When I got back to the accident scene, Helen was talking to the father and mother of the girl who had driven the Buick. The father's face was dilated with rage as he pointed his finger at the drivers of both the truck and the church bus, both of whom had said his daughter was speeding and crossing the double-yellow stripe.
"Maybe you boxed her off, too. Why would she go off the left-hand embankment unless you wouldn't let her back in line? Answer me that, goddammit," he said.
An ambulance containing the bodies of the. three girls was working its way around the other emergency vehicles, its flashers beating silently against the dusk.
I dropped the evidence bag in Helen's cruiser and drove home, passing a rural black slum at the four corners, where several cars and pickup trucks were lined up at the service window of a drive-by daiquiri store.
Early the next morning, when the streets were still empty and the light was gray and streaked with mist in the backyards along the bayou, Fat Sammy Figorelli parked his Cadillac in front of my house, puffed on a cigarette while studying the live oaks and antebellum homes that lined East Main, then walked up on my gallery and began knocking so hard the walls shook.
"You mad at my door?" I said.
"I need to straighten you out about a certain issue," he said.
I stepped outside, barefoot, still unshaved, dressed only in a T-shirt and khakis. He wore a rust-colored shirt and brown knit necktie and knife-creased slacks. He stood a half-head taller than I, his porcine face shiny with cologne.
"A little early, isn't it?" I said.
"I get up at four every morning. I think sleep sucks," he said.
"I see. Then you wake up other people. Makes sense."
"What?" he said.
"Why are you here, Sammy?"
"I got this punk Gunner Ardoin calling me up, telling me he didn't rat me out, that he's got a little girl, that he can't afford to lose work 'cause he's in the hospital."
"Why tell me about it?" I asked.
"Thanks to you and that animal Purcel, my name is getting drug into all this."
"Into what?"
"Stories about a priest getting bashed. I don't want to hear my name coming up no more in regard to Father Jimmie Dolan. This guy is a world-class pain in the ass and I got nothing to do with him. What kind of priest punches out the owner of a health salon, anyway?"
"I hadn't heard that one."
"He probably left it out of his homily."
"I'll try to remember all this. Thanks for dropping by," I said.
Sammy looked at me for a long time, his nostrils swelling with air, his small mouth a tight seam, as though he had been talking futilely to either a deaf or stupid man. A delivery truck smelling of donuts or freshly baked bread passed on the street. Fat Sammy watched the truck turn the corner by a huge, redbrick, tree-shaded antebellum home called the Shadows and disappear down a side street.
"This is a nice town," he said.
I realized that whatever was really bothering him was probably not within his ability to explain. He watched a blue jay lighting on a bird feeder that hung from an oak limb in the yard. Then, like every mainstream American gangster I had ever known, almost all of whom struggle to hold onto some vestige of respectability, he unknowingly opened a tiny window into a childlike area of his soul.
"I talked with them German film people who's doing a documentary. They say you told them I used to be on a first-name basis with a Miami guy who helped kill President Kennedy. It's true, you told them people that?" he said.
"You know the same stories I do, Sammy. They just sound better coming from you. You were born for the screen, partner," I said.
He seemed to think about my explanation, but showed no indication of wanting to leave my gallery.
"You care to come inside and have some coffee?" I said.
"Got any donuts?" he said.
I opened the door for him and watched his enormous bulk move past me into my house. I could smell an odor like testosterone ironed into his clothes.
That morning I drove to the high school that the three dead girls had attended up the bayou in the little town of Loreauville. The registrar gave me a copy of the yearbook from the previous year and I found the three girls' photographs among members of the junior class. All three had been either class officers, prom queens, members of the drama club and speech team, or participants in Madrigals. They had been scheduled to graduate in the spring.
But one of the girls had a different kind of distinction. The driver, Lori Parks, had been on probation for possession of Ecstasy and had been driving with a restricted license for a previous DWI. By late afternoon the forensic chemist at our crime lab had matched a latent print from one of the plastic cups I had picked up two hundred yards from the crash site. The latent belonged to Lori Parks.
There is no open-container law in the State of Louisiana. It is supposedly illegal to drink and drive in the state, but a vendor can sell mixed drinks at drive-by windows to people in automobiles, provided the container is sealed. Wrapping a piece of plastic around the lid of a daiquiri cup satisfies the statute, and the passengers in the automobile are allowed to open the cups and consume any amount of alcohol they wish as long as they do not give alcohol to the driver.
If the driver is drinking and sees a state trooper or sheriff's deputy hit his flasher, he only needs to hand his cup to a passenger and instantly he comes into compliance with the law.
The only person legally liable for any violation of the statutes governing the drive-by window sale of mixed drinks is the clerk who actually makes the sale, never the owner. Sometimes the clerk, who is usually paid no more than minimum wage, is fined or jailed or both for selling to underage customers. But the daiquiri windows remain open seven days and nights a week, positioned on each end of town, thriving on weekends and on all pay days
Just before I started to drive out to the daiquiri store at the four corners on Loreauville Road, the phone rang on my desk. It was the administrative assistant in the warden's office at Angola Penitentiary, the same man who had hung up on me when I had mentioned the possibility of Junior Crudup being buried under the levee along the Mississippi River.
"I did some digging around," he said.
I laughed into the receiver.
"You think this is funny?" he said.
"No, sir. I'm sorry."
"Ever know an old gun hack by the name of Buttermilk Strunk?"
"Cain't-See to Cain't-See Double-Time Strunk?" I said.
"That's the man. He was working levee gangs from Camp A in 1951. He says Crudup was a big stripe back then and on the shit list of a couple other gun bulls who wanted to make a Christian out of him, get my meaning?"
"I think so," I said.
"They worked him over pretty bad. Strunk says that's about the time a man came to the penitentiary and made recordings of some of the convicts. According to Strunk, this man probably saved Crudup's life."
"You mean John or Allen Lomax, the folk music collectors?"
"No, this guy lives in Franklin. You ought to know him. He only owns about half the goddamn state."
"Who are we talking about?" I said, my impatience growing.
"Castille Lejeune. Strunk says Lejeune came to Angola with a man from a record company and got Crudup pulled off the levee gang. He doesn't know what happened to him after that… You still there?"
"Castille Lejeune saved the life of a black convict? I'm having a hard time putting this together."
"Why's that?"
"He's supposed to be a sonofabitch."
"Remind me not to waste my time on bullshit like this again," the administrative assistant said.
That night my old enemy was back. According to his friends, Audie Murphy fashioned a bedroom out of his garage in the hills overlooking Los Angeles and slept separately from his wife, a loaded army-issue .45 under his pillow. After World War II he had become convinced that, before he could sleep a full night again, he would have to spend five days in peacetime for every day he had spent on the firing line. For him that meant twenty years of sleeplessness.