"You have some information for me, Bob?"
"Maybe. Galveston is where I started out. I'm having a couple of drinks in Broussard. Hey, guys like us were the real cops, weren't we?"
No, we weren't, I thought. But I had learned long ago not to argue with those who need to revise the past.
I drove on the old Lafayette highway to the little town of Broussard, crossed the train tracks, and parked in front of a low-roofed bar whose cracked windows were held together with silver tape and framed with Christmas tree lights. The interior was dark, the air refrigerated, the cigarette smoke curling through an exhaust fan in back. Bad Texas Bob was at the bar, hunkered over a shot glass and draft beer, wearing a gray suit, string tie, cowboy boots, and a short-brim Stetson canted on the side of his head.
He wore expensive jewelry, smoked gold-tipped, lavender cigarettes, and tried to affect an aura of contentment and prosperity. But the years had not been kind to Bob. His teeth were as long as a horse's, his face emaciated, the backs of his hands brown with liver spots. Bad Texas Bob was the nightmare that every cop fears he might become.
"You still in the Dr Pepper club?" he said.
"No other place will have me. How you been doing, Bob?"
"I do a little consulting work. I work part-time at the casino in Lake Charles. Billy Joe Pitts says you were interested in a whore by the name of —" He snapped his fingers at the air.
"Ida Durbin," I said.
He tossed back his whiskey and chased it with the draft beer, then wiped the salt from the beer glass off his mouth. "Yeah, that was her name. I knew her. What do you want to know?"
His eyes were level with mine — watery, iniquitous, harboring thoughts or memories of a kind you never want to guess at, the skin at the corners as wrinkled as a turtle's.
"What happened to her, Bob?" I said.
"Nothing, as far as I know. People who run cathouses don't kill their whores, if that's what you were thinking."
He pointed for the bartender to refill his shot glass. He seemed t
o be disconnected from our conversation now, but when I glanced at the bar mirror I saw his eyes looking back at me. "She had sandy hair, nice-looking, tall gal? I remember her. Didn't nothing happen to her. I would have knowed about it," he said.
But Bob's confidence level had slipped and he was talking too fast.
"Her pimp was named Lou Kale. Remember a lowlife by that name?" I said.
"I never worked Vice. I just used to see this little gal around the island, is all."
But I remembered another story connected to Bob and some of his colleagues, one I had always hoped was exaggerated or apocryphal, in the same way you hope that stories about pedophilia among the clergy or financial corruption in your own family are untrue.
A notorious Baton Rouge madam by the name of Vicki Rochon used to run a house specializing in oral sex. A fundamentalist Christian group was about to close her down when the local cops offered her a deal: Vicki and her girls could take a vacation in Panama City, then return to town in a couple of months and their business would not be interrupted again. No money was involved. Vicki became an invaluable snitch and personally provided free ones for the cops. As a bonus, her son, who was doing hard time in Angola's Camp J, was transferred to an honor farm. Bad Texas Bob became one of Vicki's most ardent free patrons.
"Thanks for passing on the information, Bob. But if I were you, I'd let your friend Pitts drown in his own shit. He's on a pad for the Chalons family. Did you know that?" I said.
"I was trying to do you a favor, for old times' sake. Screw Pitts." Bob knocked back his whiskey and drew in on his cigarette, the whites of his eyes threaded with tiny veins.
"Let me buy you a round," I said.
"I'm covered."
"See you around, partner," I said.
"You might think I'm pulling your joint, but I remember a Galveston whore by the name of Ida Whatever. She played a fiddle. No, that wasn't it. She played a mandolin. Played the fire out of it."
"Say that again?"
But he had nothing to add. Bad Texas Bob had outsmarted me. Like all corrupt people, he had wrapped a piece of truth inside a lie. To try to discern the fact from the lie was to empower the agenda of a classical manipulator, I told myself. I left Bob to his booze in Broussard, wondering if I had just revisited my alcoholic past or seen my future.
chapter NINE
The coroner, Koko Hebert, was waiting for me when I got to work Thursday morning. He dropped his great weight down ponderously in a chair and fanned his face with his hat. His skin was flushed, his beachball of a stomach rising up and down as he breathed. A package of cigarettes protruded from his shirt pocket. He was probably the most unhealthy-looking human specimen I had ever seen. "How's life, Koko?" I said.