was grinning when he came back out and got in the truck.
“There is a back door, Streak. You didn’t know that?” he said.
“Huh,” I said, and drove us across the drawbridge, over the Teche, into City Park. The bayou was high and yellow with mud, and the wake from a tug with green and red running lights washed over the banks into the grass. We ate at a picnic table under a tree that was alive with mockingbirds.
“You ever see a leg iron like that before, Sonny?”
“Yeah, in the museum at Jackson Square.”
“Why would you make it your business to know that Jean Lafitte operated a barracoon outside New Iberia?”
“Delia told me. She was into stuff like that.” Then he wiped his face with his hand. “It’s already getting hot.”
“I read your notebook. It doesn’t seem to have any great illumination in it, Sonny.”
“Maybe I’m a lousy writer.”
“Why do these bozos want to kill people over your notebook?”
“They’re called cleanup guys. They hose a guy and everything around him right off the planet.”
“I’ll put it to you, partner, that girl died a miserable death. You want to help me nail them or not?”
A pinched light came into his face. His hand tightened on the edge of the table. He looked out toward the bayou.
“I don’t know who they were,” he said. “Look, what I can tell you won’t help. But you’re a cop and you’ll end up putting it in a federal computer. You might as well swallow a piece of broken glass.”
I took Roy Bumgartner’s dog tag out of my shirt pocket and laid it on the table beside Sonny’s Styrofoam coffee cup.
“What’s that mean to you?” I asked.
He stared at the name. “Nothing,” he said.
“He flew a slick in Vietnam and disappeared in Laos. Somebody left this in my bait shop for me to find.”
“The guy was an MIA or POW?”
“Yeah, and a friend of mine.”
“There’s a network, Dave, old-time intelligence guys, meres, cowboys, shitheads, whatever you want to call them. They were mixed up with opium growers in the Golden Triangle. Some people believe that’s why our guys were left behind over there. They knew too much about ties between narcotics and the American government.”
I looked at him for a long time.
“What?” he said.
“You remind me of myself when I was on the grog, Sonny. I didn’t trust anyone. So I seriously fucked up my life as well as other people’s.”
“Yeah, well, this breakfast has started to get expensive.”
“I’ve got a few things to do in town. Can you take yourself back to the jail?”
“Take myself back to—”
“Yeah, check yourself in. Kelso’s got a sense of humor. Tell him you heard the Iberia Parish lockup is run like the public library.” I stuck my business card in his shirt pocket. “When you get tired of grandiose dog shit, give me a call.”
I picked up my coffee cup and walked back toward my truck.
“Hey, Dave, this isn’t right,” he said behind me.
“You want to hang from a cross. Do it without me, partner,” I said.
At one that afternoon I called Kelso at the lockup.
“Did Marsallus make it back there?” I asked.
“Yeah, we’re putting in a special cell with a turnstile for him. You’re a laugh a minute,” he said.