“Maybe he was just out of sorts,” I said.
“There’s something else bothering me. Des got wet today and was changing his socks. There’s a Maltese cross tattooed on his ankle. Didn’t you say Bienville tied a charm shaped like a Maltese cross on her daughter’s ankle?”
“I did.”
“Just coincidence?” she said.
“That’s a word liars use often,” I said.
Chapter Twenty
Early the next morning I drove to the location outside Morgan City that Desmond had turned into a replica of an early 1950s prison farm. Mounted gunbulls in gray uniforms and shades, their skin as dark as saddle leather, were silhouetted against the sunrise atop the levee, while down below, men in prison stripes and straw hats that had been painted red were pulling stumps with mules and chains.
Part of the set included a two-story barracks with barred windows, constructed in the distance, and two upended cast-iron sweatboxes set in concrete. Alafair had left the house before I had and was sitting behind a camera with a clipboard on her knee. Desmond had interrupted a scene and was telling an actor to start over again. The actor was young and handsome and did not look like a convict who would have been on the Red Hat gang at Angola Farm many decades ago.
“You’re putting me to sleep, Zeb,” Desmond said. “This is a hara-kiri moment. When you get in the hack’s face, you know you’re headed for the sweatbox. We’re talking about hundred-and-thirty-degree heat, a shit bucket between your ankles, a hole the diameter of a cigar to breathe through, your butt and knees frying against hot metal. But you hate the captain so much you’ll accept all that pain in order to keep your self-respect. So far you’re not showing either me or the audience the brave man you’re supposed to be.”
“I’ll try to do better,” the actor said.
“ ‘Try’ is the wrong word,” Des said, his pale blue eyes widening.
“Yes, sir,” the actor said.
Desmond stepped behind the camera. “Start,” he said.
The captain sat astride a horse that must have been seventeen hands. He wore a long-sleeve crimson shirt and a Stetson and shades. Unlike the other personnel, he was not armed. A quirt was stuck in his boot. Farther down the levee, three women were picking buttercups and placing them in a straw basket. The captain’s shadow fell across the young actor named Zeb.
“Was you eyeballing them ladies?” the captain asked.
“No, sir,” Zeb said.
“I think you was. One of them is the warden’s wife, son.”
“I ain’t eyeballed no free people, boss,” Zeb said.
“Calling me a liar?”
Zeb shook his head.
“I didn’t hear you,” the captain said.
“No, sir, I ain’t said that.”
“Captain LeBlanc says you was talking during bell count.”
“Wasn’t me, Cap.”
“You’ve seen me make a Christian out of a nigger. I can do it to you, too.”
“Wasn’t eyeballing. Wasn’t talking at morning count. Wasn’t doing nothing but my fucking time, boss man.”
“Cut,” Desmond said.
Zeb waited expectantly.
“I could get more vitality out of an electrified corpse,” Desmond said. He walked to the captain’s horse. “Give me your quirt.”
The actor playing the captain slipped the quirt from his boot and handed it to Desmond. The handle was knurled; a leather tassel hung from the tip. Desmond stuck the quirt in Zeb’s hand. “Hit me.”
“Pardon?” Zeb replied, half smiling.
“Hit me! In the face! Hard!”
“I cain’t do that.”
Desmond clenched Zeb’s fingers into the handle of the quirt. “You think this is funny?”
“No, sir.”
Desmond released Zeb’s hand and popped him in the face. “Now hit me with the quirt.”
“No.”
Desmond popped him again. The crew and the other actors stared at the ground. “Either hit me or say your lines like you’re supposed to,” he said. “You’ve got booze on your breath, Zeb. Don’t show up wired again.”
There were tears in the actor’s eyes. Alafair laid her clipboard on her chair and walked past me, away from the set.
They recommenced the scene. It was powerful and real and visceral and painful to watch. Zeb virtually spat in the captain’s face, then the other gunbulls beat him senseless and carried him on his knees to the sweatbox and flung him inside and slammed the iron door as though they had just hung a hog in a smokehouse.
Desmond yelled, “Cut,” and everyone applauded. My stomach felt sick. I walked up behind Des and tapped him on the shoulder. He was grinning when he turned around.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
“I’m a little busy right now,” he replied.
“Yeah, I saw you in action.”
“You think I’m too rough?”
“That was chickenshit.”
“I don’t see Zeb complaining.”
I looked away, as you do when you can’t hide your disgust for someone’s behavior. “I’d appreciate your walking over here with me.”
“Whatever makes you happy,” he said.
We went into the shade of a tarp stretched on four poles. The canvas was popping in the wind, the fall weather both cool and warm at the same time. The cast and crew were drinking coffee and eating beignets at the commissary window.
“We’ve got another homicide on our hands,” I said.
“I heard.”
“Her name was Hilary Bienville. She hung out in the same blues joint Butterworth does.”
“So talk to him.”
“Waste of time. He’s a pathological liar and a wiseass on top. I understand you have a Maltese cross on your ankle.”
“Would you like to see it?”
“I wondered if you were in the Knights Templar. Or the Nazi Party.”
“Maybe I rode with a biker group.”
“The Hells Angels?”
“I said maybe. Get off my back, Dave.”
“You’re lying, Des.”
“I don’t let people talk to me like that.”
“How about the way you just talked to that kid?”
“Titty babies don’t make it in the movie industry.”
“And bullies thrive?”
“Fuck you, Dave.”
“Next time you say that to me, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.”
I walked to my truck. I saw Alafair watching me by the commissary trailer. She mouthed the Clete Purcel mantra Take names and stomp ass, big mon.
Late Saturday night Smiley turned his rental car in to a lonely motel on a two-lane asphalt road that dead-ended in a bog far south of Lake Charles. The moon was up, the Gulf the color of pewter, the waves sliding through sand dunes and salt grass and a shrimp dock that had been wrecked by Hurricane Rita. The motel sign was off, the office dark; a panel truck was parked midway down the line of rooms. Smiley cut his headlights and engine and got out of his car with a black physician’s bag and stepped up on the concrete walkway, his skin marbled with the orange and yellow neon that circumscribed the motel. The window and the red metal door of his target were pasted with insects. He slipped a screwdriver into the doorjamb and wedged the lock loose, then eased back the door and stepped inside.
A compact unshaved man was sleeping on his side in his underclothes on top of the covers, snoring spasmodically. Smiley removed a hypodermic needle from his bag and inserted it into the man’s carotid and pushed down the plunger. The sleeping man made one startled gasp, his eyes springing open, then he dropped into a well.
Twenty minutes later, the man awoke and discovered the ligatures binding him leg and arm to the bedframe. A Brillo pad had been stuffed into his mouth, which was sealed with pipe tape. When he tried to talk, his face looked like a grape about to burst. Smiley sat in a chair by the bed, eating ice cream from the carton he had taken from the icebox. A container of Liquid-Plumr sat on the nightstand.