“Why baseball bats?”
“’Cause they done it before. I checked them out. They had a beef behind a nightclub in Lake Charles wit’ a couple of soldiers from Fort Polk. They got ball bats out of their car and busted up a soldier and smashed all the windows out of his car.”
“Slim and Tony did this?”
“And about ten more like them.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this earlier?” I said.
“’Cause you ain’t axed me,” he replied, biting into a fried pie.
I drove Monarch to his house up on Loreauville Road, then went to the department and in the Saturday- morning quietness of my office pulled out all my files and notes and photographs dealing with the unsolved vehicular homicide of Crustacean Man.
Just before noon I called Koko Hebert at his home. Strangely enough, he acted halfway normal, making me wonder if much of his public persona wasn’t manufactured.
“Do I think the fatal wound is consistent with a blow from a baseball bat?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“It could be.”
“Come on, Koko. I need a warrant. Give me something I can use.”
“The bone was crushed, the damage massive. All kinds of shit can happen in a high-speed hit-and-run we can’t reconstruct. It’s like somebody getting caught inside a concrete mixer.”
“I’ll bring you the photos. The wound is concave and lateral in nature, the indentation uniform along the edges.”
“Stop telling me what I already know. Yeah, a baseball bat could have done it. I’ll come down and make an addendum to the file if you need it.”
“Thanks, partner.”
“Who’s the warrant on?”
“Some kids who would like to pour the rest of us into soap molds,” I said.
I DOUBTED IF I’d be able to get the warrant until Monday morning, but there were other things to be done that weekend, other elements in the dream that had caused me to sit up as though a piece of crystal had shattered in my sleep.
I drove to Loreauville and crossed a drawbridge and passed a shipyard where steel boats that service offshore oil rigs are manufactured. I drove down an undulating two-lane road through water oaks and palmettos and asked an older black man clipping a tangle of bougainvillea from the trellised entrance to his yard if he knew a little girl by the name of Chereen. The house behind him was made of brick and well maintained. A speedboat mounted on a trailer was parked in his porte cochere.
“That’s my granddaughter’s name. Why you want to know?” he said.
I opened my badge holder and hung it out the window. “My name is Dave Robicheaux. I’m with the Iberia Sheriff’s Department. I thought she might have some information that could be helpful to us,” I said.
The black man wore old slacks and tennis shoes, but his shirt was pressed, his back erect. The distrust in his eyes was unmistakable. “She’s nine years old. What information she gonna have?”
“It concerns evidence she and two other children may have found at a crime scene,” I said.
“You talking about the Lujan farm?”
“I need to talk to your granddaughter, sir.”
“Maybe I need to call my lawyer, too.”
I pulled my truck in his driveway and cut the engine. I opened the door and stepped out on the grass. “She and her friends were playing in a plywood fort by Bello Lujan’s back fence. Mr. Lujan was murdered. Where’s your granddaughter?”
“She don’t know nothing about no murder.”
I could feel my patience draining and my old nemesis, anger, blooming like an infection in my chest. Like most southern white people, I did not like paying the price for what my antecedents may have done.
“The man who killed Bello Lujan is still out there. You want him prowling around your neighborhood? You want him looking for your granddaughter, sir?” I said.
He spiked his clippers into the lawn and blotted his neck with a folded handkerchief. “Come wit’ me. They in the backyard,” he said.
I followed him around the side of the house. The three children I had seen flying a kite behind Bello ’s property were playing croquet in the shade of oak trees. “You guys remember me?” I said.
They looked at one another, then at Chereen’s grandfather. “Tell him what he want to know,” he said.
I squatted down so I was eye level with the children. “When y’all were having your picnic at your fort, you opened a can of tuna fish, didn’t you?” I said.
All three of them nodded, but their eyes didn’t meet mine. I pointed to the little boy who had opened the can. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Freddy.”
“What did you use to open the can, Freddy?”
“Can opener,” he replied.
“Was it an unusual can opener?” I said, smiling at him now.
“A little bit, maybe,” he said.
“Where’d you get it?” I said.
“I found it,” Chereen said, before her friend could answer. “In the field behind the horse barn.”
“Do you still have it?”
“It’s at the fort. Wit’ the crucifix and the broke chain it was on,” she said.
“A crucifix and a chain? Those things and the can opener were all together?” I said.
“Yes, suh, lying in the weeds. Not far from the fence,” Freddy said.
“I’m glad you guys found and saved those things for me. But you should have told me this yesterday. A man was killed and his killer is still out there, maybe preparing to hurt someone else. When I asked y’all if you had been inside the tape, you told me you hadn’t. So I had to figure all this out on my own. By keeping silent about the things you had found, you were telling me a lie. Indirectly, you were helping a very bad man get away with a terrible crime.”
“They got the point,” the grandfather said.
When I stood up, I could hear my knees pop. “How old are you, sir?” I asked.
“Sixty-one,” he replied.
I wanted to ask him how much value he set on pride. Was it worth the innocent lives of others in danger? I wanted to ask him if he thought he could negotiate with the kind of evil that dwells in a man who could tear a fellow human being apart with a steel pick. I wanted to tell him I was not the source of his discontent and enmity and that as a child of poor and illiterate Cajuns I shared his background and had done nothing to warrant his irritability.
I had all these vituperative thoughts, but I expressed none of them. Instead, I shook his hand without his having offered it. He stared at me blankly.
“Will you accompany me and the children to their fort, sir?” I said.
He brushed some garden cuttings off his shirt with the backs of his fingers. “Yeah, I could use a break. I’ll get some Popsicles out of the icebox to take along. Appreciate the job you doing even though I don’t probably show it,” he said.
AFTER I DROVE WITH THE CHILDREN and their grandfather to the plywood fort, I returned to the office and logged the neck chain, crucifix, and the small P-38 army-issue can opener into an evidence locker. Then I called Helen Soileau at home.
“Bello Lujan’s killer is a guy from the Islands. He’s a friend of Lefty Raguza,” I said.
“How do you know?” she said.
“Some kids playing on Bello Lujan’s property found a chain and crucifix and G.I. can opener by Bello ’s back fence. I saw this guy wearing this stuff the night I had a run-in with Lefty at that zebra club in Lafayette.”
