Sleeping with a .45 did not bring Audie Murphy peace of mind, nor did gambling away millions in Las Vegas. I had slept with firearms, too, and invested substantial sums of money in the parimutuel industry at racetracks all over the country, but I was no more successful in my attempt at redress with the world than he was. That said, I did have an answer for insomnia, one that was surefire and one that Murphy evidently did not try. But just the thought of its coming back into my life made sweat pop on my forehead.
When I went to the office in the morning a faxed message was waiting for me from the Department of Public Safety and Corrections in Baton Rouge. Since there was no record of Junior Crudup's discharge from Angola or his death while on the farm, it was the department contention he had served his full sentence and gone out "max time," which meant he would have been released without parole stipulations or supervision sometime in 1958.
It was pure blather.
I called Father Jimmie Dolan at his rectory in New Orleans and was told he was working in the garden. Fat Sammy had said Father Jimmie was a global-size pain in the ass. The archdiocese must have felt the same. He had been assigned to an ancient, downtown church in a dirty, dilapidated neighborhood off Canal, where Mass was still said in Latin, women in the pews covered their heads, and communicants knelt at the altar rail when they received the Eucharist, as though the 1960s reforms of Vatican II had never taken place.
Last year, when I remarked to Father Jimmie on the obvious bad judgment if not pun
itive intention on the part of the diocese in placing a minister such as himself in a parish with an anachronistic mindset, he replied, "Some people can't accept change. So the church lets a few wall themselves up in a mausoleum and pretend the past is still alive. Know anybody else who has that kind of problem?"
"Excuse me?" I said.
"They're not bad guys," he said, grinning from ear to ear.
My mind came back to the present and I heard Father Jimmie scrape the phone receiver off a hard surface.
"Fat Sammy Figorelli says you punched out the owner of a health salon," I said.
"Not exactly."
"How 'not exactly'?"
"The guy we're talking about runs a massage parlor and escort service. He forced a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese girl from our parish to give a blowjob to one of his customers. Is this why you called?"
"The Department of Corrections says Junior Crudup's last sentence was up in 1958. They say he wasn't paroled and he didn't die inside the prison, so he must have gone out max time in '58."
"He was probably killed and buried on the farm. But I doubt if we'll ever know."
"There's more. An old time gun bull says a man by the name of
Castille Lejeune got Junior off the levee gang around 1951. But that's where the trail ends."
"Castille Lejeune, in Franklin? That's Theodosha Flannigan's father. She's married to Merchie Flannigan."
"How'd you know that?" I said.
"She used to live in New Orleans. She was one of our parishioners. Can we have a talk with Mr. Lejeune?"
"I don't like to get too close to Theodosha."
There was a beat, then he said, "Oh, I see."
Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.
That afternoon I went to each drive-by daiquiri store in New Iberia. Each of the stores used the same type of blue plastic cups that I had picked up near the accident scene, the same type lids, the same type sealing wrap. I showed each of the clerks working the window the yearbook photographs of the three girls killed on Loreauville Road. Each clerk looked at them blankly and shook his head. At the first three stores I believed the denials given me by the clerks. At the fourth my experience was different.
The store was a boxlike, plywood structure, painted white, located inside an oak grove just outside the city limits. I parked my cruiser in the trees and waited in the shade while the clerk, a kid probably not much over legal age himself, serviced three drive-by customers. Then I walked to the window, which had a flap on it propped up by a stick. I opened my badge on him.
"What's your name?" I said.
"Josh Comeaux."
"You work here every evening, Josh?"
"Yes, sir. Unless I have a basketball game. Then Mr. Hebert lets me off," he answered.
I flipped the high school yearbook open to a marked page and showed him pictures of two of the dead girls.