it into his chest. 'Thanks for the tour of the rig. My recommendation is you hire a good lawyer and get some advice about the wisdom of suboming perjury. Or apply for a pilot's job in a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States, See you around, Weldon.'
I walked down the iron steps to my truck. I could hear the canvas awning flapping in the hot wind, a chain clinking brightly against a piece of pipe, in the embarrassed silence of the roughnecks on the rig floor.
The next morning I drove across the I-10 bridge over the Mississippi to Baton Rouge. The river was high and muddy, almost a mile across, and the oil barges far below looked as tiny as toys. Huge oil refineries and aluminum plants sprawled along the east bank of the river, but what always struck my eye first when I rolled over the apex of the bridge into Baton Rouge was the spire of the capitol building lifting itself out of the flat maze of trees and green parks in the old downtown area. All the state's political actors since Reconstruction had passed through there: populists in suspenders and clip-on bow ties, demagogues, alcoholic buffoons, virulent racists, a hillbilly singer who would be elected governor twice, another governor who broke out of a mental asylum in order to kill his wife, a recent governor who pardoned a convict in Angola, who repaid the favor by murdering the governor's brother, and the most famous and enigmatic player of them all, the Kingfish, who might have given FDR a run for his money had he not died, along with his supposed assassin, in a spray of eighty-one machine-gun bullets in a hallway of the old capitol building.
I parked my truck and sat in the gallery during the morning session of the legislature. I watched the regard with which Bobby Earl was treated by many of his peers, the warm handshakes, the pats on the arm and shoulder, the expression of gentlemanly goodwill by men who should have known better. It reminded me of the deference sometimes shown to a small-town poolroom bully or redneck police chief. The people around him well know his hatred of Jews, intellectuals, news people, Asians, blacks; no one doubts his potential with the leaded baton or the hobnailed boot across the neck. But they make friends with the ape in their midst, no matter how violently the tuning fork vibrates inside them; consequently they absorb his dark powers, and secretly gloat at the fear he inspires in others.
They recessed for lunch, and I followed Bobby Earl and a group of his friends one block to the entrance of an expensive restaurant with an awning that extended out over the sidewalk. The windows were filled with ferns and hanging copper pots. After Earl and his group had entered the restaurant, I put on my seersucker coat, tightened my necktie, and walked inside, too. Most of the tables were filled, the air loud with conversation and scented with the smell of gumbo from the kitchen, bourbon and tropical drinks from the bar.
'I don't think we have a seating for one, sir. Would you like to wait in the bar?' the matre d' said.
'I'm with Mr. Earl's party. Ah, there he is right over there,' I said.
'Very well. Please follow me, sir,' he said.
I walked with the maitre d' to Bobby Earl's table. The maitre d' set a menu down for me at an empty place setting and walked away. Earl turned away from his conversation with another man, then his mouth opened silently as he looked up and realized who was sitting down at his table.
'Hello, Mr. Earl. I apologize for bothering you again, but I'm just in town briefly and I didn't want to disturb you at the legislature,' I said. 'How are you gentlemen? I'm Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish sheriff's office. I just need to ask Mr. Earl a question or two. Y'all go right ahead with your lunch.'
They went on talking to each other, as though my presence was perfectly natural, but I could see their eyes, the positions of their bodies, already disassociating themselves from the situation.
Bobby Earl wore a brown pinstripe suit and a yellow silk tie, and his thick hair looked blow-dried and recently cut.
'What are you doing here?' he said.
'Do you know that Joey Gouza's in custody?'
'No.'
I set my notebook on the tablecloth and peeled back several pages. It contained nothing but notes from old investigations and a grocery list I had made out at the office yesterday.
'I interviewed him in his cell yesterday and your name came up,' I said.
'What?'
'Gouza is charged with ordering two men to nail Drew Sonnier's hand to a gazebo. When I questioned him your name came up in the conversation. That fact bothered me, Mr. Earl. Is it your statement that you don't know Joey Gouza?'
'I'm not making a statement. What are you trying to do here?'
A man at the end of the table coughed quietly into his fist and went to the restroom.
'You and Joey Gouza seem to have the same friends. Your lines keep crossing in this case, Mr. Earl. Originally I questioned you about Eddy Raintree. Now someone has blown Eddy's face off with a shotgun. You knew that, didn't you?'
'No, I don't know anything about this. You listen-'
His voice level rose, and the man next to him excused himself to talk with friends at the bar.
'You're harassing me,' Earl began again. 'I can't prove it, but I suspect you have a political motivation for what you've been doing. It won't work. It just makes my cause stronger. If you doubt me, call the Morning Advocate and check the polls.'
'Let me tell you what Gouza said and you can come to your own conclusions. We were talking about you, then he begins to tell me that if he goes down for what is called the 'bitch,' which is a life sentence given to habitual criminals, he's going to take others down with him. What does that seem to suggest to you, Mr. Earl?'
'It suggests you're going to have a lawsuit against you for slander.' His monocular right eye, with the enlarged pupil like a spot of India ink, was fixed on my face. The skin along the bottom rim was trembling with anger.
I folded my notebook and put it in my shirt pocket. I picked up a package of crackers from the breadbasket, then dropped it in the basket again.
'You're an intelligent man, and I'll tell you the truth, Mr. Earl,' I said. 'I think Joey might be in on a bum rap. But unfortunately for him, nobody cares if a guy like Joey is innocent or not. People just want him put away in a cage for a long time, and they don't care how it's done. The prosecutor will probably get a new political career out of it, his lawyers will get rich on his appeals while he's chopping sugarcane at Angola, his wife and mistresses will clean out his bank accounts and sell everything he owns, and his hired stooges will go to work for his competitors and forget they ever heard of him. In the meantime, there are probably some sadistic gunbulls who will ejaculate at the thought of busting Joey's hump on their work gangs.
'Now, if you were Joey Meatballs and facing a prospect like that, wouldn't you be willing to cut a deal, any deal, including maybe putting your mother in harness on a dogsled team?'
The other men at the table had gone quiet now and had given up the pretense of conviviality. They looked at their watches, touched nervously at their mouths with their napkins, stared at a remote part of the restaurant. The cost of their lunch with Bobby Earl was not one they had anticipated.
I rose from the table.
'You like primitive law and vigilante solutions to complex problems, Mr. Earl,' I said. 'Maybe you've stumbled into one of your own creations this time. But I wouldn't end up as Joey Gouza's fall partner. He doesn't care about political causes. He had his own brother-in-law fed into an airplane propeller. What do you think his lawyers might have planned for you?'
The tables around Bobby Earl's had now become quiet, too. He turned to speak to the men seated next to him, but their eyes were fixed on the flower arrangement in the center of the table. But I learned then that Bobby Earl was not easily undone in a public situation. He rose from the table, put his napkin neatly by his plate, and walked toward the men's room, pausing to let a black drink waiter pass. His gaze was level, his face handsome, almost pleasant-looking, his thick brown hair tousled by the cool currents from the air-conditioner.
I realized then that Bobby Earl might burn inside with banked fires, and that perhaps I had indeed inserted some broken glass in his head that would saw through brain tissue later; but in front of an audience he was a tragedian actor, a protean figure who could create an emanation of himself out of willpower alone and become as benign, photogenic, and seemingly anointed by history as Jefferson Davis in defeat.
I had a feeling this one would go into extra innings.
