Charleen Jorgenson told me that she wished she could help, but she just didn't remember anything like I was asking.
I said, "Think hard, Mrs. Jorgenson. Are you sure?"
She sipped her coffee and nodded. "Oh, yes. I thought about it when that other fellow was here."
"What other fellow?"
"Another young man was here a few months ago. He said he was trying to find his sister."
I said, "Do tell."
"He wasn't very nice and he didn't stay long."
"Were you able to help him find his sister?"
"I would've been happy to, but I just couldn't help him. He became very abusive. Lloyd like to threw a fit." She nodded her head toward Lloyd, as if one of Lloyd's fits was quite a spectacle. Lloyd, sitting in a heavy chair that had been covered with a bedspread, had fallen asleep as we talked. She said, "You're trying to find some kind of organ donor, aren't you?"
"Yes, ma'am. A marrow donor."
She shook her head. "That is so sad."
"Mrs. Jorgenson, this guy who was here, was his name Jeffrey?"
She had more of the coffee, thinking. "Well, maybe. He had red hair, all piled up on his head and oily." She made a sour face. "I remember that." "Ah." "I've never been comfortable with a red-haired person.
People say the damnedest things, don't they?
I left Charleen Jorgenson's home at twenty-five minutes after four that afternoon and stopped at a bait and tackle shop on the road leading back to town. They had a pay phone on the wall under a huge sign that said LIVE WORMS. I tried calling Mrs. C. Thomas Berteaux to ask if Jeffrey's hair had been red, but I got no answer. Probably out. I tried Virginia LaMert again, but also got no answer. Virginia LaMert was the last name on my list, and if she didn't come through it was drawing-board time. I called Information and asked them if they had a listing for Martha Guidry. They did. I dialed Martha Guidry's number and, as I listened to her phone ring, the same white Mustang I'd seen at the Pig Stand turned into the parking lot and disappeared behind the bait shop.
Martha Guidry answered on the sixth ring. "Hello?"
I identified myself and told her that Mrs. C. Thomas Berteaux had suggested I call. I said that I was trying to find someone who was born in the area thirty-six years ago, and I asked if I might pay a visit. She said that would be fine. She told me her address and gave me directions and said that, as old as she was, if I didn't hurry she might be dead before I arrived. I was going to like Martha Guidry just fine.
I hung up and stood at the phone, waiting. A blue Ford pickup pulled in and a young guy with a scraggly beard went into the bait shop. An older man came out of the shop with a brown bag and got into a Chevy Caprice. The young guy came out with a Budweiser Tall Boy and hopped back into his truck. The Mustang didn't return.
I climbed back into my car and followed the directions toward Martha Guidry's house. Maybe this business with the Mustang was my imagination, like the heat.
I had gone maybe three-quarters of a mile when the Mustang swung around a Kleinpeter Dairy milk truck and eased in behind me. He came up so close that I could see the driver in my rearview mirror. He had a scoop-cut pompadour maybe six inches high and long nasty sideburns carved down into points so sharp you could cut yourself.
And he had red hair.
CHAPTER 5
T he guy in the Mustang wouldn't let anyone get between us, as if he wanted to follow me and thought he had to stay close to do it. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled, and he drove with his left hand hanging down along the door. One of those.
I turned off the state road and headed back toward town, and the Mustang turned with me. I pulled into an Exxon station and topped off my tank and asked a kid in a grease-stained uniform about the local bass fishing. The Mustang drove past while the kid was telling me, but a couple minutes later it pulled up to a stop sign a block away and sat waiting. Following me, all right.
I took it easy up through town, letting him follow, and twice managed to stop for traffic lights. Each time I stopped he eased up behind me, and each time he made a big deal out of staring off to the side. The ostrich technique. If I don't see you, you can't see me. I had to smile at this guy. He was something. At a four-way stop a kid in a red Isuzu pickup tried to turn in behind me, and the guy in the Mustang jumped the stop sign and blew his horn, cutting him off. Maybe he thought I wouldn't notice.
A set of railroad tracks ran through the center of town. The tracks were prominent and the road was old, so everybody was slowing to ease their cars across the tracks. On the other side of the tracks there were several businesses and a couple of cross streets and, still further down, a little bridge where the road crossed the bayou. Cars were waiting at most of the cross streets, people getting off work.
I eased the Taurus across the tracks, then punched it, putting enough distance between me and the Mustang for a woman in a light blue Acura to get between us. The Mustang came up to her fast, swerving into the oncoming lane, but there was too much traffic for him to pass. I swung to the right onto the shoulder, floored it past six or seven cars, then jerked it back into the traffic lane and then right again around a bread truck and into a Dairy Queen parking lot. He wouldn't have been able to see me turn past the bread truck. I pushed it around the back of the Dairy Queen, threw it into park, then jumped out and ran up the side past a couple of kids sucking malts in a '69 VW Bug. The Mustang was still behind the woman in the Acura, blowing his horn and swerving from side to side, until finally she couldn't take it anymore and pulled to the side. He horsed it past her, giving the finger and screaming that she should get her head out her butt, and then he blasted away up the shoulder, spraying gravel and dust and little bits of oyster shell. I wrote down his license number, went back to my car, and turned again toward Martha Guidry's. I checked the rearview mirror from time to time, but the Mustang didn't reappear. You had to shake your head.
I drove up the center of Evangeline Parish through dense stands of hardwood trees and sweet potato fields, passing small frame houses set near the road, many with rusted cars and large propane gas tanks and chickens in their yards. Martha Guidry lived in such a house across the street from a strawberry stand. She was a small bony woman with skin like rumpled silk and cataract glasses that made her eyes look huge and protruding. She was wearing a thin housedress and socks and house slippers, and when she answered the door she was carrying a large, economy-sized can of Raid Ant amp; Roach Killer. She squinted out the thick glasses. "You that Mr. Cole?"
"Yes, ma'am. I appreciate your seeing me."
She pushed open the screen door and told me to come in quick. She said if you don't come in quick all kinds of goddamned bugs come in with you. As soon as I was in she fogged the air around the door with the Raid. "That'll get the little bastards!"
I moved across the room to get away from the cloud of Raid. "I don't think you're supposed to breathe that stuff, Ms. Guidry."
She waved her hand. "Oh, hell, I been breathin' it for years. You want a Pepsi-Cola?"
"No, ma'am. Thank you."
She waved the Raid at the couch. "You just sit right there. It won't take a moment." I guess she was going to give me the Pepsi anyway. When she was in the kitchen there was a sharp slap and she said, "Gotcha, you sonofabitch!" The thing about this job is that you meet such interesting people.