"I don't know much about him."
"Alafair, can you go find Hogman and tell him we need to do that scene again in about fifteen minutes?" Elrod said.
"Sure, El," she said, swung her legs over the bench, scooped Tripod over her shoulder, and ran off through the trees.
"Look, El, I appreciate your working Alafair into your movie, but frankly I don't want her out here as long as Julie Balboni's around."
"I thought you heard."
"What?"
"Mikey's filing Chapter Eleven bankruptcy. He's eighty-sixing the greaseballs out of the corporation. The last thing those guys want is the court examining their finances. He told off Balboni this morning in front of the whole crew."
"What do you mean he told him off?"
"He said Balboni was never going to put a hand on one of Mikey's people again. He told him to take his porno actor and his hoods and his bimbos and haul his ass back to New Orleans. I was really proud of Mikey. . . What's the matter?"
"What did Julie have to say?"
"He cleaned his fingernails with a toothpick, then walked out to the lake and started talking to somebody on his cellular phone and skipping rocks across the water at the ducks."
"Where is he now?"
"He drove off with his whole crew in his limo."
"I'd like to talk with Mr. Goldman."
"He's on the other side of the lake."
"Ask him to call me, will you? If he doesn't catch me at the office, he can call me at home tonight."
"He'll be back in a few minutes to shoot the scene with me and Hogman and Alafair."
"We're not going to be here for it."
"You won't let her be in the film?"
"Nobody humiliates Julie Balboni in front of other people, El. I don't know what he's going to do, but I don't want Alafair here when he does it."
The wind had turned out of the south and was blowing hotly through the trees when we walked back toward my truck. The air smelled like fish spawning, and clouds with the dark convolutions of newly opened purple roses were massing in a long, low humped line on the southern horizon.
Later, after I had taken Alafair home and checked in at the office, I drove to Opelousas to talk once again with the old jailer Ben Hebert. A black man raking leaves in Hebert's yard told me where I could find him on a bayou just outside of town.
He sat on top of an inverted plastic bucket under a tree, his cane pole extended out into the sunlight, his red bobber drifting on the edge of the reeds. He wore a crushed straw hat on the side of his head and smoked a hand-rolled saliva-soaked cigarette without removing it from the corner of his mouth. The layers of white fat on his hips and stomach protruded between his shirt and khakis like lard curling over the edges of a washtub.
Ten feet down from him a middle-aged mulatto woman with a small round head, a perforated dime tied on her ankle, was also fishing as she sat on top of an inverted bucket. The ground around her was strewn with empty beer cans. She spit snuff to one side and jigged her line up and down through a torn hole in a lily pad.
Ben Hebert pitched his cigarette out onto the current, where it hissed and turned in a brown eddy.
"Why you keep botherin
g me?" he said. There was beer on his breath and an eye-watering smell in his clothes that was like both dried sweat and urine.
"I need to know what kind of work DeWitt Prejean did," I said.
"You what?" His lips were as purple as though they had been painted, his teeth small and yellow as pieces of corn.
"Just what I said."