“What do you think he meant?” Clete said.
“Who knows?”
“Dave, you going to be okay? You don’t look too good.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
But I wasn’t. I had no sooner closed the door to the pickup’s cab when I had to open it again and vomit on the concrete. My face was cold with sweat. I felt Clete’s big hand on my neck.
“What is it, Streak?” he said.
“The tattoo.”
“On fuckhead in there?”
“On Sonny’s shoulder. A Madonna figure. I saw it in the mortuary.”
Chapter 35
Later, i drove north of town to the sheriff’s house on Bayou Teche and walked around his dripping live oaks to the gallery, where he sat in a straw chair with his pipe and a glass of lemonade. His house was painted yellow and gray, and petals from his hydrangeas were scattered like pink confetti on the grass; in back, I could see the rain dimpling on the bayou.
He listened while I talked, never interrupting, snuffing down in his nose sometimes, clicking his pipe on his teeth.
“Do like Purcel and Helen tell you, Dave. Let Marsallus go,” he said.
“I feel to blame.”
“That’s vain as hell, if you ask me.”
“Sir?
“You’re a gambler, Dave. Marsallus faded the back line and bet against himself a long time ago.”
I looked at the rain rings out on the bayou, at a black man in a pirogue under a cypress overhang who was tossing a hand line and baited treble hook into the current.
“And as far as this supernatural stuff is concerned, I think Marsallus is alive only in your head,” he said.
“People have seen him.”
“Maybe they see what you want them to see.”
Wrong, skipper, I thought. But this time I kept my own counsel.
“Somebody knew we were coming for Pogue,” I said. “Maybe we’ve got a leak in the department.”
“Who?”
“How about Rufus Arceneaux?”
He thought for a moment, adjusted his shirt collar with his thumb.
“Rufus would probably do almost anything, Dave, as long as he thought he was in control of it. He’d be out of his depth on this one.”
“How’d they know we were coming?”
“Maybe it was just coincidence. We don’t solve every crime. This might be one of them.”
“They’re wiping their feet on us, Sheriff.”
He ran a pipe cleaner through the stem of his pipe and watched it emerge brown and wet from the metal airhole.
“You’re lucky you don’t smoke,” he said.
After work I went home and put on my gym shorts and running shoes and worked out with my weight set in the backyard. It had stopped raining and the sky was rippled with purple and crimson clouds and loud with the droning of tree frogs. Then I went inside and showered and put on a fresh pair of khakis and began poking through the clothes hangers in the closet. Boots sat on the bed and watched me.
“Where’s my old charcoal shirt?” I asked.
“I put it in your trunk. It’s almost cheesecloth.”
“That’s why I wear it. It’s comfortable.”
The trunk was in the back of the closet. I unlocked it and saw the shirt folded next to my AR-15 and the holstered nine-millimeter Beretta I had taught Alafair how to shoot. I removed the shirt, locked the trunk, and dropped the key in a dresser drawer.
“You still thinking about Sonny?” she said.
“No, not really.”
“Dave?”
“It’s not my job to explain what’s unexplainable. St. Paul said there might be angels living among us, so we should be careful how we treat one another. Maybe he knew something.”
“You haven’t said this to anybody else, have you?”
“Who cares?” I started to button my shirt, but she got off the bed and began buttoning it for me.
“You’re too much, Streak,” she said, nudging my leg with her knee.
In the morning I called a half dozen licensing agencies in Baton Rouge for any background I could get on Blue Sky Electric Company. No one seemed to know much about them, other than the fact they had acquired every permit they needed to begin construction on their current site by Cade.
What was their history?
No one seemed to know that, either.
Where had they been in business previously?
Eastern Washington and briefly in Missoula, Montana.
I called a friend in the chemistry department at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette, then met him for lunch in the student center, which looked out upon a cypress-filled lake on the side of old Burke Hall. He was an elderly, wizened man who didn’t suffer fools and was notorious for his classroom histrionics, namely, kicking his shoes across the lecture room the first day of class and gracefully flipping the text over his shoulder into a wastebasket.
“What do these guys make?” he said.
“Nobody seems to know.”
“What do they un-make?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s not a profound concept, Dave. If they don’t make things, they dispose of things. You said they had an incinerator. Who besides Satan needs an incinerator in a climate like this?”
“They do something with electrical transformers,” I said.
His eyes looked like slits, his skin webbed like dry clay.
“If they’re incinerating the oil in the transformers, they’re probably emitting PCB’s into the environment. PCB’s not only go into the air, they go into the food chain. Anticipate a change in local cancer statistics,” he said.
Back at my office I called the EPA in Washington, D.C. then newspapers and wire services in Seattle and Helena, Montana. Blue Sky Electric had changed its corporate name at least seven times and had been kicked out of or refused admission to thirteen states. Each time it departed an area, it left behind a Superfund cleanup that ran into millions of dollars. The great irony was that the cleanup was contracted by the same corporation that owned the nonunion railroad that transported the transformers to Blue Sky Electric.
The last place they had tried to set up business was in Missoula, where they had been driven out of town by a virtual lynch mob.
Now they had found a new home with the Bertrand family, I thought.
“What are you going to do?” Helen said.
“Spit in the punch bowl.”
I called the Daily Iberian, the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Sierra Club, an ACLU lawyer who delighted in filing class action suits on behalf of minorities against polluters, and a RICO prosecutor with the U.S. attorney general’s office.
After work, Rufus Arceneaux stopped me on the way to my truck in the parking lot. His armpits were dark with sweat rings, his breath as rank as an ashtray.
“I need to talk with you,” he said.
“Do it on the clock.”
“This is private. I got no deep involvement with the Bertrands. I did a little security for them, that’s all.”
“What are you telling me, Roof?”
“Any kind of shit coming down on their head, problems with the grease balls it’s got nothing to do with me. I’m out. Understand what I’m saying?”
“No.”
I could smell the fear in his sweat. He walked away from me, his GI haircut as slick as a peeled onion against the late sun.
That evening I helped Batist bail and chain-lock our rental boats and close up the bait shop. The air was dry and hot, the sky empty of clouds and filled with a dull white light like a reflection off tin. My hands, my chest, seemed to burn with an energy I couldn’t free myself from.
“What’s got your burner on, Streak?” Bootsie said in the living room.
“Rufus Arceneaux’s trying to disassociate himself from the Bertrands. He knows something’s about to hit the fan.”