“Step over here with me,” he said, pushing and walking with me toward my truck.
“Excuse me, but take your hand off my person, Dr. Cole.”
“You hear my words, Mr. Robicheaux. I know Vachel Carmouche’s relatives. They don’t need to suffer any more than they have. There’s nothing that requires a pathologist to exacerbate the pain of the survivors. Are you understanding me, sir?”
“You mean you lied on an autopsy?”
“Watch your tongue.”
“There was a second weapon? Which means there might have been a second killer.”
“He was sexually mutilated. While he was still alive. What difference does it make what kind of weapon she used? The woman’s depraved. You’re trying to get her off? Where’s your common sense, man?”
At sunset that same day Batist phoned up from the dock.
“Dave, there’s a man down here don’t want to come up to the house,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Hang on.” I heard Batist put the receiver down on the counter, walk away from it, then scrape it up in his hand again. “He’s outside where he cain’t hear me. I t’ink he’s a sad fellow ’cause of his face.”
“Is his name Mike or Micah or something like that?”
“I’ll go ax.”
“Never mind. I’ll be right down.”
I walked down the slope toward the dock. A purple haze hung in the trees, and birds lifted on the wind that blew across the dead cypress in the swamp. The man who was the chauffeur for Cora Gable was leaning on the rail at the end of the dock, looking out at the bayou, his face turned into the shadows. His shirtsleeves were rolled and his biceps were tattooed with coiled green and red snakes whose fangs we
re arched into their own tails.
“You’re Micah?” I said.
“That’s right.”
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“Maybe you can Ms. Perez.”
“Jim Gable’s wife?”
“I call her by her screen name. The man who marries her ought to take her name, not the other way around.”
His right eye glimmered, barely visible behind the nodulous growth that deformed the side of his face and exposed the teeth at the corner of his mouth. His hair was straw-colored and neatly barbered and combed, as though his personal grooming could negate the joke nature had played upon him.
“It’s all about a racetrack. Outside of Luna Mescalero, New Mexico,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“Mr. Gable got her to buy a spread out there. He’s building a racetrack. He’s been trying to do it for years. That’s where I’m from. I was a drunkard, a carnival man, what they call the geek act, before that woman come into my life.”
“She seems like a special person,” I said.
He turned his face into the glow of the electric lights and looked me directly in the eyes.
“I did nine months on a county road gang, Mr. Robicheaux. One day I sassed a hack and he pulled me behind the van and caned knots all over my head. When I tried to get up he spit on me and jabbed me in the ribs and whipped me till I cried. Ms. Perez seen it from her front porch. She called the governor of New Mexico and threatened to walk in his office with a reporter and slap his face unless I was released from jail. She give me a job and an air-conditioned brick cottage to live in when other people would hide their children from me.”
“I don’t know what I can do, Micah. Not unless Jim Gable has committed a crime of some kind.”