I 64
single steel-jacketed round he squeezes off splinters through the tabletop and felt cover and enters Wirtz's chin as though a red hole were punched there with a cold chisel. Wirtz stumbles through the washroom door, a crushed fedora squeezed against the wound, his mouth a scarlet flower that wishes to beg for help or mercy or perhaps even forgiveness but that can only make unintelligible sounds that seem to have no human correspondent. “He curls into a ball behind the toilet tank, his knees drawn up in front of him, his eyes pleading, his hands trembling on the fedora. Luke pulls the trigger and the hammer snaps dryly on a defective cartridge. This time he cocks the hammer, feels the spring and cylinder and cogs lock into place, but the rage has gone, like a bird with hooked talons that has suddenly freed itself from its own prey and flown away, and he drops the pistol in the toilet bowl and walks into the larger room and the collective stare of people who realize they never really knew Luke Fontenot. But the man he leaves behind closes and opens his eyes one more time, then expels a red bubble of saliva from his mouth and stares sightlessly at an obscene word scrawled in pencil on the wall. ”What happened to Wirtz's gun?“ I said. ”Moleen found witnesses who saw Wirtz pull a gun.“
”Mr. Moleen got money. You got money, you find anybody, anything you need.“
”I see,“ I said. It was starting to sprinkle on the bayou. A mother opened an umbrella over her child, and the two of them ran for the cover of the trees. ”You mentioned a baby,“ I said. ”I done tole you, he ain't want it.“ Then his face became indescribably sad, unmasked, devoid of any defense or agenda. ”What they call that, 'trimester,“ yeah, that's it, third trimester, she went did it wit'
some man in Beaumont, cut up the baby inside her, cut her up, leave her walking on a cane, leave her with that baby crying in her head.” He cleaned off his place and walked in the rain toward his car.
Chapter 17
LUKE DROPPED me off at the department, I found a phone message from Clete Purcel in my mailbox. I called him at his office in New Orleans.
“You still got Marsallus in the bag?” he said. “Yeah, he's on a hunger strike now.”
“The word's out Johnny Carp doesn't want anybody writing his bond.”
“I was right, then. Johnny's been after him from the jump.”
“He's probably already got somebody inside, or he'll get a local guy to bail him out. Any way you cut it, I think Sonny's floated into deep shit.”
“How do you figure Johnny's stake?” I said. “Something to do with money. I hear his toilet seats are inset with gold pesos. He owned a lot with a thirty-foot Indian mound on it and sold it for landfill. It's a great life, isn't it, mon?” Later, I gazed through the window at a rainbow arching across the sky into a bank of steel-colored clouds that were hung with wisps of rain. Sonny Boy was trussed and tagged and on the conveyor belt, like a pig about to be gutted, and the man who had kicked the machinery into gear was a police officer.
I crumpled up a letter inviting me to speak to the Rotary Club and threw it against the wall.
Moleen's law office was in a refurbished white-columned Victorian home, shaded by oaks, down the street from the Shadows on East Main.
I had to wait a half hour to see him. When the door opened, rather, when it burst back on its hinges, Julia Bertrand came through it as though she were emerging from the dry heat of a bake oven.
“Why, Dave,” she said, her makeup stretching on her features as though it had been painted there by a blind man. “It's so appropriate for you to be here. You fellows can kick the war around. Moleen has all this guilt but he never got to kill anybody. How unfair of the gods.”
She brushed past me before I could answer.
I picked up the paper bag by my feet and closed Moleen's office door behind me. He sat behind a huge, dark red oak desk, his knitted brown tie pulled loose at the throat. His face was flushed, as though he had a fever.
“How's life, Moleen?”
“What do you want?”
“She's still in jail.”
He bit his thumbnail.
“Moleen?”
“I can't do anything.”
“She lives on your plantation. Bail her out. Nobody'll question your motivation.”
“Where the hell do you get off talking to me like that?” he said.
I sat down without being asked. I set the paper bag containing the leg iron on his desk. The manacle yawned out of the bag like a rusty mouth.
“Luke owned up to putting this in my truck. He said he doesn't care if I tell you about it or not.”
“I think you should see a therapist. I don't mean that unkindly, either,” he said.
“Luke's pretty sharp for a guy who didn't finish high school. He read a story in a magazine about a construction site that was shut down because there was an Indian mound on it. He thought he'd given me the means to put you out of business, whatever it is.”