“Can you stop thinking in those terms?”
“You know I’m telling the truth.”
“You don’t know her.”
“And you do?”
This time I didn’t try to answer. “I’ll see you later.”
“You didn’t ask why I was calling you all day. Li’l Face Dautrieve came to my office. She’s still living in the Loreauville quarters and hooking halftime. A piece of shit named Jess Bottoms fixed her up with some of his friends and paid her with bills that were marked with purple dye.”
“Like the bills given to the hooker in New Orleans by Gideon Richetti?”
“That was my first thought,” he said. “I called Dana Magelli and got him to run the serial numbers. Bingo. Li’l Face’s bills are part of the same series.”
“Who is Jess Bottoms?”
“He manages pit bull fights.”
“Why did Li’l Face bring the bills to you?”
“She thinks there’s a gris-gris on them,” he said. “Bottoms says he’ll give her fresh bills, but he’s got to get the marked ones back. She already spent some of them.”
“So you think Richetti tried to buy another prostitute out of the life, and instead the money got spread around to her friends?”
“Something like that,” Clete said. “Li’l Face is scared of Bottoms. He’s big on beating up women.”
“Where’s Bottoms now?” I asked.
“Sunset,” he said. “Once known as the nigger-knocking capital of Louisiana.”
We drove in Clete’s Caddy to a paintless farmhouse south of Opelousas. It was surrounded by burning sugarcane stubble that glowed alight whenever the wind gusted. There was no grass in the yard, no livestock in the pens. I could see the silhouette of a two-story barn in back, and hear dogs barking.
“How do you want to play it?” I said.
Clete cut the engine and killed the headlights. “He was a deputy sheriff in Mississippi.”
“So?”
“Don’t be subtle,” Clete replied.
We walked up on the gallery and knocked on the door. The sky was an ink wash, the smoke from the stubble eye-watering. Through the glass in the door, I saw a man rise from the kitchen table and walk through a hallway into the living room. I have been in law enforcement a long time. In the American South, there is a kind of lawman every decent cop instantly recognizes. His uniform is usually soiled and wrinkled, more like army fatigues or marine utilities, as though he has worked long hours in it. If allowed, he wears a coned cowboy hat. His posture and physicality exude a quiet sense of confidence, whether he’s leaning against a rail or gazing idly at something he doesn’t like. There is no moral light in his eyes. For reasons you cannot explain, he bears an animus toward the world, particularly toward people of color, no matter how poor or powerless they are.
Jess Bottoms opened the wood door but left the screen latched. His head had the shape of a smoked ham, his shoulders thick and humped like football pads. He wore khaki trousers and suspenders, half-top slip-on boots, and a long-sleeve snap-button white shirt with silver stripes in it. His stomach hung over his belt like thirty pounds of bread dough. He glared at Clete, then at me.
I opened my badge holder. “Dave Robicheaux, Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, Mr. Bottoms. I’d like to get some information from you regarding a prostitute named Li’l Face Dautrieve.”
“Nigger works out of the quarters in Loreauville?” he said.
“Can we come in?” I asked.
“I’m eating.”
“It’s in your interest,” I said.
“What is this, Purcel?” he said.
“It’s like he says, Jess. We think you might be in danger.”
Bottoms unlatched the screen. “I got people coming over. They arrive, you leave.”
He pushed the screen open with his foot and then walked back into the kitchen. The interior of the house looked worn and old, the wallpaper water-stained; the lamps barely gave light. But the kitchen had obviously been refurbished, as though it were the only part of the home that had a purpose. The appliances were new; a flat-screen television was playing on the wall. I heard dogs barking again. Bottoms sat down and dug into a T-bone, chasing it with sips from a bottle of beer.
“You have a kennel?” I said.
His eyes were on the TV. “What’s this danger I’m in?”
“Can we turn off the television?” I asked.
“I’m watching a show,” he said, his eyes not leaving the screen.
“Li’l Face says you paid her three hundred dollars to pull a train,” Clete said.
“I never knew a nigger who didn’t lie,” he said.
“This is part of a homicide investigation, Mr. Bottoms,” I said. “We’re not interested in the sex life of your friends. You gave Li’l Face some marked bills. We’d appreciate your telling us where those bills came from.”
“I dug them out of your mother’s maggoty, insignificant cunt,” he said. “Does that answer your question?”
“That’s a mouthful,” I said.
Clete walked to the television and hit the off switch with the flat of his fist. “What’s with those dogs?”
“They’re dogs,” Bottoms said. “Turn the set on.”
“What time do you feed them?” Clete said. “You feed them after you fight them?”
Bottoms cut a piece of steak and lifted it to his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “How about you suck my dick, Purcel? When you finish, you can tell the Dautrieve girl her black ass is grass.”
“I’ll be right back, Dave,” Clete said. He went out the back door, letting it slam.
“What’s he doing?” Bottoms said.
“Search me.”
Bottoms looked out the screen at the darkness and the sparks twirling into the sky. “Maybe I can share some information with you,” he said.
“If I share some with you?”
“My enterprises tend to be cash-only. I made a mistake giving marked bills to a hooker. I was treating some businessmen. There’s nothing illegal in what I was doing.”
“Solicitation is not illegal?”
“I gave her money to be an escort. Her and maybe some of her friends. Both white and black ladies. It wasn’t a big deal. It’s part of the business. Where you been?”
“That remark you made about my mother? I let it pass because you’re dealing with an individual who is a big deal. I think you know it, too.”
“I got to piss. Get yourself a beer out of the refrigerator.”
He went into a hallway bathroom and closed the door. I heard him flush the toilet but heard no water run from the faucet. He came back in the kitchen and upended his beer bottle, the foam bubbling inside the neck. I heard a metallic clanking sound out in the dark. He stared at the screen door. “What’s he doing out there?”
I didn’t have a chance to reply. Clete came through the door with an aluminum boat paddle and slammed it across Bottoms’s head, knocking him sideways out of the chair.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Go see what’s in that barn,” Clete said. “There’s one dog dead in the straw. The others got sores all over them. The stink is awful. Get up, Jess.”
“No,” Bottoms said, holding his face.
Clete lifted Bottoms to his feet, then drove his head into the counter and beat it on the rim of the sink. Bottoms fell in a heap on the floor, his eyes crossed, his forehead laid open.
“Ease up, Clete,” I said.
“Stay out of it, Dave.”
Clete picked up the beer bottle and shoved it in the garbage disposal and flipped on the switch. The glass clanked and splintered and screeched and rumbled through the drainpipe. Clete hauled up Bottoms by his belt and wrapped one of his suspender straps around the faucet, then shoved Bottoms’s right hand into the disposal unit and rested his thumb on the wall switch. “Try taking out your big boy without fingers, Jess. Where’d the marked money come from?”