I knew bars that closed their doors to the public at two a.m. but continued to serve their friends until dawn, and casinos that kept the tap flowing twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, as long as you stayed at the tables or the machines. If you want to get slop-bucket-deep in an alcoholic culture, there is no better place than the state of Louisiana. It’s a drunkard’s dream, a twenty-four-hour chemically induced orgasm, a slide down a rainbow that lands you with a soft bump in the Baths of Caracalla. Think I’m exaggerating? Ask any souse highballing out of Texas into Lake Charles.
I passed my house and turned at the Shadows and drove around the block to St. Peter Street and circled back to East Main, then parked in front of the old Burke home and walked down to the bayou and sat under a live oak on the water’s edge. I had sat under the same tree with my father, Big Aldous Robicheaux, on V-J Day in 1945. There were still slave cabins on the bayou, although they had been turned into corn and grain cribs for the carriage horses that some people still used to go to church on Sunday morning. I had never been fishing. My father bought a cane pole with a wooden bobber and a hook and a lead weight for twenty-five cents from a man of color. The weight was a perforated .36-caliber pistol ball that the colored man had found on a battle site farther down the bayou. I will never forget swinging the bobber and the lead ball and the baited hook into the current, then watching the line come taut and the backs of the alligator gars rolling on the edge of lily pads when the bobber disturbed them.
My father could not read or write and barely spoke English, but he understood the natural world and the culture of Bayou Teche. To us, the bayou was not simply a tidal stream that knitted together what we call Acadiana; it was part of a biblical epic and, because of its mists and fog-shrouded swamps, a magical place inhabited by lamias and leprechauns and medieval tricksters and voodoo women and the spirits of Confederate soldiers and cannibalistic Atakapa Indians. It was a grand place to grow up. The day I threw my line into the water, I knew I would never leave Bayou Teche, in part because of the event that occurred as a result of my father buying the cane pole from a colored man.
The bobber had been carved from a piece of balsa wood and drilled with a hole into which a shaved stick was inserted to secure the line. I saw the bobber tremble once, then plunge straight down into the silt. I jerked the pole so hard, I broke it in half, and the line and bobber and lead bullet and hook and worm and a big green-gold goggle-eyed perch went flying into a tree limb above us. My father went to the Burke house and borrowed a garden rake and combed the fish out of the tree for me. I still suspect this may be the only time in history that a fish has been caught in a live oak tree with a garden rake.
That postage stamp of a moment has always remained with me as a reminder of the innocent world in which I grew up. Or at least the innocent world in which we chose to live, perhaps to our regret. When I sat under the tree at three in the morning, an old man watching a barge and tug working its way upstream, I knew that I no longer had to reclaim the past, that the past was still with me, inextricably part of my soul and who I was; I could step through a hole in the dimension and be with my father and mother again, and I didn’t have to drink or mourn the dead or live on a cross for my misdeeds; I was set free, and the past and the future and the present were at the ends of my fingertips, filled with promise and goodness, and I didn’t have to submit to time or fate or even mortality. The party is a grand one and infinite in nature and like the music of the spheres thunderous in its presence, and I realized finally that the invitation to it comes with the sunrise and a clear eye and a good heart and the knowledge that we’re already inside eternity and need not fear any longer.
I drove home and went inside just as the wind came up again and the clouds closed over the moon and white hail began pinging and bouncing on the roof. In minutes I was asleep and had to be shaken awake at dawn by Alafair so I could shower and shave and go to work.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Cormac Watts was the best coroner we ever had, more cop than pathologist. I always liked him. He was gay and imaginative and happy and, like many gay people, at peace with the world even though the world had often not been kind to him. If he had any professional fault, it was his tendency to extrapolate an encyclopedic amount of information from a fingernail paring, which sometimes did not help his credibility. He called me at the office on Wednesday afternoon. “Ready for the breakdown on Frenchie Lautrec?”
“I thought death by strangulation was death by strangulation,” I said.
“That’s the cause of death, all right. But we’ve got some issues.”
“I can’t tell you how much I hate that word, Cormac. I rank it with ‘awesome’ and ‘amazing.’ ”
“You want to hear what I’ve got or not?”
The truth was, I didn’t want to hear it. The sun was shining while the rain was falling, and there was a huge rainbow that dipped out of the clouds into the middle of City Park.
“Yes, please tell me about Lautrec’s corpse,” I said.
“I think he faked his own murder.”
“His wrists were taped behind him.”
“Think back,” Cormac said. “When you found him, the roll was barely wrapped around the left wrist. He could have gotten loose.”
“Not if he was unconscious.”
“His blood was clean. There are no injection marks on the body. No fresh bruises or abrasions from somebody lifting him up. He kicked the chair into the wall.”
“How do you know?”
“His right loafer was on the floor. Part of a toenail was inside the sock. He was right-handed. He kicked the chair with his right foot and chipped the nail.”
“That could have happened if someone else kicked it out from under him,” I said.
“Nope, the weight would have been going away from him. It’s unlikely the blow would have broken the nail.”
I rubbed my temples. “Lautrec had no feelings about anything or anyone except himself. I don’t see him as a suicide.”
“About ten days ago I saw him in my insurance agent’s office. He was there with his daughter.”
“I didn’t know he had one.”
“She lives in Biloxi. My agent said Lautrec bought a life insurance policy. My agent wanted to sell me one, too.”
“Can we stay on the subject, Cormac?”
“Lautrec could be a menacing presence. My agent was about to have a coronary. I don’t think he wanted to insure Lautrec.”
“Why not?”
“Because Lautrec got his way or he made other people miserable?”
“I’ll give your insurance agent a ring,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Lautrec had a Maltese cross tattooed inside his calf.”
“That bothers me,” I said.
“You think we’re dealing with a cult?”
“I don’t know. I don’t understand any of this.”
I called Cormac’s insurance agent. Lautrec had bought a three-hundred-thousand-dollar policy that did not cover suicide. His daughter was the beneficiary.
I went into Helen’s office. She was just about to go home. I told her everything I had just learned. She sat back down. “You buy Lautrec offing himself?”
“Maybe he was scared.”
“The only thing Lautrec feared was not getting laid.”
“Cormac is adamant,” I said.
“How about prints on the Sheetrock torn out of the ceiling?”
“None.”
Helen looked tired, older. “You know where this is going, don’t you?”
“Yep, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey time.”
In any given situation, the majority of people believe whatever they need to: Up is down, black is white, dog shit tastes good with mashed potatoes. This is how the collective response to an unsolved series of killings works: Shock and anger are followed by fear and the purchase of weapons and security systems, arrest of a scapegoat, rumors that the killer’s wealthy family has quietly committed him, or sometimes the mind-numbing statement by the investigators that the evidence they could not find proves the homicides are not related and that a serial killer is not at large in the community.