“No, I wouldn't. But when you sweat people, that's the kind of furnace you kick open in their face, Sheriff. It's just easier when the name's not Bertrand.”
“I don't have anything else to say to you, sir,” he said, and walked out.
Sometimes you get lucky.
In this case it was a call from an elderly Creole man who had been fishing with a treble hook, using a steel bolt for weight and chicken guts for bait, in a slough down by Vermilion Bay.
Helen and I drove atop a levee through a long plain of flooded saw grass and got there ahead of the divers and the medical examiner. It had stopped raining and the sun was high and white in the sky and water was dripping out of the cypress trees the elderly man had been fishing under.
“Where is it?” I asked him.
“All the way across, right past them cattails,” he said. His skin was the color of dusty brick, his turquoise eyes dim with cataracts.
“My line went bump, and I thought I hooked me a gar. I started to yank on it, then I knew it wasn't no gar. That's when I drove back up to the sto' and called y'all.”
His throw line, which was stained dark green with silt and algae, was tied to a cypress knee and stretched across the slough. It had disappeared beneath the surface by a cluster of lily pads and reeds.
Helen squatted down and hooked her index finger under it to feel the tension. The line was snagged on an object that was tugging in the current by the slough's mouth.
“Tell us again what you saw,” she said.
“I done tole the man answered the phone,” he said. “It come up out of the water. It liked to made my heart stop.”
“You saw a hand?” I said.
“I didn't say that. It looked like a flipper. Or the foot on a big gator. But it wasn't no gator,” he said.
“You didn't walk over
to the other side?” Helen said.
“I ain't lost nothing there,” he said.
“A flipper?” I said.
“It was like a stub, it didn't have no fingers, how else I'm gonna say it to y'all?” he said.
Helen and I walked around the end of the slough and back down the far side to the opening that gave onto a canal. The current in the canal was flowing southward into the bay as the tide went out. The sun's heat rose like steam from the water's surface and smelled of stagnant mud and dead vegetation.
Helen shoved a stick into the lily pads and moved something soft under it. A cloud of mud mushroomed to the surface. She poked the stick into the mud again, and this time she retrieved a taut web of monofilament fishing line that was looped through a corroded yellow chunk of pipe casing. She let it slide off the stick into the water again. Then an oval pie of wrinkled skin rolled against the surface and disappeared.
“Why do we always get the floaters?” she said.
“People here throw everything else in the water,” I said.
“You ever see a shrink?”
“Not in a while, anyway,” I said. In the distance I could see two emergency vehicles and a TV news van coming down the levee. “I went to one in New Orleans. I was ready for him to ask me about my father playing with his weenie in front of the kids.
Instead, he asked me why I wanted to be a homicide detective. I told him it's us against the bad guys, I want to make a difference, it bothers me when I pull a child's body out of a sewer pipe after a sex predator has gotten through with him. All the while he's smiling at me, with this face that looks like bread pudding with raisins all over it. I go, ”Look, Doc, the bad guys torture and rape and kill innocent people. If we don't send them in for fifty or seventy-five or ship them off for the Big Sleep, they come back for encores.“
”He keeps smiling at me. I go, “The truth is I got tired of being a meter maid.”
He thought that was pretty funny.“ I waited for her to go on. ”That's the end of the story. I never went back,“ she said. ”Why not?“
”You know why.“
”It still beats selling shoes,“ I said. She combed her hair with a comb from the back pocket of her Levi's. Her breasts stood out against her shirt like softballs. ”Fix your tie, cutie. You're about to be geek of the week on the evening news,“ she said. ”Helen, would you please stop that?“