“Enough so I don’t want to be on the wrong side of them.”
“We’ll stop at Henderson Swamp. I want to show you a few things about firearms.”
“I found your Beretta and disarmed it on your premises. I don’t need a gun lesson, at least not now. I’m a little tired, okay? The numbers tattooed on that old man’s forearm, they’re from the death camp?”
“Yeah, I guess. Why?”
“He made me feel dirty all over. Like when I was a little girl. I don’t know why,” she replied. “I’m not feeling too good. Can we go back to the motor court? I need to take a nap and start the day over.”
THE ONLY LEAD I had on the men who had tried to kill me outside Bengal Gardens was the name of Ronnie Earl Patin, a strong-arm robber I had helped put away a decade ago. Though there are instances when a felon goes down for some serious time and nurses a grudge over the years and eventually gets out and does some payback, it’s very rare that he goes after a cop or judge or prosecutor. Payback is usually done on a fall partner or a family member who snitched him off. Ronnie Earl was a sweaty glutton and a porn addict and a violent alcoholic who knocked around old people for their Social Security checks, but he had been jailing all of his adult life, and most of his crimes grew out of his addictions and were not part of vendettas. That said, would he do a contract job on a cop if the money was right? It was possible.
The driver of the freezer truck was too short to have been Ronnie Earl, and the shooter who had almost taken my head off with the cut-down had an ascetic face similar in design to a collection of saw blades. Could ten years in Angola, most of it on Camp J, have melted down the gelatinous pile that I helped send up there?
I called an old-time gunbull at Angola who had shepherded Ronnie Earl through the system for years. “Yeah, he was one of our Jenny Craig success stories,” the gunbull said. “He stayed out of segregation his last two years and worked in the bean field.”
“He went out max time?”
“He earned two months good time before his discharge. This was on a ten-bit. He could have been out in thirty-seven months.”
“What kept him in segregation?”
“Making pruno and raping fish and being a general shithead. What are you looking at him for?”
“Somebody tried to pop me with a shotgun.”
“It doesn’t sound like Ronnie Earl.”
“Why not?”
“He’s got two interests in life: sex and getting high. The guy’s a walking gland. The only reason he got thin was to get laid when he got out. Cain’t y’all send us a higher grade of criminals?”
“You think he’s capable of a contract hit?”
“You ever know a drunkard who wasn’t capable of anything?” Then he evidently thought about what he had just said. “Sorry. You still off the juice?”
“I go to a lot of meetings. Thanks for your time, Cap,” I said.
I began making phone calls to several bars in North Lafayette. A person might wonder how a sheriff’s detective in Iberia Parish would be presumptuous enough to believe he could find a suspect in Lafayette, twenty miles away, when the local authorities could not. The answer is simple: Every alcoholic knows what every other alcoholic is thinking. There is only one alcoholic personality. There are many manifestations of the disease, but the essential elements remain the same in every practicing dru
nk. CEO, hallelujah-mission wino, Catholic nun, ten-dollar street whore, academic scholar, world boxing champion, or three-hundred-pound blob, the mind-set never varies. It is for this reason that practicing alcoholics wish to avoid the company of drunks who have sobered up, and sometimes even get them fired from their jobs, lest there be anyone in proximity who can hear their most secret thoughts.
One bartender told me Ronnie Earl had been in his place two months back, right after his release from Angola. The bartender said Ronnie Earl looked nothing like the fat man the court had sent up the road.
“But he’s the same guy, right?” I said.
“No,” the bartender said. “Not at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s worse. You know how it works,” the bartender said. “A sick guy like that gets even sicker when he doesn’t drink. When he gets back on the train, he’s carrying a furnace with him instead of a stomach.”
The bartender had not seen Ronnie Earl since and did not know where he had gone.
The last bartender I called had picked me up out of an alley behind a B-girl joint in Lafayette’s old Underpass area, a one-block collection of buildings that was so stark and unrelieved, whose inhabitants were so lost and disconnected from the normal world, that if you found yourself drinking there, you could rest assured you had finally achieved the goal you long ago set for yourself: the total destruction of the innocent child who once lived inside you. The bartender’s name was Harvey. For me, Harvey had always been a modern-day Charon who turned me away from the Styx. “Every afternoon there’s a guy who comes in here who goes by Ron,” he said. “He drinks like he’s making up for lost time. One mug of beer, four shots lined up. Same order every time. He likes to flash his money around and invite the working girls over to his table. The whole rainbow, know what I mean?”
“I’m not sure.”
“He’s definitely multicultural.”