He saw me look at the side of his face. He bit off a hangnail, spit it off the end of his tongue, and looked at the wrecker cable quivering against the surface of the water.
"Sorry," he said.
A cloud of yellow sand mushroomed under the water, and suddenly the rear end of the Toyota burst through a tangle of lily pads and uprooted cattails into the sunlight. The tow-truck driver dragged the car clear of the water's edge and bounced it on the bank, the broken back window gaping like a ragged mouth. Two St. Martin Parish sheriff's deputies opened the side doors, and a flood of water, silt, moss, yellowed vegetation, and fish-eels cascaded out on the ground. The eels were long and fat, with bright silver scales and red gills, and they writhed and snapped among the buttercups like tangles of snakes. The man in the front seat had fallen sideways so that his head hung out the passenger's door. His head was strung with dead vines and covered with mud and leeches. Minos tried to see over my shoulder as I looked down at the dead man.
"Jesus Christ, half his face is eaten off," he said.
"Yep."
"Well, maybe Victor wanted to be part of the bayou country."
"It's not Victor Romero," I said. "It's Eddie Keats."
9
A DEPUTY STARTED to pull him by his wrists onto the grass, then wiped his palms on his pants and found a piece of newspaper in the weeds. He wrapped it around Keats's arm and jerked him out on the ground. The water sloshed out of Keats's suede cowboy boots, and his shirt was unbuttoned and pulled up on his chest. There was a black, puffed hole the size of my thumb in his right ribcage, with a seared area around the skin flap, and an exit wound under the left arm pit. The deputy nudged Keats's arm with his shoe to expose the wound better.
"It looks like somebody scooped it out with a tablespoon, don't it?" he said.
The coroner motioned to two paramedics who stood by the back of an ambulance parked at the top of the levee. They pulled the gurney out of the ambulance and started down the slope with it. A black body bag was folded under one of the canvas straps.
"How long has he been in the water?" I asked the coroner.
"Two or three days," he said. He was a big, fat, bald man, with a shirt pocket full of cigars. His buttocks looked like watermelons. He squinted in the brightness of the sun's reflection off the water. "They turn white and ripen pretty fast in this weather. He hasn't gotten mushy yet, but he was working on it. Y'all know him?"
"He was a low-level button man," I said.
"A what?"
"A contract killer. The bargain-basement variety," Minos said.
"Well, somebody sure stirred his hash for him," the coroner said.
"What kind of gun are we talking about?" Minos said.
"It's going to be guesswork because there's no bullet. Maybe some fragments, but they won't help much. Offhand, I'd rule out a rifle. The muzzle flash burned his skin, so it was pressed right up against him. But the angle was upward, which would mean the shooter would have to hold the rifle low and depress the stock he fired, which wouldn't make much sense. So I'd say he was killed with a pistol, a big one, maybe a.44 Magnum or a.45 loaded with soft-nosed shells or hollowpoints. He must have thought somebody stuffed a hand grenade down his throat. Y'all look perplexed."
"You might say that," Minos said.
"What's the problem?" the coroner said.
"The wrong guy's in the car," I said.
"He sounds like the right guy to me. Count your blessings," the coroner said. "You want to look through his pockets before we bag him up?"
"I'll be over to St. Martinville later," I said. "I'd like a copy of the autopsy report, too."
"Hell, come on over and watch. I'll have him apart in ten minutes." His eyes were bright and a smile worked around the corners of his mouth. "Relax. I just like to have a little fun with you guys sometimes. I'll have a copy ready for you by tonight."
The paramedics unzipped the body bag and lifted Eddie Keats into it. A fish-eel fell out of his pants leg and flipped in the weeds as though its back were broken.
A few minutes later, Minos and I watched the ambulance, the coroner's car, and the two St. Martin parish sheriff's cars disappear down the levee. The two-truck driver was having trouble with his winch, and he and Cecil were trying to fix it. A hot wind blew across the marsh and ruffled the water and flattened the buttercups around our feet. I could smell the schools of bluegill that were feeding on the mosquitoes on the shade of the willow islands.
Minos walked down to the Toyota and rubbed his thumb over one of my.45 holes in the trunk. The hole was smooth and silver around the edges, as though it had been cut by a machinist's punch.
"Are you sure Keats wasn't in the car when Romero shot at you?" he said.
"Not unless he was hiding on the floor."
"Then how did he get into the Toyota, and what did somebody have to gain by blowing up his shit and then dumping him with a car we were bound to find?"
"I don't know."
"Give me your speculations."
"I told you, I don't know."
"Come on, how many people had reason to snuff him?"
"About half the earth."
"Around here, how many people?"
"What are you getting at?"
"I'm not sure. I just know I want Bubba Rocque, and the people who could help me put him away keep showing up dead. That pisses me off."
"It probably pissed Keats off a lot worse."
"I don't think that's clever."
"I've got a revelation for you, Minos. Homicide isn't like narcotics. Your clientele breaks the law for one reason-money. But people kill each other for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes the reasons aren't logical ones. Particularly when you're talking about Keats and his crowd."
"You know, you always give me the feeling you tell other people only what you think they should know. Why is it that I always have that feeling about you?"
"Search me."
"I also have the feeling that you don't care how these guys get scratched, as long as they're off the board."
I walked down to the Toyota's open passenger door, rested my arm on top, and looked inside again. There wasn't much of significance to see: shards of glass on the floorboards, two exit holes in the cloth of the passenger's seat, pieces of splintered lead embedded in the dashboard, a long furrow in the headliner. A warm, wet odor rose from the upholstery.
"I think Romero drove the Toyota out here to dump it," I said. "I think Keats was supposed to meet him with another car. Then for some reason Romero blew him away. Maybe it was just an argument between the two of them. Maybe Keats was supposed to whack him and it didn't go right."
"Why would Keats want to whack Romero?"
"How the hell should I know? Look, we shouldn't even be talking about Romero. He should have been sent up the road when he first got busted. Why don't you turn the screws on your colleagues?"
"Maybe I have. Maybe they're not happy with the situation, either. Sometimes these assholes get off their leashes. One time we put a street dealer in the protected-witness program and he paid us back by shooting a liquor store clerk. It works out like that sometimes."
"I'm not sympathetic. Come on, Cecil. See you around, Minos."
Cecil and I headed down the levee past boat rentals, the bait shops and beer joints, the fish camps set up on stilts. Out in the water, the strips of moss on the dead cypress trees lifted and fell in the wind. I bought Cecil a catfish plate in a Negro café in Breaux Bridge, then we drove back to New Iberia while the heat danced on the road in front of us.
I spent the next two hours doing paperwork at the office, but I couldn't concentrate on the forms and folders that were spread around my desktop. I was never good at administration or clerical tasks, primarily because I always felt they had little to do with the job at hand and were created for people who made careers of running in place. And like most middle-aged people who hear the clock ticking in their lives, I had come to resent a waste or theft of my time that was far greater than any theft of my goods or money.