He forked a piece of pie into the back of his mouth and chewed it silently, his eyes never leaving my embarrassed averted face.
SUNDAY MORNING BOOTSIE, Alafair, and I went crabbing down by the coast. We tied chicken necks inside the weighted wire traps, whose sides would collapse on the bottom of the bay and then snap back into place with a jerk of the cord that was strung through a ring on the top. In three hours we filled a washtub with bluepoint crabs, washed them later with a garden hose in the backyard, and boiled them in a black iron pot on top of my brick barbecue pit. There was a breeze through the oaks, and the sky had a blue sheen to it, like stretched silk, and white clouds were piled high as a mountain on the western horizon.
It was a wonderful day. I had been to Mass and communion the previous evening, I had done a fifth step on my lapse of faith in my Higher Power, and I had determined once again to stop keeping score in my ongoing contention with the world, time, and mortality, and to simply thank providence for all the good things that had come to me through no plan of my own.
Eddy Raintree, with all the instincts of a mainline con and trapped animal, had tried to trade off information about a hit on Weldon, Drew, and perhaps even me. So far I hadn’t talked with either of them about Raintree’s possible knowledge of a contract on them, primarily because it was a waste of time; I had already warned them repeatedly about the possible consequence of not cooperating with the investigation, and I was tired of being dismissed as an adverb in their lives.
Also, I didn’t take Raintree seriously. Every sociopath or recidivist about to go down for a serious jolt suddenly has access to information about armored-truck scores, judges on the pad for the syndicate, the assassination of John Kennedy, or dope sales to a U.S. vice president.
I would leave Sunday intact, keep it the fine day it was, and let tomorrow and its uncertainties take care of themselves. We drove into New Iberia in the purpling light and ate ice cream under a spreading oak by Bayou Teche and listened to a Cajun band play in the park. I hugged Bootsie and Alafair against me.
“What’s that for?” Alafair said, her eyes squinting with her grin.
“I have to make sure you guys don’t get away from me,” I said.
At eleven o’clock that night, just as raindrops started to splash on the window fan in our bedroom, the sheriff called and said that Drew Sonnier had been found nailed to the gazebo in her backyard.
CHAPTER 11
A NEIGHBOR HAD FOUND her seated on the steps, half conscious, white with shock, her left hand impaled on the gazebo floor with a sixteen-penny nail, a pool of vomit in her lap.
“Hey, are you all right?” the sheriff said.
“Yes.”
“She’s at the hospital, she’s doing okay. At least under the circumstances.”
“Who did it?”
“I don’t know if you’re ready for this.”
“The guys from the Garrett killing?”
“Joey Gouza himself. Or at least he gave the orders and watched while two of his goons held her down and drove it through her hand.”
“What?” I said incredulously.
“She said it was Gouza. She can identify him, she’ll testify against him. Maybe we just hit the big one. . . . What’s the matter?”
“She can make Joey Gouza? How does she know him?”
“All I know is what the city cops told me, Dave.”
“What’s the motive?”
“Since it’s your day off, I was going to send somebody else to take her statement. But I think maybe you’d better do it. Or had you rather somebody else do it?”
He was a good man, but he was basically an administrator and more conscious of the need for professional civility than dealing with realities.
“I’ll go on over there in a few minutes,” I said. “Besides the neighbor, who was the first person at the scene?”
“I think the paramedics got there first, then the city cops.” He paused a moment. The rain was clattering on the tin roof of the gallery now. “They’re cutting a warrant on Gouza now. I don’t care if he’s in the city jail or ours, but I want that sonofabitch in a cage. Nobody’s going to do that to a woman in this parish while I’m sheriff.”
I was surprised. He wasn’t given to prof
anity or anger. I had an idea that Joey Meatballs was about to wish that he had not gotten involved with the Sonnier family and the rural unsophistication of Iberia Parish.
I WENT TO the hospital, but I didn’t go up to Drew’s room. Instead, I questioned one of the paramedics who had brought her in. I sat next to him on a wood bench by the emergency-room entrance while he drank coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. He told me he had been a navy corpsman before he had gone to work for the parish as a paramedic. His face was young and clean-shaved, and he reminded me of most medics, firemen, or U.S. Forest Service smoke jumpers whom I had known. They were enamored of the adrenaline rush, living on the edge, but they tended to be quiet and self-effacing men, and unlike many cops they didn’t have self-destructive obsessions.