He waited. The rain felt like confetti blowing against my skin. I searched his eyes, and my heart began to beat against my ribs.
"My family?" I said.
"If you"re brave and honorable and your enemies can"t destroy you personally, they"ll seek to destroy what you love."
He gestured with his crutch to a sergeant, who led a saddled white gelding around the side of the bleachers.
"Wait a minute, general. That"s not good enough," I said.
"It"s all I have," he answered, now seated in the saddle, his back erect, the reins wrapped around his gloved fist.
"Who would try to hurt them? What would they have to gain?"
"I don"t know. Keep the Sykes boy with you, though. He"s a good one. You remember what Robert Lee once said: "Texans move them every time." Good day to you, lieutenant. It"s time we go give Bonnie Nate Banks his welcome to southwestern Louisiana." Then he cut the spur on his left boot into his horse"s flank, galloped to the head of his infantry, and hollered out brightly, "Hideeho, boys! It"s a fine day for it! Let"s make religious fellows of them all!"
SOMETIME LATER, I SAT UP ON THE GROUND IN THE RAIN, MY clothes soaked, the base pad in my lap, a knot as hard and round as a half-dollar throbbing three inches behind my ear. An elderly black yardman bent over me, his face filled with concern. Down the street I could see an ambulance coming toward me through the rain.
"You okay, mister?" the black man said.
"Yes, I think so."
"I seen you there and t"ought you was drunk. But it look like somebody done gone upside yo" head."
"Would you help me up, please?"
"Sho. You all right?"
"Why, yes, I"m sure I am. Did you see a man on horseback?"
"The Popsicle man gone by. His li"l cart got a horse. That"s what you talkin" about?"
The black man eased me down on the bottom plank of the bleachers. It was starting to rain hard now, but right next to me, where the general had been sitting, was a pale, dry area in the wood that was as warm to the touch as living tissue.
CHAPTER 15.
The sky was clear when I woke in the morning, and I could hear gray squirrels racing across the bark of the trees outside the window. The icebag I had put on the lump behind my ear fell to the floor when I got out of bed to answer the phone.
"I called your office and found out you"re still suspended," Lou Girard said. "What"s going on over there?"
"Just that. I"m still suspended."
"It sounds like somebody"s got a serious bone on for you, Dave. Anyway, I talked to this FBI agent, what"s her name, Gomez, as well as your boss. We vacuumed the Buick. Guess what we found?"
"I don"t know."
"Paper wadding. The kind that"s used to seal blank cartridges. It looks like somebody fired a starter"s gun at you. He probably leaned down through the pa.s.senger window, let off a couple of rounds, then bagged out."
"What"d the sheriff have to say when you told him?"
"Not much. I got the feeling that maybe he was a little uncomfortable. He doesn"t look too good, right, when one of his own men has to be cleared by a cop and a pathologist in another parish? I thought I could hear a little Pontius Pilate tap water running in the background."
"He"s always been an okay guy. He just got too close to a couple of the oil cans in the Chamber of Commerce."
"Your friends don"t stand around playing pocket pool while civilians kick a two-by-four up your b.u.t.t, either."
"Anyway, that"s real good news, Lou. I owe you a red-fishing trip out to Pecan Island."
"Wait a minute, I"m not finished. That Gomez woman has some interesting theories about serial killers. She said these guys want control and power over people. So I got to thinking about the LeBlanc girl. If your FBI friend is right and the guy who killed her is from around here, what kind of work would he be in?"
"He may be just a pimp, Lou."
"Yeah, but she got nailed on a prost.i.tution charge when she was sixteen, right? That means the court gave somebody a lot of control over her life. What if a probation or parole officer had her selling out of her pants?"
"I saw the body. I think the guy who mutilated her has a furnace instead of a brain. I think he"d have a hard time hiding inside a white-collar environment."
"It was the pencil pushers who gave the world Auschwitz, Dave. Anyway, her prost.i.tution bust was in Lafayette. I"ll find out if her P.O. or social worker is still around."
"Okay, but I still believe we"re after a pimp of some kind."
"Dave, if this guy"s just a pimp, particularly if he"s mobbed-up, he would have been in custody a long time ago. These are dumb guys. That"s why they do what they do. Most of them couldn"t get jobs cleaning gum off movie seats."
"So maybe Balboni"s got a smart pimp working for him."
"No, this guy knows how things work from the inside. He sucked us both in on that deal at Red"s Bar."
Lou had never gotten along with white-collar authority, in fact, was almost obsessed about it, and I wasn"t going to argue with him.
"Let me know what you come up with," I said.
But he wasn"t going to let it drop that easily.
"I"ve been in law enforcement for thirty-seven years," hesaid. "I"ve lost count of the lowlifes I"ve helped send up the road. Is Louisiana any better for it? You know the answer to that one. Face it. The real sonsofb.i.t.c.hes are the ones we don"t get to touch."
"Don"t be too down, Lou." I told him about Julie line-driving a ball off the side of my head. Then I told him the rest of it. "I asked the paramedics who called in the report. They said it was anonymous. So I went down later and listened to the 911 tapes. It was a guy named Cholo Manelli. He"s a-"
"Yeah, I know who he is. Cholo did that?"
"There"s no mistaking that broken-nose Irish Channel accent."
"He owes you or something?"
"Not really. But he"s an old-time mob soldier. He knows you don"t antagonize cops unnecessarily. Maybe Julie"s starting to lose control of his people."
"It"s a thought. But stay away from Balboni till you get your shield back. Stay off baseball diamonds, too. For a sober guy you sure have a way of spitting in the lion"s mouth."
After I hung up the phone I showered, dressed in a pair of seersucker slacks, brown loafers, a charcoal shirt with a gray and red striped tie, and got a haircut and a shoe shine in town. My scalp twitched when the barber"s scissors clipped across the lump behind my ear. Through the front window I saw Julie Balboni"s purple limo drive down Main Street. The barber stopped clipping. The shop was empty except for the shoe-shine man.
"Dave, how come that man"s still around here?" the barber said. His round stomach touched lightly against my elbow.
"He hasn"t made the right people mad at him."
"He ain"t no good, that one. He don"t have no bidness here."
"I think you"re right, Sid."
He started clipping again. Then, almost as a casual afterthought, he said, "Y"all gonna get him out of town?"
"There"re some business people making a lot of money off of Julie. I think they"d like to keep him around awhile."
His hands paused again, and he stepped around the side of the chair so I could see his face.
"That ain"t the rest of us, no," he said. "We don"t like having that man in New Iberia. We don"t like his dope, we don"t like his criminals he bring up here from New Orleans. You tell that man you work for we gonna "member him when we vote, too."
"Could I buy you a cup of coffee and a doughnut this morning, Sid?"
A little later, with my hair still wet and combed, I walked out of the heat into the air-conditioned coolness of the sheriff"s department and headed toward the sheriff"s office. I glanced inside my office door as I pa.s.sed it. Rosie was not inside but Rufus Arceneaux was, out of uniform now, dressed in a blue suit and tie and a silk shirt that had the bright sheen of tin. He was sitting behind my desk.
I leaned against the door jamb.
"The pencil sharpener doesn"t work very well, but there"s a pen knife in my drawer that you can use," I said.
"I wasn"t bucking for plainclothes. The old man gave it to me," he said.
"I"m glad to see you"re moving on up, Rufe."
"Look, Dave, I"m not the one who went out and got f.u.c.ked up at that movie set."
"I hear you were out there, though. Looking into things. Probably trying to clear me of any suspicion that I got loaded."
"I got a GED in the corps. You"re a college graduate. You were a homicide lieutenant in New Orleans. You want to blame me for your troubles?"
"Where"s Rosie?"
"Down in Vermilion Parish."
"What for?"
"How would I know?"
"Did she say anything about Balboni having legal troubles with Mikey Goldman?"
"What legal-" His eyes clouded, like silt being disturbed in dark water.
"When you see her, would you ask her to call me?"
"Leave a message in her box," he said, positioned his forearms on my desk blotter, straightened his back, and looked out the window as though I were not there.
When I walked into the sheriff"s office he was pouring a chalky liquid from a brown prescription bottle into a water gla.s.s. A dozen sheets of paper were spread around on his desk. The "hold" light was flashing on his telephone. He didn"t speak. He drank from the gla.s.s, then refilled it from the water cooler and drank again, his throat working as though he were washing out an unwanted presence from his metabolism.
"How you doin", podna?" he said.
"Pretty good now. I had a talk with Lou Girard this morning."
"So did I. Sit down," he said, then picked up the phone and spoke to whoever was on hold. "I"m not sure what happened. When I am, I"ll call you. In the meantime, Rufus is going to be suspended. Just hope we don"t have to pa.s.s a sales tax to pay the bills on this one."
He hung up the phone and pressed the flat of his hand against his stomach. He made a face like a small flame was rising up his windpipe.
"Did you ever have ulcers?" he asked.
"Nope."
"I"ve got one. If this medicine I"m drinking doesn"t get rid of it, they may have to cut it out."
"I"m sorry to hear that."
"That was the prosecutor"s office I was talking to. We"re being sued."
"Over what?"
"A seventy-six-year-old black woman shot her old man to death last night, then killed both her dogs and shot herself through the stomach. Rufus in there handcuffed her to the gurney, then came back to the office. He didn"t bother to give the paramedics a key to the cuffs either. She died outside the emergency room."
I didn"t say anything.
"You think we got what we deserved, huh?" he said.
"Maybe he would have done it even if he hadn"t been kicked up to plainclothes, sheriff."
"No, he wouldn"t have been the supervising officer. He wouldn"t have had the opportunity."
"What"s my status this morning?"
He brushed at a nostril with one knuckle.
"I don"t know how to say this," he said. "We messed up. No, I messed up."
I waited.
"I did wrong by you, Dave," he said.
"People make mistakes. Maybe you made the best decision you could at the time."