Dixie City Jam (Dave Robicheaux 7)

'It's the lightning,' she said. 'It was popping out in the marsh. I saw a tree burning.'

I walked her back to the bed and lay beside her. In a little while the rain began ticking in the trees; then it fell harder, drumming on the eaves and the tin roof of the gallery. She fell asleep with her head on my arm and slept through a thunderstorm that broke across the marsh at daybreak and flooded the yard and blew a fine, cool mist through the screens.

At eight o'clock the sheriff called and told me to go directly to Iberia General rather than to the office. Charles Sitwell, our only link to Will Buchalter, would never be accused of ratting out on his friends.

* * *

chapter thirteen

The window blinds in Sitwell's hospital room were up, and the walls and the sheets on his bed were bright with sunlight. A nurse was emptying Sitwell's bedpan in the toilet, and the deputy who had stood guard on the door was chewing on a toothpick and staring up at a talk show on a television set whose sound was turned off.

'I can't tell you with any certainty when he died,' the doctor said. 'I'd say it was in the last two or three hours, but that's a guess. Actually, I thought he was going to make it.'

Sitwell's head was tilted back on the pillow. His mouth and eyes were open. A yellow liquid had drained out of the plaster and bandages on his face into the whiskers on his throat.

'You want to guess at what caused his death?' I said.

The doctor was a powerfully built, sandy-haired man, a tanned, habitual golf player, who wore greens and protective plastic bags over his feet.

'Look at his right hand,' he said. 'It's clutching the sheet like he was either afraid of something or he was experiencing a painful spasm of some kind.'

'Yes?'

'That's not unusual in itself, so maybe I'm just too imaginative.'

'You're going to have to be a little more exact for me, Doctor.'

He flipped out his rimless glasses, fitted them on his nose, then bent over Sitwell's body.

'Take at look at this,' he said, rotating Sitwell's chin sideways with his thumb. 'You see that red spot in his whiskers, like a big mosquito bite? Come around in the light. Here, right by the jugular.'

'What about it?'

'Look closely.' He used his thumb to brush back the whiskers. 'The skin's torn above the original puncture. You want to know what I think, or had you rather I stay out of your business?'

'Go ahead, Doc, you're doing just fine.'

'I think maybe somebody shoved a hypodermic needle in his throat.'

I rubbed back Sitwell's whiskers with the tips of my fingers. His blood had already drained to the lowest parts of his body, and his skin was cold and rubbery to the touch. The area right above the puncture looked like it had been ripped with an upward motion, like a wood splinter being torn loose from the grain of the skin.

'If someone did put a needle in him, what do you think it might have been loaded with?' I said.

'Air would do it. A bubble can stop up an artery like a cork in a pipe.'

I turned toward the deputy, who was sitting in a chair now, still staring up at the silent talk show on television. His name was Expidee Chatlin, and he had spent most of his years with the department either as a crossing guard at parish elementary schools or escorting prisoners from the drunk tank to guilty court.

'Were you here all night, Expidee?' I asked.

'Sure, what you t'ink, Dave?' He had narrow shoulders and wide hips, a thin mustache, and stiff, black hair that no amount of grease seemed capable of flattening on his skull.

'Who came in the room during the night?' I asked.

'Hospital people. They's some ot'er kind working here?'

'What kind of hospital people, Expidee?'

'Nurses, doctors, all the reg'lar people they got working here.' He took a fresh toothpick from his shirt pocket and inserted it in the corner of his mouth. His eyes drifted back up to the television set. The doctor went out into the hall. The nurse began untaping the IV needle from Sitwell's arm. I reached up and punched off the television set.