His eyebrows went up in half-moons.
'The Spanish broad. Or Mexican. Or whatever she is.'
I opened the memo and looked at it. It read, Dave, why don't you return my calls? I'm still waiting at the same place. Have I done wrong in some way? It was signed 'Amber.'
'Amber?' I said.
'You got eight or nine of them in your mailbox,' he said. 'Her last name sounded Spanish.'
'Who is she?'
'How should I know? You're the guy she's calling.'
'All right, thanks, Wally,' I said.
I took all my mail out of my box, then shuffled through the pink memo slips one at a time.
The ones from 'Amber' were truly an enigma. A few examples:
I've done what you asked. Please call.
Dave, leave a message on my answering machine.
It's me again. Am I supposed to drop dead?
You 're starting to piss me off. If you don't want me to bother you again, say so. I'm getting tired of this shit.
I'm sorry, Dave. I was hurt when I said those things. But don't close doors on me.
I walked back to the dispatcher's cage.
'There's no telephone number on any of these,' I said.
'She didn't leave one.'
'Did you ask her for one?'
'No, I got the impression y'all were buddies or something. Hey, don't look at me like that. What is she, a snitch or something?'
'I don't have any idea.'
'She sounds like she's ready to bump uglies, though.'
'Why don't you give some thought to your language, Wally?'
'Sorry.'
'If she calls again, get her telephone number. If she doesn't want to give it to you, tell her to stop calling here.'
'Whatever you say.'
I wadded up the memo slips, dropped them into a tobacco-streaked brass cuspidor, and walked into the sheriff's office.
A manila folder was open on his desk. He was reading from it, with both his elbows propped on the desk blotter and his fingertips resting lightly on his temples. His mouth looked small and downturned at the corners. On his wall was a framed and autographed picture of President Bush.
'How you doing?' I said.
'Oh, hello, Dave,' he said, looking up at me over his glasses. 'It's good to see you. How do you feel today?'
'Just fine, sheriff.'
'You didn't need to come in. I wanted you to take a week or so off. Didn't Bootsie tell you?'
'I went up to Opelousas this morning. I think I found out who those bones out in the Atchafalaya might belong to.'
'What?'
'A couple of armed men broke a black prisoner named DeWitt Prejean out of the St. Landry Parish jail in 1957. The guy was in for threatening a white woman with a butcher knife. But it sounds like an attempted rape. Or maybe there's a possibility that something was going on with consent. The old jailer said something about Prejean not being able to keep his equipment in his pants. Maybe the woman and Prejean just got caught and Prejean got busted on a phony charge and set up for a lynching.'
The sheriff's eyes blinked steadily and he worked his teeth along his bottom lip.
'I don't understand you,' he said.
'Excuse me?'
'I've told you repeatedly that case belongs to St. Mary Parish. Why is it that you seem to shut your ears to whatever I say?'
'Kelly Drummond's death doesn't belong to St. Mary Parish, sheriff. I think the man who killed her was after me because of that lynched black man.'
'You don't know that. You don't know that at all.'
'Maybe not. But what's the harm?'
He rubbed his round cleft chin with his thumb. I could hear his whiskers scraping against the skin.
'An investigation puts the right people in jail,' he said. 'You don't throw a rope around half the people in two or three parishes. And that's what you and that woman are doing.'
'That's the problem, is it?'
'You damn right it is. Thirty minutes ago Agent Gomez marched into my office with all her findings.' He touched the edge of the manila folder with his finger. 'According to Agent Gomez, New Iberia has somehow managed to become the new Evil Empire.'
I nodded.
'The New Orleans mob is laundering its drug money through Bal-Gold Productions,' he said. 'Julie Balboni is running a statewide prostitution operation from Spanish Lake, he's also having prostitutes killed, and maybe he laced your Dr Pepper with LSD when he wasn't cutting illegal deals with the Teamsters. Did you know we had all those problems right here in our town, Dave?'
'Julie's a walking shit storm. Who knows what his potential is?'
'She also called some of our local business people moral weenies and chicken-hearted buttheads.'
'She has some eloquent moments.'
'Before she left my office she said she wanted me to know that she liked me personally but in all honesty she had to confess that she thought I was full of shit.'
'I see,' I said, and fixed my eyes on a palm tree outside the window.
The room was quiet. I could hear a jail trusty mowing the grass outside. The sheriff turned his Southwestern class ring on his finger.
'I want you to understand something, Dave,' he said. 'I was the one who wanted that fat sonofabitch Balboni out of town. You were the one who thought he was a source of humor. But now we're stuck with him, and that's the way it is.'
'Why?'
'Because he has legitimate business interests here. He's committed no crime here. In fact, there's no outstanding warrant on this man anywhere. He's never spent one day in jail.'
'I think that's the same shuck his lawyers try to sell.'
He exhaled his breath through his nose.
'Go home. You've got the week off,' he said.
'I heard my leave might even be longer.'
He chewed on a fingernail.
'Who told you that?' he said.
'Is it true or not?'
'You want the truth? The truth is your eyes don't look right. They bother me. There's a strange light in them. Go home, Dave.'
'People used to tell me that in bars. It doesn't sound too good to hear it where I work, sheriff.'
'What can I say?' he said, and held his hands up and turned his face into a rhetorical question mark.
When I walked back down the corridor toward the exit, I stuffed my mail back into my mailbox, unopened, and continued on past my own office without even glancing inside.
My clothes were damp with sweat when I got home. I took off my shirt, threw it into the dirty-clothes hamper, put on a fresh T-shirt, and took a glass of iced tea into the backyard where Bootsie was working chemical fertilizer
