It became the kind of case that eventually you close the file on and hope the right man is in jail. Clete and I were both glad when we heard that the lower court's decision had been overturned and that a new trial date was to be set soon. Maybe someone else could prove or disprove what we could not.
Three days later, a psychotic inmate at Angola, a big stripe, attacked the contractor with a cane knife and severed his spinal cord with one blow across the back of the neck. The body was lying in state at a funeral home in Metairie when the mother and aunts of the murdered girls burst into the room, screaming hysterically like Shakespearean hags, and flung bags of urine on the corpse.
For a long time I had a recurrent dream about the contractor. He awoke in the blackness of his coffin, then realized that tons of earth had been bulldozed and packed down on top of him. He couldn't move his shoulders or twist his body against the hard, sculpted silk contours of the coffin; his screams went no farther than the coffin's lid, which hovered an inch from his mouth.
As time passed and his nails and eyebrows and hair grew long and filled the air cavity around him, and he realized that his death was to be prolonged in ways that no mortal thought imaginable, he began to plan ways that he could burn himself even more deeply, more painfully, into our memory.
He would reveal to the rest of us a secret about his soul that would forever make us think differently about our common origins. With nails that were yellow and sharp as talons he cut his confession into the silk liner above him, his mouth red with gloat as he wounded us once more with a dark knowledge about ourselves.
But those are simply images born of my dreams. Maybe the contractor was innocent. Or maybe in the murder house he began to enact a fantasy, tried to lure one of the girls into a seduction, and found himself involved in a kaleidoscopic nightmare whose consequences filled him with terror and from which he couldn't extricate himself.
I don't know. Ten months on the firing line in Vietnam, twenty years in law enforcement, and a long excursion into a nocturnal world of neon-streaked rain and whiskey-soaked roses have made me no wiser about human nature than I had been at age eighteen.
But Brother Oswald had made another remark that forced me to reexamine a basic syllogism that I had been operating on: 'You think the real problem is y'all don't have no idea of what you're dealing with?'
I had not been able to find any record anywhere on a man named Will Buchalter.
Why? Perhaps because that was not his name.
I had assumed from the beginning that Buchalter was not an alias, that the man who had violated my wife and home was a relative of Jon Matthew Buchalter, a founder of the Silver Shirts. It was a natural assumption to make. Would someone choose the name of Hitler or Mussolini as an alias if he wished to avoid drawing attention to himself?
Maybe the man who called himself Will Buchalter had thrown me a real slider and I had swung on it.
It was time to have a talk with Hippo Bimstine again.
But I didn't get the chance. At seven the next morning I went to an Al-Anon meeting to get some help for Bootsie that I wasn't capable of providing myself, then two minutes after I walked into my office Lucinda Bergeron called from New Orleans.
'Hey, Lucinda. What's up?' I said.
'The East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Department just nailed a mule with a suitcase full of Mexican tar in his trunk. This'll be his fourth time down. He says he'll do anybody he can for some slack.'
'So?'
'The dope drop's in New Orleans. That's why Baton Rouge called us. This guy says the tar's going into the projects.'
'I'm still not with you.'
'He says the Calucci brothers are dealing the tar. It looks like they're making a move on the projects. Anyway, the guy says he can do them.'
'I doubt it.'
'Why?'
'Max and Bobo always have three or four intermediaries between themselves and whatever they're in.'
'I had the impression you thought they were connected with Lonighan and that Lonighan was mixed up with this psychopath who keeps coming around your house.'
'That's right.'
'So do you have a better lead?'
'Not really.'
'Good. I'll meet you at the jail in two hours. Also, I'm a little pissed, with you this morning, Mr. Robicheaux.'
'Oh?'
'You can't seem to stay out of other people's business.'
'What is it now?'
'I'll tell you when I see you,' she said, and hung up.
Lucinda really knew how to set the hook. All the way across the Atchafalaya Basin, on a beautiful, wind-kissed fall day when I should have been looking at the bays and canals and flooded cypress and willow trees along I-10, I kept wondering what new bagful of spiders she would like to fit over my head.
She met me in the parking lot at the lockup. She wore a pair of white slacks and a purple-flowered blouse, and her hair was brushed out full on her shoulders. She had one hand on her hip and a pout on her face. She looked at the tiny gold watch on her wrist.
'Did you stop for a late breakfast?' she said.
'No, I didn't. I came straight from the office. Get off it, Lucinda.'
'Get
'Yeah, I'm not up to being somebody's pincushion today.'
'My son is back home. He told me you made some inquiries about the company I keep.'
'No, I didn't.'
'He said you seemed to take an interest in the fact that I had a white man at my house.'
'Kids get things turned around. He volunteered that information on his own.'
'Do you think it should be of some concern to you, sir?'
'No. But one troubling thought did occur to me.'
'Yes?'
'Was it Nate Baxter?'
She looked like a wave of nausea had just swept through her system.
'Do you stay up all night thinking of things like this to say to people?' she said.
'I've known him for twenty years. He'll try to coerce a woman in any way he can. If he hasn't done it to you yet, he will later. He's a sonofabitch and you know it.'
'That doesn't mean I'd allow him in my house.'
'Okay, Lucinda, I apologize. But I know what he did to some women in the First District.'
'I'll buy you a cup of coffee later and tell you about Nate Baxter. In the meantime, our man is waiting on us.'
His name was Waylon Rhodes, from Mount Olive, Alabama; he had skin the color of putty, hands dotted with jailhouse art, a narrow, misshapen head, and a wide slit of a mouth, whose lips on one side looked like they had been pressed flat by a hot iron. His premature gray hair was grizzled and brushed back into faint ducktails; his eyes jittered like a speed addict's. Inside his left arm was a long, blue tattoo of a bayonet or perhaps a sword.
Lucinda and I sat across the wood table from him in the interrogation room. He smoked one cigarette after another, crumpling up an empty pack, ripping the cellophane off a fresh one. The backs of his fingers were yellow with nicotine; his breath was like an ashtray.
'There's no reason to be nervous, partner,' I said.
'Y'all want me to do the Caluccis. That ain't reason to be nervous?' he said.
'You don't have to do anybody. Not for us, anyway. Your beef's with the locals,' I said.
'Don't tell me that, man. Y'all got a two-by-four up my ass.'
