"Mrs. Rocque, I wish you good luck because I think you're going to need it."
"I heard him offer you a job. You should take it. The people that work for him make a lot of money."
"Yes, they do, and there's a big cost to lots of other people."
"He doesn't make them do anything they don't already want to."
"Your mother ran brothels, but she wasn't a white-slaver and she didn't sell dope. The most polite thing I can say about Bubba is that he's a genuine sonofabitch. I don't even think he'd mind."
"I like you. Come have dinner with us sometime," she said. "I'm home a lot."
I drove back down the pea-gravel lane and headed toward New Iberia and the picnic in the park with Annie and Alafair. The sun was bright on the tin roofs of the barns set back in the sugarcane fields. The few moss-hung oaks along the road made deep pools of shadow on the road's surface. I had to feel sorry for Bubba's wife. In AA we called it denial. We take the asp to our breast and smile at the alarm we see in the eyes of others.
I had gotten to him when I mentioned Immigration busting two of his mules. Which made me wonder even more what role Immigration played in all of this. They had obviously stonewalled Minos Dautrieve at the DEA, and I believed they were behind the disappearance of Johnny Dartez's body after it was recovered from the plane crash by the Coast Guard. So if I was any kind of cop at all, why hadn't I dealt with Immigration head-on? They probably would have thrown me out of their office, but I also knew how to annoy bureaucrats, call their supervisors in Washington collect, and file freedom-of-information forms on them until their paint started to crack. So why hadn't I done it, I asked myself. And in answering my own question, I began to have a realisation about presumption and denial in myself.
* * *
5
ANNIE AND ALAFAIR were wrapping fried chicken in wax paper and fixing lemonade in a thermos when I got back home. I sat at the kitchen table with a glass of iced tea and mint leaves and looked out the window at the blue jays swooping over the mimosa tree in the backyard. The ducks in my pond were shaking water off their backs and waddling onto the bank in the shade created by the cattails.
"I feel foolish about something," I said.
"We'll take care of that tonight," she said, and smiled.
"Something else."
"Oh."
"Years ago when I was a patrolman there was a notorious street character in the Quarter named Dock Stratton. The welfare officer would give him a meal-and-lodging ticket at one of their contract hotels, and he'd check into the place, then throw all the furniture out the window—tables, chairs, dresser drawers, lamps, mattresses, everything he could squeeze through the window, it would all come crashing down on the sidewalk. Then he'd run downstairs before anybody could call the heat and haul everything to the secondhand store. But no matter what this guy did, we never busted him. I was new and didn't understand. The other guys told me it was because Dock was a barfer. If he got a finger loose in the back of the car, he'd stick it down his throat and puke all over the seats. He'd do it in a lineup, in a holding cell, in a courtroom. He was always cocked and ready to fire. This guy was so bad a guard at the jail threatened to quit rather than take him on the chain to morning court. So Dock was allowed to drive welfare workers and skid-row hotel managers crazy for years, and when rookies like me asked why, we got treated to a good story.
"Except I discovered there was another reason why Dock stayed on the street. He not only knew every hustler and thief in downtown New Orleans, but he'd been a locksmith before he melted his head with Thunderbird, and he could get into a place faster than a professional house creep. So there were a couple of detectives in robbery and homicide who would use him when things weren't working right in a case. One time they knew a hit man from Miami was in town to take out a labor union agent. They told Dock they were making him a special agent with the New Orleans police department and got him to open up the guy's motel room, steal his gun, his suitcase, all his clothes and traveler's checks, then they picked up the guy on suspicion—it was a Friday, so they could hold him until Monday morning—and kept him in a small cell for two days with three drag queens."
"What's the point?" Annie said. Her voice was flat, and her eyes looked at the sunlight in the trees when she spoke.
"Cops leave certain things and people in place for a reason."
"I know these people you talk about are funny and unusual and interesting and all that, Dave, but why not leave them in the past?"
"You remember that guy from Immigration that came around here? He's never been back to the house, has he? He could make a lot of trouble for us if he wanted to, but he hasn't. I told myself that was because I'd given him reason to avoid us."
"Maybe he has other things to do. I just don't think the government is going to be interested in one little girl." She wore a pair of wash-faded Levi's and a white sun halter, and I could see the brown spray of sun freckles on her back. Her hips creased softly above her belt line while she filled the picnic hamper at the drainboard.
"The government is interested in what they choose to be interested in," I said. "Right now I think they've got us on hold. They sent me a signal, but I didn't see it."
"To tell you honestly, this sounds like something of your own creation."
"That guy from Immigration, Monroe, was asking questions about us at the sheriff's office. He didn't need to do that. He could have cut a warrant, come out here, and done anything he wanted. Instead, he or somebody above him wanted me to know their potential in case I thought I could make problems for them about Johnny Dartez."
"Who cares what they do?" Annie said.
"I don't think you appreciate the nature of bureaucratic machinery once it's set in motion."
"I'm sorry. I'm just not going to invest my life in speculating about what people can do to me."
Alafair was looking back and forth between the two of us, her face clouded with the tone of our voices. Annie had dressed her in pink shorts, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and pink tennis shoes with the words left and right stamped boldly on the rubber tip of each shoe. Annie rubbed her hand over Alafair's head and gave her the plastic draw bag in which we kept the old bread.
"Go feed the ducks," she said. "We'll leave in a minute."