"You couldn't help Phil out?" he asked.
The next day I called the warden's office at Angola Penitentiary and asked an administrative assistant to do a records search under the name of Clarence "Junior" Crudup.
"When was he here?" the assistant asked.
"In the forties or fifties."
"Our records don't go back that far. You'll have to go through Baton Rouge for that."
"This guy went in but didn't come out."
"Say again?"
"He was never released. No one knows what happened to him."
"Try Point Lookout."
"The cemetery?"
"Nobody gets lost in here. They either go out through the front gate or they get planted in the gum trees."
"How about under the levee?"
He hung up on me.
At noon I walked past the whitewashed and crumbling brick crypts in St. Peter's Cemetery to Main Street and ate lunch at Victor's Cafeteria, then returned to the office just as the sun went behind a bank of thunderheads and the wind came up hard in the south and began blowing the trees along the train tracks. There were two telephone messages from Theodosha Flannigan in my mailbox. I dropped them both in the dispatcher's wastebasket.
At 4:00 P.M. in the middle of a downpour, I saw her black Lexus pull to the curb in front of the courthouse. She popped open an umbrella and raced for the front of the building, water splashing on her calves and the bottom of her pink skirt.
I went out into the corridor to meet her, feigning a confidence that masked my desire to avoid seeing her again.
"Did you get my invitation?" she said, her face and hair bright with rain.
"Yes, thanks for sending it," I replied.
"I called earlier. A couple of times."
Two deputies at the water cooler were looking at us, their eyes traveling the length of her figure.
"Come on in the office, Theo. It's been a little busy today," I said.
I closed the door behind us. "If you can't come Saturday, I understand. I need to talk to you about something else, though," she said.
"Oh?"
"I've got a problem. It comes in bottles. Not just booze. Six months ago I started using again. My psychiatrist gave me the keys to the candy store," she said.
Her voice was wired, the whites of her eyes threaded with tiny veins. She let out a breath in a ragged sigh. Her breath smelled like whiskey and mint leaves, and not from the previous night. "Can I sit down?" she asked.
"Yes, I'm sorry. Please," I said, and looked over my shoulder at Helen Soileau passing in the corridor.
"Dave, I have little men with drills and saws working in my head all day. Sometimes in the middle of the night, too," Theodosha said.
"There's a meeting tonight at Solomon House, across from old New Iberia High," I said.
"I've been in treatment twice. I was in analysis for seven years. I get a year of sobriety, then things start happening in my head again. My most recent psychiatrist shot himself last week. In Lafayette, in Girard Park, while his kids were playing on the swings. I keep thinking I had something to do with it."
"Where's Merchie in all this?"
"He makes excuses for me. He doesn't complain. I couldn't ask for more. You know, he's not entirely normal himself." She took a handkerchief from her purse and blotted the moisture from her eyes. "I don't know what I'm doing here. Merchie's bothered because you think he's dumping oil waste around poor people's homes. He looks up to you. Can't you come out to Fox Run Saturday?"
"I'm kind of jammed up these days."
"How long were you drunk?"
"Fifteen years, more or less."
"You didn't want to drink when your wife died?"
"No," I said, my eyes leaving hers.
"I don't know how anybody stays sober. I feel dirty all over."
"Why?"
"Who cares? Some people are born messed up," she said. "I'm sorry for coming in here like this. I'm going to find a dark, hermetically sealed, air-conditioned lounge and dissolve myself inside a vodka collins."
"Some people just ride out the hangover. Today can be the first inning in a new ballgame."
"Good try," she said, rising from her chair.
I thought she was about to leave. Instead, she fixed her gaze on me, waiting. Her hair had the black-purplish sheen of silk, the tips damp and curled around her throat.
"Is there something else?" I asked.
"What about Saturday?" Her face softened as she waited for an answer.
CHAPTER 4
That evening, at twilight, a Buick carrying three teenage girls roared around a curve on Loreauville Road, passed a truck, caromed off a roadside mailbox, then righted itself and slowed behind a school bus as someone in the backseat flung a box of fast-food trash and plastic cups and straws out the window. The truck driver, a religious man who kept a holy medal suspended from a tiny chain on his rearview mirror, would say later he thought the girls had settled down and would probably follow the church bus at a reasonable speed into Loreauville, five miles up Bayou Teche.
Instead, the driver crossed the double-yellow stripe again, into oncoming traffic, then tried to cut in front of the church bus when she realized safe harbor would never again be hers.
Helen Soileau, four uniformed deputies, two ambulances, and a firetruck were already at the accident scene when I arrived. The girls were still inside the Buick. The telephone pole they had hit was cut in half at the base and the downed wires were hanging in an oak tree. The Buick had slid on its roof farther down the embankment, splintering a white fence before coming to rest by the side of a fish pond, where the gas tank had exploded and burned with heat so intense the water in the pond boiled.
"You run the tag yet?" I said.
"It's registered to a physician in Loreauville. The baby-sitter says he and his wife are playing golf. I left a message at the country club," Helen said.
She wore her shield on a black cord around her neck. The wind shifted, blowing across the barns and pastures of the horse farm where the Buick had burned. But the odor the wind carried was not of horses and alfalfa. Helen held a wadded-up piece of Kleenex to her nose, snuffing, as though she had a cold. Two firemen used the jaws-of-life to pry apart the window on the driver's side of the Buick, then began pulling the remains of the driver out on the grass.
"The bus driver says the Buick was swinging all over the road?" I asked.
"Yep, they were having a grand time of it. Life on the bayou in 2002," Helen said.
The water oaks along the Teche had already lost their leaves and their branches looked skeletal against the flattened, red glow of the sun on the western horizon. A spruce green Lincoln with two people in the front seat approached us from the direction of Loreauville, slowing in the dusk, pulling onto the shoulder. The driver got out, looking over the top of his automobile at the scene taking place by the fish pond, his face stenciled with a sadness that no cop, at least no decent one, ever wishes to deal with.
I reached through the open window of Helen's cruiser and picked up a pair of polyethylene gloves and a vinyl garbage bag.
"Where you going?" she said.
"Litter patrol," I replied.
I walked back along the road for two hundred yards or so, past a line of cedar trees that bordered another horse farm, then crossed the road to the opposite embankment where a spray of freshly thrown trash bloomed in the grass. I picked up chicken bones, half-eaten dinner rolls, soiled paper napkins, a splattered container of mashed potatoes and gravy, three blue plastic cups, three lids and straws, and broken pieces of a plastic wrap that had been used to seal the lids on the cups.
There were still grains of ice in the cups, along with the unmistakable smell of sugar, lemon juice, and rum. I found a paper sack and placed the cups and lids in it, then deposited the sack in the garbage bag.