He looked into my eyes. “You want to spell that out?” he said.
“You know damn well what I’m talking about. If you want to hide a personal relationship, that’s your business. But you’re hiding something else, too, Moleen, about that plantation. I just don’t know what it is.”
He fitted the shotgun’s stock to his shoulder, fired at a nutria that was swimming behind a half-submerged log, and blew a pattern of bird shot all over the pond. The nutria ducked under the water and surfaced again but it was hurt and swimming erratically. Moleen snapped open the breech and flung the casing out into the water.
“I don’t take kindly to people insulting me on my own property,” he said.
“The insult is to that woman on the plantation. You didn’t even have the decency to inscribe her name on the photograph you gave her.”
“You’re beyond your limits, my friend.”
“And you’re cruel to animals as well as to people. Fuck you,” I said, and walked back toward the camp.
I found Bootsie on the gallery.
“We have to go,” I said.
“Dave, we just ate.”
“I already said our good-byes. I have some work to do at the dock.”
“No! It’s rude.”
Three women drinking coffee nearby tried not to hear our conversation.
“Okay, I’m going to put on my gym shorts and tennis shoes and jog a couple of miles. Pick me up out on the road.” She looked at me with a strangled expression on her face. “I’ll explain it later.”
We had come in Bootsie’s Toyota. I unlocked the trunk, took out my running shoes and gym shorts, and changed in the lee of the car. Then I jogged across a glade full of buttercups, past a stand of persimmon trees that fringed the woods, and out onto the hard-packed dirt road that led off the chenier.
The wind was warm and the afternoon sky marbled with yellow and maroon clouds. I turned my face into the breeze, kept a steady pace for a quarter mile, then poured it on, the sweat popping on my forehead, the blood singing in my chest until Moleen Bertrand’s words, his supercilious arrogance, became more and more distant in my mind.
I passed a clump of pecan trees that were in deep shadow, the ground under them thick with palmettos. Then in the corner of my vision I saw another jogger step out into the spangled light and fall in beside me.
I smelled him before I saw him. His odor was like a fog, gray, visceral, secreted out of glands that could have been transplanted from animals. His head was a tan cannonball, the shoulders ax-handle wide, the hips tapering down to a small butt that a woman could probably cover with both her hands. His T-shirt was rotted into cheesecloth, the armpits dark and sopping, the flat chest a nest of wet black hair.
His teeth were like tombstones when he grinned.
“You do it in bursts, don’t you?” he said. His voice was low, full of grit, like a man with throat cancer. “Me, too.”
His shoulder was inches away, the steady pat-pat-pat-pat of his tennis shoes in rhythm with mine, even the steady intake and exhalation of his breath now part of mine. He wrapped his towel over his head and knotted it under his chin.
“How you doin’?” I said.
“Great. You ever run on the grinder at Quantico?” He turned his face to me. The eyes were cavernous, like chunks of lead shot.
“No, I wasn’t in the Corps,” I said.
“I knew a guy looked like you. That’s why I asked.”
I didn’t answer. Out over the salt a single-engine plane was flying out of the sun, its wings tilting and bouncing hard in the wind.
“Were you at Benning?” the man said.
“Nope.”
“I know you from somewhere.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe it was Bragg. No, I remember you now. Saigon, sixty-five. Bring Cash Alley. You could get on the pipe and laid for twenty bucks. Fucking A, I never forget a face.”
I slowed to a walk, breathing hard, my chest running with sweat. He slowed with me.
“What’s the game, partner?” I said.
“It’s a small club. No game. A guy with two Hearts is a charter member in my view.” He pulled his towel off his head and mopped his face with it, then offered it to me. I saw Bootsie’s Toyota headed down the road toward us.
I backed away from him, my eyes locked on his.
“You take it easy, now,” I said.
“You too, chief. Try a liquid protein malt. It’s like wrapping copper wire around your nuts, really puts an edge on your run.”
I heard Bootsie brake behind me. I got in the passenger seat beside her. My bare back left a dark wet stain on the seat.
“Dave, put on your shirt,” she said.
“Let’s go.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
She glanced in the rearview mirror. The man with the tan cannon-ball head was mopping the inside of his thighs with the towel.
“Yuck,” she said. “Who’s that?”
“I have a feeling I just met Mr. Emile Pogue,” I answered.
Chapter 13
“This doesn’t happen,” the sheriff said, his hands on his hips, looking at the manila folders and papers on my floor, the prise marks where a screwdriver had sprung the locks on the drawers in my desk and file cabinet. “We have to investigate the burglary of our own department.”
It was 8 A.M. Monday morning and raining hard outside. The sheriff had just come into the office. I’d been there since seven.
“What’s missing?” he asked.
“Nothing that I can see. The files on Marsallus and Delia Landry are all over the floor, but they didn’t take anything.”
“What about Helen’s files?”
“She can’t find her spare house key. She’s going to have her locks changed today,” I said.
He sat down in my swivel chair.
“Do you mind?” he said.
“Not at all.” I began picking up the scattered papers and photographs from the floor and arranging them in their case folders.
He took a breath. “All right, Wally says the cleaning crew came in about eleven last night. They vacuumed, waxed the floors, dusted, did the rest rooms, and left around two A.M. He’s sure it was the regular bunch.”
“It probably was.”
“Then who got in here?”
“My guess is somebody else wearing the same kind of uniform came in and picked the locks, probably right after the cleaning crew left. Nobody pays much attention to these guys, so the only people who might have recognized the impostors were gone.”
The sheriff picked up my phone and punched a number.
“Come down to Dave’s office a minute,” he said into the receiver. After he hung up he leaned one elbow on the desk and pushed a thumb into the center of his forehead. “This makes me madder than hell. What’s this country coming to?”
Wally opened my office door. He was a tall, fat man, with hypertension and a florid face and a shirt pocket full of cellophane-wrapped cigars. He was at the end of his shift and his eyes had circles under them.
“You’re sure everybody on the cleaning crew was gone by two A.M.?” the sheriff said.
“Pretty sure. I mean after they went out the front door the hall down here was dark and I didn’t hear nothing.”
“Think about it, Wally. What time exactly did the last cleaning person leave?” the sheriff said.
“I told you, two A.M.” or a minute or two one side or another of it.”
“They all left together?” the sheriff said.
“The last guy out said good night at two A.M.”
“Was it the last guy or the whole bunch?” I asked.
He fingered the cigars in his pocket and stared into space, his eyes trying to concentrate.
“I don’t remember,” he said.
“Did you know the guy who said good night?” I asked.