“Sean doesn’t have trouble with anyone. Except for a couple of wiseasses in the department.”
“Axel Devereaux is one of those wiseasses?”
“Devereaux knows you’re protective of Sean.”
“It goes deeper than that,” I said. “Sean slammed Devereaux in the head with a napkin dispenser at Victor’s.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It doesn’t matter. Devereaux shouldn’t be a member of the department.”
“When I fire him arbitrarily, you can handle the lawsuit,” she said.
“I think he may be working with a pimp.”
“Which pimp?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I talked to a black prostitute in Jeanerette. She wouldn’t give him up. Do we have anything more on the escaped convict from Texas?”
“No, why?”
“The prostitute is named Hilary Bienville. Her baby had a Maltese cross tied on her ankle. It was an icon worn by Crusader knights.”
“What’s the connection?”
“Lucinda Arceneaux had a chain on one ankle. The medal on it had been pulled off.”
“I got that. What’s the connection with Hugo Tillinger?”
“I don’t know, Helen. I’m lost. From everything we hear, Tillinger’s head is full of superstition and general craziness.”
“Do you know how many people in southern Louisiana wear a charm or religious medal on their body, including you?”
We had reached a point where we were taking out our anger on each other, which, in a police investigation, almost always signals a dead end in the making.
“I’ll talk to Sean,” I said.
“Here’s the rest of it. When Devereaux passed him in the corridor this morning, he went ‘Bow-wow’ and ‘Meow-meow.’ ”
That night the weather was hot and dry, the end of summer floating like ash on the wind. The sky flickered with heat lightning, like flashes of artillery that began on the horizon and spread silently through the clouds. A drunk plowed into a power pole and knocked out the electricity on East Main, and the three air-conditioning units in my house made a groaning sound and died like sick animals. I took a jar of lemonade from the icebox and rolled it on my face, then sat in my chair on the bayou and drank the lemonade and watched the stars fall out of the sky.
The phone was ringing and the message light blinking when I came back inside. It was 2:13 a.m.
“Where’ve you been?” Helen said.
“Outside.”
“Need you on Old Jeanerette Road,” Helen said. “Between Alice Plantation and the drawbridge. Hang on. I’ve got to get a news photographer out of here.”
The location made my stomach flip-flop. It was a short distance from the trailer of Hilary Bienville.
Helen came back on the line. “We’ve got a body. Or what’s left of it. Haul ass, will you?”
“Man or woman?”
“Good question,” she replied.
Chapter Eight
The most surreal aspect of the scene was the juxtaposition of the antebellum plantation homes on the road, the carriage lamps glowing like candles on a wedding cake, and the drag on the asphalt. It began by the LSU experimental farm and continued in a wet serpentine line almost to the drawbridge, a journey of about half a mile. That was where the vehicle stopped and someone cut the rope that had been cinched around the victim’s neck.
He lay in the weeds on his side, his eyes open, clotted with blood. Most of his face and hair had been sanded off. His teeth and shoes were gone, his jaw broken. His legs looked like bloody sticks clothed in rags.
Emergency vehicles, their flashers rippling, lined the road. “There’s no ID on him,” Helen said.
“His name is Travis Lebeau,” I said.
“Clete’s snitch?”
“Just a bumbling, hapless guy.”
She shined her light on a green teardrop that still remained on the skin. “He was in the AB?”
“Until they sold him to the Black Guerilla Family.”
“I can’t believe we’ve got these guys here,” she said. “Wasn’t it the AB that dragged a black man in Texas about twenty years back?”
“They had white-supremacist tats. Maybe they were AB, maybe not. This isn’t racial.”
“Yeah, but it’s them.”
I walked with a flashlight down the trail of blood and skin. The moon had come from behind the clouds and lit the bayou and the cattails and canebrakes in the shallows. There was blood at the base of two oak trees that grew by the road. I hoped Lebeau had been knocked unconscious when he struck them. I clicked off my flashlight and walked back to where Helen was standing.
“You don’t look good,” she said.
“Not enough sleep.”
“Right.”
“Lebeau tried to sell me information so he could score or get out of town,” I said. “I blew him off.”
“You didn’t trust his information?”
“No.”
“So what were you supposed to do? Give him the money anyway? Put the cork in it, Pops.”
I clicked on my light again and shone it in Lebeau’s mouth. “I don’t think his teeth were broken on the road.”
She stared at me.
“The roots are gone,” I said. “I think his teeth were pulled before he was dragged.”
I ached for a drink. I think Helen did, too. Wonder why cops bring the job home or to a bar? It’s no mystery.
We had no leads. Travis Lebeau had been staying at a men’s shelter in Lafayette. No one there remembered seeing him the day of his death. He was a loner, had no family or friends, and took little interest in the other men at the shelter. We put his mug shots in local newspapers and on television and asked anyone with information about him to call the department.
On Friday I got a call from a bartender in North Lafayette named Skip Dubisson. At one time he had been a pitcher in the St. Louis Cardinals farm system, but he’d lost an arm in Iraq and now worked at a low-bottom bar in Lafayette’s old unofficial red-light district north of Four Corners. “I’m pretty sure your guy was in here, Dave. The one whose picture you put on TV.”
“Travis Lebeau?” I said.
“He didn’t give his name. But yeah, same guy, a week ago. He wanted to set up a tab. I think he wanted to get laid, too.”
“Did he come in with anyone? Make any friends, female or otherwise?”
“I didn’t pay that much attention,” he said. “My regulars keep me busy, know what I mean?”
“You’ve had some bad dudes in?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?”
“The Aryan Brotherhood?”
“Who knows? Everybody’s got sleeves these days, all blue, wrist to the pits, lots of swastikas. Race-baiting is back in style.”
“This isn’t about race.”
“In this place everything is about race,” he said.
I drove to Lafayette in my pickup rather than a cruiser and parked in front of the club. It was a wretched place on a backstreet, the parking lot full of flattened beer cans, the trash barrels overflowing and crawling with flies. I went inside and stood at the bar. Skip saw me from the far end and poured a Dr Pepper in a glass packed with ice and dropped two cherries and an orange slice into it and set the glass on a napkin in front of me. His upper left arm was fitted with a prosthesis. The IED that took his arm had also disfigured the side of his face, puckering the tissue like a heat burn on a lamp shade. But he was still a handsome man, as though defined by an internal radiance rather than his wounds. I’d never once heard him complain or even make mention of his war experience. “How’s business in New Iberia?” he asked.
“Just the usual effluent. Want to check out some of our clientele?”
My iPhone was loaded with mug shots of outlaw bikers and members of the Klan, Christian Identity, Aryan Nations, the American Nazi Party, and the AB. I watched as Skip scanned through them.