"Who put it in there?"
"Batist said he saw a black man on a bicycle stop out on the road . . . It's on the dining room table."
I went inside and came back out again. My name and address were printed in pencil, in broken letters, on the envelope. Bootsie watched my face while I read the note inside.
"It's from him, isn't it?"
I lay the sheet of Big Chief notebook paper on the picnic table so she could read it.
I killed the two blak boys in the tool bin cause they wuldnt let me be. But I still aint to blame for the first one. Tell that bucket of shit done me all this grief he aint going make Baton Rouge. You was good to me. So don't be standing betwix me and a man that is about to burn in hell wich is where he shud have been sent a long time ago.
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Yours truly,
Aaron Jefferson Crown
"He uses a funny phrase. He's says he 'ain't to blame' rather than 'innocent,'" I said.
"He probably can't spell the word."
"No, I remember, he always said 'I ain't did it.'"
"Forget the linguistics, Dave. Pay attention to the last sentence. I'm not going to let you take one for Buford LaRose."
"It's not going to happen."
"You've got that right. I'm going to have a talk with our friend Karyn."
"Don't complicate it, Boots."
"She's a big girl. She can handle it."
"When the sheriff wants me off, he'll pull me off."
"Nice Freudian choice, Streak. Because that's what she's doing— fucking this whole family."
I still had a half hour before I had to drive to the Hotel Acadiana on the Vermilion River, where Buford and Karyn were being hosted by a builders association. I sat at the picnic table and took apart my 1911 model U.S. Army .45 automatic that I had bought for twenty-five dollars in Saigon's Bring Cash Alley. It felt cool and heavy in my hand, and my fingers left delicate prints in the thin film of oil on the blueing. I ran the bore brush through the barrel, wiped the breech and the outside of the slide free of the burnt powder left from my last visit to the practice range, slid each hollow-point round out of the magazine, oiled the spring, then replaced them one at a time until the eighth round snugged tight under my thumb.
But guns and the sublimated fantasies that went along with cleaning them were facile alternatives for thinking through complexities. The main problem with this case lay in the fact that many of the players were not professional criminals.
Sabelle's story was not an unusual one. In small southern towns, since antebellum times, the haves and the have-nots may have either despised or feared one another in daylight, but at night both sexual need and the imperious urge had a way of dissolving the social differences that were so easily defined in the morning hours.
I say it wasn't an exceptional story. But that doesn't mean it is any less an indicator of the people we were. I just didn't know if it had a bearing on the case.
He had never really noticed her at New Iberia High. She had been one grade behind him, one of those girls who wore a homemade tattoo on her hand and clothes from the dry goods section of the five-and-dime and trailed rumors behind her that were too outrageous to be believed. She was arrested for shoplifting, then she left school in the eleventh grade and became a waitress in the drive-in and bowling alley at the end of East Main. The summer of his graduation he had gone to the drive-in for beers in his metallic green Ford convertible with three other ballplayers after an American Legion game. He was unshowered, his face flushed with victory and the pink magic of the evening, his uniform grass stained, his spikes clicking on the gravel when he walked to the service window and saw her wiping the moisture off a long-necked Jax with her cupped hand.
She leaned over the beer box and smiled and looked into his eyes and at the grin at the corner of his mouth and knew that he would be back later.
He drove his friends home and bathed and changed clothes and sat at one of the plank tables under the live oaks and drank beer and listened to the music that was piped from the jukebox into loudspeakers nailed in the tree limbs, until she finally walked out in the humid glare of the electric lights at midnight and got into his car and reached over and blew his horn to say good night to the other waitresses who stood giggling behind the drive-in's glass window. He took no notice of her presumption and seemingly proprietary display; he even grinned good-naturedly. No one else was in the lot except an elderly Negro picking up trash and stuffing it in a gunny sack.
They did it the first time on a back road by Lake Martin, in the way that she expected him to, on the backseat, the door open, his pants and belt around his ankles, his body trembling and awkward with his passion, his jaws already going slack and his voice a weak and hoarse whisper before he had fully penetrated her.
Three nights later he went by her home, the Montgomery Ward brick house on the coulee, and convinced her to call in sick at work. This time they drove down the Teche toward Jeanerette and did it in the caretaker's cottage of a plantation built on the bayou by West Indies slaves in 1790, which Buford's father had bought not because of its iron-scrolled verandas or oak-canopied circular drive or wisteria-entwined gazebos or the minie balls drilled in its window frames by Yankee soldiers but simply as a transitory real estate investment for which he wrote a check.
As the summer passed, Buford and Sabelle's late-night routine became almost like that of an ordinary young couple who went steady or who were engaged or whose passion was so obviously pure in its heat and intensity that the discrepancy in their family backgrounds seemed irrelevant.
In her mind the summer had become a song that would have no end. She looked at calendar dates only as they indicated the span of her periods. The inept boy who had trembled on top of her that first night by Lake Martin, and who had sat ashamed in the dark later, his pants still unbuttoned over his undershorts while she held his hand and assured him that it had been a fine moment for her, had gradually transformed into a confident lover, realizing with the exhalation of her breath, the touch of her hands in certain places, the motion of her hips, what gave her the most pleasure, until finally he knew all the right things to do, without being told, and could make her come before he did and then a second time with him.