whenever Alafair or I turned Tripod loose, he usually headed for the dock and worked the screen open and slept on top of the icebox behind the counter. Last week I saw Batist roaring down the bayou in an outboard, with Tripod sitting on the bow, his face pointed into the breeze like a hood ornament.
When I went inside the shop Batist was drinking a cup of coffee, looking out the screen window at the swamp.
'You ever seen a red moon like that this time of year?' he said.
'The wind's up. There's a lot of dust in the air,' I said.
He was a big man, the muscles in his upper arms like croquet balls; his bell-bottomed dungarees and white T-shirt looked sewn to his skin.
'Old people say back in slave days they poured hog blood in the ground under a moon like this,' he said.
'Why?' I asked.
'Make the corn and cane bigger. Same reason people kill a gator and plant it in the field,' he replied. 'I seen Clete Purcel with Passion Labiche.'
'Really?'
'Them girls are trouble, Dave. Their folks was pimps.'
'A good apple can come off a bad tree,' I said.
'Tell that to the man got his parts chopped up all over the flo'.'
'I think he had it coming,' I replied.
Tripod had crawled up on the counter and was sniffing ajar of pickles. Batist hefted him up in the crook of his arm. Tripod's tail was ringed with silver bands and it flipped back and forth between his upended legs.
'We was ten of us when I was growing up. My mama made a big pan of biscuits for breakfast every morning but we didn't have nothing to put on them. So she kept a jar of fig preserves on the table. We rubbed the biscuit on the side of the jar, then ate it. We all laughed when we done that. Everybody's road got glass on it, Dave. Don't mean you got the right to kill nobody,' he said.
'What does that have to do with Clete seeing Passion, Batist?'
'I knowed them girls since they was little. You seen one, you seen the other. They wasn't never more than a broom handle apart.'
'It's too early in the morning to argue with you, partner,' I said.
'I ain't arguing. The troot's the troot. I ain't got to prove nothing, me.'
He walked outside into the soft blue light and set Tripod on the handrail and began hosing down the spool tables on the dock, the moon dull red behind his head.
Later that morning I filled an envelope full of black-and-white photos taken at the Vachel Carmouche murder scene and drove out to Carmouche's boarded-up house on the bayou. The property itself seemed physically stricken by the deed that had been committed there. The yard was waist-high in weeds, the gallery stacked with old tires and hay bales that had gone gray with rot. Nests of yellow jackets and dirtdobbers buzzed under the eaves and a broken windmill clanged uselessly in a dry, hot wind.
I walked around back, re-creating in my mind's eye the path that Letty must have taken from the back porch to the rear of her house, where she stripped off her shoes and robe and washed the blood from her hair and body with a garden hose. The lock was already broken on the back door of Carmouche's house, and I pushed the door open, scraping it back on the buckled linoleum.
The air was stifling, like the inside of a privy in summer, rife with the smell of bat guano and pools of settled water under the floor, superheated by the tin roof and the closed windows. A green plant, as dark as spinach, had blossomed from the drain in the sink.
But the signs of Carmouche's agony from his crawl were still visible on the linoleum, like smeared reddish black paint that had dried and taken on the crisp, razored design of broken leaves. But there were other stains in the kitchen, too-a tentacle of connected dots on the wall by the stove and two similar streakings on the ceiling. I touched my fingers on the dots by the stove and felt what I was sure were the crusted, physical remains of Louisiana 's most famous electrician.
I looked through the crime scene photos again. Blood had been slung all over the floor, the walls, the curtains on the cabinets, the icebox, and even the screen of the television set, which had been tuned to an old Laurel and Hardy comedy when the photo was taken. But how would blood from a mattock, a heavy, two-handed tool used to bust up stumps and root systems, create whipped patterns like those on the ceiling and the wall?
I walked across the yard to the back of the Labiche house. The faucet where Letty had washed herself dripped water into the dust; the oil drum she had tried to destroy her robe and shoes in now smoldered with burning leaves; the house she had grown up in was ringed with roses and gardenias, and red squirrels leaped from the branches of the live oaks and clattered across the roof.
The home was weathered, the woodwork termite-eaten and the white paint cracked by the sun and dulled by smoke from stubble fires, but it was still a fine place in which to live, a piece of history from antebellum times, if only Letty were here to enjoy it, if only she had not traded off her life in order to kill a worthless man like Vachel Carmouche.
'You prowling round my house for a reason?' someone said behind me.
'What's the haps, Passion?' I said.
She wore sandals and baggy jeans and stood with her big-boned hands on her hips.
'Clete says you think he's a cradle robber, that I'm too young a chick for a man his age.'
'He tells that to women all the time. It makes them feel sorry for him,' I replied.
'What were you doing over at Carmouche's place?' she asked.
'An elderly black friend of mine was mentioning how you and Letty were inseparable. How if somebody saw one of you, he automatically saw the other.'
'So?'
'What were you doing the night Carmouche got it?'
'Read the trial report. I'm not interested in covering that same old territory again. Tell me something. You got a problem with your friend seeing me 'cause I'm Creole?'
'You'll have to find another pincushion, Passion. See you around,' I said, and walked across the yard under the shade trees toward my truck.
'Yeah, you, too, big stuff,' she said.
When I drove back up the road, she was carrying a loaded trash can in each hand to the roadside, her chest and heavy arms swollen with her physical power. I waved, but my truck seemed to slide past her gaze without her ever seeing it.
That afternoon Governor Belmont Pugh held a news conference, supposedly to talk about casinos, slot machines at the state's racetracks, and the percentage of the gambling revenue that should go into a pay raise for schoolteachers.
But Belmont did not look comfortable. His tie was askew, the point of one collar bent upward, his eyes scorched, his face the color and texture of a boiled ham. He kept gulping water, as though he were dehydrated or forcing down the regurgitated taste of last night's whiskey.
Then one reporter stood up and asked Belmont the question he feared: 'What are you going to do about Letty Labiche, Governor?'
Belmont rubbed his mouth with the flat of his hand, and the microphone picked up the sound of his calluses scraping across whiskers.
'Excuse me, I got a sore throat today and cain't talk right. I'm granting an indefinite stay of execution. Long as she's got her appeals up there in the courts. That's what the law requires,' he said.
'What do you mean 'indefinite,' Governor?'
'I got corn fritters in my mouth? It means what I said.'
'Are you saying even after her Supreme Court appeal, you're going to continue the stay, or do you plan to see her executed? It's not a complicated question, sir,' another reporter, a man in a bow tie, said, smiling to make the insult acceptable.
Then, for just a moment, Belmont rose to a level of candor and integrity I hadn't thought him capable of.
'Y'all need to understand something. That's a human life we're talking about. Not just a story in your papers
