His eyes blinked.
"They tell you a guy resisted arrest or fell down when they put him in the car," I said. "They're supposed to bring in a hooker, but they can't ever seem to find her. You send them into a Negro neighborhood and you wonder if the town is going to be burning by midnight."
"There's another problem, too. It comes in bottles."
"If I go out of control, fire me."
"Everybody around here likes and respects you, Dave. I don't like to see a man go back to his old ways because he's trying to fly with an overload."
"I'm doing all right, Sheriff." I looked him steadily in the eyes. I didn't like to run a con on a decent man, but most of the cards in my hands were blanks.
"You look like you've been out in the sun too long," he said.
"I'm dealing with it. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. If I come in here blowing fumes in your face, pull my plug. That's all I can tell you. Where do you think those killers are now?"
"I don't know."
"They're doing a few lines, getting laid, maybe sipping juleps at the track. They feel power right now that you and I can't even guess at. I've heard them describe it as being like a heroin rush."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because I know how they think. I don't believe you do. Those other guys out there don't, either. You know what they did after they murdered Annie? They drove to a bar. Not the first or the second one they saw, but one way down the road where they felt safe, where they could drink Jack Daniel's and smoke cigarettes without speaking to one another, until that moment when their blood slowed and they looked in each other's eyes and started laughing."
"Look at it another way. What evidence do you have in hand?"
"The lead we dug out of the walls, the shotgun shells off the floor, the pry bar they dropped on the porch," he said.
"But not a print."
"No."
"Which means you have almost nothing. Except me. They were out to kill me, not Annie. Every aspect of the investigation will eventually center around that fact. You'll end up interviewing me every other day."
He lit a cigarette and smoked it with his elbow on the desk blotter. He looked through the door glass at the deputies in the outer office. One of them leaned to the side of his desk and spit tobacco juice into a cuspidor.
"I'll have to run it by a couple of other people, but I don't think there'll be any trouble," he said. "But you don't work on just this one case, Dave. You carry a regular load just like the other detectives and you go by the same rules."
"All right."
He puffed on his cigarette and widened his eyes in the smoke, as though dismissing some private concerns from his mind, then he watched my expression closely and said, "Who do you think did it?"
"I don't know."
"You told me that the day after it happened, and I accepted that. But you've had a lot of time to think in the last ten days. I can't believe you haven't come to some conclusion. I wouldn't want to feel you're being less than honest here, and that maybe you're going to try to operate on your own after all."
"Sheriff, I gave motive to any number or combination of people. The bartender at Smiling Jack's is the kind of vicious punk who could blow out your light and drink a beer while he was doing it. I not only ran his head into a window fan and cocked a.45 between his eyes, I turned Bubba Rocque loose on him and made him get out of New Orleans. I messed up Eddie Keats with a pool cue in front of his whores, and I went into Bubba Rocque's house and told him I was going to put my finger in his eye if I found out he sent Keats and the Haitian after me."
"Maybe it was Toot and a guy I don't know. Maybe it was two contract men Bubba or Keats brought in from out of state. Maybe it's somebody out of the past. Once in a while they get out of Angola and keep their promises."
"New Orleans thinks the bartender went to the Islands."
"Maybe, but I doubt it. He's a rat, and a rat goes into a hole. He's more afraid of Bubba than he is of cops. I don't believe he'll be walking around on a beach anywhere. Besides, he's a mama's boy. He probably won't run far from home."
"I'll be truthful with you, Dave. I don't know where to start on this one. We just don't have this kind of crime around here. I sent two deputies to question Keats, and he picked his nose in front of them and told them to bust him or beat feet. His bartender and one of his hookers said he was in the club when Annie was killed."
"Did they question the bartender and the hooker separately?"
He looked away from me. "I don't know," he said.
"That's all right. We can talk to them again."
"I went out to Bubba Rocque's myself. I don't know what to think about a guy like that. You could scratch a match on those eyes and I don't think they'd blink. I remember thirty years ago when he was a kid and he dropped a fly ball in the city park and lost the game for his side. After the game he was eating a snowcone and his daddy slapped it out of his hand and hit him across the ear. His eyes didn't show any more feeling than a couple of zinc pennies."
"What did he tell you?"
"He was home asleep."
"What'd his wife say?"
"She said she was in New Orleans that night. So Bubba doesn't have an alibi."
"He knows he doesn't need one yet. Bubba's a lot smarter than Eddie Keats."
"He said he was sorry about Annie. I think maybe he meant it, Dave."
"Maybe."
"You think he's bad through and through, don't you?"
"Yep."
"I guess I just don't have your mileage."
I started to tell him that any cop who gave the likes of Bubba Rocque an even break would probably not earn much mileage, but fortunately I kept my own counsel and simply asked when I could get a badge.
"Two or three days," he answered. "In the meantime, take it easy. We'll get these guys sooner or later."
As I said, he was a decent man, but the Rotary Club had a larger claim on his soul than the sheriff's department. The fact is that most criminals are not punished for their crimes. In New York City only around two percent of the crimes are punished, and in Miami the figure is about four percent. If you want to meet a group of people who have a profound distrust of, and hostility toward, our legal system, don't waste your time on political radicals; interview a random selection of crime victims, and you'll probably find that they make the former group look like Utopian idealists by comparison.
I shook hands with him and walked out into the hazy noon-day heat and humidity. In the meadows along the road, cattle were bunched in the hot shade of the oak trees, and white egrets were pecking in the dried cow flop out in the grass. I pulled my tie loose, wiped my forehead on my shirt sleeve, and looked at the long wet streaks on the cloth.
Fifteen minutes later I was in a dark, cool bar south of town, a cold, napkin-wrapped collins glass in my hand. But I couldn't stop perspiring.
Vodka is an old friend to most clandestine drunks. It has neither odor nor color, and it can be mixed with virtually anything without the drinker being detected. But its disadvantage for a whiskey drinker like me was that it went down so smoothly, so innocuously, in glasses filled with crushed ice and fruit slices and syrup and candied cherries, that I could drink almost a fifth of it before I realised that I had gone numb from my hairline to the soles of my feet.
"Didn't you say you had to leave here at four?" the bartender asked.
"Sure."
He glanced up at the illuminated clock on the wall above the bar. I tried to focus my eyes on the hands and numbers. I pressed my palm absently to my shirt pocket.
"I guess I left my glasses in my truck," I said.
"It's five after."
"Call me a cab, will you? You mind if I leave my truck in your lot awhile?"
"How long?" He was washing glasses, and he didn't look at me when he spoke and his voice had the neutral tone that bartenders use to suppress the disdain they feel for some of the people whom they serve.