“How about two guys who look like Mutt and Jeff?”
He began shaking his head noncommittally. “The short guy's got a fire hydrant for a neck. Maybe he did some work for Idi Amin. Maybe Sonny Boy popped a cap on his brother,” I said. His eyes stayed fixed on mine, but I saw his hand tic on the countertop, heard his heavy ring click on the glass. He picked up the notepad from the countertop and tossed it on a littered desk behind him. “You shouldn't job me, man,”
he said. His eyes were unblinking, his gum rolling on his teeth. “You think I'm a cop?”
“You got it, Jack.”
“You're right.” I opened my badge holder on the countertop. “You know who the guy with the sawed-off neck is, don't you?” He dropped his ring of keys in his pocket and called out to a man sweeping the wood floors in front, “Lock it up, Mack. I'm gonna see what the old woman's got for supper. The fun guy here is a cop. But you don't have to talk to him, you don't want.” Then he spat his chewing gum neatly into a trash bag and clanged through a metal door into the back alley. I went through the door after him. He began to walk rapidly toward his car, his keys ringing in the pocket of his camouflage trousers. “Hold on, Tommy,” I said. Helen had parked her car by the end of the alley, next to a Dumpster and a stand of banana trees that grew along a brick wall.
She got out of her car with her baton in her hand. “Right there, motherfucker!” she said, breaking into a run. “Freeze! Did you hear me? I said freeze, goddamn it!” But Tommy Carrol was not a good listener and tried to make his automobile. She whipped the baton behind his knee, and his leg folded under him as though she had severed a tendon. He crashed into the side of his car door, his knee held up before him with both hands, his mouth open as though he were trying to blow the fire out of a burn. “Damn it, Helen,” I said between my teeth. “He shouldn't have run,” she said. “Right, Tommy? You got nothing to hide, you don't need to run. Tell me I'm right, Tommy.”
“Lay off him, Helen. I mean it.” I helped him up by one arm, opened his car door, and sat him down in the seat. An elderly black woman, pulling a child's wagon, with a blue rag tired around her head, came off the side street and began rooting in the Dumpster. “I'm going to file charges on you people,” Tommy said. “That's your right. Who's the short guy, Tommy?” I said. “You know what? I'm gonna tell you. It's Emile Pogue. Send the mutt here after him. She'll make a great stuffed head.” I heard Helen move behind me, gravel scrape under her shoes. “No,” I said, and held up my hand in front of her.
Tommy kneaded the back of his leg with both hands. A thick blue vein pulsed in his shaved scalp.
“Here's something else to take with you, too,” he said. “Emile didn't work for Idi Amin. Emile trained him at an Israeli jump school. You jack-offs don't have any idea of what you're fooling with, do you?”
Monday morning I went to the Iberia Parish Court House and began researching the records on the Bertrand plantation out by Cade. Bertie Fontenot maintained that Moleen Bertrand's grandfather had given a strip of land to several black tenants, her ancestors included, ninety-five years ago, but I could find no record of the transfer.
Neither could the clerk of court. The early surveys of the Bertrand property were crude, in French arpents, and made use of coulees and dirt roads as boundaries; the last survey had been done ten years ago for an oil company, and the legal descriptions were clear and the unit designations now in acres. But no matter-there had been no apparent subdivision of the plantation granting Bertie and her neighbors title to the land on which they lived.
The secretary at Moleen's law office told me he had gone out to the country club to join his wife for lunch. I found them by the putting green, he on a wood bench, only enough bourbon in his glass to stain the water the color of oak, she in a short white pleated skirt and magenta blouse that crinkled with light, her bleached hair and deeply tanned and lined face a deceptive and electric illusion of middle-aged health down in the Sunbelt.
For Julia Bertrand was at the club every day, played a mean eighteen as well as game of bridge, was always charming, and was often the only woman remaining among the male crowd who stayed at the bar through supper time. Her capacity was awesome; she never slurred her words or used profane or coarse language; but her driver's license had been suspended twice, and years ago, before I was with the sheriff's department, a Negro child had been killed in a hit-and-run accident out in the parish. Julia Bertrand had been held briefly in custody. But later a witness changed his story, and the parents dropped charges and moved out of state.
She bent over the ball, the breeze ruffling her pleated skirt against her muscular thighs, and putted a ten-footer, plunk, neatly into the cup. From the wood bench she picked up her drink, which was filled with fruit and shaved ice and wrapped with a paper napkin and rubber band, and walked toward me with her hand extended. Her smile was dazzling, her tinted contacts a chemical blue-green.
“How are you, Dave? I hope we're not in trouble,” she said. Her voice was husky and playful, her breath heavy with nicotine.
“Not with me. How you doing, Julia?”
“I'm afraid Dave's doing pro bono for Bertie Fontenot,” Moleen said.
“Dave, not really?” she said.
“It's gone a little bit beyond that,” I said. “Some peculiar things seem to be happening out at your plantation, Moleen.”
“Oh?” he said.
“I went jogging on your place Friday night. I hope you don't mind.”
“Anytime,” he said.
“Somebody dropped a rusted leg iron on my truck seat.”
“A leg iron? Well, that's interesting, isn't it?” Moleen said, and drank from his glass. His long legs were crossed, his eyes impossible to read behind his sunglasses.
“Somebody was running a dozer blade through that grove of gum trees at the end of Bertie Fontenot's lane. It looks to me like there might have been some old graves in there.”
“I'm not quite sure what you're telling me or why, but I can tell you, with some degree of certainty, what was in there. My great grandfather leased convicts as laborers after the Civil War. Supposedly there was a prison stockade right where those gum trees are today.”
“No kidding?” I said.
“A bad chapter in the family history, I'm afraid.”
“Oh, it was not. You liberals love collective guilt,” Julia said.
“Why would somebody want to put a leg iron in my truck?”