"Governments have protected you in the past. That won't happen here. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Esteban?" I said.
"Me cago en la puta de tu madre," he answered, his eyes focused on the backs of his square, thick hands, his mouth curling back in neither a sneer nor a grimace but a disfigurement like the expression in a corpse's face when the lips wrinkle away from the teeth.
"What'd he say?" Daigle asked.
"He probably doesn't have a lot of sentiment about Mother's Day," I said.
"That's not all he don't have. He's got a tube in his pants. No penis," Daigle said, and started giggling.
Outside, it was still raining hard when Helen and I got in our cruiser.
"What'd Daigle do before he was a cop?" Helen asked.
"Bill collector and barroom bouncer, I think."
"I would have never guessed," she said.
Ruben Esteban paid his fine that afternoon and was released.
THAT NIGHT I SAT in the small office that I had fashioned out of a storage room in the back of the bait shop. Spread on my desk were xeroxed copies of the investigator's report on the shooting and death of Alex Guidry, the coroner's report, and the crime scene photos taken in front of the barn. The coroner stated that Guidry had already been hit in the rib cage with a round from a.357 magnum before Helen had ever discharged her weapon. Also, the internal damage was massive and probably would have proved fatal even if Helen had not peppered him with her nine-millimeter.
One photo showed the bloody interior of Guidry's Cadillac and a bullet hole in the stereo system and another in the far door, including a blood splatter on the leather door panel, indicating the original shooter had fired at least twice and the fatal round had hit Guidry while he was seated in the car.
Another photo showed tire tracks in the grass that were not the Cadillac's.
Two rounds had been discharged from Guidry's.38, one at Helen, the other probably at the unknown assailant.
The photo of Guidry, like most crime scene photography, was stark in its black and white contrasts. His back lay propped against the barn wall, his spine curving against the wood and the earth. His hands and lower legs were sheathed in blood, his shattered mouth hanging open, narrowing his face like a tormented figure in a Goya painting.
The flood lamps were on outside the bait shop, and the rain was blowing in sheets on the bayou. The water had overflowed the banks, and the branches of the willows were trailing in the current. The body of a dead possum floated by under the window, its stomach yellow and swollen in the electric glare, the claws of feeding blue-point crabs affixed to its fur. I kept thinking of Guidry's words to me in our last telephone conversation: It was under your feet the whole time and you never saw it.
What was under my feet? Where? By the barn? Out in the field where Guidry was hit with the.357?
Then I saw Megan Flynn's automobile park by the boat ramp and Megan run down the dock toward the bait shop with an umbrella over her head.
She came inside, breathless, shaking water out of her hair. Unconsciously, I looked up the slope through the trees at the lighted gallery and living room of my house.
"Wet night to be out," I said.
She sat down at the counter and blotted her face with a paper napkin.
"I got a call from Adrien Glazier. She told me about this guy Ruben Esteban," she said.
Not bad, Adrien, I thought.
"This guy's record is for real, Dave. I heard about him when I covered the Falklands War," she said.
"He was in custody on a misdemeanor in Lafayette this morning. He doesn't blend into the wallpaper easily."
"We should feel better? Why do you think the Triads sent a walking horror show here?"
Megan wasn't one to whom you gave facile assurances.
"We don't know who his partner is. While we're watching Esteban, the other guy's peddling an icecream cart down Main Street," I said.
"Thank you," she said, and dried the back of her neck with another napkin. Her skin seemed paler, her mouth and her hair a darker shade of red under the overhead light. I glanced away from her eyes.
"You and Cisco want a cruiser to park by your house?" I asked.
"I have a bad feeling about Clete. I can't shake it," she said.
"Clete?" I said.
"Geri Holtzner is driving his car all around town. Look, nobody is going to hurt Billy Holtzner. You don't kill the people who owe you money. You hurt the people around them. These guys put bombs in people's automobiles."
"I'll talk to him about it."
"I already have. He doesn't listen. I hate myself for involving him in this," she said.
"I left my Roman collar up at the house, Meg."
"I forgot. Swinging dicks talk in deep voices and never apologize for their mistakes."
"Why do you turn every situation into an adversarial one?" I asked.
She raised her chin and tilted her head slightly. Her mouth reminded me of a red flower turning toward light.
Bootsie opened the screen door and came in holding a raincoat over her head.
"Oh, excuse me. I didn't mean to walk into the middle of something," she said. She shook her raincoat and wiped the water off it with her hand. "My, what a mess I'm making."
THE NEXT AFTERNOON WE executed a search warrant on the property where Alex Guidry was shot. The sky was braided with thick gray and metallic-blue clouds, and the air smelled like rain and wood pulp and smoke from a trash fire.
Thurston Meaux, the St. Mary Parish plainclothes, came out of the barn with a rake in his hand.
"I found two used rubbers, four pop bottles, a horseshoe, and a dead snake. That any help to y'all?" he said.
"Pretty clever," I said.
"Maybe Alex Guidry was just setting you up, podna. Maybe you're lucky somebody popped him first. Maybe there was never anything here," Meaux said.
"Tell me, Thurston, why is it nobody wants to talk about the murder of Jack Flynn?"
"It was a different time. My grandfather did some things in the Klan, up in nort' Louisiana. He's an old man now. It's gonna change the past to punish him now?"
I started to reply but instead just walked away. It was easy for me to be righteous at the expense of another. The real problem was I didn't have any idea what we were looking for. The yellow crime scene tape formed a triangle from the barn to the spot where Guidry's Cadillac had been parked. Inside the triangle we found old shotgun and.22 shells, pig bones, a plowshare that groundwater had turned into rusty lace, the stone base of a mule-operated cane grinder overgrown with morning glory vine. A deputy sheriff swung his metal detector over a desiccated oak stump and got a hot reading. We splintered the stump apart and found a fan-shaped ax head, one that had been hand-forged, in the heart of the wood.
At four o'clock the uniformed deputies left. The sun came out and I watched Thurston Meaux sit down on a crate in the lee of the barn and eat a sandwich, let the wax paper blow away in the wind, then pull the tab on a soda can and drop it in the dirt.
"You're contaminating the crime scene," I said.
"Wrong," he replied.
"Oh?"
"Because we're not wasting any more time on this bullshit. You've got some kind of obsession, Robicheaux." He brushed the crumbs off his clothes and walked to his automobile.
Helen didn't say anything for a long time. Then she lifted a strand of hair out of her eye and said, "Dave, we've walked every inch of the field and raked all the ground inside and around the barn. You want to start over again, that's okay with me, but-"
"Guidry said, 'It was under your feet, you arrogant shithead.' Whatever he was talking about, it's physical, maybe something we walked over, something he could pick up and stick in my face."
"We can bring in a Cat and move some serious dirt."
"No, we might destroy whatever is here."