had already assaulted and threatened the victim the same day of the homicide and then left his prints at the crime scene? No, don't tell me. Just go think about it somewhere and drop me a card sometime.'
'I want to see him.'
'Be my guest. Please. By the way, I saw the black broad blow you off. In case you want to get more involved with her, I hear she's starting up a charm school. Take it easy, Robicheaux. You never surprise me,' he said.
But while I had been talking with Nate Baxter, Batist had already been locked to a wrist chain and taken to morning arraignment. By the time I got to the courtroom the public defender, who did not look to be over twenty- five, was trying to prevail upon the judge to set a reasonable bail. He was methodical, even eloquent, in his argument and obviously sincere. He pointed out that Batist had no arrest record and had been employed for years at a boat-rental dock run by a law officer in Iberia Parish, that he had lived his entire life in one small community and was not apt to leave it.
But Judge James T. Flowers was a choleric white-knuckle alcoholic who stayed dry without a program by channeling his inner misery into the lives of others. His procedures and sentences kept a half dozen ACLU attorneys occupied year round.
He looked at the clock and waited for the public defender to finish, then said, 'Hell's hot, my young friend. Perhaps it's time some of your clients learned that. Bail is set at fifty thousand dollars. Next case.'
An hour later Sergeant Motley arranged for me to see Batist in an interrogation room. The walls were a smudged white and windowless, and the air smelled like refrigerated cigarette smoke and cigar butts. Batist sat across from me at the wood table and kept rubbing his hands on top of each other. The scars on them looked like tiny pink worms. His face was unshaved and puffy with fatigue, his eyes arterial red in the corners with broken blood veins.
'What's gonna happen, Dave?'
'I'm going to call a bondsman first, then we'll see about a lawyer. We just have to do it a step at a time.'
'Dave, that judge said fifty t'ousand dollars.'
'I'm going to get you out, partner. You just have to trust me.'
'What for they doin' this? What they get out of it? I never had no truck with the law. I ain't even seen these people befo'.'
'A bad cop out there is carrying a grudge over some things that happened a long time ago. Eventually somebody in the prosecutor's office will probably figure that out. But in the meantime we have a problem, Batist. They say your fingerprints were on the door of that cottage across the street.'
I looked into his face. He dropped his eyes to the table and opened and closed his hands. His knuckles looked as round and hard against the skin as ball bearings.
'Tell me,' I said.
'After you was gone, after I bust that man's lip, I seen them kids t'rew the window, hangin' round his cottage do' again. When I call the po-lice, they ax me what he done. I say he sellin' dope to children, that's what he done. They ax me I seen it, I seen him take money from somebody, I seen somebody lighting up a crack pipe or somet'ing. I say no I ain't seen it, you got to see a coon climb in a tree to know coons climb in trees?
'So I kept watchin' out the window at that nigger's do'. After a while he come out with two womens, I'm talkin' about the kind been workin' somebody's crib, and they got in the car with them kids and drove round the block. When they come back them kids was fallin' down in the grass. I call the po-lice again, and they ax what crime I seen. I say I ain't seen no crime, long as it's all right in New Orleans for a pimp and his whores to get children high on dope.
'This was a white po-liceman I was talkin' to. So he put a black man on the phone, like nobody but another black man could make sense out of what I was sayin'. This black po-liceman tole me to come down and make a repote, he gonna check it out. I tole him check out that nigger after I put my boot up his skinny ass.'
'You went over there?'
'For just a minute, that's all. He wasn't home. I never gone inside. Maybe he went out the back do'. Why you look like that, Dave?'
I rested my chin on my fist and tried not to let him read my face.
'Dave?'
'I'm going to call a bondsman now. In the meantime, don't talk about this stuff with anyone. Not with the cops, not with any of those guys in the lockup. There're guys in here who'll trade off their own time and lie about you on the witness stand.'
'What you mean?'
'They'll try to learn something about you, enough to give evidence against you. They cut deals with the prosecutor.'
'They can do that?' he said 'Get out of jail by sendin' somebody else to Angola?'
'I'm afraid it's a way of life, podna.'
The turnkey opened the door and touched Batist on the shoulder. Batist stared silently at me a moment, then rose from his chair and walked out of the room toward a yellow elevator, with a wiremesh and barred door, which would take him upstairs into a lockdown area. The palms of his hands left tiny horsetails of perspiration on the tabletop.
It was going to cost a lot, far beyond anything I could afford right now. I had thirty-two hundred dollars in a money market account, most of which was set aside for the quarterly tax payments on my boat-rental and bait business, four hundred thirty-eight dollars in an account that I used for operating expenses at the dock, and one hundred thirteen dollars in my personal checking account.
I went back to the guesthouse and called every bondsman I knew in New Orleans. The best deal I could get was a one-week deferment on the payment of the fifty-thousand-dollar bail fee. I told the bondsman I would meet him at the jail in a half hour.
I couldn't even begin to think about the cost of hiring a decent defense attorney for a murder trial.
Welcome to the other side of the equation in the American criminal justice system.
Our room was still in disarray after being tossed by Nate Baxter and his people. Batist's cardboard suitcase had been dumped on the bed, and half of his clothes were on the floor. I picked them up, refolded them, and began replacing them in the suitcase. Underneath one of his crumpled shirts was the skull of what had once been an enormous catfish. The texture of the bone was old, a shiny gray, mottled with spots the color of tea, polished smooth with rags.
I remembered when Batist had caught this same mud cat three years ago, on a scalding summer's day out on the Atchafalaya, with a throw line and a treble hook thick with nutria guts. The catfish must have weighed thirty- five pounds, and when Batist wrapped the throw line around his forearm, the cord cut into his veins like a tourniquet, and he had to use a club across the fish's spine to get it over the gunwale. After he had driven an ice pick into its brain and pinned it flat on the deck, skinned it and cut it into steaks, he sawed the head loose from the skeleton and buried it in an anthill under a log. The ants boiled on the impacted meat and ate the bone and eye sockets clean, and now when you held up the skull vertically, it looked like a crucified man from the front. When you reversed it, it resembled an ecclesiastical, robed figure giving his benediction to the devout. If you shook it in your hand, you could hear pieces of bone clattering inside. Batist said those were the thirty pieces of silver that Judas had taken to betray Christ.
It had nothing to do with voodoo. It had everything to do with Acadian Catholicism.
Before I left the guesthouse for the jail, I called up Hippo Bimstine at one of his drugstores.
'How bad you want that Nazi sub, Hippo?' I asked.
'It's not the highest priority on my list.'
'How about twenty-five grand finder's fee?'
'Jesus Christ, Dave, you were yawning in my face the other day.'
'What do you say, partner.'
'There's something wrong here.'
'Oh?'
'You found it, didn't you?'
I didn't answer.
