“What are you down here for, to toss peanut shells at the monkeys?” he said. “Go tell that screw there’s no toilet paper in here.”
“I thought you might want to talk to me.”
He rose from the bunk, breathing hard through his nose, and came toward me.
“That broad’s lying,” he said.
“She’s been pretty convincing.”
His eyes looked hard into mine and narrowed.
“You know it’s a ream. I see it in your face, man,” he said. “You offering me something?”
“Somebody did it to her. I don’t think it was anybody around here. Everybody I talk to thinks you’re the number-one candidate, Joey. I think they’ve got the right person in the cell.”
His hand shot out of the bars, knotting my shirt in his fist. His breath was rife with jailhouse funk. My collar button popped loose on the floor.
“I ain’t going down on a phony beef. You tell that broad that,” he said. “You tell her brother to get her off my back.”
I tore his hand loose.
“You understand me, man?” he said. “I don’t roll over. You push me, I’ll leave your hair on the wallpaper.”
“Tell that to everybody at your trial, Joey. It makes good courtroom theater.”
He hit the bars with the heel of his fist. His face was livid, popping with cartilage.
“You’re twisting me, man. What’s your stake? What’s your fucking stake?” he said.
“Why did those guys creep Weldon Sonnier’s house?”
He paced back and forth, his nostrils dilating.
“I’ll print it out for you in big letters,” he said. “I’m a businessman, I don’t creep houses, I don’t drive out to some hole in the road to stoke up a bunch of small-town jackoffs. They’re the kind who send you to the electric chair and then go back to watering their plants. Look, you were a New Orleans cop. You know how it gets done. Somebody keeps getting in your face and don’t listen to reason, you tell another guy about it, then you forget it. You don’t even want to know who does it. If you’re a sick guy, with a real bone on for somebody, you get Polaroids, then you burn them.
“That’s how it works. You don’t drive into some broad’s backyard and nail her to a gazebo. You don’t end up in a hick court with Elmer Fudd dropping a one-point-seven-million-dollar bond on your head. The point is, when people got dog food between their ears they’re dangerous, and I don’t fuck with them. Is it starting to clear up for you now?”
He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and hunted in his shirt pockets for a match.
“Gimme a light,” he said.
“How’d you get involved with Bobby Earl?” I said.
He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and shook it at me.
“You quit trying to jerk my chain, man,” he said. “You want to know how I got this voice? A swinging dick tried to make me his punk when I was a seventeen-year-old fish. I caught him in the shower with a string knife. Except he was a made guy, and I didn’t know the rules about made guys back then, and his friends hung me up in my cell with a coat hanger. They crushed my voice box. But I didn’t roll over then, man, and I don’t roll over now.
“Explain to the broad I’m a three-time loser. If I go down on the bitch, I got nothing to lose. That means I can cop to anything they want and take Sonnier with me. I’ll make sure he gets heavy time, and I’ll be inside with him when he does it. Let her think about that.”
“You’re a hard man, Joey.”
“Tell that screw down there to get me processed or send up some toilet paper.”
He scratched at the inside of his nostril with his thumbnail and blew air through his nasal passages. He had already lost interest in my presence, but a dark light remained in his face, as though he were breathing bad air, and his heated eyes, the nests of veins in his neck, his unwashed smell, the soft scud of his loafers on the cement, his jug head in silhouette against the cell window, made me think of the circus creatures who pawed the dark while they watched the denouement of Eddy Raintree from their cages.
LATER, I CALLED Weldon at his office and was told that he was with a drilling crew at the old Sonnier farm.
I drove down the dirt road past the rusted windmill and crumbled brick supports where the house had stood before Weldon had hired a gang of drunken blacks to tear it apart with crowbars and sledgehammers. I parked my truck by a sludge pond and an open-sided shed stacked with pipe and sacks of drilling mud, and walked up the iron steps of a rig that roared with the noise of the drilling engine.