An hour later I asked a cop at the entrance of the casino on the Indian reservation where I could find the man named Legion, then walked inside, into the smell of refrigerated cigarette smoke and rug cleaner, through banks of slot and video-poker machines, past crap and blackjack tables and a fast-food bar and an artificial pond with a painted backdrop that was meant to look like a cypress swamp, a stone alligator half submerged in the water, its mouth yawning open among the coins that had been thrown at it. The man named Legion was at the bar in a darkened cocktail lounge, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette in front of a mirror that was trimmed with red and purple neon. His eyes looked at me indifferently in the mirror when I sat down on the stool next to him and hung my cane from the edge of the bar. A waitress in a short black skirt and . shnet stockings set a napkin down in front of me and smiled.
“What will you have?” she asked.
“A Dr Pepper on ice with some cherries in it. Mr. Legion here knows me. He comes around to my house sometimes. Put it on his tab,” I said.
At first she thought she was listening to a private joke between Legion and me, then she glanced at his face and her smile went away and she made my drink without looking up from the drainboard.
I hooked my coat behind the butt of the .45 automatic I carried in a clip-on holster.
“T’es un pédéraste, Legion?” I asked.
His eyes locked on mine in the mirror. Then he brought his cigarette up to his mouth and exhaled smoke through his nose and tipped the ash into his coffee saucer, his eyes following the woman behind the bar now.
“You don’t talk French?” I said.
“Not wit’ just anybody.”
“I’ll ask you in English. You a homosexual, Legion?”
“I know what you doin’. It ain’t gonna work, no,” he replied.
“Because that’s the impression you left me with. Maybe raping those black women convinced you there’s not a girl buried down inside you.”
He rotated the burning tip of his cigarette in his coffee saucer until the fire was dead. Then he fastened a button on his shirt pocket and straightened his tie and looked at his reflection in the mirror.
“Go back to the kitchen and see if they got my dinner ready,” he said to the barmaid.
I turned on my stool so I was looking at his profile.
“I’m a superstitious man, so I went to see a traiture about you,” I lied. “My traiture friend says you got a gris-gris on you. Those women you forced yourself on, Mr. Julian, his poor wife who burned up in the fire, a man you murdered outside a bar in Morgan City? Their spirits all follow you around, Legion, everywhere you go.”
The skin wrinkled under his right eye. He turned his head slowly and stared into my face.
“What man in Morgan City?”
“He was a writer. From somewhere up North. You shot him outside a bar.”
“You found that in an old newspaper. It don’t mean anyt’ing.”
“You shot him twice. His coat caught fire from the muzzle flash. The second time you shot him on the ground.”
His mouth parted and his eyes narrowed and stayed fixed on mine.
From my shirt pocket I removed a dime I had drilled a hole through early that morning, then strung on a piece of looped red string. I pushed the dime across the bar toward his coffee cup.
“The traiture said you should carry this on your ankle, Legion.”
“Like a nigger woman, huh?” he said, and pitched the dime into the bottles behind the bar.
The barmaid came out of the kitchen with a tray. She took a plate of rice and gravy and stewed chicken and string beans off the tray and set it in front of Legion with a napkin and knife and fork.
“Anything wrong here, Legion?” she asked.
“Not wit’ me,” he replied, and tucked his napkin into his shirt and picked up his silverware.
“Why would you kill a writer from up North?” I said.
He leaned over his plate and opened his mouth to shovel in a fork piled with food. His face suddenly slanted sideways.