I decided I had one more stop to make before I headed back to New Iberia. Because of my concern for Alafair, I had given the Immigration and Naturalization Service a wide berth. But as that Negro janitor had told me in high school, you never let the batter know you're afraid of him. When he spreads his feet in the box and gives you that mean squint from under his cap, as though he's sighting on your throat, you spit on the ball and wipe his letters off with it. He'll probably have a change in attitude toward your relationship.
But Mr. Monroe was to surprise me.
I parked the truck in the shade of a spreading oak off Loyola and walked back in the hot sunlight to the INS office. His desk was out on the floor, among several others, and when he looked up from a file folder in his hands and saw me, the skin around his ears actually stretched across the bone. His black hair, which was combed like wires across his pate, gleamed dully in the fluorescent light. I saw his throat swallow under his bow tie.
"I'm here officially," I said, easing my badge out of my side pants pocket. "I'm a detective with the Iberia sheriff's office now. Do you mind if I sit down?"
He didn't answer. He took a cigarette out of a pack on his desk and lit it. His eyes were straight ahead. I sat down in the straight-backed chair next to his desk and looked at the side of his face. By his desk blotter in a silver frame was a picture of him and his wife and three children. A clear vase with two yellow roses in it sat next to the picture.
"What do you want?" he said.
"I'm on a murder investigation."
He held his cigarette to his mouth between two fingers and smoked it without ever really detaching it from his lips. His eyes were focused painfully into space.
"I think you guys have a string on somebody I want," I said.
Finally he looked at me. His face was as tight as paper.
"Mr. Robicheaux, I'm sorry," he said.
"Sorry for what?"
"For… about your wife. I'm truly sorry."
"How did you know about my wife?"
"It was in the area section of the Picayune."
"Where's Victor Romero?"
"I don't know this man."
"Listen, this is a murder investigation. I'm a police officer. Don't you jerk me around."
He lowered his cigarette toward the desk blotter and let out his breath. People at the other desks were obviously listening now.
"You have to understand something. I do field work with illegal immigrants in the workplace. I check green cards. I make sure people have work permits. I've done that for seven years."
"I don't care what you do. You answer me about Victor Romero."
"I can't tell you anything."
"You think carefully about your words, Mr. Monroe. You're on the edge of obstruction."
His fingers went to his temple. I saw his bottom lip flutter.
"You have to believe this," he said. "I'm very sorry about what's happened to you. There's no way I can express how I feel."
I paused before I spoke again.
"When somebody's dead, apologies have as much value as beating off in a paper bag," I said. "I think you need to learn that, maybe go down to the courthouse and listen to one of the guys on his way up to Angola. Are you following me? Because this is what I believe you guys did: you planted Johnny Dartez and Victor Romero inside the sanctuary movement, and four people ended up dead at Southwest Pass. I think a bomb brought that plane down. I think Romero had something to do with it, too. He's also hooked up with Bubba Rocque, and maybe Bubba had my wife killed. You shield this guy and I'm going to turn the key on you."
I could hear him breathing now. His pate was slick with oil and perspiration under the light. His eyes clicked back and forth.
"I don't care who hears this, and you can make of it what you want," he said. "I'm a career civil servant. I don't make policy or decisions. I try to keep illegals from taking American jobs. That's all I do here."
"They made you a player. You take their money, you take their orders, you take their fall."
"I'm not an articulate man. I've tried to tell you my feelings, but you won't accept that. I don't blame you. I'm just sorry. I don't have anything else to say, Mr. Robicheaux."
"Where's your supervisor?"
"He's gone to Washington."
I looked at the picture of his family on the desk.
"My wife's casket had to be kept closed at the funeral," I said. "You think about that a minute. Also, you tell your supervisor I'm going to run that heroin mule to ground. When I do, I'm going to squeeze him. You better hope none of y'all's names come out of his mouth."
When I walked out the door the only sound in the room was the telex machine clacking.
It was evening when I got home, and Alafair and the babysitter had already had their supper. I was hungry and too wired to sleep, so I heated up some dirty rice, shelled crawfish, and cornbread, wrapped it in foil, and packed it in my canvas rucksack with my army mess kit and walked down the road in the flaming sunset to a spot of the bayou where my father and little brother and I used to dig for minie balls when I was a boy.
A sugar planter's home had been built there in the 1830s, but the second story had been torched by General Banks's soldiers in 1863 and the roof and the blackened cypress timbers had collapsed inside the brick shell. Over the years the access road had filled with pine seedlings and undergrowth, vandals had prized up the flagstones in the fireplaces, looking for gold coins, and the grave markers had been knocked down in the family burial ground and the graves themselves were recognisable only because of their dark green color and the blanket of mushrooms that grew across them.
Four-o'clocks and wild rosebushes grew along the rim of a small coulee that flowed through the edge of the clearing, past a rotted-out cistern by the side of the house and a blacksmith's forge that was now only a rusty smear in the wet soil. The breeze off the bayou was still strong enough to push the mosquitoes back into the trees, and I sat on a dead cypress stump in the last wash of red sunlight and ate supper from my mess kit. The water was clear, copper-colored, flowering over the rocks in the bottom of the coulee, and I could see small bream hiding under the moss that swung in the current. Along these same banks my father, my brother, and I had dug out a bucket full of minie balls as well as cannister and grapeshot, bits of chain, and chopped-up horseshoes fired by union cannon into the Confederate rearguard. We used rakes to clear the vines and damp layers of dead leaves from the coulee walls, and the minie balls would drop from the loam like white teeth. They were conical-shaped on one end, with a hollow indentation and three grooved rings on the other, and they always felt heavy and smooth and round in your palm.
In our innocence we didn't think about them as objects that blew muscle away from bone, ripped through linkage and webs of vein, tore the jaw and tongue from a face. I had to become a new colonial and journey across the seas to learn that simple fact. I had to feel a shotgun shell touched by the long black fingers of a man whose mission was to create and capture human misery on Polaroid film.
I put aside my mess kit and tore the petals from a pink rose and watched them drift down onto the water, float along the riffle through the ferns and out into the sunlight. I had more to think about than I wanted to. True, I was sober; the physical pain of my last bender was gone, and the tiger seemed to be in his cage; but I had a lot of tomorrows to face, and in the past the long-distance view of my life had a way of getting me drunk again. Tomorrow at noon I would go to an AA meeting and confess my slip in front of the group, which was not an easy thing to do. I had once again failed not only myself and my Higher Power, but I had betrayed the trust of my friends as well.