The forensic team was dusting the house, the medics bagging up Devereaux, the fog breaking up on the bayou. It was a new day for everyone except Devereaux. I almost felt sorry for him. But I suspected his own victims were many and that most of them would never tell others of the degradation he had put them through. Anyway, have a good trip to the other side, I thought, and walked to my truck.
“Where you going?” Helen said.
“To work,” I replied.
• • •
I WASN’T SURPRISED BY Hugo Tillinger’s phone call to my office later that day. There is a subculture in this country that seems to have no antecedent—a conflation of reality television, National Enquirer journalism, fundamentalist religion, militarism, and professional football. At the center is an adoration of celebrity, no matter how it is acquired or in what form it comes. Women line up to marry Richard Ramirez and the Menendez brothers; the Jerry Springer clientele will degrade themselves and their families and destroy any modicum of dignity in their lives for ten minutes in front of the camera. Tillinger had probably stumbled into his role as the innocent man on death row, then decided after a few headlines that a frolic in the limelight might be worth the grief. Check out the story of Caryl Chessman.
“What do you want this time?” I asked him.
“Y’all gonna try to put the Devereaux job on me?”
“You’d be a logical candidate.”
“On what grounds?”
“You already burglarized his house?”
“I did that for Miss Lucinda.”
“Maybe you shoved a baton down his throat for the same reason.”
“That’s how he went out?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Did you mutilate Travis Lebeau before he was dragged?”
“Where in the hell did you get that?”
“You used a quote from the book of Psalms about Jehovah breaking the teeth of His enemies.”
“That doesn’t mean I go around mutilating people.”
“You’re a nuisance, Mr. Tillinger. I wish you would go away.”
“The AB probably killed Travis. But I think the order came from Devereaux.”
“Devereaux was hooked up with the AB?”
“They kept his whores in line. How come you don’t know this?”
“I’m not that smart,” I said. I looked at the second hand on my watch. Eight seconds passed before he spoke again.
“I don’t want to go back to Texas, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“That’s not an unreasonable attitude.”
“Every night I dream about being injected.”
“I don’t have the power to influence your situation, sir.”
“You could get me to the right people. Actors, celebrities, hereabouts. People are making films all over the state these days.”
“A bartender in Lafayette told me you already knew those kinds of people.”
“Miss Lucinda knew them,” he said.
My attention was starting to fade.