“You got that right, Jack. You kill me, Robo Man.” He looked again at the bartender and laughed loudly, slapping the bar with the flat of his hand.
Emma Poche went back to the St. Martinville Sheriff’s Department, and Herman Stanga rode with me back to New Iberia. I didn’t like sitting next to him or talking to him or even acknowledging his presence. He smelled of hair cream and the decayed food in his teeth and the deodorant he used to overlay the sweat in his armpits. I cracked the window and kept my eyes on the road and wondered at the level of the enmity I felt toward him.
At the city limits, we entered a long corridor of oak trees. On the right-hand side of the road, set in deep shade, was a two-story antebellum home with a wide veranda, built out of wood in imitation of the columned brick Greek revival mansions down the Teche. The veranda sagged in the middle from either termite damage or settling in the foundation. The paint had turned gray in the smoke of stubble fires or dust blown out of the fields. A wash line was strung across the side yard, the clothes flapping in the wind.
“The man who built that house was a free man of color named Labiche,” I said. “He owned a brick factory in town. He also owned slaves. He got rich selling out his own people. What do you think about that, Herman?”
“Say again? I was just starting to catch some Z’s.”
“The guy who built that home back there was a mulatto who bought and sold slaves and used them to make bricks that went into the construction of the biggest homes in this area before the Civil War. Some people would probably say he was just a creature of his times. My feeling is that he was probably an opportunist and a Judas. Since you’re a man of considerable experience in racial matters, I wondered what your opinion is.”
“What I t’ink is you couldn’t find your own dick if you had a string tied to it. Wake me up when we’re there,” he replied.
It was almost five P.M. when I drove down East Main and turned in to the long driveway that led past the city library to the spacious brick building that served as both City Hall and the sheriff’s department. Between the library and the wall of bamboo was a grotto dedicated to the mother of Jesus. The street and the buildings and the grotto were already deep in shadow under the oak trees. A crowd was gathered around the grotto, and at first I thought they were tourists or religious people; then I recognized Layton Blanchet in their midst and remembered he was a member of a live oak or historical preservation society, the kind of group that he would probably find useful in his machinations.
As I drove past him, he raised his hand in recognition, but I pretended not to see him. I put Herman Stanga in one of our interview rooms and went to Helen’s office and told her I had delivered the freight. “Where you going?” she said.
“To my office, if you don’t mind,” I replied.
“I mind.”
“Talking to Stanga is a waste of time.”
“Humor me.”
“The truth is, everyone would be a lot happier if Clete had taken him off at the neck. Stanga gets high on being rousted. He’ll probably file a harassment charge against us and use it in his suit against Clete. The only thing Stanga understands is a club upside his head or a bullet in the mouth.”
“Bwana no run the department. Bwana shut up. Bwana go into the interview room now.”
Earlier in the day I had given Helen all my notes on the death of Bernadette Latiolais, my interview with her brother on the work gang outside Natchez, and my interview with the store clerk and Bernadette Latiolais’s grandmother in Jeff Davis Parish. I also had given her my files on Robert Weingart and Vidor Perkins. When we entered the interview room, Stanga was sitting at the table, gazing out the window at a speedboat that was towing a girl on skis down the bayou. He put an Altoid in his mouth and sucked on it. “I got about fifteen minutes for this, then I need a ride back to my car. Y’all cool wit’ that?”
“We appreciate your coming in,” Helen said. “You knew a convict in Mississippi by the name of Elmore Latiolais?”
“I been over that wit’ Robo Man here. The answer is yeah, I knew that lying nigger for twenty years. He got hisself capped. Do I know why? Let me guess. He shot off his mout’ to a peckerwood guard and ate a load of buckshot. Do I know anyt’ing about these girls that has gotten themselves killed? Let me guess again. They was working independent and messed wit’ the wrong john and had the kind of date they wasn’t expecting.”
“Why were you over in Jeff Davis Parish with Robert Weingart?”
“The writer?”
“Yeah, the writer,” Helen said.
“Who says I was?”
“A half-dozen people,” she lied.
He opened his hands in disbelief. “What would I be doing wit’ a writer? That’s like axing me if I’m hanging out with the IRS.”
“Maybe you were doing some work for the St. Jude Project.”
“Yeah, I he’p out the St. Jude, but I don’t know this writer. If you say I know him, then write that in my file. But I don’t know him, and I don’t know nothing about him except I seen him signing books at Books Along the Teche, and I’m tired of y’all getting in my face about this.”
“Here’s our problem, Herman,” she said. “No matter what avenue we take into this investigation, your name comes up.”
“What investigation? All them crimes, if there ever was any crimes, was in Jeff Davis Parish. But RoboCop and his friend Dumbo the flying beer barrel been trying to find a reason to drag their shit into my life.”
“We had a body dumped in our parish, and we think the victim was connected to the homicides in Jeff Davis, Herman,” Helen said, sitting on the corner of the table, her hands folded on one thigh. “If you’re not involved in this, you have a good idea who is. Most people around here have one of two attitudes about you. A lot of them just laugh when your name is mentioned, like you’re a funny hobgoblin that got loose from Railroad Avenue. Others say you’re not at fault for what you are, that you never had a father and your mother had to turn tricks in a shack behind Broussard’s bar and you grew up a raggedy-ass little boy who had to carry out the whores’ pails from the back of the cathouses on Hopkins. But I always thought you were a smart man. I don’t like what you do for a living, but there’s no denying you’re intelligent. That’s right, isn’t it? You’re a smart man, aren’t you, Herman? I knew your mother well. You were born premature, out in the hallway at Charity Hospital. I remember your mother’s words: ‘He wasn’t no bigger than a squirrel.’”
Herman Stanga’s face looked feverish, the skin moist, his eyelids stitched to his forehead. “Y’all t’ink you run t’ings. Y’all ain’t nothing but a bunch of ants running around on a wet log, pretending y’all in charge, when the people that’s running t’ings wouldn’t let y’all squat on their commodes. But I got you, Robo Man. Your peckerwood friend is going to Angola. When he gets in there, he’s gonna be the gift that keeps on giving. And Lady Hermaphrodite here is gonna keep using you to wipe her ass while I’m laughing at the bunch of y’all. I fucked you good, man, and you can t’ink about that all the way to your grave.”
Helen got up from the table and stood at the window, her back to us. She was silent a long time, the heel of her hand resting on the windowsill, her fingers tapping without sound on the wood. In the distance, I heard the whine of the speedboat fading, disappearing around a bend in the bayou. Without turning around, Helen said, “Make sure he gets back to his car all right.”
CHAPTER 7
WHEN HERMAN STANGA returned home from St. Martinville, the night sky was smoky with stars and moon glow, the underwater lights burning beneath the surface of his swimming pool, the wind ruffling the canopy of the trees along the bayou. While he undressed down to his white silk boxer shorts at his wet bar, kicking his trousers onto the rug, he called the home of his lawyer. The lawyer’s message machine clicked on.
“Monroe, it’s me. Pick up the phone,” Herman said. “I got an update for you. I know you’re there, man, so stop pretending you ain’t. Dave Robicheaux ran me in this afternoon. He was talking in the car about niggers selling out niggers during the Civil War or some shit. He put me in a room wit’ Amazon Woman. She was trying to make me admit I knew somet’ing about them girls that was killed in Jeff Davis Parish. She was calling my mother a whore. She didn’t have a lot of nice t’ings to say about you, either. I’m telling you, Monroe, if I find out you’re home and
