'Give me another julep,' he said to the bartender.
Bootsie WAS waiting for me in the parking lot after work.
'How about I buy you dinner, big boy?' she said.
'What's going on?'
'I just like to see if I can pick up a cop once in a while.'
We drove to Lerosier, across from the Shadows, and ate in the back room. Behind us was a courtyard full of roses and bamboo, and in the shade mint grew between the bricks.
'Something happen today?' I said.
'Two messages on the machine from Connie Deshotel. I'm not sure I like other women calling you up.'
'She probably has my number mixed up with her Orkin man's.'
'She says she's sorry she offended you. What's she talking about?'
'This vice cop, Ritter, taped an interview with a perpetrator by the name of Steve Andropolis. The tape contained a bunch of lies about my mother.'
Bootsie put a small piece of food in her mouth and chewed it slowly, the light hardening in her eyes.
'Why would she do that?' she said.
'Ask her.'
'Count on it,' she said.
I started to reply, then looked at her face and thought better of it.
But Connie Deshotel was a willful and determined woman and was not easily discouraged from revising a situation that was somehow detrimental to her interests. The next evening Belmont Pugh's black Chrysler, followed by a caravan of political sycophants and revelers, parked by the boat ramp. They got out and stood in the road, blinking at the summer light in the sky, the dust from their cars drifting over them. All of them had been drinking, except apparently Belmont. While his friends wandered down toward the bait shop for food and beer, Belmont walked up the slope, among the oaks, where I was raking leaves, his face composed and somber, his pinstripe suit and gray Stetson checkered with broken sunlight.
'Why won't you accept that woman's apology?' he asked.
'You're talking about Connie Deshotel?'
'She didn't mean to cast an aspersion on your mother. She thought she was doing her job. Give her a little credit, son.'
'All right, I accept her apology. Make sure you tell her that for me, will you? She actually got the governor of the state to drive out here and deliver a message for her?'
He removed his hat and wiped the liner out with a handkerchief. His back was straight, his profile etched against the glare off the bayou. His hair had grown out on his neck, and it gave him a distinguished, rustic look. For some reason he reminded me of the idealistic young man I had known years ago, the one who daily did a good deed and learned a new word from his thesaurus.
'You're a hard man, Dave. I wish I had your toughness. I wouldn't be fretting my mind from morning to night about that woman on death row,' he said.
I rested the rake and popped my palms on the handle's end. It was cool in the shade and the wind was blowing the tree limbs above our heads.
'I remember when a guy offered you ten dollars to take a math test for him, Belmont. You really needed the money. But you chased him out of your room,' I said.
'The cafeteria didn't serve on weekends. You and me could make a can of Vienna sausage and a jar of peanut butter and a box of crackers go from Friday noon to Sunday night,' he said.
'I've witnessed two executions. I wish I hadn't. You put your hand in one and you're never the same,' I said.
'A long time ago my daddy said I was gonna be either a preacher or a drunk and womanizer. I wake up in the morning and have no idea of who I am. Don't lecture at me, son.' His voice was husky, his tone subdued in a way that wasn't like Belmont.
I looked beyond him, out on the dock, where his friends were drinking can beer under the canvas awning. One of them was a small, sun-browned, mustached man with no chin and an oiled pate and the snubbed nose of a hawk.
'That's Sookie Motrie out there. I hear he's the money behind video poker at the tracks,' I said.
'It's all a trade-off. People want money for schools but don't like taxes. I say use the devil's money against him. So a guy like Sookie gets to be a player.'
When I didn't reply, he said, 'A lot of folks think Earl K. Long was just an ignorant redneck. But Earl did good things people don't know about. A whole bunch of Negro women graduated from a new nursing program and found out right quick they couldn't get jobs nowhere. So Earl hears about it and says he wants a tour of the state hospital. He pumps hands all over the building, sticks his head in operating rooms, flushes toilets, then gets all the hospital's administrators in one room and locks the door.
'He says, 'I just seen a shameful spectacle here. Y'all got white nurses hand-waiting on nigra patients, carrying out their bedpans and I don't know what all, and I ain't gonna stand for it. You either hire nigra nurses in those wards or every damn one of you is gonna be out of a job.'
'The next week the state hospital had two dozen black nurses on staff.'
'Makes a good story,' I said.
'Stories are all the human race has got, Dave. You just got to find the one you like and stay with it,' he replied.
'Are you going to execute Letty Labiche?'
He replaced his hat on his head and walked down the slope to rejoin his entourage, jiggling his hands in the air like a minstrel man.
14
FARTHER TO THE SOUTH of us, in the working-class community of Grand Bois, a young attorney, two years out of law school, filed suit on behalf of the local residents against a large oil corporation. The locals were by and large Cajuns and Houma Indians, uneducated, semiskilled, poor, without political power, and bewildered by the legal apparatus, the perfect community to target as the open-pit depository of oil sludge trucked in from a petroleum treatment plant in Alabama.
Company officials didn't argue with the contention the pits contained benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and arsenic. They didn't have to. Years ago, during a time of gas shortages, the U.S. Congress had granted the oil industry blanket exemptions from the regulations that govern most toxic wastes. Secondly, the state of Louisiana does not define oil waste as hazardous material.
The state, the oil corporation, and the community of Grand Bois were now in court, and Connie Deshotel's office was taking depositions from the people in Grand Bois who claimed their children were afflicted with vertigo, red eyes, skin rashes, and diarrhea that was so severe they had to keep buckets in their automobiles.
Two of those Grand Bois families had moved to New Iberia and were now living up on the bayou road, not far from Passion Labiche's nightclub. On Monday Helen Soileau was assigned to drive Connie Deshotel and her assistant out to their homes.
Later she told me of Connie Deshotel's bizarre behavior, although she could offer no explanation as to its cause.
It had rained hard that morning, then the sun had become a white orb in the center of a windless sky, evaporating the water out of the fields, creating a superheated dome of humidity that made you feel like ants were crawling inside your clothes.
The air-conditioning unit in the cruiser began clanking, then gasped once and gave out. Connie Deshotel had removed her white suit coat and folded it on her lap, trying to keep her composure while her male assistant talked without stop in the backseat. Her armpits were ringed with sweat and a hostile light was growing in her eyes.
