'Jesus Christ, I don't believe it,' somebody said.
'Get a shovel or a broom or something. I ain't picking that up with my hands.'
'What the fuck you guys talking about?' the man in the white sports coat said, pushing his way, along with Gouza, to get a better view of the trunk. Then he pressed his hand over his mouth and nose.
'Put in a call for the ME,' one of the plain-clothes cops said.
A uniformed sergeant, his hands inside a vinyl evidence bag, reached into the trunk of the car, took out Jewel Fluck's head, and laid it on the grass. Joey Gouza's face was stunned, his mouth dropped open; he stared speechless at the man in the white sports coat. He gestured emptily with both hands at the air.
'I don't know what it's doing there, Dom,' he said. 'It's a setup. These fuckheads are working with some pisspot cops over in Iberia Parish. I swear it, Dom. They been trying to put an iron hook through my stomach and tear my insides out.'
'Shut up, Joey. You're under arrest,' one of the plain clothes cops said. 'Put your hands on the car and spread your legs. You know the drill. The rest of you people go back to your lasagne.'
The uniformed sergeant shoved Joey face-forward against the side of the Cadillac and hit him under both arms. Joey's face went livid with rage, and he whirled and drove his elbow into the sergeant's nose.
Then NOPD went to work with the subtlety of method for which they're famous. While the sergeant tried to cup his hands over the blood that fountained from his nose, two other uniformed cops rained their batons down on Joey's back.
'We got a perp on dust,' somebody yelled.
Then as though that one declaration justified any means of restraint, another cop ran from the far side of the street with a Taser gun. The cops flailing with their batons jumped back just as he fired.
But Joey had seen what was coming, too, and he drove sideways and the dart embedded in the thick, fat neck of the man in the white sports coat. He went down as though he had been bludgeoned with an ax, his body convulsing, his arms writhing in the damp grass with the electric shock.
Then a cop garroted Joey across the throat with his baton and lifted him, strangling, to his feet while two other cops cuffed his wrists behind him. The last frames in the film showed Joey being stuffed behind the wire screen of a patrol car, one foot kicking wildly at the window glass.
The sheriff put the VCR on rewind.
'The anonymous call was traced to the Acme Oyster Bar on lberville,' he said. 'When the arresting plain- clothes got there, they ran into none other than Cletus Purcel, bombed on boilermakers with seven dozen empty oyster shells piled on his table. The plain-clothes don't think it's coincidence that Purcel was sitting in the Acme.'
'But they didn't take him in, did they?'
'No.'
'They won't, either.'
'Why not?'
'Because they don't care, sheriff. Gouza won't go down on a murder beef, but they'll put him away for resisting arrest and assault and battery on a police officer. The court considers him a habitual. That means this time he goes into lockdown with the big stripes at Angola and they weld the door shut on him. Why should they worry about Clete?'
'You misunderstand me, Dave. I don't care about Purcel. I'm bothered by the possibility that one of my men shaved the dice. You know that was Jewel Fluck's head, don't you?'
'Maybe.'
'You want to tell me what really happened with you and Jack Gates?'
I rubbed my palms together between my legs. The sunlight outside was white and hot through the cracks in the blinds.
'The evidence was found on the right person, sheriff. There's no way around that conclusion. You have my word on it.'
He picked at his thumbnail, then raised his eyes to mine.
'That's about all I'm going to get from you, huh?' he said.
'Yeah, I guess that's about it.'
'Well, maybe it's time I talk to Garrett's family again over in Houston.'
I studied his face and waited.
'I think you wrote your signature on this case with a baseball bat, Dave. But anyway we're closing the file on it. The three men who killed Garrett are dead. The man they worked for is in the New Orleans city prison under a two million-dollar bond. I think the slate's wiped clean.' He gave me a measured look. 'For everybody, you got my drift?'
'That's for other people to decide.'
'I figured you might say that. Pride can be a sonofabitch sometimes, can't it?'
He pulled up the blinds. The hot, white radiance off the cement outside and the violent green of the trees and shrubs grass made my eyes water. As I walked out of the office, I heard him pull the cassette from the VCR and drop it carelessly into a metal file drawer, then slam the drawer shut.
CHAPTER 16
I took a vacation day from work the next day. Alafair and I packed a lunch, iced down some soft drinks, paddled a pirogue deep into the green light of the marsh, and fished with red worms and spinners for bluegill and goggle-eye.
The morning air was moist and cool among the flooded trees, and in the shadows and mist rising off the water you could hear big-mouth bass flopping on the edge of the lily pads, hear a heron lift and flap his wings as he flew down a canal through a long corridor of trees and disappeared like a black cipher in a cone of sunlight at the end.
But as I pulled the paddle through dark water, heard it knock against a wet cypress knee, watched the earnestness in Alafair's face as she cast her baited spinner next to the water lilies and slowly retrieved it through a nest of bream, I knew that something else was taking hold of me, too. Age had finally taught me that there was a time to go with the season, to let go of the world's seriousness, to leave the terrible obligation of defining both yourself and the world to others.
Yesterday at the dock I had told Batist that Lyle Sonnier had invited him to the crab boil in Baton Rouge.
'What for he ax a black man?' he said.
'Because he likes you, because he'd like us all to come over.'
He cocked one eye at me. 'sure he want me there, Dave?'
'Yeah, or I wouldn't ask you, Batist.'
He looked at me and reflected a moment.
'All right, that sounds nice. I'd like to go wit' y'all,' he said. Then, when I turned to go back up to the house, he added, 'Dave, why you want to go? I had the feeling for a while you might want to put all them Sonniers in a tote sack with some bricks and Vrow it in the bayou.'
I smiled at his joke and didn't reply.
Did I indeed still feel guilt for letting Lyle go down a VC tunnel when we could have blown it and passed it by? Or did I feel obligated to Drew because of our young impetuosity in the back seat of my convertible on a summer night years ago? Was I so self-destructively flawed that I had taken on Weldon's problems only because I saw myself mirrored in him?
No, that wasn't it.
A therapist once told me that we're born alone and we die alone.
It's not true.
We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them. The people closest to me have always been marked by a peculiar difference in their makeup. They're the walking wounded, the ones to whom a psychological injury was done that they will never be able to define, the ones with the messianic
