'I was a chaplain in Thailand during the Vietnam War. I knew a young soldier who participated in a massacre. You might have seen the pictures. The most unforgettable was of a little boy holding his grandmother's skirts in terror while she begged for their lives. I spent many hours with that young soldier, but I could never remove the evil that lived in his dreams.'
'I don't understand how-' I began.
He raised his hand. 'Listen to me,' he said. 'There was another man, a civilian profiteer who lived on the air base. His corporation made incendiary bombs. I told him the story of the young soldier who had machine-gunned whole families in a ditch. The profiteer's rejoinder was to tell me about a strafing gun his company had patented. In thirty seconds it could tear the sod out of an entire football field. In that moment I think that man's eyes were the conduit into the abyss.'
Bootsie's face wore no expression, but I saw her look at me, then back at the priest.
'Please have dinner with us,' she said.
'Oh, I've intruded enough. I really haven't made my point either. Last night in the middle of the storm a truck stopped outside the rectory. I thought it was a parishioner. When I opened the door a man in a slouch hat and raincoat was standing there. I've never felt the presence of evil so strongly in my life. I was convinced he was there to kill me. I think he would have done it if the housekeeper and Father Lemoyne hadn't walked up behind me.
'He pointed his arm at me and said, 'Don't you break the seal.' Then he got back in his truck and drove away with the lights off.'
'You mean divulge the content of a confession?' I asked.
'He was talking about the Terrebonne woman. I'm sure of it. But what she told me wasn't under the seal,' he replied.
'You want to tell me about Lila, Father?' I said.
'No, it wouldn't be proper. A confidence is a confidence. Also, she wasn't entirely coherent and I might do her a great disservice,' he said. But his face clouded, and it was obvious his own words did little to reassure him.
'This man in the truck, Father? If his name is Harpo, we want to be very careful of him,' I said.
'His eyes,' the priest said.
'Sir?'
'They were like the profiteer's. Without moral light. A man like that speaking of the confessional seal. It offends something in me in a way I can't describe.'
'Have dinner with us,' I said.
'Yes, that's very kind of you. Your home seems to have a great warmth to it. From outside it truly looked like a haven in the storm. Could I have that drink after all?'
He sat at the table with a glass of cream sherry, his eyes abstract, feigning attention, like those of people who realize that momentary refuge and the sharing of fear with others will not relieve them of the fact that death may indeed have taken up residence inside them.
MONDAY MORNING I DROVE down Bayou Teche through Jeanerette into the little town of Franklin and talked to the chief of police. He was a very light mulatto in his early forties who wore sideburns and a gold ring in his ear and a lacquered-brim cap on the back of his head.
'A man name of Harpo? There used to be a Harpo Delahoussey. He was a sheriff's deputy, did security at the Terrebonne cannery,' the police chief said.
'That's not the one. This guy was maybe his nephew. He was a Franklin police officer. People called him Little Harpo,' I said.
He fiddled with a pencil and gazed out the window. It was still raining, and a black man rode a bicycle down the sidewalk, his body framed against the smoky neon of a bar across the street.
'When I was a kid there was a cop round here name of H. Q. Scruggs.' He wet his lips. 'When he come into the quarters we knew to call him Mr. H.Q. Not Officer. That wasn't enough for this gentleman. But I remember white folks calling him Harpo sometimes. As I recall, he'd been a guard up at Angola, too. If you want to talk about him, I'll give you the name and address of a man might hep you.'
'You don't care to talk about him?'
He laid the pencil flat on his desk blotter. 'I don't like to even remember him. Fortunately today I don't have to,' he said.
CLEM MADDUX SAT ON his gallery, smoking a cigarette, in a swayback deer-hide chair lined with a quilt for extra padding. One of his legs was amputated at the torso, the other above the knee. His girth was huge, his stomach pressing in staggered layers against the oversized ink-dark blue jeans he wore. His skin was as pink and unblemished as a baby's, but around his neck goiters hung from his flesh like a necklace of duck's eggs.
'You staring at me, Mr. Robicheaux?' he asked.
'No, sir.'
'It's Buerger's Disease. Smoking worsens it. But I got diabetes and cancer of the prostate, too. I got diseases that'll outlive the one that kills me,' he said, then laughed and wiped spittle off his lips with his wrist.
'You were a gun bull at Angola with Harpo Scruggs?'
'No, I was head of farm machinery. I didn't carry a weapon. Harpo was a tower guard, then a shotgun guard on horseback. That must have been forty years ago.'
'What kind of hack was he?'
'Piss-poor in my opinion. How far back you go?'
'You talking about the Red Hat gang and the men buried under the levee?'
'There was this old fart used to come off a corn-whiskey drunk meaner than a razor in your shoe. He'd single out a boy from his gang and tell him to start running. Harpo asked to get in on it.'
'Asked to kill someone?'
'It was a colored boy from Laurel Hill. He'd sassed the field boss at morning count. When the food truck come out to the levee at noon, Harpo pulled the colored boy out of the line and told him he wasn't eating no lunch till he finished sawing a stump out of the river bottom. Harpo walked him off into some gum trees by the water, then I seen the boy starting off on his own, looking back uncertain-like while Harpo was telling him something. Then I heard it,
Maddux tossed his cigarette over the railing into the flower bed.
'What happened to Scruggs?' I asked.
'He done a little of this, a little of that, I guess.'
'That's a little vague, cap.'
'He road-ganged in Texas a while, then bought into a couple of whorehouses. What do you care anyway? The sonofabitch is probably squatting on the coals.'
'He's squatting-'
'He got burned up with a Mexican chippy in Juarez fifteen years ago. Wasn't nothing left of him except a bag of ash and some teeth. Damn, son, y'all ought to update and get you some computers.'
TWELVE
TWO DAYS LATER I SAT at my desk, sifting through the Gypsy fortune-telling deck called the Tarot. I had bought the deck at a store in Lafayette, but the instruction book that accompanied it dealt more with the meaning of the cards than with the origins of their iconography. Regardless, it would be impossible for anyone educated in a traditional Catholic school not to recognize the historical associations of the imagery in the Hanged Man.
The phone on my desk buzzed.
'Clete Purcel and Megan Flynn just pulled up,' the sheriff said.
'Yeah?'
'Get him out of here.'
