When I got home from the office the next afternoon, Alafair was sitting in the swing on the gallery, snapping beans in a pot. Her face was scratched, and there were grass and mud stains on her Levi’s.
“You look like you rode Tex through a briar patch, Alf,” I said.
“I fell down the coulee.”
“How’d you do that?” I leaned against the rail and a post on the gallery.
“A dog got after Tripod. I ran over in Mr. LeBlanc’s yard and tripped on the bank. I fell in a bunch of stickers.”
“The coulee’s pretty steep over there.”
“That’s what that man said.”
“Which man?”
“The one who got me out. He climbed down the side and got all muddy. He might buy Mr. LeBlanc’s house.”
I looked over into the neighbor’s yard. A realtor I knew from town had just walked from the far side of the house with a clipboard in his hand. He was pointing at some features in the upstairs area, talking over his shoulder, when my eyes locked on the man behind him.
“Did this man say anything to you?” I said.
“He said I should be careful. Then he got Tripod out of the willow tree.”
“Where’s Bootsie?” I said.
“She had to go to the store. Is something wrong, Dave?”
“No. Excuse me a minute.”
I went inside and called the dispatcher for a cruiser. Then I went back out on the gallery.
“I’m going next door. But you stay on the gallery, understand?” I said.
“He didn’t do anything wrong, Dave.”
I walked across the grass toward my neighbor’s property and the man with miniature buttocks and ax-handle shoulders and chunks of lead for eyes.
He was dressed in a pale blue summer sports coat, an open-collar white shirt with ballpoint pens in the pocket, gray slacks, shined brown wingtips that were caked with mud around the soles; except for the stains on his clothes, he could have been a working man on his way to a fine evening at the track.
The realtor turned and looked at me.
“Oh hello, Dave,” he said. “I was just showing Mr. Pogue the properly here.”
“I’d like to thank the gentleman for helping my daughter out of the coulee,” I said.
“It was my pleasure,” the man with the buckshot eyes said, his mouth grinning, his head nodding.
“Mr. Andrepont, could I talk with him in private a minute?” I said.
“I beg your pardon?” he said.
“It’ll take just a minute. Thank you,” I said.
“I see, well, let me know when you’re finished, sir.” He walked toward his car, averting his eyes to hide the anger in them.
“You’re Emile Pogue,” I said.
“Why not?” The voice sounded like it came from rusted pipe.
“You get around a lot. Exercising out at Pecan Island, showing up at the house next door. What’s your interest, Mr. Pogue?”
“I’m retired, I like the weather, I like the price on this house.”
“Why is it I think you’re full of shit?”
“Be fucked if I know.” He grinned.
“I’d like to ask a favor of you, take a ride down to our jail with me, we had a little problem there.”
“I was planning on having an early dinner with a lady friend,” he said.
“Change it to candlelight. Put your hands behind your head, please.”
“You got to have a warrant, don’t you, chief?”
“I’m not big on protocol. Turn around.”
When he laced his fingers behind his neck his muscles almost split his coat. I rotated his left hand counterclockwise to the center of his back and pushed it into a pressure position between his shoulder blades. His upper arm had the tension and resistance of a wagon spring.
“Move your right hand higher, no, no, up behind your ear, Mr. Pogue. That’s right,” I said.
I cuffed his right wrist and moved it clockwise to his spine and then hooked it up to his left. I could see the cruiser coming up the road under the oak trees. I walked him down the sloping lawn to meet it, past the realtor, who stared at us open-mouthed.
“Is it true Sonny Marsallus popped a cap on your brother?” I said.
“Sounds like you left your grits on the stove too long,” he answered.
I rode in the back of the cruiser with him to the department, then took him down to my office and hooked him to the D-ring inset in the floor. I called the sheriff and Kelso, the jailer, at their homes. When I hung up the phone, Pogue was staring at me, his eyes taking my measure, one shoulder pulled lopsided by the D-ring. He gave off a peculiar smell, like testosterone in his sweat.
“We’re going to have to wait a little bit,” I said.
“For what?”
I took out my time sheet from my desk drawer and began filling it in.
We’d had a power failure earlier and the air-conditioning had been off for two hours.
“Wait for what?” he said.
I heard him shift in his chair, the handcuff clink against the steel D-ring. Five minutes later, he said, “What’s this, Psy Ops down in Bumfuck?” His sports coat was rumpled, his face slick with heat.
I put away my time sheet and opened a yellow legal pad on my desk blotter. I uncapped my fountain pen and tapped it idly on the pad. Then I wrote on several lines.
“You were an instructor at an Israeli jump school?” I said.
“Maybe. Thirty years in, a lot of different gigs.”
“Looks like you managed to stay off the computer.”
He worked his wrist inside the cuff.
“I’m maxing out here on this situation, chief,” he said.
“Don’t call me that again.”
“You ever fish with a Dupont special, blow fish up into the trees? You cut to the chase, that’s how it gets done. Who you think runs this country?”
“Why don’t you clear that up for me?”
“You’re a smart guy. Don’t make like you ain’t.”
“I see. You and your friends do?”
He smiled painfully. “You got you a good routine. I bet the locals dig it.”
Through my window I saw the sheriff, Kelso, and the night man from the jail out in the hall. They were watching Emile Pogue. Kelso’s eyes were distorted to the size of oysters behind his thick glasses. He and the night man shook their heads.
“We selling tickets? What’s going on?” Pogue said.
“You ever work CID or get attached to a federal law enforcement agency?” I said.
“No.”
“Somebody with insider experience kidnapped a man out of our jail. They murdered him out at Lake Martin.”
His laugh was like the cough of a furnace deep under a tenement building.
“Don’t tell me, the black guy looking out of the fishbowl has got to be the jailer,” he said.
Kelso and the night man went down the hall. The sheriff opened my door and put his head inside.
“See me on your way out, Dave,” he said, and closed the door again.
“It doesn’t look like you’re our man,” I said.
“I got no beef, long as we get this thing finished... What you writing there?”
“Not much. Just a speculation or two.” I propped the legal pad on the edge of the desk and looked down at it. “How’s this sound? You probably enlisted when you were a kid, volunteered for a lot of elite units, then got into some dirty stuff over in “Nam, the Phoenix Program maybe, going into Charlie’s ville at night, slitting his throat in his sleep, painting his face yellow for his wife to find in the morning, you know the drill.”
He laughed again, then pinched the front of his shirt with his fingers and shook it to cool himself. I could see the lead fillings in his molars, a web of saliva in his mouth.