“A famous writer,” she said.
“He drives that Mustang out front?”
“That’s him.”
“Ax Tee Jolie if she got a minute.”
“She came to his table on her own, Hogman. He ain’t picked her up.”
“I know, he’s probably researching a book. We get a lot of them kind in here.”
Hogman went to the restroom, then had to move two cases of beer from the storage room to the cooler. When he had finished loading the cooler, Tee Jolie and Weingart had left. He wiped his hands on a dish towel and went out on the front porch of the club.
Weingart escorted Tee Jolie to his Mustang and opened the passenger door for her. But instead of getting in, she rested one hand on top of the door and studied his face and the unnatural glaze it had taken on in the glow of the Christmas-tree lights stapled around the club’s front windows, as though the tissue in it had been injected with synthetics. “Can my sister come wit’ us?”
“I thought we got that situation out of the way.”
“I feel a li’l guilty about her not getting to audition, like maybe I’m taking her chance away from her.”
“There’re all kinds of legal problems when you start dealing with minors. Record companies will do it if the prospect is big enough, but they don’t like it. Besides, kids’ voices change.”
“You telling me the troot’?”
“I mean this with all respect: Why would I lie to you? Because I can’t find a girlfriend? I have to go to barrooms on back roads and make up lies like some kind of molester? Is that what I look like?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You’re a nice girl. You’re bright and evidently have talent. But if you don’t want to go to Lafayette, no hard feelings. Maybe you’re right. It’s not meant to be.”
“What isn’t?”
“One of those breakthrough moments. Doors open, and we go through them or we don’t. If a person lets fear dominate his life, he doesn’t deserve the talent he’s been given. Believe me, if that’s the case, with you or me or anybody who has a gift, it will be taken from us and given to somebody else.”
“I never t’ought of it like that. Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“I want you to hear me sing. Let’s go to Lafayette, Robert.”
“You called me by my name. That’s a breakthrough in itself.”
She sat down in the deep black leather of the seat and fastened the safety belt across her chest while he closed the door behind her. Then he turned the ignition, backed in a half circle, and drove slowly across the gravel toward the road.
He got only twenty feet before the female deputy sheriff stepped in front of his headlights, her eyes watering in the glare.
Weingart rolled down his window. “What’s the trouble?”
“Cut your engine and step out of the car, please,” she said. The deputy leaned over and peered inside at Tee Jolie. “You doin’ all right tonight, miss?”
“I’m fine,” Tee Jolie replied.
“Did you hear me, sir?”
“Whatever,” Weingart said, lifting his hands from the steering wheel. He turned off the ignition and the lights and got out of the car.
“Walk over here with me,” the deputy said.
“Can we pull the plug on this?”
“Do you have a hearing impairment?”
Weingart and the deputy went into the shadows by the corner of the club, ignoring the black bartender who stood on the porch. “You leave that girl alone,” she said.
“Somebody made you the patroness of mulatto bar girls?”
“This isn’t St. Mary Parish. Your free ride is over, buster.”
“If I were short and fat, I’d be mad at the world, too.”
“I hope you wise off one more time. I really do. Short of that, you get your sorry ass down the road.”
“Gladly.”
“She stays.”
“That should be up to her.”
“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’ve taken this attitude. There were a couple of times I wanted to do this, but I didn’t. I’ll always regret that.”
“Whoa,” he said, stepping backward.
Hogman heard the deputy slide her baton from the plastic ring on her belt.
“Tell me how you like this. I’ve heard it passes in a week or so,” she said, thrusting the point of the baton with both hands into a spot just above Weingart’s belt.
He let out a groan and slumped against a car fender, barely able to support himself, his mouth open, his face gray.
“One more little poke, in case you didn’t get the message,” the deputy said. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? Happy motoring.”
HOGMAN CALLED AT the office in the morning and told me what he and the waitress had seen and heard at the club the previous night.
“What happened to the girl?” I asked.
“She called a cab.”
“I’m not sure what you’re telling me here, Hogman.”
“Dave, this ain’t just some trashy po’ white shopping for country girls. When a man like that picks up a black girl, it’s ’cause he wants to leave his mark on her.”
“But is something else bothering you about what you saw and heard?”
“The deputy and this Hollywood guy talked like they knew each other. Like the deputy knew about t’ings he’d done before. When she come inside later, I said, ‘A man like that don’t stop being what he is ’cause you poke him wit’ a club, no. He just do what you done to him to the next girl he gets his hands on.’”
“What’d she say?”
“That he hadn’t broke no law. That she run him off and he wouldn’t be back again.”
“What’s this deputy’s name?”
“I just call her Miss Emma,” he replied. “I don’t know her last name.”
GEORGE ORWELL ONCE wrote that people are always better than we think they are. They are more kind, more loving, more brave and decent. They keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber and go down with the decks awash and the guns blazing. I still believe that Orwell was right. But too often there are times when our fellow human beings let us down, and when they do, all of us are the less for it.
After I finished talking to Hogman, I drove to St. Martinville and walked into the sheriff’s department and found Emma at a desk in her cubicle, sorting through a pile of paperwork in her in-basket.
“Sometimes I wrap mine in a paper sack and stuff it in the bottom of the trash can,” I said. “The irony is, it doesn’t seem to make any difference.”
A half-smile lingered on her mouth. “You just passing by?”
“I understand you had a run-in with Robert Weingart last night.”
I hoped she would make a joke about it or indicate convincingly that she was busy. I hoped she would be mildly irritated. I hoped she would do almost anything except pause and think before she replied. But I saw her eyes go flat and bright without cause, and impossible to read. “Who told you that?” she asked.
“You’ve met Weingart before?”
“I know who he is.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Clete told me once that Weingart might be using roofies on local girls. So I invited him out of St. Martin Parish.”
I pulled up a chair and sat down by the side of her desk, not over two feet from her. “Yesterday Weingart
