He looked at me for a beat, considering his words, perhaps already dismissing their value. ”How close are the next-door neighbors?“ he said.
”The next three cells are empty.“
”I did a gig with the DEA, not because they liked me, they just thought my city library card meant I probably had two or three brain cells more than the pipe heads and rag-noses they usually hire for their scut work. Anyway, considering the environment, it's not the kind of press I need, know what I'm saying?“
”Come on, Sonny.“
”Down in the tropics, the cocaine trail always leads back to guns. I met guys who'd been in Laos, the Golden Triangle, guys who'd helped process opium into heroin in Hong Kong. Then I started hearing stories about POWs who'd gotten written off by the government.
“I was carrying this shitload of guilt, so I thought I could trade it off by involving myself with these MIA-POW families. I helped put together this telephone tree, with all kinds of people on it who I didn't even know. I didn't realize some of them were probably ex-intelligence guys who'd been mixed up with these opium growers in Laos. You with me?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said.
“Their consciences bothered them and they started telling the families about what went on over there. I was making out a death list and didn't know it. At least that's the best I can figure it. I burned the Xerox copy. Do the same with the original, Dave, before more people get hurt.”
“Guilt about what?” I said.
“I used people-Indians, peasant girls, people who'd always gotten the dirty end of the stick, anyway.”
He brushed at the top of his bare thigh.
ISO
“We walked into an ambush. I had a flak vest on. Everybody around me got chewed up,” he said. “Sometimes a guy feels guilt when the guy next to him catches the bus. That's just the way it is, Sonny.”
“I was hit twice. When I went down, a half dozen other guys got shredded into horse meat right on top of me. Later, the Indians thought I had religious powers or I was an archangel or something. 11 played it for all it was worth, Streak. Look, my whole life I peddled my ass and ran games on people. Guys like me don't see a burst of light and change their hustle.” He reached under the top of the mattress and took out a jar and unscrewed the cap. The smell was like soft fruit that had been mixed with lighter fluid and left in a sealed container on a radiator.
After he drank from the jar the skin of his face seemed to flex against his skull. “You called me a Judas goat. I have a hard time accepting that, Sonny.”
“Yeah, I don't like this cell too much, either.”
“You think I led you down the slaughter chute?”
“No, not really,” he said. I nodded, but I couldn't look at his face. We both knew that had he not phoned me at the house to warn me about Patsy Dap, he might be riding on a breezy streetcar down St. Charles Avenue. “I'll tell you something else, Dave,” he said. “I've whacked out five guys since I left the tropics. Jack and Pogue's brother were just two knots on the string.”
“You have a peculiar way of expiating your sins.”
“I don't want to hurt your feelings, for a roach you're a stand-up guy, but go write some parking tickets, or shuffle some papers, or take some of the Rotary boys out to supper and let them work your dork under the table.
I'm probably going down for the big bounce. Don't drag your bullshit into my cell, Streak. This is one place where it's truly an insult.”
I hit on the bars with the side of my fist and called for the turnkey to open up. When I looked back at him, the cartilage working in my jaw, he was picking at a callus on his foot. The tattoo of the blue Madonna on his right shoulder, with needles of orange light emanating from it, looked like a painting on polished moonstone. I started to speak again, but he turned his eyes away from me.
Rufus Arceneaux had been a tech sergeant in the Marine Corps at age twenty-three. In the ten years he had been with the department he had gone from uniform to plainclothes and back to uniform again. He was a tall, raw-boned man, with a long nose and blond crewcut hair, whose polished gunbelt and holster fitted against his trim body as though it had been welded there. Rufus wore dark-tinted pilot's sunglasses and seldom smiled, but you always had the sense that his hidden eyes were watching you, taking your inventory, a suppressed sneer tugging at his mouth as soon as your back was turned.
It was Friday morning when Luke Fontenot called and told me his sister, Ruthie Jean, was in jail and that Rufus had been the arresting officer.
I walked down to his office and went inside without knocking. He was talking on the phone, one leg propped across an opened desk drawer. He glanced sideways at me, then returned to his conversation. I waited for him to finish. But he didn't.
His mouth dropped open when I tore the receiver out of his hand and hung it up in the cradle.
“What the hell you think you're doing, Robicheaux?”
“You busted Ruthie Fontenot for procuring?”
“So what?”
“You're intruding in a homicide investigation.”