“I thank you for your time, captain,” I said.
Then as an afterthought he said, “If you bust that boy, tell him he just as lief hang himself as come back here for killing a policeman.”
His pupils were like black cinders in his washed-out blue eyes.
I ARRIVED BACK at my office just in time to shuffle some papers around on my desk and sign out at five o’clock. I was tired from the round-trip drive up to Angola; my shoulder still hurt where Eddy Raintree had caught me with the crowbar, and I wanted to go home, eat supper, take a run along the dirt road by the bayou, and maybe go to a movie in Lafayette with Alafair and Bootsie.
But parked next to my pickup truck was a waxed fire-engine-red Cadillac, with the immaculate white canvas top folded back loosely on the body. A man in ice-cream slacks lay almost supine across the leather seats, one purple suede boot propped up on the window jamb, a sequined sunburst guitar hung across his stomach.
“Allons à Lafayette, pour voir les ’tites françaises,” he sang, then sat up, pulled off his sunglasses with his mutilated hand, and grinned at me. “What’s happening, lieutenant?”
“Hello, Lyle.”
“Take a ride with me.”
“How many of these do you own?”
“They actually belong to the church.”
“I bet.”
“Take a ride with me.”
“I’m on my way home.”
“You can blow a few minutes. It’s important.”
“Do you have anything against talking to me during office hours?”
“Somebody broke into Drew’s house last night.”
“I didn’t hear anything about it. Did she report it to the city police?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe I’ll explain that. Take a ride with me.” He lifted his guitar over into the back seat. I opened the door and sat back in the deep flesh-colored leather seat next to him. We clanked across the drawbridge over Bayou Teche and drove out of town on East Main. He picked up a paper cup from the floor and drank out of it. A familiar odor struck my nostrils in the warm air.
“Did you give yourself a dispensation today?” I said.
“I preach against drunkenness, not drinking. There’s a big difference.”
“Where are we going, Lyle?”
“Not far. Right there,” he said, and pointed across a sugarcane field to a collapsed barn, a rusted and motionless windmill, and some brick pilings that had once supported a house. The field behind the barn was unplowed, and in it were a half-dozen oil wells.
We pulled off the parish road into a weed-grown dirt lane that led back to the barn. Lyle cut the engine, removed a pint bottle of bourbon from under the seat, and unscrewed the cap with one thumb. His hair, which he wore on-camera in a waved conk that reminded me of a washboard, was windblown and loose and hanging in his eyes.
“I own a third of it, a third of them wells out there, too,” he said. “But I’m not fond of coming out here. I surely ain’t.”
“Why are we here, then?”
“You got to go back where the dragons live if you want to get rid of them.”
“I tried to make myself clear before, Lyle. I sympathize with the problems your family had in the past, but my concern now is with a murdered police officer.”
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