Helen's face blanched. She started to speak, but I placed my hand on her shoulder. Her muscles felt like a bag of rocks. We watched Koko Hebert walk toward an ambulance, its emergency flashers blinking. It was hot and breathless inside the trees, and the air smelled of stagnant water and leaves that had turned black in damp shade.
"Blow him off. He's an unhappy fat man who tries to make other people as miserable as he is," I said.
She slapped a mosquito on her cheek and looked at the smear of blood on her hand. The paramedics lifted the body heavily out of the water, their latex-gloved hands sinking deep into the tissue. "Wrap it up for me, Pops?" Helen said.
"Sure. You okay?" I said.
"I will be after a hot bath and four inches of Jack Daniel's. It's God's compensation for giving me this fucking job," she said, then grimaced at her own remark.
"Drink two inches of it for me," I said.
She hit me on the arm with the flat of her fist and walked to her cruiser., her eyes sliding off the face of the coroner.
It was dark by the time the crime scene investigators finished their work. A wind came up and blew the mosquitoes out of the trees, and I could see heat lightning in the clouds over the Gulf and smell distant rain. I thought about four inches of Jack on ice, with a sprig of mint bruised inside the glass. I rubbed my mouth and swallowed dryly. Then I said good night to the other personnel at the scene and got back in my truck.
Just in time to see a television news van rumble down the road and stop squarely in front of me, its headlights burning into my eyes. The first figure out of the van was none other than Valentine Chalons, the one certifiable celebrity in the Chalons family, the same people who owned cotton, sugar cane, oil, and timber interests all over Louisiana and East Texas, including the parish where my former college friend, Troy Bordelon, had lived.
Valentine could have descended from Vikings rather than the chivalric Norman French ancestry his family claimed for themselves. He was tall, athletic-looking, and blue-eyed, with a bladed face and hair that had turned silver on the tips in his late thirties. Unlike the rest of the Chalons family, his views were ostensibly populist or libertarian, although I sensed that inside his populism was the soul of a snob.
He had studied journalism at the University of Missouri, then had worked as a stringer and feature writer for the Associated Press before taking a news anchor position with a television station in New Orleans. But Valentine Chalons's stops on the ladder of success were always temporary, and nobody doubted that he considered ambition a virtue rather than a vice.
Before the 9/11 attacks, he actually interviewed Osama bin Laden high up in the mountains on the Pakistan border. After hiking three days through burning moonscape and razor-edged rocks, Valentine and an interpreter finally trudged up a path to a cave opening, where the man who would help orchestrate the murder of almost three thousand people stood waiting for him, his robes swirling in the wind. According to what had become a folk legend among newsmen, the first words out of Val's mouth were: "Why don't you build a decent driveway Jack?"
Now he owned a television station in Lafayette and one in Shreveport and was an editorial contributor on a national cable network. But regardless of his acquisitions, Val remained a hands-on journalist and took great pleasure in covering a story himself as well as immersing himself in the fray.
"You're too late, podna," I said.
"That's what you think. I got a shot inside the ambulance at the intersection," he replied. He motioned to his cameramen, who flooded the pond and the trees with light. One of them accidentally snapped the yellow crime scene tape that was wrapped around a pine trunk.
"You guys step back," I said.
"Sorry," the offending cameraman said.
But Val didn't miss a beat. He extended his microphone in front of my face. "Does the victim have a name yet?" he said.
"No," I replied.
But he slogged on, undeterred, and repeated the question, using the name of the missing DEQ official's wife.
"Cut the bullshit, Val. You want information, talk to the sheriff," I said.
He lowered the mike. "How you been?" he said.
"Great." I slipped my hands into my back pockets and took a step closer to him, maybe because his aggressive manner had given me license I wouldn't have had otherwise. "Did you know a guy by the name of Troy Bordelon?"
"No, I don't think so. Who is he?"
"A dead guy who worked for your family."
"A dead guy?"
"He gave me a deathbed statement about the disappearance of a prostitute named Ida Durbin. I think she was killed." I held my eyes on his.
"I'm listening," he said.
"A couple of rogue cops paid me a visit. Their names are J. W. Shockly and Billy Joe Pitts. These guys seemed worried about what Troy might have told me. Their names ring a bell?"
"Nope." He looked idly at one of his cameramen who was filming the pond and the drag marks where the paramedics had pulled the body out of the water.