“He walked by me with a lunch pail and a thermos. A shooting came in two minutes earlier. That’s how I knew the time. I wasn’t thinking about the guy.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
Wally looked at the sheriff.
“It’s not your fault, Wally. Thanks for your help,” the sheriff said.
A moment later he said to me, “What are these guys after?”
“They don’t know that Marsallus gave me his notebook. But I bet they think we found a copy of it that they missed in Delia Landry’s house.”
“What’s in it, though? You said it reads like St. Augustine’s Confessions among the banana trees.”
“You got me. But it must be information they need rather than information they’re trying to keep from us. You follow me?”
“No.”
“If we have it, they know we’ve read it, maybe made copies of it ourselves. So that means the notebook contains something indispensable to them that makes sense only to themselves.”
“This guy you met jogging yesterday, you think he’s this mercenary, what’s his name, Pogue?”
“He knew the year I was in Vietnam. He even knew how many times I’d been wounded.”
The sheriff looked at the blowing rain and a mimosa branch flattening against the window.
“I see only one way through this,” he said. “We find Marsallus again and charge him with shooting the man in front of your house. Then he can talk to us or take up soybean farming at Angola.”
“We don’t have a shooting victim.”
“Find him.”
“I need a warrant on Sweet Pea’s Cadillac.”
“You’re not going to get it. Why aren’t you sweating that black woman out at the Bertrand plantation on this?”
“That’s a hard word,” I said.
“She’s involved, she’s dirty. Sorry to offend your sensibilities.”
“It’s the way we’ve always done it,” I said.
“Sir?”
The air-conditioning was turned up high, but the room was humid and close, like a wet cotton glove on the skin.
“Rounding up people who’re vulnerable and turning dials on them. Should we kick a board up Moleen Bertrand’s butt while we’re at it? I think he’s dirty, too. I just don’t know how,” I said.
“Do whatever you have to,” the sheriff said. He stood up and straightened his back, his eyes empty.
But no urgency about Moleen, I thought.
He read it in my face.
“We have two open murder cases, one involving a victim kidnapped from our own jail,” he said. “In part we have shit smeared on our faces because you and Purcel acted on your own and queered a solid investigative lead. Your remarks are genuinely testing my level of tolerance.”
“If you want to stick it to Moleen, there’s a way to do it,” I said.
The sheriff waited, his face narrow and cheerless. “Create some serious man-hours and reactivate the vehicular homicide file on his wife.”
“You’d do that?” he asked.
“No, I wouldn’t. But when you sweat people, that’s the kind of furnace you kick open in their face, Sheriff. It’s just easier when the name’s not Bertrand.”
“I don’t have anything else to say to you, sir,” he said, and walked out.
Sometimes you get lucky.
In this case it was a call from an elderly Creole man who had been fishing with a treble hook, using a steel bolt for weight and chicken guts for bait, in a slough down by Vermilion Bay.
Helen and I drove atop a levee through a long plain of flooded saw grass and got there ahead of the divers and the medical examiner. It had stopped raining and the sun was high and white in the sky and water was dripping out of the cypress trees the elderly man had been fishing under.
“Where is it?” I asked him.
“All the way across, right past them cattails,” he said. His skin was the color of dusty brick, his turquoise eyes dim with cataracts.
“My line went bump, and I thought I hooked me a gar. I started to yank on it, then I knew it wasn’t no gar. That’s when I drove back up to the sto’ and called y’all.”
His throw line, which was stained dark green with silt and algae, was tied to a cypress knee and stretched across the slough. It had disappeared beneath the surface by a cluster of lily pads and reeds.
Helen squatted down and hooked her index finger under it to feel the tension. The line was snagged on an object that was tugging in the current by the slough’s mouth.
“Tell us again what you saw,” she said.
“I done tole the man answered the phone,” he said. “It come up out of the water. It liked to made my heart stop.”
“You saw a hand?” I said.
“I didn’t say that. It looked like a flipper. Or the foot on a big gator. But it wasn’t no gator,” he said.
“You didn’t walk over to the other side?” Helen said.
“I ain’t lost nothing there,” he said.
“A flipper?” I said.
“It was like a stub, it didn’t have no fingers, how else I’m gonna say it to y’all?” he said.
Helen and I walked around the end of the slough and back down the far side to the opening that gave onto a canal. The current in the canal was flowing southward into the bay as the tide went out. The sun’s heat rose like steam from the water’s surface and smelled of stagnant mud and dead vegetation.
Helen shoved a stick into the lily pads and moved something soft under it. A cloud of mud mushroomed to the surface. She poked the stick into the mud again, and this time she retrieved a taut web of monofilament fishing line that was looped through a corroded yellow chunk of pipe casing. She let it slide off the stick into the water again. Then an oval pie of wrinkled skin rolled against the surface and disappeared.
“Why do we always get the floaters?” she said.
“People here throw everything else in the water,” I said.
“You ever see a shrink?”
“Not in a while, anyway,” I said. In the distance I could see two emergency vehicles and a TV news van coming down the levee.
“I went to one in New Orleans. I was ready for him to ask me about my father playing with his weenie in front of the kids. Instead, he asked me why I wanted to be a homicide detective. I told him it’s us against the bad guys, I want to make a difference, it bothers me when I pull a child’s body out of a sewer pipe after a sex predator has gotten through with him. All the while he’s smiling at me, with this face that looks like bread pudding with raisins all over it. I go, “Look, Doc, the bad guys torture and rape and kill innocent people. If we don’t send them in for fifty or seventy-five or ship them off for the Big Sleep, they come back for encores.”
“He keeps smiling at me. I go, “The truth is I got tired of being a meter maid.”
He thought that was pretty funny.”
I waited for her to go on.
“That’s the end of the story. I never went back,” she said.
“Why not?”
“You know why.”
“It still beats selling shoes,” I said.
She combed her hair with a comb from the back pocket of her Levi’s. Her breasts stood out against her shirt like softballs.
“Fix your tie, cutie. You’re about to be geek of the week on the evening news,” she said.
“Helen, would you please stop that?”
“Lighten up, Streak.”
“That’s exactly what Clete Purcel says.”
“Cluster fuck? No kidding?” she said, and grinned.
Twenty minutes later two divers, wearing wet suits and air tanks and surgical gloves over their hands, sawed loose the tangle of mono-filament fish line that had been wrapped around and crisscrossed over the submerged body and threaded through a daisy chain of junkyard iron. They held the body by the arms and dragged it heavily onto the bank, the decomposed buttocks sliding through the reeds like a collapsed putty-colored balloon.