The man with the shotgun looked in Mout's direction, as if asking a question.
'I'll think about it,' the man with whiskers said.
'It's mighty loose, Harpo.'
'Every time I say something, you got a remark to make.'
The man with the shotgun rewrapped the bloody handkerchief on his hand. He rose from the chair and threw the shotgun to his friend. 'You can use my raincoat if you decide to do business,' he said, and went out into the dawn.
Mout' waited in the silence.
'What do you think we ought to do about you?' the man with whiskers asked.
'Don't matter what happen here. One day the devil gonna come for y'all, take you where you belong.'
'You got diarrhea of the mouth.'
'My boy better than both y'all. He outsmarted you. He know y'all here. He out there now. Cool Breeze gonna come after you, Mr. White Trash.'
'Stand up, you old fart.'
Mout' pushed himself to his feet, his back against the plank wall. He could feel his thighs quivering, his bladder betraying him. Outside, the sun had risen into a line of storm clouds that looked like the brow of an angry man.
The man with whiskers held the shotgun against his hip and fired one barrel into Mout's dog, blowing it like a bag of broken sticks and torn skin into the corner.
'Get a cat. They're a lot smarter animals,' he said, and went out the door and crossed the board walkway to the levee where his friend sat on the fender of their pickup truck, smoking a cigarette.
TEN
'COOL BREEZE RUN OUT OF gas. That's why he didn't come back to the camp,' Mout' said.
It was Wednesday afternoon, and Helen and I sat with Mout' in his small living room, listening to his story.
'What'd the Vermilion Parish deputies say?' Helen asked.
'Man wrote on his clipboa'd. Said it was too bad about my dog. Said I could get another one at the shelter. I ax him, 'What about them two men?' He said it didn't make no sense they come into my camp to kill a dog. I said, 'Yeah, it don't make no sense 'cause you wasn't listening to the rest of it.''
'Where's Cool Breeze, Mout'?'
'Gone.'
'Where?'
'To borrow money.'
'Come on, Mout',' I said.
'To buy a gun. Cool Breeze full of hate, Mr. Dave. Cool Breeze don't show it, but he don't forgive. What bother me is the one he don't forgive most is himself.'
BACK AT MY OFFICE, I called Special Agent Adrien Glazier at the FBI office in New Orleans.
'Two white men, one with the first name of Harpo, tried to clip Willie Broussard at a fish camp in Vermilion Parish,' I said.
'When was this?'
'Last night.'
'Is there a federal crime involved here?'
'Not that I know of. Maybe crossing a state line to commit a felony.'
'You have evidence of that?'
'No.'
'Then why are you calling, Mr. Robicheaux?'
'His life's in jeopardy.'
'We're not unaware of the risk he's incurred as a federal witness. But I'm busy right now. I'll have to call you back,' she said.
'You're busy?'
The line went dead.
A UNIFORMED DEPUTY PICKED up Cool Breeze in front of a pawnshop on the south side of New Iberia and brought him into my office.
'Why the cuffs?' I said.
'Ask him what he called me when I told him to get in the cruiser,' the deputy replied.
'Take them off, please.'
'By all means. Glad to be of service. You want anything else?' the deputy said, and turned a tiny key in the lock on the cuffs.
'Thanks for bringing him in.'
'Oh, yeah, anytime. I always had aspirations to be a bus driver,' he said, and went out the door, his eyes flat.
'Who you think is on your side, Breeze?' I said.
'Me.'
'I see. Your daddy says you're going to get even. How you going to do that? You know who these guys are, where they live?'
He was sitting in the chair in front of my desk now, looking out the window, his eyes downturned at the corners.
'Did you hear me?' I said.
'You know how come one of them had a raincoat on?' he said.
'He didn't want the splatter on his clothes.'
'You know why they left my daddy alive?'
I didn't reply. His gaze was still focused out the window. His hands looked like black starfish on his thighs.
'Long as Mout's alive, I'll probably be staying at his house,' he said. 'Mout' don't mean no more to them than a piece of nutria meat tied in a crab trap.'
'You didn't answer my question.'
'Them two men who killed the white boys out in the Basin? They ain't did that in St. Mary Parish without permission. Not to no white boys, they didn't. And it sure didn't have nothing to do with any black girl they raped in New Iberia.'
'What are you saying?'
'Them boys was killed 'cause of something they done right there in St. Mary.'
'So you think the same guys are trying to do you, and you're going to find them by causing some trouble over in St. Mary Parish? Sounds like a bad plan, Breeze.'
His eyes fastened on mine for the first time, his anger unmasked. 'I ain't said that. I was telling you how it work round here. Blind hog can find an ear of corn if you t'row it on the ground. But you tell white folks grief comes down from the man wit' the money, they ain't gonna hear that. You done wit' me now, suh?'
LATE THAT SAME AFTERNOON, an elderly priest named Father James Mulcahy called me from St. Peter's Church in town. He used to have a parish made up of poor and black people in the Irish Channel, and had even known Clete Purcel when Clete was a boy, but he had been transferred by the Orleans diocese to New Iberia, where he did little more than say Mass and occasionally hear confessions.
'There's a lady here. I thought she came for reconciliation. But I'm not even sure she's Catholic,' he said.
'I don't understand, Father.'
'She seems confused, I think in need of counseling. I've done all I can for her.'
