"Don't go off in a snit, nose out of joint, that sort of thing," he said.
"I think you have a problem," I said.
"We're talking about chemical dependencies now, are we?"
"No, you're hard of hearing. No offense meant," I said, and went inside the shop and busied myself in back until all of them were gone except Clete, who remained at the table, sipping from his beer bottle.
"Why's Holtzner want to get close to you?" he asked.
"You got me."
"I remembered where I'd seen him. He was promoting USO shows in Nam. Except he was also mixed up with some PX guys who were selling stuff on the black market. It was a big scandal. Holtzner was kicked out of Nam. That's like being kicked out of Hell… You just going to sit there and not say anything?"
"Yeah, don't get caught driving with beer on your breath."
Clete pushed his glasses up on his head and drank from his bottle, one eye squinted shut.
THAT NIGHT, IN A Lafayette apartment building on a tree-and-fern-covered embankment that overlooked the river, the accountant named Anthony mounted the staircase to the second-story landing and walked through a brick passageway toward his door. The underwater lights were on in the swimming pool, and blue strings of smoke from barbecue grills floated through the palm and banana fronds that shadowed the terrace. Anthony carried a grocery sack filled with items from a delicatessen, probably obscuring his vision, as evidently he never saw the figure that waited for him behind a potted orange tree.
The knife must have struck as fast as a snake's head, in the neck, under the heart, through the breastbone, because the coroner said Anthony was probably dead before the jar of pickled calf brains in his sack shattered on the floor.
SIXTEEN
HELEN SOILEAU AND I MET Ruby Gravano and her nine-year-old boy at the Amtrak station in Lafayette Monday afternoon. The boy was a strange-looking child, with his mother's narrow face and black hair but with eyes that were set unnaturally far apart, as though they had been pasted on the skin. She held the boy, whose name was Nick, by one hand and her suitcase by the other.
"Is this gonna take long? Because I'm not feeling real good right now," she said.
"There's a female deputy in that cruiser over there, Ruby. She's going to take Nick for some ice cream, then we'll finish with business and take y'all to a bed-and-breakfast in New Iberia. Tomorrow you'll be back on your way," I said.
"Did you get the money bumped up? Houston's a lot more expensive than New Orleans. My mother said I can stay a week free, but then I got to pay her rent," she said.
"Three hundred is all we could do," I said.
Her forehead wrinkled. Then she said, "I don't feel too comfortable standing out here. I don't know how I got talked into this." She looked up and down the platform and fumbled in her bag for a pair of dark glasses.
"You wanted a clean slate in Houston. You were talking about a treatment program. Your idea, not ours, Ruby," Helen said.
The little boy's head rotated like a gourd on a stem as he watched the disappearing train, the people walking to their cars with their luggage, a track crew repairing a switch.
"He's autistic. This is all new to him. Don't look at him like that. I hate this shit," Ruby said, and pulled on the boy's hand as though she were about to leave us, then stopped when she realized she had no place to go except our unmarked vehicle, and in reality she didn't even know where that was.
We put Nick in the cruiser with the woman deputy, then drove to Four Corners and parked across the street from a sprawling red-and-white motel that looked like a refurbished eighteenth-century Spanish fortress.
"How do you know he's in the room?" Ruby said.
"One of our people has been watching him. In five minutes he's going to get a phone call. Somebody's going to tell him smoke is coming out of his truck. All you have to do is look through the binoculars and tell us if that's the john you tricked on Airline Highway," I said.
"You really got a nice way of saying it," she replied.
"Ruby, cut the crap. The guy in that room tried to kill a priest Friday morning. What do you think he'll do to you if he remembers he showed you mug shots of two guys he capped out in the Basin?" Helen said.
Ruby lowered her chin and bit her lip. Her long hair made a screen around her narrow face.
"It's not fair," she said.
"What?" I asked.
"Connie picked those guys up. But she doesn't get stuck with any of it. You got a candy bar or something? I feel sick. They wouldn't turn down the air-conditioning on the train."
She sniffed deep in her nose, then wiped her nostrils hard with a Kleenex, pushing her face out of shape.
Helen looked through the front window at one of our people in a phone booth on the corner.
"It's going down, Ruby. Pick up the binoculars," she said.
Ruby held the binoculars to her eyes and stared at the door to the room rented by Harpo Scruggs. Then she shifted them to an adjacent area in the parking lot. Her lips parted slightly on her teeth.
"What's going on?" she said.
"Nothing. What are you talking about?" I said.
"That's not the guy with the mug shots. I don't know that guy's name. We didn't ball him either," she said.
"Take the oatmeal out of your mouth," Helen said.
I removed the binoculars from her hands and placed them to my eyes.
"The guy out there in the parking lot. He came to the diner where the guy named Harpo and the other John were eating with us. He talks like a coon-ass. They went outside together, then he drove off," she said.
"You never told us this," I said.
"Why should I? You were asking about Johns." I put the binoculars back to my eyes and watched Alex Guidry, the fired Iberia Parish jailer who had cuckolded Cool Breeze Broussard, knock on empty space just as Harpo Scruggs ripped open the door and charged outside, barefoot and in his undershirt and western-cut trousers, expecting to see a burning truck.
LATER THE SAME AFTERNOON, when the sheriff was in my office, two Lafayette homicide detectives walked in and told us they were picking up Cool Breeze Broussard. They were both dressed in sport clothes, their muscles swollen with steroids. One of them, whose name was Daigle, lit a cigarette and kept searching with his eyes for an ashtray to put the burnt match in.
"Y'all want to go out to his house with us?" he asked, and dropped the match in the wastebasket.
"I don't," I said.
He studied me. "You got some kind of objection, something not getting said here?" he asked.
"I don't see how you make Broussard for this guy's, what's his name, Anthony Pollock's murder," I replied.
"He's got a hard-on for the Terrebonne family. There's a good possibility he started the fire on their movie set. He's a four-time loser. He shanked a guy on Camp J. He mangled a guy on an electric saw in your own jail. You want me to go on?" Daigle said.
"You've got the wrong guy," I said.
"Well, fuck me," he said.
"Don't use that language in here, sir," the sheriff said.
"What?" Daigle said.
"The victim was an addict. He had overseas involvements. He didn't have any connection with Cool Breeze. I think you guys have found an easy dart-board," I said.
"We made up all that stuff on Broussard's sheet?" the other detective said.
"The victim was stabbed in the throat, heart, and kidney and was dead before he hit the floor. It sounds like a professional yard job," I said.
"A yard job?" Daigle said.
"Talk to a guy by the name of Swede Boxleiter. He's on lend-lease from Canon City," I said.
"Swede who?" Daigle said, taking a puff off his cigarette with three fingers crimped on the paper.
The sheriff scratched his eyebrow.