"Nope, he stays behind the lines. He makes the system work for him."
"You know him outside the job?" I asked.
"He arrested my maid out on a highway at night when he was a deputy in St. Mary Parish. She's never told anyone what he did to her."
Helen and I parked the cruiser in front of the country club and walked past the swimming pool, then under a spreading oak to a practice green where Alex Guidry was putting with a woman and another man. He wore light brown slacks and two-tone golf shoes and a maroon polo shirt; his mahogany tan and thick salt-and-pepper hair gave him the look of a man in the prime of his life. He registered our presence in the corner of his eye but never lost his concentration. He bent his knees slightly and tapped the ball with a plop into the cup.
"The sheriff has invited you to come down to the department," I said.
"No, thank you," he said.
"We need your help with a friend of yours. It won't take long," Helen said.
The red flag on the golf pin popped in the wind. Leaves drifted out of the pecan trees and live oaks along the fairway and scudded across the freshly mowed grass.
"I'll give it some t
hought and ring y'all later on it," he said, and started to reach down to retrieve his ball from the cup.
Helen put her hand on his shoulder.
"Not a time to be a wise-ass, sir," she said.
Guidry's golf companions looked away into the distance, their eyes fixed on the dazzling blue stretch of sky above the tree line.
Fifteen minutes later we sat down in a windowless interview room. In the back seat of the cruiser he had been silent, morose, his face dark with anger when he looked at us. I saw the sheriff at the end of the hall just before I closed the door to the room.
"Y'all got some damn nerve," Guidry said.
"Someone told us you're buds with an ex-Angola gun bull by the name of Harpo Scruggs," I said.
"I know him. So what?" he replied.
"You see him recently?" Helen asked. She wore slacks and sat with one haunch on the corner of the desk.
"No."
"Sure?" I said.
"He's the nephew of a lawman I worked with twenty years ago. We grew up in the same town."
"You didn't answer me," I said.
"I don't have to."
"The lawman you worked with was Harpo Delahoussey. Y'all put the squeeze on Cool Breeze Broussard over some moonshine whiskey. That's not all you did either," I said.
His eyes looked steadily into mine, heated, searching for the implied meaning in my words.
"Harpo Scruggs tried to kill a priest Friday morning," Helen said.
"Arrest him, then."
"How do you know we haven't?" I asked.
"I don't. It's none of my business. I was fired from my job, thanks to your friend Willie Broussard," he said.
"Everyone else told us Scruggs was dead. But you know he's alive. Why's that?" Helen said.