I couldn't offer my limited experience in Vietnam as the raison d'etre for my insomnia. I drank before I went there and I drank more when I came back. Now I did not drink at all and my nocturnal hours were still filled with the same visitors and feelings; they simply took on different shapes and faces.
The night seemed alive with sound the clatter of red squirrels on the roof, a dredge boat out on the bayou, a brief rain shower that swept across the trees in the yard. When I finally fell asleep I dreamed of my dead wife Bootsie and Father Jimmie Dolan and the three girls who had died in a burning automobile and of a Negro convict who had been ground up in a system that loathed courage in a black man.
What were the dreams really about? An imperfect world, I suspect, one over which death and injustice often seemed to hold dominion. But what kind of fool would surrender his sleep over a condition he could not change?
Sleeping with a .45 did not bring Audie Murphy peace of mind, nor did gambling away millions in Las Vegas. I had slept with firearms, too, and invested substantial sums of money in the parimutuel industry at racetracks all over the country, but I was no more successful in my attempt at redress with the world than he was. That said, I did have an answer for insomnia, one that was surefire and one that Murphy evidently did not try. But just the thought of its coming back into my life made sweat pop on my forehead.
When I went to the office in the morning a faxed message was waiting for me from the Department of Public Safety and Corrections in Baton Rouge. Since there was no record of Junior Crudup's discharge from Angola or his death while on the farm, it was the department contention he had served his full sentence and gone out "max time," which meant he would have been released without parole stipulations or supervision sometime in 1958.
It was pure blather.
I called Father Jimmie Dolan at his rectory in New Orleans and was told he was working in the garden. Fat Sammy had said Father Jimmie was a global-size pain in the ass. The archdiocese must have felt the same. He had been assigned to an ancient, downtown church in a dirty, dilapidated neighborhood off Canal, where Mass was still said in Latin, women in the pews covered their heads, and communicants knelt at the altar rail when they received the Eucharist, as though the 1960s reforms of Vatican II had never taken place.
Last year, when I remarked to Father Jimmie on the obvious bad judgment if not punitive intention on the part of the diocese in placing a minister such as himself in a parish with an anachronistic mindset, he replied, "Some people can't accept change. So the church lets a few wall themselves up in a mausoleum and pretend the past is still alive. Know anybody else who has that kind of problem?"
"Excuse me?" I said.
"They're not bad guys," he said, grinning from ear to ear.
My mind came back to the present and I heard Father Jimmie scrape the phone receiver off a hard surface.
"Fat Sammy Figorelli says you punched out the owner of a health salon," I said.
"Not exactly."
"How 'not exactly'?"
"The guy we're talking about runs a massage parlor and escort service. He forced a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese girl from our parish to give a blowjob to one of his customers. Is this why you called?"
"The Department of Corrections says Junior Crudup's last sentence was up in 1958. They say he wasn't paroled and he didn't die inside the prison, so he must have gone out max time in '58."
"He was probably killed and buried on the farm. But I doubt if we'll ever know."
"There's more. An old time gun bull says a man by the name of
Castille Lejeune got Junior off the levee gang around 1951. But that's where the trail ends."
"Castille Lejeune, in Franklin? That's Theodosha Flannigan's father. She's married to Merchie Flannigan."
"How'd you know that?" I said.
"She used to live in New Orleans. She was one of our parishioners. Can we have a talk with Mr. Lejeune?"
"I don't like to get too close to Theodosha."
There was a beat, then he said, "Oh, I see."
Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.
That afternoon I went to each drive-by daiquiri store in New Iberia. Each of the stores used the same type of blue plastic cups that I had picked up near the accident scene, the same type lids, the same type sealing wrap. I showed each of the clerks working the window the yearbook photographs of the three girls killed on Loreauville Road. Each clerk looked at them blankly and shook his head. At the first three stores I believed the denials given me by the clerks. At the fourth my experience was different.
The store was a boxlike, plywood structure, painted white, located inside an oak grove just outside the city limits. I parked my cruiser in the trees and waited in the shade while the clerk, a kid probably not much over legal age himself, serviced three drive-by customers. Then I walked to the window, which had a flap on it propped up by a stick. I opened my badge on him.
"What's your name?" I said.
"Josh Comeaux."
"You work here every evening, Josh?"
"Yes, sir. Unless I have a basketball game. Then Mr. Hebert lets me off," he answered.
I flipped the high school yearbook open to a marked page and showed him pictures of two of the dead girls.
"You know either one of these girls?" I asked.
"No, sir, I can't say I do," he said. He wore khakis and a starched, print shirt, the short sleeves folded in neat cuffs on his upper arms.
His hair was black, combed back with gel, boxed on the neck, his skin tanned.
"Can't or won't?" I said, and smiled at him.
"Sir?" he said, confused.
I turned to another marked page in the yearbook and showed him a picture of Lori Parks.
"How about this girl?" I said.
He shook his head, his eyes flat. "No, sir. Don't know her. I guess I'm not much help on this. These girls do something wrong?"
"You seem out of breath. You all right?" I said.
"I'm fine," he said, and tried to smile.
"What time did you serve her?" I asked.
"Serve who?"
"Lori Parks," I said, tapping the picture of the driver.
"I haven't said I did that. I haven't said no such thing. No, sir."
"The autopsy on this girl indicates she was alive when the gasoline tank on her car exploded. She was seventeen years old. I think you're in a world of shit, partner."
He swallowed and looked at the smoke hanging in the trees from a barbecue joint. He opened his mouth to speak, but a middle-aged, balding man who wore a cowboy vest and a string tie and hillbilly sideburns that looked like grease pencil cupped his hand on the boy's shoulder and glared at me through the service window.
"You saying we served somebody under age?" he asked.
"I know you did," I said.
"Every young person who comes by this window has to show ID. That's the rule. No exceptions," he said.
"You the owner?" I said.
He ignored my question and addressed his clerk. "You serve anybody who looked like a minor yesterday?"
"No, sir, not me. I checked everybody," the clerk said.
"That's what I thought," the man in the vest said. "We're closed."
"How did you know the problem sale was yesterday?" I asked.
He pulled out the support stick from under the window flap and let it slam shut in my face.
While I had spent the afternoon questioning the employees of New Iberia's drive-by daiquiri stores, an unusual man was completing his journey on the Sunset Limited from Miami into New Orleans. He had small ears that were tight against his scalp, narrow shoulders, white skin, lips that were the color of raw liver, and emerald green eyes that possessed the rare quality of seeming infinitely interested in what other people were saying. He sat in the lounge car, wearing a seersucker suit and pink dress shirt with a plum-colored tie and ruby stick pin, sipping from a glass of soda and ice and lime slices while the countryside rolled by. An elderly Catholic nun in a black habit sat down next to him and opened a book and began reading from it. She soon became conscious that the man was watching her.