'What?'
'I asked her out to lunch. I told her I had some helpful information on an armed robber she's prosecuting.'
'Can't you let one day go by without stirring something up?'
He snuffed down in his nose and nodded to a uniformed deputy passing in the corridor. The deputy did not acknowledge him.
'I'm sorry. I'll catch you another time,' Clete said.
'Come inside,' I said.
I closed the office door behind us. Before he could speak, I said, 'Remember Ruby Gravano?'
'A hooker, used to live in a flophouse by Lee Circle?'
'She was killed last night. Maybe beaten to death.'
'I heard she was out of the life. You talk to her pimp?' he said.
'Beeler something?'
'Beeler Grissum. I think she married him,' Clete said.
'Thanks, Cletus.'
He opened the office door. 'I'll let you know how my lunch came out. This is a class broad, Dave.' He blew his breath on his palm and sniffed it. 'Oh, man, I smell like; puke. I got to brush my teeth.'
The sheriffs wife, who was a mild and genteel woman, happened to be passing in the corridor. She shut and opened her eyes, as though she were riding in an airplane that had just hit an air pocket.
Helen Soileau and I checked out a cruiser and drove the thirty miles down to Franklin, then stopped by the sheriffs department and got directions to Ruby Gravano's, which turned out to be a one-story, weathered, late-Victorian frame house, with ventilated window shutters and high windows and a wide gallery hung with flower baskets. An oak tree that must have been two hundred years old grew in the side yard, a broken rope swing dangling in the dust.
Ruby's husband, Beeler Grissum, who was from north Georgia or South Carolina, sat on the steps, cracking peanuts and flicking them to a turkey in the yard. Two or three years ago, in a Murphy scam gone bad, a John had delivered a martial-arts kick into Beeler's face that had broken his neck Today his body had the contours of a sack of potatoes, his chin held erect by a leather and steel neck brace, so that his head looked like a separate part of his anatomy positioned inside a cage. His hair was dyed platinum, like a professional wrestler's, combed straight back on his scalp. He rotated his upper torso as we approached the steps, a vague recognition swimming into his face.
'Sorry about your wife, Beeler,' I said.
He removed a peanut from the sack in his hand, then offered the sack to us.
'No, thanks,' I said. 'The sheriff thinks maybe Ruby was thrown from a car.'
'He wasn't there. But if that's what he says,' Beeler said.
As I remembered him, he had been a carnival man before he was a pimp and had lived most of his life off the computer. His speech was flat, adenoidal, laconic, so lacking in joy or passion or remorse or emotion of any kind that the listener felt Beeler did not care enough about others or the world or even his own fate to lie.
'Two women have been murdered recently in Iberia Parish. Maybe Ruby's death is connected to them,' I said.
He looked into space and seemed to think about my words. He scratched a place under his eye with one fingernail.
'It ain't her death brought you here then. It's the cases you ain't been able to solve?' he said.
'I wouldn't put it that way,' I said.
'Don't matter. It's my fault,' he said.
'I don't follow you,' I said.
'We had a fight. She took off in my truck. Sometimes she'd go to a colored blues joint, sometimes to the casino on the reservation. She kept all her tips in a fruit jar. She had a thing for poker machines.'
'Was she involved with another man?' Helen asked.
'She was out of the life. She been a one-man woman since. Most ex-whores are. Don't be talking about her like that,' he replied.
'Can you let us have a picture of your wife?' Helen asked.
'I reckon.'
He went into the house and returned with a photograph of Ruby and himself that was tucked with several others inside a gold-embossed Bible. He handed it to Helen. Ruby's hair was full and black, but the gauntness of her face made her hair look like a wig on a mannequin.
'Ruby hooked for eleven years. Curbside, motels, truck stops. She seen it all, every kind of pervert and geek they is. The guy who got next to her? You ain't gonna catch him,' he said.
'You want to explain that?' Helen said.
'I just did,' Beeler replied.
He shook the peanuts from his sack onto the ground for the turkey to eat and went back inside the gloom of his house without saying good-bye.
That night I hosed down the dock and threaded a chain through the steel eyelet screwed into the bow of each of our rental boats and wrapped the chain around a dock piling and snapped a heavy padlock on it, then tallied up the receipts in the bait shop and turned off the lights and locked the door and walked up the dock toward the house.
A brown and gray pickup truck, dented and work-scratched from bumper to bumper, was parked under the overhang of a live oak. A tall man in khaki clothes and a western straw hat stood by the tailgate, smoking a cigarette. The cigarette sparked in an arc when he tossed it into the road.
'You looking for somebody?' I asked.
'You,' he said. 'The man hepping that black bitch spread them rumor.'
He walked out of the shadows into the moonlight. The skin of his face was white, furrowed in vertical lines. One oily strand of black hair hung from under his hat, across his ear.
'Mistake to come around my house, Legion,' I said.
'That's what you t'ink,' he replied, and swung a blackjack down on my head, clipping the crown of the skull.
I fell on the side of the road, against the embankment of my yard. I could smell leaves and grass and the moist dirt on my hands as he walked toward me. His blackjack hung from his fingers, like a large, leather- sheathed darning sock.
'I'm a police officer,' I heard myself say.
'Don't matter what you are, no. When I get finish here, you ain't gonna want to tell nobody about it,' he replied.
He backstroked me across the side of the head, and when I tried to curl into a ball, he beat my arms and spine and kneecaps and shins, then pulled me by my shirt onto the road and laid into my buttocks and the backs of my thighs. The lead weight inside the stitched leather sock was mounted on a spring and wood handle, and with each blow I could feel the pain sink all the way to the bone, like a dentist's drill hollowing into marrow.
He stopped and stood erect, and all I could see of him were his khaki-clad legs and loins and the western belt buckle on his flat stomach and the blackjack hanging motionlessly from his hand.
I was sitting up now, my legs bent under me, my ears ringing with sound, my stomach and bowels like wet newspaper torn in half. If he had hit me again, I couldn't have raised my arms to ward off the blow.
He lifted me by the front of my shirt and dropped me in a sitting position on the embankment of my yard. He slipped the blackjack into his side pocket and looked down at me.
'How you feel?' he asked.
He waited in the silence for my reply.
'I'll ax you again,' he said.
'Go fuck yourself,' I whispered.
He knotted my hair in his fist and wrenched back my head and kissed me hard on the mouth, pushing his
