imposed upon them. Gus Vitelli was a slight, bony Sicilian ex-horse trainer and professional bouree player whose left leg had been withered by polio and who had probably read almost every book in the New Orleans library system. He was obsessed with what he called 'untold history,' and his bookstore was filled with material on conspiracies of every kind.
He told anyone who would listen that the main players in the assassinations of both John Kennedy and Martin Luther King came from the New Orleans area. Some of the names he offered were those of Italian gangsters. But if the Mob was bothered by his accusations, they didn't show it. Gus Vitelli had long ago been dismissed in New Orleans as a crank.
The problem was that Gus was a reasonable and intelligent man. At least in my view.
He was wearing a T-shirt that exclaimed 'I Know Jack Shit,' and wrote prices on used books while I told him the story about the murder of Jack Flynn and the possible involvement of an FBI informant.
'It wouldn't surprise me that it got covered up. Hoover wasn't any friend of pinkos and veterans of the Lincoln Brigade,' he said. He walked to a display table and began arranging a pile of paperback books, his left leg seeming to collapse and then spring tight again with each step. 'I got a CIA manual here that was written to teach the Honduran army how to torture people. Look at the publication date, 1983. You think people are gonna believe that?' He flipped the manual at me.
'Gus, have you heard anything about a hit on a black guy named Willie Broussard?'
'Something involving the Giacanos or Ricky Scarlotti?'
'You got it.'
'Nothing about a hit. But the word is Ricky Scar's sweating ball bearings 'cause he might have to give up some Asian guys. The truth is, I'm not interested. People like Ricky give all Italians a bad name. My greatgrandfather sold bananas and pies out of a wagon. He raised thirteen kids like that. He got hung from a street-lamp in 1890 when the police commissioner was killed.'
I thanked him for his time and started to leave.
'The guy who was crucified against the barn wall?' he said. 'The reason people don't buy conspiracy theories is they think 'conspiracy' means everybody's on the same program. That's not how it works. Everybody's got a different program. They just all want the same guy dead. Socrates was a gadfly, but I bet he took time out to screw somebody's wife.'
I HAD WORRIED THAT Cool Breeze Broussard might go after Alex Guidry. But I had not thought about his father.
Mout' and two of his Hmong business partners bounced their stake truck loaded with cut flowers into the parking lot of the New Iberia Country Club. Mout' climbed down from the cab and asked the golf pro where he could find Alex Guidry. It was windy and bright, and Mout' wore a suit coat and a small rainbow-colored umbrella that clamped on his head like an elevated hat.
He began walking down the fairway, his haystack body bent forward, his brogans rising and falling as though he were stepping over plowed rows in a field, a cigar stub in the side of his mouth, his face expressionless.
He passed a weeping willow that was turning gold with the season, and a sycamore whose leaves looked like flame, then stopped at a polite distance from the green and waited until Alex Guidry and his three friends had putted into the cup.
'Mr. Guidry, suh?' Mout' said.
Guidry glanced at him, then turned his back and studied the next fairway.
'Mr. Guidry, I got to talk wit' you about my boy,' Mout' said.
Guidry pulled his golf cart off the far slope of the green. But his friends had not moved and were looking at his back now.
'Mr. Guidry, I know you got power round here. But my boy ain't coming after you. Suh, please don't walk away,' Mout' said.
'Does somebody have a cell phone?' Guidry asked his friends.
'Alex, we can go over here and have a smoke,' one of them said.
'I didn't join this club to have an old nigger follow me around the golf course,' Guidry replied.
'Suh, my boy blamed himself twenty years for Ida's death. I just want you to talk wit' me for five minutes. I apologize to these gentlemen here,' Mout' said.
Guidry began walking toward the next tee, his golf cart rattling behind him.
For the next hour Mout' followed him, perspiration leaking out of the leather brace that held his umbrella hat in place, the sun lighting the pink-and-white discoloration that afflicted one side of his face.
Finally Guidry sliced a ball into the rough, speared his club angrily into his golf bag, walked to the clubhouse, and went into the bar.
It took Mout' twenty minutes to cover the same amount of ground and he was sweating and breathing heavily when he came inside the bar. He stood in the center of the room, amid the felt-covered card tables and click of poker chips and muted conversation, and removed his umbrella hat and fixed his blue, cataract-frosted eyes on Guidry's face.
Guidry kept signaling the manager with one finger.
'Mr. Robicheaux say you held a wet towel over Ida's nose and mout' and made her heart stop. He gonna prove it, so that mean my boy don't have to do nothing, he ain't no threat to you,' Mout' said.
'Somebody get this guy out of here,' Guidry said.
'I'm going, suh. You can tell these people here anyt'ing you want. But I knowed you when you was buying black girls for t'ree dol'ars over on Hopkins. So you ain't had to go after Ida. You ain't had to take my boy's wife, suh.'
The room was totally quiet. Alex Guidry's face burned like a red lamp. Mout' Broussard walked back outside, his body bent forward at the middle, his expression as blank as the grated door on a woodstove.
TWENTY-FIVE
LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON I RECEIVED a call from John Nash in Trinidad.
'Our friend Jubal Breedlove checked out of the clinic in Raton and is nowhere to be found,' he said.
'Did he hook up with Scruggs?' I asked.
'It's my feeling he probably did.'
The line was silent.
'Why do you feel that, Mr. Nash?' I asked.
'His car's at his house. His clothes seem undisturbed. He didn't make a withdrawal from his bank account. What does that suggest to you, Mr. Robicheaux?'
'Breedlove's under a pile of rock?'
'Didn't Vikings put a dog at the foot of a dead warrior?' he asked.
'Excuse me?'
'I was thinking about the family he murdered in the campground. The father put up a terrific fight to protect his daughter. I hope Breedlove's under a pile of rock by that campground.'
AFTER WORK I HAD to go after a boat a drunk smashed into a stump and left with a wrenched propeller on a sandbar. I tilted the engine's housing into the stern of the boat and was about to slide the hull back into the water when I saw why the drunk had waded through the shallows to dry land and walked back to his car: the aluminum bottom had a gash in it like a twisted smile.
I wedged a float cushion into the leak so I could pull the boat across the bayou into the reeds and return with a boat trailer to pick it up. Behind me I heard an outboard come around the corner and then slow when the man in the stern saw me standing among the flooded willows.
'I hope you don't mind my coming out here. The Afro-American man said it would be all right,' Billy Holtzner said.
'You're talking about Batist?'
