Butterworth blinked but caught it with his left hand as deftly as a frog tonguing an insect out of the air. “Flinging things around, are we?”
“Your eyesight seems pretty good,” I said. “Too bad it seems to fail you when you look through a telescope.”
“Aren’t we the clever one.”
“I recommend you not speak to me in the first-person plural again,” I said.
“Bad boy. That excites me,” he said.
“I don’t think you get it, Mr. Butterworth,” I said. “Louisiana is America’s answer to Guatemala. Our legal system is a joke. Our legislature is a mental asylum. How’d you like to spend a few days in our parish prison?”
“Some big black husky fellows will be visiting me after lights-out?”
As with all megalomaniacs, he had no handles. He was the type of man the Spanish call sin dios, sin verguenza, without God or shame.
“Would you stand up a minute?” I said.
“Are we going to get rough now?” he said.
“No, your robe is open and I don’t like looking at you,” I said. “I also don’t like your general disrespect.”
He flipped his robe over his nether regions but didn’t move from the recliner. “I told Desmond we made a mistake coming here.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“We’re shooting a film in Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana. I told him we’d have trouble here.”
“You’re filming in Louisiana because the state will subsidize up to twenty-five percent of your costs,” I said. I removed an envelope from my pocket and handed it to him. “Take a look at this.”
Butterworth slipped a photo out of the envelope and studied it. His eyebrows were beaded with sweat. “This was taken in a morgue?”
“That’s right.”
“This is the woman who was on the cross?”
The photo showed the body of Lucinda Arceneaux on the autopsy tray, a sheet pulled to her chin. Butterworth replaced the photo in the envelope and returned it to me, his face solemn.
“Look again,” I said. “She worked for a catering service that supplies film companies on the set.”
“I don’t need to. I’ve never seen this person.”
“Look again, Mr. Butterworth.”
“I told you the truth. I think you gave me that envelope to get my fingerprints on it.”
I could smell the sweat and grease and weed on his skin. “You like to beat up hookers?”
“That’s a lie.”
“An administrator at the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department told me you make them strap on dildos and degrade each other, and then you hang them up on hooks or straps and beat the hell out of them.”
“I’m done with this,” he said.
“Yeah, how about it, Dave?” Desmond said behind me.
“It takes a special kind of guy to use up the life of an innocent young woman in order to re-create the Crucifixion,” I said. “We never had anything like this around here. At least not till you brought Mr. Butterworth to town.”