“In our previous conversation, you told me to stay out of your jurisdiction.”
“I’m at Kevin Penny’s trailer. The coroner won’t get here for a couple of hours. I want you to see this.”
“See what?”
“Use your imagination,” she replied.
It was raining and the sun was shining when I got there. Wildflowers were blooming in a field across the road. The crime scene tape was up; an ambulance and two cruisers were parked by Penny’s trailer. A tall woman with jet-black hair, wearing dark slacks and a short-sleeve denim shirt and western boots, the kind with rounded steel tips, stood with an umbrella by the motorcycle shed. She bent over and picked up a Styrofoam fast-food container and put it into an evidence bag. Three cops in uniform lounged in the cruisers, smoking, tipping the ashes outside the windows.
I parked my cruiser outside the tape and put on my rain hat and walked to the shed. She looked at her watch. “Good timing. The coroner will be here earlier than he thought.”
“This had better be worth it, Detective,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Giving parts of information over the phone.”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
“Because I worry about Kevin Penny’s child,” I said.
She looked away and then back at me, as though making a reevaluation. She had pale skin and lean features, like an Indian’s, and a mole by the side of her mouth. “Get your latex on and be careful where you step. One of the uniforms puked on the porch.”
The body was on the floor, dressed only in sweatpants, the naked stomach white and mottled and bloated like a frog’s, the wrists pulled taut above the head and fastened to the floor with toggle bolts. There were pools of black blood under both knees and elbows. The left ear was clogged with blood and brain matter. In the corner was an electric drill matted with spray, the extension cord still plugged in the socket.
“Ever see anything like this?” Picard said.
“Overseas.”
“Vietnam?”
I shook off her question. “Who found him?”
“One of Penny’s chippies. He was supposed to take her shopping today.”
“Why’d you want me over here, Detective?”
“You and Penny go back.”
“Not a good choice of words,” I said.
“He and Clete Purcel go back.”
“Clete tried to help Penny’s kid.”
“Who would you make for this?” she said.
“For a vic like this, half the planet.”
“Let’s go outside,” she said.
The rain had quit. The swaths of flowers in the field looked like twisted rainbows surrounded by green grass. I wanted to walk among them and keep walking, over the edge of the earth. “Why were you picking up trash by the shed?”
“Somebody was eating fried chicken there and throwing the bones on the ground. I don’t think it was Penny.”
“Penny was a slob.”
“The pond is full of trash, but there’s none out here. The chrome and paint on the motorcycle are clean.”
Not bad.
“Clete’s not your guy,” I said.
“How about you? The word is you might be up on a murder beef.”
“You must know an Iberia detective named Spade Labiche.”
“I try to stay upwind from dog shit,” she said.
The coroner’s car turned off the asphalt road onto the dirt track that led to the trailer.
“You need me for anything else?” I said.
“Nope.” Her mouth formed into a button.
“That’s it?”
“Yep.”
“You haven’t bagged anything from inside?”
“Not till the coroner gets here,” she said.
“There’s a gold cigarette lighter in a corner, right by the mop.”
“Yeah, I saw it.”
“I’d handle it with special care,” I said.
She looked at me blankly.
“You might have to get downwind from dog shit after all,” I said.
Chapter 19
I went to Helen’s office and told her what I had seen at Kevin Penny’s trailer. I didn’t mention the gold lighter. She leaned back in her chair. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“We lost the one guy who could cut me loose on Dartez’s murder.”
“Who would have that kind of motivation?” she said.
“Take your choice.”
“There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“The person who did it is a psychopath. Penny was tortured for reasons of information or revenge. That leaves lots of possibilities.”
“How about Tony Nemo’s nematodes?” she said.
“I think Maximo Soza might be a candidate,” I said.
“How about JuJu?”
“He does what he’s told.”
She rubbed her forehead. “I wanted Penny for the Dartez killing. We’re going to have trouble with the DA. This stinks.”
“There was a gold cigarette lighter on the floor of Penny’s trailer.”
It took her a second. “Why didn’t you say that?”
“I’m not objective about certain individuals.”
“Have you seen Labiche?”
“In the coffee room.”
“Tell him to get his ass in here.”
That evening I went to an A.A. meeting in Lafayette. Sometimes A.A. is a hard sell in South Louisiana. Booze is a big part of the culture. When I was a teenager, nobody was ever carded. Uniformed cops worked as bartenders and in gambling houses in St. Martinville, Lafayette, and Opelousas. The law in Louisiana was never intended to be enforced. Its purpose was to provide a vague guideline that made people feel respectable. New Iberia had the most notorious red-light district in the state. There was a semi-cathouse and bar right around the corner from the Lafayette Daily Advertiser in the middle of downtown. Friday was family night, no prostitutes allowed; the boiled crawfish and shrimp were free. What better way to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s?
Drive-through daiquiri windows are open until two A.M. You can get plowed before you go to midnight Mass. Fans get wildly drunk at baseball games. If anyone tells you he’s from New Orleans and doesn’t drink, he’s probably not from New Orleans. Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives. That’s not an exaggeration. Cirrhosis is a family heirloom.
The meetings I attend are made up of the bravest people I’ve ever known. Don’t let anyone tell you that only victims of war suffer post-traumatic problems. The unconscious of a recovering drunk is filled with images no one wants to have as part of his spiritual cache. They hit you at a red light, shopping in a grocery, talking to a friend, kneeling in church. There are people in A.A. who have killed people with their cars or their bare hands. There are people whose negligence killed their children.
As I sat in the meeting in Lafayette, I felt dishonest and unworthy. I had owned up to my slip but not to the possibility that I was involved in a homicide. Nor had I told anyone that the desire to drink was still with me, that pushing a basket down the beer and wine aisle at Winn-Dixie made my throat go dry. A Lutheran minister sat on one side of me, a black hooker on the other. The woman leading the meeting owned a chain of hair salons. Our commonality lay in our addictions and unexplainable chemistry, one that absolutely no one, including us, understands.
Though I don’t believe in capital punishment, I don’t mourn when someone like Penny gets blown out of his socks. However, no one deserves to go out the way he did. When it was my time to speak, I told the group that I was a police officer and had seen an awful instance of inhumanity that morning. I added that, when drunk and in a blackout, I may have been guilty of inhumane acts myself. After the Our Father, the hooker told me to have a nice evening, the minister asked if I could give his car battery a jump, and the woman who owned the beauty salons stopped washing coffee cups long enough to throw me a dish towel.