“I’ll tell you something else, Dave,” he said. “I’ve whacked out five guys since I left the tropics. Jack and Pogue’s brother were just two knots on the string.”
“You have a peculiar way of expiating your sins.”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings, for a roach you’re a stand-up guy, but go write some parking tickets, or shuffle some papers, or take some of the Rotary boys out to supper and let them work your dork under the table. I’m probably going down for the big bounce. Don’t drag your bullshit into my cell, Streak. This is one place where it’s truly an insult.”
I hit on the bars with the side of my fist and called for the turnkey to open up. When I looked back at him, the cartilage working in my jaw, he was picking at a callus on his foot. The tattoo of the blue Madonna on his right shoulder, with needles of orange light emanating from it, looked like a painting on polished moonstone. I started to speak again, but he turned his eyes away from me.
Rufus Arceneaux had been a tech sergeant in the Marine Corps at age twenty-three. In the ten years he had been with the department he had gone from uniform to plainclothes and back to uniform again. He was a tall, raw-boned man, with a long nose and blond crewcut hair, whose polished gunbelt and holster fitted against his trim body as though it had been welded there. Rufus wore dark-tinted pilot’s sunglasses and seldom smiled, but you always had the sense that his hidden eyes were watching you, taking your inventory, a suppressed sneer tugging at his mouth as soon as your back was turned.
It was Friday morning when Luke Fontenot called and told me his sister, Ruthie Jean, was in jail and that Rufus had been the arresting officer.
I walked down to his office and went inside without knocking. He was talking on the phone, one leg propped across an opened desk drawer. He glanced sideways at me, then returned to his conversation. I waited for him to finish. But he didn’t.
His mouth dropped open when I tore the receiver out of his hand and hung it up in the cradle.
“What the hell you think you’re doing, Robicheaux?”
“You busted Ruthie Fontenot for procuring?”
“So what?”
“You’re intruding in a homicide investigation.”
“Tough shit. That place is crawling with nigger whores. It should have been cleaned out a long time ago.”
“You think Julia Bertrand is going to get you promoted?”
“Get the fuck out of my office.”
I leveled my finger at him. “She’d better be kicked loose by five o’clock this afternoon. Don’t underestimate your situation, Rufus.”
“Fuck you,” he said as I went out the door.
I talked with the sheriff and the prosecutor’s office. Rufus had done his job well; he used another deputy as a witness to the sting, paid a prostitute at the juke to go in back, waited until she in turn passed the money to Ruthie Jean at the bar, and busted and Mirandized both the hooker and Ruthie Jean on the spot.
At eleven o’clock I got a surprise phone call.
“What can you do?” Moleen said.
“I don’t know. Maybe nothing,” I said.
“She’s not a procurer. What kind of crazy ideas do y’all operate on down there?”
“She took the money, she put it in the cash register.”
“You know what goes on in those places. She can’t sanitize every dollar that goes through her hands.”
“You’re getting on the wrong person’s case, Moleen.”
“Yeah?”
I didn’t speak. I could almost hear his anger building on the other end of the line.
“Goddamn it, you stop jerking me around, Dave.”
“Your wife was in here yesterday. I explained to her I didn’t take vice complaints. I think she found the right person, though.”
“Are you telling me...” He couldn’t get the sentence out.
“The arresting officer was Rufus Arceneaux. Talk to him, Moleen. In the meantime, you want to do some good, go her bail.”
“You self-righteous sonofabitch.”
“Thanks for your call,” I said, and hung up.
At noon, as I was leaving the building for lunch, I saw Luke Fontenot’s paint less smoking, 1970s gas-guzzler, its ruptured muffler roaring against the pavement, swing out of the traffic toward the curb.
He leaned down so he could see me through the passenger’s window.
“I ain’t gone hide no more,” he said. “I got to talk. When you gone be back?”
“Talk about what?”
“He ain’t want the baby. That’s where it all gone bad, even before I had to shoot that man ‘cause he was bad-mouthing my sister and blackmailing Mr. Moleen at the same time.”
I opened the car door and got in beside him.
“How about I buy us both a po’-boy?” I said.
Chapter 16
This is how luke told it to me, or as best as I can reconstruct it.
The Bertrand family had always been absentee landowners and had left the general care of the plantation to an overseer named Noah Wirtz, a sharecropper from the Red River parishes who could pass or not pass for a person of color, whichever the situation required. Other than a few teachers at the rural elementary school, Ruthie Jean, at age eleven, had little immediate contact with white adults, until that smoky winter morning when Moleen came to the plantation with his college friends from Springhill to shoot doves.
He had been kneeling by the coulee’s edge, his double-barrel propped against the trunk of a leafless sycamore, pouring a cup of coffee from his thermos while his dog hunted for the birds Moleen had just downed in the cane stubble, when he turned around and saw her watching him.
Her pigtails were tied with rubber bands, her plump body lost in a man’s mackinaw.
“Why, good heavens, you gave me a start,” he said, although she knew it wasn’t true. He winked at her. “My friends and I are all out of coffee. Can you go ask your mama to fill this up?”
She took the thermos and wet cup from his hands, her eyes fascinated with his handsome face and the lifeless birds that he had charmed out of the sky into his canvas game pouch.
“Wait a minute,” he said, and slipped his thumb in his watch pocket and put a silver dollar in her palm. The ends of his slender fingers brushed her skin. She had not known a coin could be that heavy and big. “That’s for Christmas. Now, run along and tell your mama the coffee’s for Mr. Moleen.”
She didn’t see him again for six years, then on a cold New Year’s afternoon she heard guns popping on the far side of the cane field, out by the treeline, and when she went out on the gallery she saw four men walking abreast through the frozen stubble, while a frenzy of birds leaped into the air in front of them and tried to find invisibility against a pitiless blue sky.
The hunters unloaded canvas chairs, a cooler, a collapsible grill from the bed of a pickup, and drank whiskey and cooked two-inch bloodred steaks on a wood fire that whipped in the wind like a torn handkerchief. When the one named Moleen saw her from across the field and asked her to bring water, she went quickly into the kitchen and filled a plastic pitcher, her heart beating in her breast for a reason she didn’t understand.
The faces of the hunters were red with windburn and bourbon, their eyes playful, their conversation roaming between the depth of drilling wells and the remembered adrenaline surge in the glands when they led a throbbing covey with ventilated-rib sights and, one-two-three-four-five, turned each bird into a broken smudge against the winter sun. She filled their glasses, now aware that her sense of alarm was not only baseless but vain, that their eyes never really took note of her, other than a glance to ensure the water didn’t spill over their outstretched wrists.