"Yes." His voice sounded as though someone had just wrapped a strand of piano wire around his throat.
"You all right?" I said.
"Yes, I'm fine, thanks . . . You heard about Crown?" he said.
"A guard at the prison told me."
"Does this give you some idea of his potential?"
"I hear they were cruising for it."
"He broke one guy's neck. He drowned the other one in a barrel of tractor oil," he said.
"I couldn't place your friend this morning. He's Clay Mason, isn't he? What are you doing with him, partner?"
"None of your business."
"That guy was the P. T. Barnum of the acid culture."
"As usual, your conclusions are as wrong as your information."
He hung up the phone. I sat back down at the table.
"You really called Karyn LaRose?" I asked.
"Why? Do you object?" she said.
"No."
She put a piece of chicken in her mouth and looked at me while she chewed. My stare broke.
"I wish I hadn't gone out to see her, Boots."
"He's mixed up with that guru from the sixties?" she said.
"Who knows? The real problem is one nobody cares about."
She waited.
"Aaron Crown had no motivation to kill Ely Dixon. I'm more and more convinced the wrong man's in prison," I said.
"He was in the Klan, Dave."
"They kicked him out. He busted up a couple of them with a wood bench inside a Baptist church."
But why, I thought.
It was a question that only a few people in the Louisiana of the 1990s could answer.
His name was Billy Odom and he ran a junkyard on a stretch of state highway west of Lafayette. Surrounded by a floodplain of emerald green rice fields, the junkyard seemed an almost deliberate eyesore that Billy had lovingly constructed over the decades from rusted and crushed car bodies, mountains of bald tires, and outbuildings festooned with silver hubcaps.
Like Aaron Crown, he was a north Louisiana transplant, surrounded by papists, blacks who could speak French, and a historical momentum that he had not been able to shape or influence or dent in any fashion. His face was as round as a moonpie under his cork sun helmet, split with an incongruous smile that allowed him to hide his thoughts while he probed for the secret meaning that lay in the speech of others. A Confederate flag, almost black with dirt, was nailed among the yellowed calendars on the wall of the shed where he kept his office. He kept licking his lips, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes squinting as though he were staring through smoke.
"A fight in a church? I don't call it to mind," he said.
"You and Aaron were in the same klavern, weren't you?"
His eyes shifted off my face, studied the motes of dust spinning in a shaft of sunlight. He cocked his head philosophically but said nothing.