“Oh yeah?” he said, his heart seizing up.
“Remember Boog Powell? He played first base for Baltimore. He used to own a boatyard in the Keys. I used to take a charter out of there to Seven Mile Reef. Boog always said mermaids lived under the reef. He was a big kidder.”
“That was probably it.”
“You’re a piece of work,” she said.
“I’m not sure how to take that.”
“It’s a compliment,” she said. “Sometimes I have to travel. Are you cool with that?”
“No, if you work for me, you work for me.”
She shrugged. “And eBay is killing my antique business, anyway. You got anything to eat? I’m starving.”
BeforeI left the office to bring in Jesse Leboeuf, Helen told me to bring along a black female deputy named Catin Segura. “What for?” I asked.
“Because she’s about to be promoted to detective, and I want her around a good influence.”
“What’s the real reason?”
“What I said.” When I continued to look at her, she added, “If Jesse Leboeuf gives you trouble, I want a witness.”
Catin Segura was a single mother and had a two-year degree in criminal justice from a community college in New Orleans. Like Helen, she had started her career in law enforcement at the NOPD as a meter maid, then had gone to work for the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department as a 911 dispatcher. She owned a modest home in Jeanerette and lived there with her two children and was a pleasant and decent and humble woman who was conscientious about her job and the care of her family. In the five years she had been a patrolwoman, no complaint of any kind had ever been filed against her. As we headed down to Cypremort Point in her cruiser, I knew that Helen had made a mistake in assigning Catin to accompany me. There is an old lesson a police officer learns soon or learns late: Evil does not rinse itself out of the human soul. Catin Segura had no business around the likes of Jesse Leboeuf.
The rain had stopped, and through the cruiser’s windshield, I could see a waterspout on the bay, its funnel as bright as spun glass, bending and warping in the sunlight. The cypress trees that stood in freshwater ponds on either side of us were turning gold with the season, and there was a smell in the wind like shrimp or trout schooling up in the coves.
“What’s the story on this guy?” Catin asked.
“He’s just an old man. Don’t pay too much attention to what he says or does.”
She took her eyes off the road. “He’s got some racial issues?”
“He’s one of those guys whose head is like a bad neighborhood. It’s better not to go into it.”
She didn’t speak the rest of the way to Jesse’s house. When we pulled into his yard, he was standing by a barbecue pit under a pecan tree, wrapping a sheet of aluminum foil around a large redfish. He had filled the aluminum foil with sauce piquante and sliced onions and lemons and had perforated it with a fork so the fish could absorb the smoke from the coals. He glanced at us and then picked up a can of beer from a wood table and drank from it, his attention focused on the waterspout on the bay. His shoulders looked as wide as an ax handle. The wind was blowing steadily out of the south, rustling the leaves on the tree limbs above us.
“Sheriff Soileau wants you to help her out with something, Mr. Jesse,” I said. “If you have a few minutes to spare, we can drive you into town.”
“You’re talking about the hermaphrodite?” he said.
“Bad choice of words,” I replied.
“He’p with what?” he asked.
“Better take it up with her. She doesn’t always share everything with me,” I said.
“You’re a goddamn liar.”
“That’s not a good way to talk to a fellow officer,” I said.
“Who’s this?” he asked, looking at Catin.
“Deputy Sheriff Segura, sir,” she said.
Jesse’s eyes traveled up and down her person as though he were examining a side of beef. “I’m fixing to eat,” he said to me. “Tell the hermaphrodite I’ll come in when I’ve got a mind to.”
“No, sir, you need to come in now,” Catin said.
“Did I address you?” Jesse asked.
“Jesse, you know the drill. It’s not up for grabs,” I said.
“I asked this girl a question,” Jesse said.
“Sir, you can go in as a friend of the process or in cuffs,” Catin said.
“You need to do something about this, Robicheaux.”
“Here’s the way I see it, Mr. Jesse,” I said. “There are ponds on both sides of your road that are full of sunfish and goggle-eye perch. You’re surrounded by palm and oak trees and a saltwater bay with schools of both white and speckled trout. You can sail a boat from your yard to Key West, Florida. How many men get to live in a place like that? Sheriff Soileau probably needs about twenty minutes of your time. Is that too much to ask of you, sir?”
“After I’m done with my dinner and washing my dishes and cleaning out my fire pit, I’ll give it some thought,” he replied. “Then I’ll call Sheriff Soileau and take care of the matter. In the meantime, I want y’all out of here.”
Catin stepped closer to him, her thumbs hooked on the sides of her belt. “No, you will get in the back of the cruiser, Mr. Leboeuf. You will also lose the attitude. If you don’t like a female deputy or a black female deputy standing on your grass, that’s too bad. I’m going to put my hand on you now and escort you to the cruiser. If you do not do as you are told, you are going to be charged with resisting.”
“You get this bitch off my property,” Leboeuf said to me.
“That’s it,” Catin said. She spun him around and shoved him between the shoulder blades into the side of the cruiser. Then she pulled out her handcuffs and reached for his left wrist, as though the situation had been resolved. That was a mistake. Jesse Leboeuf turned around and stiff-armed her in the chest, his face bitten with disdain.
She stumbled backward, then pulled her can of Mace from her belt. I stepped between her and Leboeuf and held my hands up in front of him, not touching him, moving side to side as he tried to advance toward her. “I’m hooking you up, Jesse,” I said. “You’re under arrest for resisting and assault on a police officer. If you touch my person, I’m going to put you on your knees.”
His eyes looked hot and small and recessed in his sun-browned face. I could only guess at the thoughts he was having about Catin and the images he carried from a lifetime of abusing people who had no power: black women in the three-dollar cribs on Hopkins; a hobo pulled off a boxcar; a New Orleans pimp who thought he could bring his own girls to town and not piece off the action; an illiterate Cajun wife whose body shrank when he touched her. I could hear Catin breathing next to me. “I need to finish this, Dave,” she said.
“No, Mr. Jesse is going to be all right,” I said. “Right, Mr. Jesse? This bullshit is over. Give me your word to that effect, and we’ll all go into town and work this out.”
“Don’t you do this,” Catin said to me.
“It’s over,” I said. “Right, Jesse?”
He looked hard at me, then nodded.
“Shame on you,” Catin said to me.
We rode in front with Leboeuf in back, unhooked, behind the wire-mesh screen. We didn’t speak until we were at the department, and then it was only to get Leboeuf into a holding cell.
Catin went in to see Helen first, then I did. “Catin says you wouldn’t back her up,” Helen said.
“Call it what you want,” I replied. “I didn’t see too many alternatives at the time.”
“Nobody is going to knock my deputies around.”
“What would you have done?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“You’d bust up an old man and involve one of your deputies in a liability suit? That’s what you’re saying?”
She picked a pen up from her desk blotter and dropped it in a can full of other pens. “Talk to her. She thinks
