r short man?”
“No, he wasn’t tall.”
“How about an accent or tattoos?”
She seemed to look into her memory, then she shook her head. “He had tiny pits in his cheeks, like needle holes.”
“This afternoon somebody from the department will bring you a few mug shots. Maybe you can pick this fellow out for us.”
But she wasn’t hearing me. Her face made me think of paper that had been held too close to a heat source. It seemed to have wrinkled from within, as though someone had pinched off a piece of her soul. “Mr. Robicheaux, I’m very sorry I didn’t notify you. Is your raccoon—”
“He’s fine, Miss Ellen. Don’t feel bad about this. You’ve been very helpful.”
“No, I haven’t,” she said. “I should have called your house.”
“I think you’ve already told me who this guy is. You’ve done a good deed here.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“I do.”
“Thank you, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Miss Ellen?”
“Yes?”
“If you see this man again, don’t talk with him. Call me or the sheriff’s department,” I said.
“This man is genuinely wicked, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he is.”
I watched her go back to work in her garden, troweling a hole for a potted caladium, the damp black soil she had created out of coffee grinds and compost sprinkled on her forearms like grains of pepper. But I knew Miss Ellen had not returned to the normalcy that characterized an ordinary day in her life as caretaker of East Main. The lie told her by the man in the canoe had diminished her faith in her fellow man, and if wounds can remain green, this one I suspected was at the top of the list.
On the way back to the house, I saw a tube of roach paste lying inside the bamboo border of my property.
That afternoon, a uniformed deputy showed Miss Ellen a half-dozen booking-room photos. The deputy radioed in that she took all of two seconds to tap her finger on the face of Lefty Raguza.
Why would Raguza commit such a senseless act of cruelty? If you ask any of these guys why they do anything (and by “these guys” I mean those who long ago have stopped any pretense of self-justification), the answer is always the same: “I felt like it.”
I called Joe Dupree, an old friend at the Lafayette P.D. who had transferred from Homicide to the Sex Crimes Unit to Vice. The last helicopter may have lifted off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon in 1975, but thirty years later Joe was still humping a pack on a night trail, an M-60 across his shoulders, his arms spread on the stock and barrel like a man on a cross. He was addicted to speed, booze, bad women, and the conviction that no force on earth could remove his fear of sleep. I had long ago given up trying to help Joe, but I still admired his courage, his integrity as a cop, and the fact that he stacked his own time and didn’t complain about the burden he carried.
“This guy does scut work for Whitey Bruxal?” he said.
“More or less. Maybe he helped take down an armored car in Miami. Two people got killed in the heist. One of them was a friend of mine.”
“Why would he want to poison your coon?”
“Maybe Whitey Bruxal is starting to feel the heat and wants to provoke me into self-destructing. Or maybe it has to do with Clete Purcel. He bounced Raguza around a little bit.”
“I can’t quite visualize ‘bounced.’”
“Clete blew him all over a restroom with a fire hose.”
I heard Joe laugh. “You want me to have a talk with Raguza?”
“That’s like talking to a closetful of clothes moths. I need a serious handle on him, something that can jam him up and leave him with bad choices.”