rain, and the world felt like a grand and beautiful place to be.
Back at the guesthouse we watched a movie on television while the rain and wind shook the mulberry tree outside the French doors. I paid no attention to the sirens that I heard on the avenue, nor to the emergency lights that beat angrily against the darkness on the far side of the parking lot. We were picking up my boat in the morning, and with luck we would be somewhere south of Terrebonne Bay by noon, on our way back to New Iberia, our baited jigs bouncing in the trough behind us.
Sheets of lightning were trembling against the sky, and I lay down on the pillow with my arm across my eyes. Batist began undressing for bed, then walked to the French doors to close the curtain.
'Hey, Dave, they's a ambulance and a bunch of policemens over at that cottage where that nigger run to,' he said.
'I'm hitting the sack, partner. Clete's right. Leave New Orleans to its own problems.'
'They carryin' somebody out of there.'
'Tell me about it in the morning. Good night.'
He didn't answer, and I felt myself drifting on the edges of sleep and the sound of the rain blowing against the windows; then I heard him click off the lamp switch.
It must have been an hour later that we were awakened by the knock on the door. No, that's wrong; it wasn't a knock; it was an incessant beating, with the base of the fist, the kind of ugly, penetrating sound sent by someone whose violation of your sleep and privacy is only a minimal indicator of his larger purpose.
I walked to the door in my skivvies, turned the dead bolt, and opened the door two inches.
'Take off the night chain, Robicheaux.'
'What do you want, Nate?'
'What's this look like?' He held a warrant up in front of me. His chrome-plated.357 Magnum hung from his right hand. The skin of his face was tight with fatigue and muted anger, beaded with rainwater. Three uniformed white cops stood behind him.
'For what? That beef at Calucci's Bar?' I said.
'You never disappoint me. Tell me stink and shit don't go hand in hand.'
'Why don't you try making sense, Nate?'
'We just hauled away a carved-up boon from across the street. Guess who knocked him around in front of a half dozen witnesses today? It's great having you back in town, Robicheaux. It's just like old times.'
He pulled his handcuffs from his belt and let them swing loosely from his index finger like a watch fob. Behind me, Batist sat on the edge of his bed, his big hands splayed on his naked thighs, his eyes focused on a sad and ancient racial knowledge that only he seemed able to see.
chapter three
There are those who, for political reasons, enjoy talking about country club jails. But any jail anywhere is a bad place to be. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never been in one.
Imagine an environment where the lights never go off and you defecate in full view of others on a toilet seat streaked with other people's urine, where you never quite fall asleep, where you are surrounded by the sounds of clanging iron, irrational voices resonating down stone corridors, a count-man or irritated turnkey whanging his baton off steel bars, or the muffled and tormented cries of an eighteen-year-old fish being gang-raped behind a shower wall.
Perhaps even a worse characteristic of jail is the denial of any identity you might have had before you stepped inside a piece of geography where time can sometimes be measured in five-minute increments that seem borne right out of Dante's ninth ring. Here you quickly learn that the personal violation of your
Batist spent the night in the tank and wasn't booked until the next morning. I sat on a wood chair in a waiting area next to a squad room and a row of glassed-in offices, one of which was Nate Baxter's. Through a doorway at the back of the squad room I could see the holding tank where Batist was still being held, though he had already been fingerprinted and photographed.
I had been waiting an hour and a half to see Nate Baxter. Then Sergeant Lucinda Bergeron walked past me, in navy blue slacks, a starched white short-sleeve shirt, and a lacquered black gunbelt with a leather pouch for handcuffs. She carried a clipboard in her hand, and if she noticed me, her face didn't show it.
'Excuse me, Sergeant,' I said.
She stopped and looked at me but said nothing. Her eyes were turquoise and elongated, like an Oriental's, and her cheekbones were rouged high up on her face.
'Could I talk with you a minute?' I asked.
'What is it?'
'I'm Dave Robicheaux. You left a message for me with Cletus Purcel.'
'Yes?'
'I came in and filed a report with Sergeant Motley yesterday.'
She looked at me, her face as still and expressionless as a picture painted upon the air.
'I was at Calucci's Bar,' I said. 'You asked me to come in and file a statement.'
'I understood you. What can I help you with?' she said.
'I have a friend back there in the tank. The black man, Batist Perry. He's already been booked.'
'What do you want from me?'
'How about getting him moved into a holding cell?'
'You'll have to talk to the officer in charge.'
'That's what I've been trying to do. For an hour and a half.'
'I can't help you. I'm sorry.'
She walked away to her desk, which was located in the squad room, among the uniformed officers, rather than in an enclosed office. Ten minutes later Baxter stepped out of his office door, studying some papers in his hand, then glanced in my direction and beckoned to me with one finger.
While I sat down across from him, he tipped his cigarette ashes in an ashtray and continued to concentrate on the papers on his desk blotter. He looked rested and fresh, in a sky blue sports coat and a crinkling shirt that was the color of tin.
'You're really charging Batist with murder?' I said.
'That decision comes down from the prosecutor's office, Robicheaux. You know that.'
'The man's never been in trouble. Not in his whole life. Not even for a misdemeanor. What's the matter with you?'
'Well, he's in trouble now. In a big way.' He leaned forward and tipped his ashes into his ashtray, cocking his eyebrows at me.
'I don't think you have a case, Nate. I think this is all smoke.'
'His prints are on the door at the crime scene.'
'That's impossible.'
'Tell that to our fingerprint man. Does this look like smoke to you?' He removed a half dozen eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photographs from his desk drawer and dropped them in front of me. 'You ever see that much blood at a crime scene? Check out the chest wound. Has your friend ever been into voodoo?'
'You're using a homicide investigation to settle an old score, Nate. Don't tell me you're not.'
'Is the light in here bad? That must be the problem. The killer sawed the guy's heart out. That wasn't enough for him, either. He stuffed purple roses into the heart cavity.'
'What's your point?'
'Your friend wears a dime on a string around his ankle,' Baxter said. 'He carries a shriveled alligator's foot in his pocket. He had bones in his suitcase. The murder has all the characteristics of a ritual killing. If you were in my place, who would be your first suspect? Is there any chance it might be a superstitious backwater black guy who
