"This ain't the way."
"It's a nice day for a drive."
I saw the recognition come together in Dock's face.
"You're trying to piss on my shoes. You know my wife's out at Karyn LaRose's," he said.
"I've got to check something out, Dock. It doesn't have anything to do with you."
"Fuck that and fuck you. I don't like them people. I ain't going on their property."
I pulled off on the shoulder of the road by the LaRoses' drive. Dust was billowing out of the fields in back, and the house looked pillared and white and massive against the gray sky.
"Why not?" I asked.
"I got to do business with hypocrites, it don't mean we got to use the same toilet. Hey, you don't think they got shit stripes in their underwear? They got dead people in the ground here."
"You're talking about the cemetery in back?"
"I ain't got to see a headstone to smell a grave. There's one by that tree over there. There's another one down by the water. A kid's in it."
"You know about a murder?"
But he didn't get to answer. A shudder went through him and he sank back into the seat and began to speak unintelligibly, his lips wrinkling back on his teeth as though all of his motors were misfiring, obscenity and spittle rolling off his tongu
e.
I put the transmission in gear and turned into the drive.
"You going to make it, Dock?" I said.
His breath was as dense as sewer gas. He pressed his palm wetly against his mouth.
"Hang loose, babe," I said, and walked through the drive and the porte cochere into the backyard, where a state trooper in sunglasses was eating a bowl of ice cream in a canvas lawn chair.
I opened my badge.
"I'd like to check the stables," I said.
"What for?"
I averted my gaze, stuck my badge holder in my back pocket.
"It's just a funny feeling I have about Crown," I answered.
"Help yourself."
I climbed through the rails of the horse lot and entered the open end of the old brick smithy that had been converted into a stable. The iron shutters on the arched windows were closed, and motes of dust floated in the pale bands of light as thickly as lint in a textile mill. The air was warm and sour-sweet with the smells of leather, blankets stiff with horse sweat, chickens that wandered in from outside, the dampness under the plank floors, fresh hay scattered in the stalls, a wheelbarrow stacked with manure, a barrel of dried molasses-and-grain balls.
I went inside the tack room at the far end of the building. Buford's saddles were hung on collapsible two-by-fours that extended outward on screwhooks from the wall. The English saddles were plain, utilitarian, the leather unmarked by the maker's knife. But on the western saddles, with pommels as wide as bulls' snouts, the cantles and flaps and skirts were carved with roses and birds and snakes, and in the back of each cantle was a mother-of-pearl inlay of an opened camellia.
But the man named Arana had said the bugarron rode a silver saddle, and there was none here.
"What you looking for in the tack room, Detective Robicheaux?" the trooper said behind me. He leaned against the doorjamb, his arms folded, his expression masked behind his shades. He wore a campaign hat tilted over his eyes, like a D.I.'s, with the leather strap on the back of his head.
"You never can tell what you might trip across."
"Somehow that don't ring right."