'I thought you heard.'
'What?'
'Mikey's filing Chapter Eleven bankruptcy. He's eighty-sixing the greaseballs out of the corporation. The last thing those guys want is the court examining their finances. He told off Balboni this morning in front of the whole crew.'
'What do you mean he told him off?'
'He said Balboni was never going to put a hand on one of Mikey's people again. He told him to take his porno actor and his hoods and his bimbos and haul his ass back to New Orleans. I was really proud of Mikey… What's the matter?'
'What did Julie have to say?'
'He cleaned his fingernails with a toothpick, then walked out to the lake and started talking to somebody on his cellular phone and skipping rocks across the water at the ducks.'
'Where is he now?'
'He drove off with his whole crew in his limo.'
'I'd like to talk with Mr. Goldman.'
'He's on the other side of the lake.'
'Ask him to call me, will you? If he doesn't catch me at the office, he can call me at home tonight.'
'He'll be back in a few minutes to shoot the scene with me and Hogman and Alafair.'
'We're not going to be here for it.'
'You won't let her be in the film?'
'Nobody humiliates Julie Balboni in front of other people, El. I don't know what he's going to do, but I don't want Alafair here when he does it.'
The wind had turned out of the south and was blowing hotly through the trees when we walked back toward my truck. The air smelled like fish spawning, and clouds with the dark convolutions of newly opened purple roses were massing in a long, low humped line on the southern horizon.
Later, after I had taken Alafair home and checked in at the office, I drove to Opelousas to talk once again with the old jailer Ben Hebert. A black man raking leaves in Hebert's yard told me where I could find him on a bayou just outside of town.
He sat on top of an inverted plastic bucket under a tree, his cane pole extended out into the sunlight, his red bobber drifting on the edge of the reeds. He wore a crushed straw hat on the side of his head and smoked a hand-rolled saliva-soaked cigarette without removing it from the corner of his mouth. The layers of white fat on his hips and stomach protruded between his shirt and khakis like lard curling over the edges of a washtub.
Ten feet down from him a middle-aged mulatto woman with a small round head, a perforated dime tied on her ankle, was also fishing as she sat on top of an inverted bucket. The ground around her was strewn with empty beer cans. She spit snuff to one side and jigged her line up and down through a torn hole in a lily pad.
Ben Hebert pitched his cigarette out onto the current, where it hissed and turned in a brown eddy.
'Why you keep bothering me?' he said. There was beer on his breath and an eye-watering smell in his clothes that was like both dried sweat and urine.
'I need to know what kind of work DeWitt Prejean did,' I said.
'You what?' His lips were as purple as though they had been painted, his teeth small and yellow as pieces of corn.
'Just what I said.'
'You leave me the hell alone.'
I sat down on the grass by the edge of the slope.
'It's not my intention to bother you, Mr. Hebert,' I said. 'But you're refusing to cooperate with a police investigation and you're creating problems for both of us.'
'He done… I don't know what he done. What difference does it make?' His eyes glanced sideways at the mulatto woman.
'You seem to have a good memory for detail. Why not about DeWitt Prejean?'
The woman rose from her seat on the bucket and walked farther down the bank, trailing her cork bobber in the water.
'He done nigger work,' Hebert said. 'He cut lawns, cleaned out grease traps, got dead rats out from under people's houses. What the fuck you think he did?'
'That doesn't sound right to me. I think he did some other kind of work, too.'
His nostrils were dilated, as though a bad odor were rising from his own lap.
'He was in bed with a white woman here. Is that what you want to know?'
'Which woman?'
'I done tole you. The wife of a cripple-man got shot up in the war.'
'He raped her?'
'Who gives a shit?'
'But the crippled man didn't break Prejean out of jail, Mr. Hebert.'
'It wasn't the first time that nigger got in trouble over white women. There's more than one man wanted to see him put over a fire.'
'Who broke him out?'
'I don't know and I don't care.'
'Mr. Hebert, you're probably a good judge of people. Do I look like I'm just going to go away?'
The skin of his chest was sickly white, and under it were nests of green veins. 'It was better back then,' he said. 'You know it was.'
'What kind of work did he do, Ben?'
'Drove a truck.'
'For whom?'
'It was down in Lafayette. He worked for a white man there till he come up here. Don't know nothing about the white man. You saying I do, then you're a goddamn liar.' He leaned over to look past me at the mulatto woman, who was fishing among a group of willows now. Then his face snapped back at me. 'I brung her out here 'cause she works for me. 'Cause I can't get in and out of the car good by myself.'
'What kind of truck did he drive?' I asked.
'Beer truck. No, that wasn't it. Soda pop. Sonofabitch had a soda pop truck route when white people was making four dollars a day in the rice field.' He set down his cane pole and began rolling a cigarette. His fingernails looked as thick and horned as tortoiseshell against the thin white square of paper into which he poured tobacco. His fingers trembled almost uncontrollably with anger and defeat.
I DROVE TO TWINKY LEMOYNE'S BOTTLING WORKS IN Lafayette, but it was closed for the day. Twenty minutes later I found Lemoyne working in his yard at home. The sky was the pink of salmon eggs, and the wind thrashed the banana and lime trees along the side of his house. He had stopped pruning the roses on his trellis and had dropped his shears in the baggy back pocket of his faded denim work pants.
'A lot of bad things happened back in that era between the races. But we're not the same people we used to be, are we?' he said.
'I think we are.'
'You seem unable to let the past rest, sir.'
'My experience has been that you let go of the past by addressing it, Mr. Lemoyne.'
'For some reason I have the feeling that you want me to confirm what so far are only speculations on your part.' There were tiny pieces of grit in his combed sandy hair and a film of perspiration and rose dust on his glasses.
'Read it like you want. But somehow my investigation keeps winding its way back to your front door.'
He began snipping roses again and placing them stem down in a milk bottle full of green water. His two-story peaked white house in an old residential neighborhood off St. Mary Boulevard in Lafayette was surrounded by spectacular moss-hung oak trees and walls of bamboo and soft pink brick.
'Should I call my lawyer? Is that what you're suggesting?'
