“Pretty good, Streak.”
“It’s enough for a warrant,” I said.
“Then we toss his Caddy and maybe match the blood on the rug to the scraping you took from the trailer behind the juke. Dave, square your beef with the old man. I can’t partner with Rufus.”
“It’s not my call.”
“You heard Patsy Dap’s in town?”
“No.”
“Nobody told you?” she said.
“No.”
“He got stopped for speeding on East Main yesterday. The city cop made him and called us. I’m sorry, I thought somebody told you.”
“Where is he now?”
“Who knows? Wherever disfigured paranoids hang out.”
“Keep me informed on the warrant, will you?” I said.
“You’re a good cop, Dave. You get your butt back here.”
“You’re the best, Helen.”
I walked down to the dock. The air was hot and still and down the road someone was running a Weed Eater that had the nerve-searing pitch of a dentist’s instrument. So Patsy Dapolito was in New Iberia and no one had bothered to tell me, I thought. But why not? We did it all the time. We cut loose rapists, pedophiles, and murderers on minimum bail, even on their own recognizance, and seldom notified the victims or the witnesses to their crimes.
Ask anyone who’s been there. Or, better yet, ask the victims or survivors about the feelings they have when they encounter the source of their misery on the street, in the fresh air, in the flow of everyday traffic and normal life, and they realize the degree of seriousness with which society treats the nature of their injury. It’s a moment no one forgets easily.
My thoughts were bitter and useless.
I knew the origins of my self-indulgence, too. I couldn’t get the word disfigured out of my mind. I tried to imagine the images that flashed through Patsy Dap’s brain when he saw his face reflected in the mirror.
I helped Batist fill the coolers with beer and soda and scoop the ashes out of the barbecue pit, then I sat in the warm shade at one of the spool tables with a glass of iced tea and thought about Clete’s offer.
Chapter 19
The next morning I drove out to the Bertrand plantation to talk to Ruthie Jean, but no one was at home. I walked next door to Bertie’s and knocked on the screen. When she didn’t answer, I went around the side and saw her get up heavily from where she had been sitting on the edge of the porch. Her stomach swelled out between her purple stretch pants and oversize white T-shirt. She unhooked a sickle from the dirt and began slicing away the dead leaves from the banana trees that grew in an impacted clump against the side wall of the house.
I had the impression, however, she had been doing something else before she saw me.
“I’m worried about Ruthie Jean, Bertie,” I said. “I think she nursed a man named Jack who died in the trailer behind the juke. She probably heard and saw things other people don’t want her to talk about.”
“You done already tole her that.”
“She’s not a good listener.”
“There’s two kinds of trouble. What might happen, and what done already happen. White folks worry about might. It ain’t the same for everybody, no.”
“You lost me.”
“It ain’t hard to do,” she said. She ripped a tangle of brown leaves onto the ground, then lopped a stalk cleanly across the middle. The cut oozed with green water.
On the planks of the porch I saw a square of red flannel cloth, with a torn root and a tablespoon of dirt in the middle. I saw Bertie watch me out of the corner of her eye as I walked closer to the piece of flannel. Among the grains of dirt were strands of hair, what looked like a shirt button, and a bright needle with blood on it.
“I’m going to take a guess — dirt from a grave, root of a poison oak, and a needle for a mess of grief,” I said.
She whacked and lopped the dead stalks and flung the debris behind her.
“Did you get Moleen’s hair and shirt button out of the shack by the treeline?” I asked.
“I ain’t in this world to criticize. But you come out here and you don’t do no good. You pretend like you know, but you playing games. It ain’t no fun for us.”
“You think putting a gris-gris on Moleen is going to solve your problems?”
“The reason I put it on him is ‘cause she ain’t left nothing out here so I can put it on her.”
“Who?”
“Julia Bertrand.” She almost spit out the words. “She already been out here once this morning. With that man work down the hall from you. Ruthie Jean ain’t got her house no more. How you like that?”
I blew out my breath.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
She tossed the sickle in the flower bed.
“That’s my point,” she said, and went in her house.
A few minutes later, almost as though Bertie had planned Julia appearance’s as part of my ongoing education about the realities of life on a corporate plantation, I saw Julia’s red Porsche turn off the highway and drive down the dirt road toward me. Rufus Arceneaux sat next to her in a navy blue suit that looked like pressed cardboard on his body.
When she stopped next to me, her window down, her face cheerful, I tried to be pleasant and seem unknowing, to mask the embarrassment I felt for her and the level of vindictiveness to which she had devoted herself.
“Bertie doesn’t have you digging holes after pirate’s treasure, does she, Dave?” she said.
“She told me something disturbing,” I said, my voice bland, as though she and I were both concerned about the ill fortune of a third party. “It looks like Ruthie Jean and Luke are being evicted.”
“We need the house for a tenant family. Ruthie Jean and Luke don’t work on the plantation, nor do they pay rent. I’m sorry, but they’ll have to find a new situation.”
I nodded, my face blank. I felt my fingers tapping on the steering wheel. I cut my engine.
“You already dropped the dime on her and had her locked up. Isn’t that enough?” I said.
“Whatever do you mean?” she said.
I opened my door partway to let the breeze into the truck’s cab. I felt my pulse beating in my neck, words forming that I knew I shouldn’t speak.
“With y’all’s background and education, with all Moleen’s money, can’t you be a little forgiving, a little generous with people who have virtually nothing?” I said.
Rufus bent down in the passenger’s seat so I could see his face through the window. He had taken off his pilot’s sunglasses, and his eyes looked pale green and lidless, the pupils as black and small as a lizard’s, the narrow bridge of his nose pinched with two pink indentations.
“You’re operating without your shield, Dave. That’s something IA doesn’t need to hear about,” he said.
She placed her hand on his arm without looking at him.
“Dave, just so you understand something, my husband is a charming man and a wonderful litigator who also happens to be a financial idiot,” she said. “He has no money. If he did, he’d invest it in ski resorts in Bangladesh. Is Ruthie Jean home now?”
Her eyes fixed pleasantly on mine with her question. Her lips ticked smile looked like crooked red lines drawn on parchment.
I dropped the truck into low and drove under the wisteria-hung iron trellis of the Bertrand plantation, wondering, almost in awe, at the potential of the human family.
That afternoon Batist called me from the phone in the bait shop.
“Dave, there’s a man out on the dock don’t belong here,” he said.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“I ax him if he want a boat. He says, “Give me a beer and a sandwich.” An hour later he’s sitting at the table under the umbrella, smoking a cigarette, he ain’t eat the sandwich, he ain’t drunk the beer. I ax him if there’s any ting wrong with the food. He says, “It’s fine. Bring me another beer.” I say, “You ain’t drunk that one.” He says, “It’s got a bug in it. You got the afternoon paper here?” I say, “No, I ain’t got the paper.” He says, “How about some magazines?”