"Because he was told to. Two other cops were there. They put a throw-down on the body."
"I couldn't tell you. I was ten years old when all this happened. You guys running short of open cases in New Iberia?"
"Where's Bobby Cale now?"
"If you're up to it, I'll give you directions to his place. Or you can get them from the Department of Health and Hospitals."
"What do you mean 'if I'm up to it'?"
"Maybe his sins are what got a fence post kicked up his ass. Check it out. Ask yourself if you'd like to trade places with him," the Lafourche Parish sheriff said.
I DROVE MY PICKUP truck to Morgan City, then down deep into Terrebonne Parish, toward the Gulf, almost to Point au Fer. The sky was gray and roiling with clouds and I could smell salt spray on the wind. I went down a dirt road full of sinkholes, between thickly canopied woods that were hung with air vines, dotted with palmettos, and drifting with gray leaves. The road ended at a sunless, tin-roofed cypress cabin that was streaked black with rainwater. A man sat in a chair on the front porch, his stomach popping out of his shirt like a crushed white cake, a guitar laid flat on his lap.
When I got out of the truck, the man leaned forward and picked up a straw hat from the porch swing and fitted it low on his head. In the shade his skin had the bloodless discoloration that an albino's might if he bathed in blue ink. He wore steel picks on the fingers of his right hand and the sawed-off, machine-buffed neck of a glass bottle on the index finger of his left. He slid the bottle neck up and down the strings of the guitar and sang, "I'm going where the water tastes like cherry wine, 'cause the Georgia water tastes like turpentine."
A mulatto or Indian woman who was shaped like a duck, with Hottentot buttocks and elephantine legs, was hanging wash in back. She turned and looked at me with the flat stare of a frying pan, then spit in the weeds and walked heavily to the privy and went inside and closed the door behind her by fitting a hand through a hole in a board.
"She ain't rude. She's just blind. Preacher tole me once everybody's got somebody," the man on the porch said. He picked up a burning cigarette from the porch railing and raised it to his mouth. His hand was withered, the fingers crimped together like the dried paw of an animal.
"You Bobby Cale?" I asked.
He pushed his hat up on his forehead and lifted his face, turning it at a slight angle, as though to feel the breeze.
"I look like I might be somebody else?" he said.
"No, sir."
"I was in Carville fifteen years. That was back in the days when people like me was walled off from the rest of y'all. I run off and lived in Nevada. Wandered in the desert and ate grasshoppers and didn't take my meds and convinced myself I was John the Baptizer come back in modern times. I scared the hell out of people who turned up the wrong dirt road."
I started to open my badge.
"I know who you are. I know why you're here, too. It won't do you no good," he said.
"You didn't shoot Ladrine Theriot," I said.
"The paperwork says otherwise."
"The two other cops there had on uniforms. They wore black slickers. They made you take their heat because they were from another parish and out of their jurisdiction."
He threw his cigarette out into the yard and looked into space. His nose was eaten away, the skin of his face drawn back on the bone, the cheeks creased with lines like whiskers on a cat.
"You know a whole lot for a man wasn't there," he said.
"There was a witness. She used the name Mae Guillory," I said.
"Everybody's got at least one night in his life that he wants to carry on a shovel to a deep hole in a woods and bury under a ton of dirt. Then for good measure burn the woods down on top of it. I wish I was a drunkard and could just get up and say I probably dreamed it all. I don't remember no witness."
"The two other cops killed her. Except a hooker saw them do it."
His eyes held on me for a long time. They were green, uncomplicated, and still seemed to belong inside the round, redneck face of an overweight constable from thirty years ago.
"You got an honest-to-God witness can hold them over the fire?" he said, his eyes lingering on mine.
"She never knew their names. She didn't see their faces well, either."
The moment went out of his eyes. "This world's briers and brambles, ain't it?" he said.
"You a churchgoin' man, Mr. Cale?"
"Not no more."
"Why not get square and start over? People won't be hard on you."
"They killed Mae Guillory? I always thought she just run off," he said, an unexpected note of sadness in his voice.
I didn't reply. His eyes were hooded, his down-turned nose like the ragged beak of a bird. He pressed the bottle neck down on the frets of the guitar and drew his steel picks across the strings. But his concentration was elsewhere, and his picks made a discordant sound like a fist striking piano keys.
"I had a wife and a little boy once. Owned a house and a truck and had money left over at the end of the month. That's all gone now," he said.
"Mae Guillory was my mother, Mr. Cale. Neither she nor I will rest until the bill's paid."
He set his guitar in the swing and placed his hat crown-down next to it and pulled the bottle neck and steel picks off his fingers and dropped them tinkling inside the hat.
"The old woman and me is going to eat some lima bean soup. You can stay if you want. But we're done talking on this particular subject," he said.
"Those cops are still out there, aren't they?" I said.
"Good-bye, sir. Before you judge me, you might be thankful you got what you got," he said, and went inside the darkness of the cabin and let the screen slam behind him.
Members in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous maintain that alcohol is but the symptom of the disease. It sounds self-serving. It's not.
That night I sat at the counter in the bait shop and watched Clete Purcel use only one thumb to unscrew the cap from a pint bottle of whiskey, then pour two inches into a glass mug and crack open a Dixie for a chaser. He was talking about fishing, or a vacation in Hawaii, or his time in the corps, I don't remember. The beer bottle was dark green, running with moisture, the whiskey in the mug brownish gold, like autumn light trapped inside a hardwood forest.
The air outside was humid and thick with winged insects, and strings of smoke rose from the flood lamps. I opened a can of Dr Pepper but didn't drink it. My hand was crimped tightly around the can, my head buzzing with a sound like a downed wire in a rain puddle.
Clete tilted the glass mug to his mouth and drank the whiskey out of the bottom, then chased it with the beer and wiped his mouth on his palm. His eyes settled on mine, then went away from me and came back.
"Your head's back in that story the black hooker told you," he said.
"My mother said her name was Mae Robicheaux," I said.
"What?"
"Before she died, she said her name was Robicheaux. She took back her married name."
"I'm going to use your own argument against you, Dave. The sonsofbitches who killed your mother are pure evil. Don't let them keep hurting you."
"I'm going to find out who they are and hunt them down and kill them."
He screwed the cap back on his whiskey bottle and wrapped the botde in a paper bag, then drank from his beer and rose from the counter stool and worked the whiskey bottle into his side pocket.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Going back to the motel. Leaving you with your family. Taking my booze out of here."
"That's not the problem."
"It's not the main one, but you'd like it to be. See you tomorrow, Streak," he said.
He put on his porkpie hat and went out the door, then I heard his Cadillac start up and roll heavily down the dirt road.
I chained up the rental boats for the night and was turning off the lights when Clete's Cadillac came back down the road and parked at the cement boat ramp. He met me at the end of the dock with a tinfoil container of microwave popcorn in his hand.