EARLY THE NEXT MORNING I checked out a cruiser and drove back to New Orleans. The sky over the wetlands was still filled with birds that seemed to have no destination or home. After four days, members of the 82nd Airborne had arrived in the city and most of the looting and violence had stopped. But eighty percent of the city was still underwater, and tens of thousands of people still had nowhere to go.
I turned off St. Charles and threaded my way through piles of downed trees on several side streets in the general direction of Otis Baylor’s house. Finally I parked my pickup and either waded or walked across people’s lawns the rest of the way.
The front porch of Otis Baylor’s house was rounded, with a half-circle roof on it supported by Doric columns. I raised the brass ring on the door and knocked. The water had receded on his street, exposing the neutral ground. Down the street, on the opposite side, I could see the home of Sidney Kovick. A repair crew was pulling plywood off the picture windows.
Otis Baylor opened the front door. His face was round and empty, like that of a man who had just returned from a funeral. “Yes?” he said.
“I’m Dave Robicheaux, from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, Mr. Baylor,” I said. “I’ve been assigned to help in the investigation of a double shooting that took place in front of your house. You might remember me from New Iberia.”
He did not extend his hand. “What can I do for you?”
“I’ve got a little problem here. A high school kid got his brains blown out in front of your house, and a full-time loser with him took a round through his spinal cord. The Feds think vigilantes may have done it. Frankly, I don’t think this investigation is going anywhere, but our department is on lend-lease with the City of New Orleans and we need to do what we can.”
There was a beat, a microsecond pause in which his eyes went away from mine.
“Come in,” he said, holding open the door. “You’re lucky you caught me at home. I’m using the house as my office now, but I’m usually in the field with my adjusters. Would you like some tea? I still have ice in my freezer.”
“No, thanks. I’ll make this as quick as I can, sir.”
He invited me to sit down with him in his den. The books on his shelves were largely referential or encyclopedic in nature, or had been purchased from book clubs that specialize in popular history and biography. His desk was overflowing with paper. Through the side window I could see a bullet-headed man on a ladder trying to free a splintered oak limb from his roof.
“An FBI investigator said you heard a single shot but you don’t know where it came from,” I said.
“I was asleep. The shot woke me up. I looked out the dormer window and saw a kid floating in the water and another guy lying half inside the front of the boat.”
“You own a firearm, Mr. Baylor?”
“It’s Otis. Yes, a 1903-model Springfield bolt-action rifle. You want to see it?”
“Not right now. Thanks for offering. After you saw the kid in the water and the one half inside the boat, did you go outside?”
“By the time I got my clothes on, one guy had loaded the wounded one all the way into the boat and was already down to the corner. Another guy was running.”
“They were all black?”
“As far as I could tell. It was dark.”
“And you saw nobody else on the street or on a porch or in a house window?”
“No, I didn’t.”
I opened the manila folder in my hand and read from the notes given to me over the phone by an FBI agent working out of Baton Rouge. “The Feds and the guys from NOPD believe the shot had to come from this side of the street.”
“Maybe it did. I wouldn’t know.”
“The only occupied houses in immediate proximity to the shooting were yours and your next-door neighbor’s.”
“I have no argument with other people’s conclusions as to what happened here. I’ve told you what I heard and what I saw.” He looked at his watch. “You want to see the Springfield?”
“If you don’t mind.”
He went upstairs and returned with the rifle, handing it to me with the bolt open on an empty magazine. “Am I a suspect in the shooting?”
“Right now, we’re eliminating suspects.”
“Why didn’t your friends take my firearm? That’s what I would have done.”
“Because they didn’t have a place to store evidence. Because they didn’t have a warrant. Because the system is broken.”
But there was another reality at work as well, one I hadn’t shared with him. The round that had struck Eddy Melancon’s throat and emptied Kevin Rochon’s brainpan never slowed down and the metal tracings inside the wounds it inflicted would be of little evidentiary value.
I lifted the rifle to my face and sniffed at the chamber. “You just oiled it?”
“I don’t remember exactly when I cleaned it.”
“Can I see the ammunition that goes with it?”
“I don’t even know if I have any.”
“What kind of ammunition do you fire in it?”
“It’s a thirty-aught-six-caliber rifle. It fires thirty-aught-six-caliber rounds.”
I was sitting in a burgundy-colored soft leather chair, an autumnal green-gold light filtering through the trees outside. But the comfortable ambience did not coincide with the sense of disquiet that was beginning to grow inside me. “That’s not my point, sir. This is a military weapon. Do you fire metal-jacketed, needle-nosed rounds in it?”
“I target shoot. I don’t hunt. I shoot whatever ammunition is on sale. What is this?”
“It’s illegal to hunt with military-type ammunition, because it passes right through the animal and wounds instead of kills. I think the two shooting victims got nailed with a metal-jacketed rather than a soft-nosed round. One other thing. You keep referring to the DOA as a ‘kid.’ You call the other looters ‘guys.’”
“I didn’t notice.”
“You’re correct, the DOA was a teenager. The wounded man and his brother are both adults. The man who fled was probably a guy by the name of Andre Rochon, also an adult. You speak of these guys with a sense of familiarity, as though you saw them up close.”
He rolled his eyes. He started to speak, then gave it up. He was sitting in a chair at his desk, his long-sleeved white shirt crinkling. His stolid face and square hands and scrubbed manner made me think of a farmer forced to go to church by his wife. I continued to stare at him in the silence. “Listen, Mr. Robicheaux-”
“It’s Dave.”
“I’ve told you what I know. Right now there are thousands of people in Louisiana and Mississippi waiting to hear from their insurance carrier. That’s me. I wish you well, but this conversation is over.”
“I’m afraid it’s not over.” I closed the manila folder and set it by my foot, as though its contents were no longer relevant. “Years ago I attended a convention of Louisiana and Mississippi police officers at the Evangeline Hotel in Lafayette. That particular weekend the FBI had dragged the Pearl River in search of a lynching victim. They didn’t find the guy they were looking for, but they found three others, one whose body had been sawed in half. I was in the hotel bar when I heard four plainclothesmen laughing in a booth behind me. One of them said, ‘Did you hear about the nigger who stole so many chains he couldn’t swim across the Pearl?’ Another detective said, ‘You know how they found him? They waved a welfare check over the water and this burr-headed boy popped to the surface and yelled out, ‘Here I is, boss.’
“These guys not only made me ashamed I was a police officer, they made me ashamed I was a white man. I think you’re the same kind of guy I am, Mr. Baylor. I don’t think you’re a racist or a vigilante. I know what happened to your daughter. If my daughter were attacked by degenerates and sadists, I’d be tempted to hand out rough justice, too. In fact, any father who didn’t have those feelings is not a father.”
His eyes were blue and lidless, his big hands splayed on his knees, the backs as rough as starfish.
