But that parish, its sawmills, corporate cotton and soy bean fields, its catfish farms, along with its politicians and sheriff's department, had always been owned by the Chalons family in St. Mary Parish.
Unconsciously I touched the stitches in my scalp where my attacker had clubbed me with a two-by-four. Was he sent by the Chalonses, over the disappearance or death of a prostitute in 1958? No, that was my old class-conscious paranoia at work, I told myself.
I kept telling myself that all the way back to New Iberia.
That evening, Clete Purcel picked me up at the house and we had dinner at a bar-and-grill that served food on a deck overlooking the bayou. It was dusk, the western sky ribbed with strips of orange cloud, the turn bridge on the bayou open for a barge. Clete had been quiet all evening. "I think I need to make a home call on this Pitts character," he said.
"Nope," I said.
"Nothing dramatic. Maybe drive him out to a quiet spot and give him a chance to get some things off his chest."
"Clete -"
"Nobody messes with the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. Every lowlife in New Orleans always understood that, big mon. This dickhead doesn't get slack because he's a cop."
Some people at the next table stared at us.
"I have no evidence Pitts was the guy," I said.
"You know he was the guy."
"Maybe."
"Trust me, I'll get the 'maybe' out of the equation. Quit worrying. He'll probably thank me for it," he said. He took a bite out of his po'boy sandwich. "These fried oysters are supposed to be aphrodisiacs, did you know that?"
Talking with Clete Purcel about personal restraint or reasonable behavior was like a meteorologist telling an electrical storm it shouldn't come to town. But I couldn't be mad at Clete. He was the first person to whom I always took my problems, and in I truth his violence, recklessness, and vigilantism were simply the other side of my own personality. I felt his gaze wander over my face and the stitches I had tried to comb my hair over.
"Will you stop that?" I said.
"What's your brother say about all this?" he said.
"Haven't talked with him about it."
He looked at me.
"He's got his own problems," I said.
"Jimmie the Gent is a stand-up guy. Why not treat him like one?" Clete said.
Years ago my brother had taken a bullet for me and lost an eye. I didn't feel like cluttering up his life with any more grief or the detritus of 1958. I started to tell Clete that when my cell phone rang. The caller number was Helen Soileau's.
"We got a floater out by the St. Martin line," she said. "It may be the wife of that DEQ official who's in Seagoville. We've got personal effects, but I don't think we'll get a visual ID."
"That bad?"
"The guy who did this isn't human."
"None of them are," I replied.
"Better see the vie," she said.
chapter FIVE
The crime scene was only ten minutes from the bar-and-grill on the bayou. But the images there belonged in a medieval painting of a netherworld that should have existed only in the imagination. On a deadend dirt road lined with garbage was a black pond spiked by gum trees. The sky was tormented by birds, the sun a gush of red on the horizon. The victim lay on her back, her torso half in the water. I felt my stomach constrict when Helen shined her flashlight on the woman's face.
"Get this. The sonofabitch hung her purse in a tree," she said. "Money, car keys, driver's license, credit cards, everything was in there."
"Her husband was with the Department of Environmental Quality?"
"Yeah, he was taking juice from a couple of petrochemical guys. So maybe this isn't the Baton Rouge serial killer."
The coroner, Koko Hebert, had just arrived. He was a gelatinous, cynical man, a sweaty, foul-smelling chain smoker, given to baggy clothes, tropical shirts, and a trademark Panama hat. I always suspected a Rotarian lay hidden inside his enormous girth and wheezing breath and jaded manner, but, if so, he hid it well. He leaned over with a penlight and stared down at the body. "Jesus Christ," he said.
"Got any speculations?" Helen said.
"Yeah, her face looks like a flower pot after a truck ran over it," he said.
Helen gave me a look. "Are those ligations around her throat?" she asked.
He made a pained face, as though he were weighing a great decision. "Could be. But those knots could be the nodules associated with bubonic plague. Been a couple of outbreaks in East Texas. Squirrels and pack rats can carry it sometimes. You didn't touch anything here, did you?" he said. He held Helen's eyes somberly, then his mouth broke at the corners and his breath wheezed like air escaping from a ruptured tire. "Ligations, shit. The guy who did this had a boner on he couldn't knock down with a baseball bat."
"The signature on the Baton Rouge serial killings is death by strangulation," Helen said.
But the coroner ignored her and motioned for two paramedics to bag up the body.
"Did you hear me?" she said.
He stared into space, his eyes askance, a manufactured look of pensiveness on his face. "Our killer is not into methodology," he said.
"Say again?" Helen said.
"Our killer is a horny prick who loves beating the shit out of people. He doesn't care how he does it. Are we all better now?" Koko said.
Helen's face blanched. She started to speak, but I placed my hand on her shoulder. Her muscles felt like a bag of rocks. We watched Koko Hebert walk toward an ambulance, its emergency flashers blinking. It was hot and breathless inside the trees, and the air smelled of stagnant water and leaves that had turned black in damp shade.
"Blow him off. He's an unhappy fat man who tries to make other people as miserable as he is," I said.
She slapped a mosquito on her cheek and looked at the smear of blood on her hand. The paramedics lifted the body heavily out of the water, their latex-gloved hands sinking deep into the tissue. "Wrap it up for me, Pops?" Helen said.
"Sure. You okay?" I said.
"I will be after a hot bath and four inches of Jack Daniel's. It's God's compensation for giving me this fucking job," she said, then grimaced at her own remark.
"Drink two inches of it for me," I said.
She hit me on the arm with the flat of her fist and walked to her cruiser., her eyes sliding off the face of the coroner.
It was dark by the time the crime scene investigators finished their work. A wind came up and blew the mosquitoes out of the trees, and I could see heat lightning in the clouds over the Gulf and smell distant rain. I thought about four inches of Jack on ice, with a sprig of mint bruised inside the glass. I rubbed my mouth and swallowed dryly. Then I said good night to the other personnel at the scene and got back in my truck.
Just in time to see a television news van rumble down the road and stop squarely in front of me, its headlights burning into my eyes. The first figure out of the van was none other than Valentine Chalons, the one certifiable celebrity in the Chalons family, the same people who owned cotton, sugar cane, oil, and timber interests all over Louisiana and East Texas, including the parish where my former college friend, Troy Bordelon, had lived.
Valentine could have descended from Vikings rather than the chivalric Norman French ancestry his family claimed for themselves. He was tall, athletic-looking, and blue-eyed, with a bladed face and hair that had turned silver on the tips in his late thirties. Unlike the rest of the Chalons family, his views were ostensibly populist or libertarian, although I sensed that inside his populism was the soul of a snob.
He had studied journalism at the University of Missouri, then had worked as a stringer and feature writer for the Associated Press before taking a news anchor position with a television station in New Orleans. But Valentine Chalons's stops on the ladder of success were always temporary, and nobody doubted that he considered ambition a virtue rather than a vice.