I stood up to leave. His attention was concentrated on finding another target for his rubber band and paper clip.
"Does a white Corvette with the letters ELK on the door bring any of your clientele to mind?" I said.
"Were these the guys out at your place?" His eyes still avoided me.
"Yes."
"How should I know? We're lucky to keep tabs on two or three of these assholes." He was looking straight at me now, his eyes flat, the skin of his face tight. "Maybe it's somebody you sold some bad fish to."
I walked outside in the sunshine and the wind blowing through the mimosa trees on the lawn. A Negro gardener was sprinkling the flower beds and the freshly cut grass with a hose, and I could smell the damp earth and the green clippings that were raked in piles under the trees. I looked back up at the office window of Minos P. Dautrieve. I opened and closed my hands and took a breath and felt the anger go out of my chest.
Well, you asked for it, I told myself. Why poke a stick at a man who's already in a cage? He probably gets one conviction out of ten arrests, spends half his time with his butt in a bureaucratic paper shredder, and on a good day negotiates a one-to-three possessions plea on a dealer who's probably robbed hundreds of people of their souls.
Just as I was pulling out into the traffic, I saw him come out of the building waving his arm at me. He was almost hit by a car crossing the street.
"Park it a minute. You want a snowcone? It's on me," he said.
"I have to get back to work."
"Park it," he said, and bought two snowcones from a Negro boy who operated a stand under an umbrella on the corner. He got in the passenger side of my truck, almost losing the door on a passing car whose horn reverberated down the street, and handed me one of the snowcones.
"Maybe the Corvette is Eddie Keats's," he said. "He used to run a nickel-and-dime book in Brooklyn. Now he's a Sunbelter, he likes our climate so much. He lives here part of the time, part of the time in New Orleans. He's got a couple of bars, a few whores working for him, and he thinks he's a big button man. Is there any reason for a guy like that to be hanging around your place?"
"You got me. I never heard of him."
"Try this—Eddie Keats likes to do favors for important people. He jobs out for Bubba Rocque sometimes, for free or whatever Bubba wants to give him. He's that kind of swell guy. We heard he set fire to one of Bubba's hookers in New Orleans."
He stopped and looked at me curiously.
"What's the matter? You never got a case like that in homicide?" he said. "You know how their pimps keep them down on the farm."
"I talked to a stripper in New Orleans about Johnny Dartez. She told me he worked for Bubba Rocque. I've got a bad feeling about her."
"This disturbs me."
"What?"
"I'm serious when I warn you about fooling around in a federal investigation."
"Listen, I reported four dead people in that plane. The wire service was told there were only three. That suggests that maybe I was drunk or that I'm a dumb shit or maybe both."
"All right, for right now forget all that. We can pick her up and give her protective custody, if that's what you want."
"That's not her style."
"Getting the shit kicked out of her is?"
"She's an alcoholic and an addict. She'd rather eat a bowl of spiders than disconnect from her source."
"Okay, if you see that car around your place again, you call us. We handle it. You're not a player, you understand?"
"I don't intend to be one."
"Watch your ass, Robicheaux," he said. "If I see your name in the paper again, it had better be in the fishing news."
I crossed the Vermilion River and took the old two-lane road through Broussard to New Iberia. At almost exactly three o'clock it started to rain. I watched it move in a gray, lighted sheet out of the south, the shadows racing ahead of the clouds as the first drops clicked across the new sugarcane and then clattered on the abandoned tin sugar factory outside of Broussard. In the middle of the shower, shafts of
sunlight cut through the clouds like the depictions of spiritual grace on a child's holy card. When the sun shone through the rain my father used to say, "That how God tell you it ain't for long, Him."