and wiped his face with it, staring out at the traffic on the street.
“My girlfriend killed herself. She was stoned out of her head and maybe went to bed with several men before she did it. I might be arrested tomorrow for the death of a homeless man. I think maybe I’m a coward. I may commit a terrible act of betrayal and send one of my parents to prison.”
The priest’s mouth parted silently. His face was still flushed from play, the hair on his arms speckled with dirt from his work in the garden. His eyes glistened. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Sorry about what? Yvonne’s death? Sorry he had nothing to offer? What was he saying?
But the priest’s gaze had drifted toward the street, where Slim Bruxal’s SUV had just pulled behind Tony’s Lexus. The SUV was loaded with kids from the fraternity house. At least two of them were wearing T-shirts imprinted with the faces of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which had been one of several ways the fraternity signaled its feelings on the question of race.
“I have to go,” Tony said.
“Who are those guys?” the priest said.
“My friends.”
The priest looked again at the kids getting out of Slim’s vehicle. “You didn’t tell me your name.”
“I don’t know who I am, Father. I don’t know anything anymore.”
“Stay,” the priest said.
But Tony had already fitted a crooked smile on his face and directed his steps toward his friends, who waited for him by the curb. The speckled shade under the St. John Oak seemed to slip off his skin like water sliding off stone.
IT WAS HOT AND DRY that evening, and heat lightning flickered against a black sky in the south. Molly and I ate a late dinner of cold cuts and potato salad and iced tea on the picnic table in the backyard with Snuggs and Tripod. The air was thick with birds, the bayou coated with a pall of smoke from meat fires in the park.
“I think it’s going to storm,” Molly said. “You can feel the barometer dropping.”
Just as she spoke, the wind touched the leaves over our heads and I felt a breath of cool air against my cheek, smelled a hint of distant rain. The phone rang in the kitchen. Molly got up to answer it.
“Let the machine take it,” I said.
She sat back down. Then she tapped herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand. “I forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
“A kid called just before you got home. He wouldn’t leave a number. He said he’d call back later.”
“What’s his name?”
“Tony?”
“Tony Lujan?”
“He just said ‘Tony.’ He sounded like he’d been drinking.”
“He probably was. That’s Bello Lujan’s kid. The D.A. and the Feds are about to chain-drag him down East Main.”
The phone rang again. This time I went inside and answered it. It was Wally, our dispatcher, working the late shift and, I suspected, trying to pass on his discontent about it.
“We got Monarch Little in a holding cell. He t’rew his food t’rew the bars. What do you t’ink we ought to do?”
“Tell him to clean it up. Why you calling me with this, Wally?”
“’Cause he wants to talk to Helen, but she ain’t here.”
“What’s he in for?”
“Illegal firearms possession. Maybe littering, too, ’cause he left his burned car on the street.”
“I’m not in the mood for it, partner.”
“His car caught fire, down at the corner where he sells dope. Soon as the fire truck gets there, shotgun shells start blowing up inside the car. There was a sawed-off double-barrel on the floor. The firemen found what was left of a truck flare on the backseat. Want to come down?”
“No.”
There was a pause. “Dave?”
“What?”
“One of the uniforms called Monarch a bucket of black gorilla shit. Monarch axed him if it was true the uniform’s mother still does it dog-style in Master P’s backyard. The same uniform tole me he was recommending suicide watch for Monarch. I go off shift in t’ree hours. I don’t want no accidents happening here after I’m gone.”
I took the receiver from my ear and pinched the fatigue out of my eyes. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
“T’anks. I knew you wouldn’t mind.”
I asked Molly to save my dinner and went down to the jail, where Monarch sat in a holding cell, barefoot, beltless, his gold neck chains locked up in a personal possessions envelope. One eye had a deep red blood clot in the corner, the eyebrow ridged, split in the middle.
“Who popped you?” I asked.
“Slipped down getting into the cruiser. Check the arrest report if you t’ink I’m lying. I cain’t get ahold of that FBI woman. I’m suppose to be in Witness Protection, not in no holding cell.”
“This may come as a shock, but Witness Protection doesn’t empower a person to go on committing crimes.”
“That cut-down shotgun ain’t mine. I ain’t never seen it before.”
“Why were you on the corner?”
“I wasn’t on the corner. I was in the back room of the li’l store there, drinking a soda wit’ my friends. I go there every afternoon to have a soda. Then my ’Bird explodes. Next t’ing I know, I got a racial problem wit’ a cracker don’t have no bidness in a black neighborhood.” He brushed at his eye with the back of his wrist.
“Did you mouth off to the arresting officer?”
“I tole him what I tole you-that ain’t my gun. He t’ought my ’Bird burning up was funny. He said too bad I wasn’t taking a nap in it.”
“I’ll see if I can get you kicked. But I want you in my office at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow morning.”
His eyes wandered around the opposite wall and up on the ceiling. “That’s military talk, ain’t it? Kind of stuff John Wayne like to snap off.”
“Sometimes you make me wish I was black, Monarch.”
“Why?”
“So I could beat the crap out of you and not feel guilty about it,” I said.
But Monarch was not destined to make the street that night. Before I could get in touch with Helen, Wally took a 911 call from a community of rusted trailers, shacks, weed-grown yards, and piled garbage that was so egregious in the social decay it represented that it seemed planned rather than accidental. The 911 caller said he had heard shots, four of them, that afternoon, down by the bayou. He had thought the shooter was target- practicing and consequently had paid little attention to it. At sunset he had let his dog out to run in the sugarcane. The dog had come back from the field with blood on its muzzle.
So far, the only deputy at the crime scene was our retired Marine NCO, Top. He had driven his cruiser down a turnrow in the field, his flasher bar rippling with color, and was now standing with the driver’s door open, gazing at the sun’s last reflection on the bayou. A hundred yards up the bayou, the turn bridge’s lights were on, and close to the four corners, a juke joint rimmed by a shell parking lot thundered with music. Behind us, inside the deep evening shade of clustered cedar and locust trees and slash pines, children rode bicycles among trailers and shacks where no one ever responded to a knock on a door without first checking to see who the visitor was.
“Where’s the vic?” I said.
Top picked up a rock and threw it at a dog that was slinking through the Johnson grass toward the back of a tin-sided tractor shed. “Still need to ask?”
“What’s that smell?”
“You don’t want to know.”
I took a flashlight from my glove box and walked to the rear of the shed. I have investigated many homicides over the years. They’re all bad and none are easy to look at. Rarely does a fictionalized treatment do them justice.
