His lips were purple with age, his skin covered with brown spots the size of dimes. He breathed loudly, as though he had emphysema.
"I ax you what you want," he said.
"I wondered if you remembered a black man by the name of DeWitt Prejean."
He looked at me carefully. His eyes were clear-blue, liquid, elongated, red along the rims.
"A nigger, you say?" he asked.
"That's right."
"Yeah, I remember that sonofabitch. What about
him?"
"Is it all right if I sit down, Mr. Hebert?"
"Why should I give a shit?"
I sat down in the swing. He put a cigarette in his mouth and searched in his shirt pocket for a match while his eyes went up and down my body. Gray hair grew out of his nose and on the back of his thick neck.
"Were you on duty the night somebody broke him out of jail?" I said.
"I was the jailer. A jailer don't work nights. You hire a man for that."
"Do you remember what that fellow was charged with?"
"He wasn't charged with nothing. It never got to that."
"I wonder why he was still in a holding cell eleven hours after he was arrested."
"They busted him out of the tank."
"Not according to the newspaper."
"That's why a lot of people use newspaper to wipe their ass with."
"He went into a white woman's home with a butcher knife, did he?"
"Find the nigger and ax him."
"That's what puzzles me. Nobody seems to know what happened to this fellow, and nobody seems to care. Does that make sense to you?"
He puffed on his cigarette. It was wet and splayed when he took it out of his mouth. I waited for him to speak but he didn't.
"Did y'all just close the books on a jailbreak, Mr. Hebert?" I asked.
"I don't remember what they done."
"Was DeWitt Prejean a rapist?"
"He didn't know how to keep his prick in his pants, if that's what you mean."
"You think her husband broke him out?"
"He might have."
I looked into his face and waited.