e stepped inside and left his suitcase on the gallery. A moment later he opened the door again and took the suitcase inside with him. I parked in the convenience store at the four corners and bought a soft drink from the machine and drank it in the shade and waited for Marvin Oates to come out of the shack.
Thirty minutes later he walked back out in the sunlight and fitted his bleached cowboy straw hat on his head and began pulling his suitcase down the street. I drove up behind him and rolled down the window. He wore a tie and a navy-blue sports coat in spite of the heat and breathed with the slow inhalation of someone in a steam room. But his face managed to fill with a grin before he even knew whose vehicle had drawn abreast of him.
“Why, howdy do, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.
“I see you and Barbara Shanahan are pretty good friends,” I said.
His grin remained on his face, as though incised in clay, his eyes full of speculative light. He removed his hat and fanned himself. His ash-blond hair was soggy with sweat and there were gray strands in his sideburns, and I realized he was older than he looked.
“I don’t quite follow,” he said. For just a second his gaze lit on the shack he had just left.
“I saw you in Barbara’s office this morning,” I replied.
He nodded agreeably, as though a humorous mystery had just been solved. He wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief and twisted his head and looked down toward the end of the street, although nothing of particular interest was there.
“It’s flat burning up, ain’t it?” he said.
“In traveling through some of the other southern parishes, have you run across a man by the name of Legion? No first name, no last name, just Legion,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows thoughtfully. “An old man? He worked in Angola at one time? Black folks walk around him. He lives behind the old sugar mill down by Baldwin. Know why I remember his name?” he said. His face lit as he spoke the last sentence.
“No, why’s that?” I said.
“’Cause when Jesus was fixing to heal this possessed man, he asked the demon his name first. The demon said his name was Legion. Jesus cast the demon into a herd of hogs and the hogs run into the sea and drowned.”
“Thanks for your help, Marvin. Did you sell a Bible to the woman in that last house you were in?”
“Not really.”
“I imagine it’d be a hard sell. She hooks in a joint on Hopkins.”
He looked guardedly up and down the road, his expression cautionary now, one white man to another. “The Mormons believe black people is descended from the lost tribe of Ham. You think that’s true?”
“Got me. You want a ride?”
“If you work in the fields of the Lord, you’re suppose to walk it, not just talk it.”
His face was full of self-irony and boyish good cheer. Even the streaks of sweat on his shirt, like the stripes a flagellum would make on the chest of its victim, excited sympathy for his plight and the humble role he had chosen for himself. If his smile could be translated into words, it was perhaps the old adage that goodness is its own reward.
I gave him the thumbs-up sign and made a mental note to run his name through the computer at the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C., at the first opportunity.
CHAPTER 7
The next night Batist’s sister banged down the dirt road in a dilapidated pickup that sounded like a dying animal when she parked it by the bait shop and turned off the ignition. She sat down heavily at the counter and fished in her purse for a Kleenex and blew her nose, then stared at me as though it were I rather than she who was expected to explain her mission to my bait shop.
“Ain’t nobody ever known the true story of what happened on Julian LaSalle’s plantation,” she said.
I nodded and remained silent.
“I had bad dreams about Legion since I was a girl. I been afraid that long,” she said.
“Lots of us have bad memories from childhood. We shouldn’t think less of ourselves for it, Clemmie,” I said.
“I always tole myself God would punish Legion. Send him to hell where he belong.”
“Maybe that’ll happen.”
“It ain’t enough,” she said.