How do you react to perps or corrupt cops who try to bargain? As Alafair once said about her dealings with venal people in the film industry: “It’s easy. You hang up on them. They can’t stand it.”
“Did you hear me?” Labiche said.
“Sorry, I drifted off.”
“What is it with you? I want to be friends. I didn’t file charges.”
“I think you wanted me to attack you.”
He adjusted his tie and made a snuffing sound. “Who knows why anybody does anything?”
“Did you ever destroy evidence or steal it from an evidence locker?” I asked.
“Where’d you come up with that one? People are getting killed, and you’re talking about evidence lockers.”
“Everybody dies,” I said.
His face drained as though he were aging before my eyes.
“You all right?” I said.
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be all right? Why’d you say that?”
“No reason, Spade. Have a good one.”
I turned my back on him and resumed washing the boat. Mon Tee Coon jumped from one tree limb to the next, shaking leaves on my head. When I looked up, Labiche was gone.
Just outside Lafayette, a man someone said looked like an egg with features painted on it turned off the service road in a Mazda and parked in front of a rental storage locker. He fitted a key into the lock and pulled up the door, waving to anyone nearby. He removed a cardboard box overflowing with folded clothes that still had price tags and placed the box into the trunk of the car. He did the same with a large and seemingly heavy rifle case. He was almost hairless and wore red tennis shoes that were caked with mud. While he loaded the car, he sucked on a lollipop.
A little boy wandered next to him. The man in tennis shoes patted him on the head. “What’s your name, little fella?”
Before the child could answer, his mother jerked him away.
“Why’d you do that?” the man said to her.
“He’s not supposed to talk to strangers.”
The man took her measure, his face crumpling. “I don’t think I like you.”
She hurried to her car with the child, looking nervously over her shoulder. The man drove into a trailer court inside an oak grove on the far side of the service road, and ate a sack lunch on a picnic table with people from the trailers. Smoke drifted from barbecue grills into the trees. A ball game was being broadcast from a radio placed on a windowsill. The man in tennis shoes flagged down an ice cream truck and bought Popsicles for any kid who wanted one. Then he walked on his hands and did flips across the grass, filling the children with delight.
That evening, Juju Ladrine and Pookie Domingue stopped at a fruit and watermelon stand located not far from the drawbridge at Nelson’s Canal, a historical site that few cared about and where retreating Confederates tried to stop Nathaniel Banks’s invasion into southwestern Louisiana in the spring of 1863.
On the far side of the four-lane street were a drawbridge, a church, a pecan orchard, and a pasture with horses in it. The evening star was winking in the west, the light in the trees as bright as a flame, the wind smelling of distant rain. Pookie and JuJu ordered big bleeding slices of rattlesnake melon served on paper plates with plastic forks and a roll of paper towels for napkins. They sprinkled their melon with salt and dug in, chewing with their mouths open, enjoying the grandeur of the evening.
Opposite the stand was a huge sugarcane field where the cane was hardly more than green tentacles waving in the wind. In the distance, a solitary truck was parked on a dirt road.
“There was some kind of battle here?” JuJu said.
“Nothing like the battles at Vicksburg or places like that,” Pookie said.
“That was in the Civil War?”
“Yeah, between the Nort’ and the Sout’,” Pookie said.
“Back in the 1960s, over civil rights and shit?”
Pookie stared at the side of JuJu’s face. JuJu had been scratching at his scalp and was looking at his nails.
“Where’d you go to school?” Pookie asked.
“After the fourt’ grade, I didn’t go nowhere.”
“You could fool me,” Pookie said.
A black kid was unloading melons and cantaloupes from a flatbed trailer behind their table. Behind the truck on the dirt road, there was a flash of light and a puff of smoke, then a sound like the pop of a wet firecracker. JuJu touched his forehead. “What’s with this?”
“What’s what?” Pookie said.
“I got watermelon in my hair.”
Pookie looked over his shoulder. “The kid was t’rowing melons around. Hey, kid! Ease up on t’rowing them melons.”
“I wasn’t t’rowing no melons,” the kid said.
“Then why is slop running down your pile?” Pookie said to JuJu.
“Is there somewhere around here we can get laid?” JuJu said.
“Your friend Maximo gets clipped by a guy with a birdcage for a brain and you’re talking about cooze?”
“I got the creeps,” JuJu said.
“What you got is a walking nervous breakdown you came out of the womb wit’.”
The wind changed, and Pookie thought he heard another solitary pop. He felt something wet on his face. JuJu’s head was teetering on his shoulders, then it sank in his plate. Pookie stared across the field at the truck and at the early cane bending in the wind and at the amber-tinged twilight glinting on the train tracks, as though he were being drawn against his will into a historical photograph that would have no importance to anyone except him. For a brief moment, he wanted desperately to relive his life and change every thought and deed and event in it, even the ones that were good, in order to alter the sequence of events that had placed him near a site where ragged specters in gray and butternut took their revenge upon the quick.
Chapter 26
The sun was low in the west, flooding the crime scene with a red glow, when I arrived. Helen arrived minutes later. Someone had pulled a polyethylene tarp over the two bodies that sat slumped at the picnic table. An ambulance, three cruisers, and a fire truck had pulled onto the grass. The crime scene tape was already up. Cars were slowing at the intersection, people gawking from the windows. Spade Labiche was waiting for us. “Better take a look,” he said.
I lifted up a corner of the tarp, high enough to see both victims without exposing their state to people on the other side of the tape.
“Jesus,” Helen said.
I lowered the tarp. “The entry wounds are in the front.”
“There’s splatter on the flatbed behind them,” Labiche said. “One guy says he thought he heard a backfire. A woman says she heard firecrackers.”
“From where?” I said.
“Across the road,” he said.
The sugarcane field was empty, the sky lavender and full of birds. A dust devil spun across the rows, wobbling, then broke apart.
I walked over to the trailer where a black kid had been stacking or unloading melons. Three melons were cored or broken. There was no bullet hole in the trailer that I could see. Farther down the street were houses and small businesses. I talked with the black kid, who was still shaken by what he had witnessed. “One guy was wiping melon out of his hair, then his whole head blowed off. Man, I ain’t up for dis.”
“Did you see anyone out there in the field?” I asked.
“No, suh. Wait. I seen a truck.”
“Did you see the truck go somewhere?”
“No, suh, I ain’t.”
“You see anything else? Think about it.”
“Maybe a flash behind the truck.”
“You see a man?”
“I cain’t remember.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “Let’s talk again later.” I gave him my card and joined Helen.
“Want me to start knocking on doors?” Labiche said.