political, either, at least not to my knowledge. So what was the motivation, I asked myself. In homicide cases, it's almost always money, sex, or power. Which applied in the case of Aaron Crown?
"Whatcha thinking about, Dave?" Alafair asked.
"When I was a young cop in New Orleans, I was home on vacation and Aaron Crown came to the house and said his daughter was lost out here in a boat. Nobody would go after her because she was fourteen and had a reputation for running off and smoking dope and doing other kinds of things, you with me?"
She looked at her bobber floating between the pilings.
"So I found her. She wasn't lost, though. She was in a houseboat, right across the bay there, with a couple of men. I never told Aaron what she had been doing. But I think he knew."
"You believe he's innocent?"
"Probably not. It's just one of those strange deals, Alf. The guy loved his daughter, which means he has emotions and affections like the rest of us. That's something we don't like to think about when we assign a person the role of assassin and community geek."
She thought the word geek was funny and snorted through her nose.
It started to sprinkle, and we hung raincoats over our heads like cloistered monks and pulled sac-a-lait out of the pilings until mid-morning, then layered them with crushed ice in the cooler and headed for home just as a squall churned out of the south like smoke twisting inside a bottle.
We gutted and half-mooned the fish at the gills and scaled them with spoons under the canvas tarp on the dock. Batist, the black man who worked for me, came out of the bait shop with an unlit cigar stuck in his jaw. He let the screen slam behind him. He was bald and wore bell-bottomed blue jeans and a white T-shirt that looked like rotted cheesecloth on his barrel chest.
"There's a guard from the prison farm inside," he said.
"What's he want?" I said.
"I ain't axed. Whatever it is, it don't have nothing to do with spending money. Dave, we got to have these kind in our shop?"
Oh boy, I thought.
I went inside and saw the old-time gunbull from the lockdown unit I had visited at Angola just yesterday. He was seated at a back table by the lunch meat cooler, his back stiff, his profile carved out of teak.
He wore a fresh khaki shirt and trousers, a hand-tooled belt, a white straw hat slanted over his forehead. His walking cane, whose point was sheathed in a six-inch steel tube, the kind road gang hacks used to carry, was hooked by the handle over the back of his chair. He had purchased a fifty-cent can of soda to drink with the brown paper bag of ginger snaps he had brought with him.
"How's it goin', Cap?" I said.
"Need your opinion on something," he replied. His accent was north Louisiana hill country, the vowels phlegmy and round and deep in the throat, like speech lifted out of the nineteenth century.
His hands, which were dotted with liver spots, shook slightly with palsy. His career reached back into an era when Angola convicts were beaten with the black Betty, stretched out on anthills, locked down in sweatboxes on Camp A, sometimes even murdered by guards on a whim and buried in the Mississippi levee. In the years I had know him I had never seen him smile or heard him mention any form of personal life outside the penitentiary.
"Some movie people is offered me five thousand dollars for a interview about Crown. What do you reckon I ought to do?" he said.
"Take it. What's the harm?"
He bit the edge off a ginger snap.
"I got the feeling they want me to say he don't belong up there on the farm, that maybe the wrong man's in prison."
"I see."
"Something's wrong, ain't it?"
"Sir?"
"White man kills a black man down South, them Hollywood people don't come looking to get the white man off."
"I don't have an answer for you, Cap. Just tell them what you think and forget about it." I looked at the electric clock on the wall above the counter.
"What I think is the sonofabitch's about half-human." My eyes met his. "He's got a stink on him don't wash off. If he ain't killed the NAACP nigger, he done it to somebody else."
He chewed a ginger snap dryly in his jaw, then swallowed it with a small sip of soda, the leathery skin of his face cobwebbed with lines in the gloom.