“Levon Broussard spat in Nightingale’s face at Iberia General. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“That was then. This is now.”
“You’re muddying the water, Dave,” he said. “I don’t understand why. Helen, could I speak to Dave alone, please?”
“Powder my nose?” she said.
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Your ass,” she said, and left the room.
Score one for Helen Soileau.
After she was gone, Lala put the pages of my report back into a folder and leaned forward, his face bladed with color, his nose cut out of tin. “The investigation into the Dartez homicide has been the most unusual in my career.”
“Really?” I said.
“Don’t be clever with me, Dave. There’s a cloud over your head, and nothing we do seems to get rid of it. The department and my office have been taking your weight.”
“Then stop doing it.”
“It’s not a time to be gallant. Labiche lifted your prints on the broken glass from the driver’s side of the truck. That detail will not go away. Unless you’re willing to make it go away.”
“What are you hinting at?”
“You were at the Dartez house and could have touched his truck. Or maybe on another occasion.” He paused, then said, “Am I right?”
“I could have.”
“You did or you didn’t?”
I could hear a motorboat on the bayou. I wanted to get up and walk to the window and float away, above the picnic shelters and trees and children playing on swing sets and seesaws. “I did not touch Dartez’s vehicle at his home. I cannot explain the presence of my fingerprints on the glass.”
I could hear myself breathing in the silence. I counted the seconds. I got up to fourteen, then restarted the count, my heart twisting.
“You think you did it?” he asked. “Just say it. Let’s end this crap.”
“I think I’m capable of it.”
“You truly mean that? You would kill a man with your bare hands?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you done with your drinking?”
I could feel my control slipping, my old enemy, childhood rage, surfacing once again. “It’s not my drinking—” I began. I saw a red glow behind my eyes and heard a popping sound in my ears. I started over. “No, sir, I cannot swear that I’m done. No drunk can.”
He leaned back in his chair. He shook his head as though in bewilderment. “Best of everything to you.”
“Want to translate that?”
“You’re an honorable man. But others have to pay your tab.”
I have to say, the cut went deep. “Anything else?”
He didn’t answer. When I opened the door to leave, he was standing at the window, a hand on his hip, staring at the park, his shirt pinched inside his suspenders.
“I never popped a cap on somebody who didn’t ask for it,” I said. “Even in a free-fire zone.”
“Ooh-rah,” he said without turning around.
Chapter 22
At one time St. Mary Parish was a fiefdom ruled by an oligarchical family who owned everything and everyone in the parish, bar none. In the 1970s, when a group of activist Catholic nuns tried to organize the cane workers, they found themselves at mortal risk in an area that was more than ninety percent Catholic. Enforcement of the law was situational. Every public servant knew which ring to kiss. The people at the bottom of the pile were not necessarily abused, but they weren’t necessarily protected from abuse, either.
Sexual exploitation is not a subject most police departments like to deal with. But it’s often there. A cop picks up a hippie runaway hitchhiking. Maybe she’s holding, maybe she’s got a warrant on her, maybe she’s sixteen and her teeth are chattering. It’s twilight. She’s in the backseat, wrists cuffed behind her, trying to see where they’re going as the cop swings around on the shoulder and heads down a two-lane away from town. The cop has already dropped his badge inside his pocket so she won’t get his number.
His name was Jude McVane. Before he was a deputy sheriff, he was a chaser in a navy brig, a hack in a women’s prison, and a collector for a loan company. He had big hands and smelled of manly odors and was good at his paperwork because he did as little of it as possible. There were never any complaints about him. But his colleagues did not hang out with him after work hours, particularly those who were protective of their wives’ sensibilities.
At sunrise Thursday, he was driving his cruiser on a two-lane back road that followed the curves along Bayou Teche. The primroses were blooming on the edge of the cane fields, the sun spangling inside the tunnel of live oaks. He passed two antebellum homes built in the early nineteenth century, then crossed the drawbridge and turned in to a trailer village that belonged in Bangladesh. He stopped in front of a trailer occupied by a young black single mother. Without speaking, she exited the trailer, locked the door behind her, and got into the back of the cruiser.
“Good morning, sunshine,” McVane said.
She looked wanly out the window. He drove out of the trailer park and back across the drawbridge and past a closed sugar refinery. Then he hooked back in to the confines of the refinery on a dirt road and parked in the shade of a rusted-out tin shed.
“Nobody does it like you,” he said, getting in back.
When she was finished, she walked away from the cruiser and cleared her mouth and spat.
“I always heard it tastes like watermelon rind,” he said.
She refused to speak. He drove her back to her home and watched her get out and go inside. He shifted into gear and drove out of the trailer park and back over the Teche and headed toward Franklin. A solitary figure was walking around the edge of the road, dragging a wheeled case behind him, a beach bag hanging from his shoulder. McVane pulled alongside and rolled down the passenger window. “Where you going, partner?”
The man wore red tennis shoes and khakis that probably came from Target and a green T-shirt with Bugs Bunny eating a carrot on the front. “I’m touring the countryside. I got off the bus at the wrong place.”
“Where are you from?”
“New Or-yuns, originally. My name is Chester. Sometimes people call me Smiley.”
“Chester what?”
“Wimple. What’s yours?”
“Get in.”
“Why?”
“I’ll take you where you’re going.”
Chester leaned his head in the window and sniffed. “There’s been a woman in here.”
“Get in the cruiser, please.”
“I like walking.”
“I guess it’s going to be one of those days,” McVane said.
“All right. If you want to act like that. I don’t want to make anybody mad.” The man got inside and inhaled. “Icky.”
“What is?”
“Like somebody has been doing something he shouldn’t.”
“Buckle up,” McVane said. He drove down the road until he reached an oak grove. He turned inside it and cut the engine. “I have a feeling you got loose from an institution, Chester.”
“I did no such thing.”
“Let’s see your identification.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’re being impolite and talking to me in a hurtful way.”
“I think you’re from Crazy Town, Chester. Crazy Town people have to be housed and fed and medicated. They also create shit piles of paperwork. Now get rid of the baby talk and show me your fucking ID.”
“I knew people like you in the orphanage. They were bullies and loudmouths and had no manners.”
“You’re really starting to piss me off. Smart-mouth me again and I’ll slap you upside the head, boy.”
“I’m going to walk. You need to clean out this car. You should be ashamed of yourself.”