The theft of the ice cream truck was a new one. In the late hours, the driver had gassed up in St. Martinville and entered the convenience store for a cup of coffee. When he came back outside, his truck was gone. We added the theft to our list of bizarre occurrences in Acadiana.
It was Saturday. The wind was balmy, out of the south, and smelling of salt and rain, when a man in a Jolly Jack ice cream suit and a white stiff-billed hat stopped the truck by a park in a poor black neighborhood near Bayou Lafourche. Happy tunes jingled from the loudspeakers. The driver stuck his head out the window and waved at the children. There were tiny plastic roses on his coat, like candied flowers on cake icing. “Hi, kids! Who wants some ice cream?”
“We ain’t got no money,” a little girl said.
“What if I told you the ice cream is free today?” the man said.
“Then you be lying,” a little boy said.
The children laughed.
“My name is Smiley,” the driver said. “I can make my face look like rubber.” He made his face go out of shape.
They laughed louder this time. “Do it again, Smiley!” someone yelled.
He hooked his fingers inside his mouth and stretched it until it was almost splitting. “I can speak Spanish. I bet you can’t.”
“If we could speak it, there wouldn’t be nobody here who could understand it,” the little girl said. “So why do we want to speak it?”
“That’s pretty good,” the driver said. He rose from his seat and opened a locker behind him. “Hang on, you guys. Here it comes.”
He was wearing gloves. As fast as he could, he trundled out Popsicles, fudge bars, cups of marbled ice cream, ice cream sandwiches, Eskimo Pies, and frozen sundaes, while more children came running from all over the park. He peeled the paper off the last fudge bar and ate it with them. “How do you like that, kids?”
“Yea!” they shouted.
The little girl stuck her head in the door and looked into the rear of the truck. “What’s that sound?” she said.
“Which sound?”
“It goes thump, thump, thump.”
“That’s my refrigerator unit. It’s broken.”
“It sound like you got a gorilla locked in there,” the little boy said.
“Maybe that’s what it is,” the driver said.
“No, it ain’t,” the girl said.
“I got to go,” the driver said. “Make sure you clean up your trash. Don’t be litterbugs.”
“You coming here tomorrow, Smiley?” she asked.
“I got a lot of places to visit. Be good kids.” He raised his hand in farewell.
“Hey, everybody t’ank Smiley,” the little girl said.
“T’ank you, Smiley!” they yelled.
He shifted into gear and drove away, water streaming off his back bumper, the back end swaying and vibrating.
He stopped at the end of the street and got into the rear of the truck. He opened a large door that gushed with cold. He looked at something on the floor, his jaw tightening. “I told you to be quiet.”
He held on to the doorjamb for balance and stomped a mouth-taped figure with his red tennis shoe, then stood on the figure’s face for good measure. “You make me very mad. You have been a bad boy. Don’t make me come back here again. I do not like bad boys.”
On Sunday morning I got the call.
“We’ve got a beaut, Pops,” Helen said. “We haven’t been able to get inside the ice cream truck yet, but this looks like one for the books.”
Chapter 24
At sunrise, a man wearing a Jolly Jack vendor’s uniform pulled up to the pumps in the same truck that had been stolen at the same filling station two days previous. He turned off the engine and went inside without buying any gas. He used the restroom, bought a bag of Ding Dongs, and munched them while he read the newspaper in the convenience store. Then he paid for the newspaper and went outside and did something in the back of the truck.
A minute later, the clerk saw him activate the gas pump with what turned out to be a stolen credit card. The clerk had never seen him before and knew nothing of the truck’s history. The driver was on the other side of the truck, so the clerk assumed he was gassing up. Someone entered the store and said smoke was rising from the back of the truck. The digital counters were racing on the gas pump. The hose and nozzle had been draped over the driver’s window and were sloshing gasoline across the seats and the floor. A flame flickered inside the glass in the rear doors. The driver had disappeared.
The explosion seemed to lift the truck off its wheels, then the fire roared with such intensity that it wilted the roof into carbon paper. One of the customers said he heard the muffled cries of a person inside the flames.
It took me only ten minutes to reach the site. The firemen had finished hosing down the truck, and one of them was prizing open the back doors with a crowbar. Helen was standing by her cruiser, talking into her mic. I waited for her to finish.
“What’s that smell?” I said.
“I hate to think,” she replied. “A car was reported stolen up the road. That’s probably how our man made his getaway.”
“What’s on the surveillance cameras?”
“The top of a head wearing a cap. It looks like he had gloves on.”
“What’s the clerk say?”
“The guy talked baby talk, like Elmer Fudd, and has lips that were ‘red like licorice.’ Fudd ate a bag of Ding Dongs and read the paper before he set the truck on fire.”
“This is the same truck that was stolen from here?”
“You got it.”
“How do you figure that one?”
“Our guy’s a nutcase?” she said.
The fireman was now inside the truck. He used the head of the crowbar to snap loose the handle on the freeze locker and pulled back the door on its hinges. He jumped down from the bumper, the ends of his mustache bouncing. He coughed wetly in his chest. “Y’all better take a look.”
The man inside the locker was bound hand and foot with ligatures, a strip of heat-baked tape hanging from his mouth. His eyes were wide, like those of someone holding his breath underwater. His forehead and bare feet were crusted with black blood, his hair and eyebrows singed, his clothes covered with burn holes. His skin had turned to orange marmalade. I hoped he had died of asphyxiation or a heart attack rather than from the burning gasoline that had curled around the bottom of the freeze locker.
“Recognize him?” Helen said.
“It’s Maximo Soza.”
“That’s him? I remember him being larger.”
“He was a small man inside and out.”
“Who’s the guy in the Jolly Jack suit?”
“I think the same guy who shot McVane.”
“How do you arrive at that?”
“He commits crimes no one would suspect him of. He does it for reasons that make sense to him but no one else. He builds the gallows and drops the trapdoor before anyone realizes he’s not a carpenter.”
“Who would want to pop one of Tony Squid’s guys?”
“Somebody who wants information about Tony or somebody who plans on popping Tony.”
“Mob guys don’t get popped without permission,” she said.
“That was in the old days. Whoever did this plans to leave a big footprint.”
At 7:38 Sunday evening, I got a call from the man himself. “I’m all broken up. What the fuck is going on over there in Mosquito Town?”
“You said you were not going to call here again, Tony,” I said.
“Maximo was like a son to me.”
“Yeah, he was a great guy. Maybe he tortured Kevin Penny to death or put a kindhearted social worker in Lafayette General.”