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“I’m still trying to puzzle a couple of things out here, Dave. It’s like there’s a blank space or two in your report,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“I’m not criticizing it. You were pretty used up when you wrote this stuff down. But let me see if I understand everything here. You went down a little early to open up your bait shop?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s when you saw Gates?”
“That’s correct.”
“You called the dispatcher, then you went after him in your truck?”
“Yeah, that’s about it.”
“So it was already first light when you saw him?”
“It was getting there.”
“It had to be, because the sun was up when you nailed him.”
“I’m not following you, sheriff.”
“Maybe it’s just me. But why would a pro like Gates come around your house at sunrise when he could have laid for you at night?”
“Who knows?”
“Unless he didn’t mean to hurt you, unless he was there for some other reason—”
“Like Clete once told me, trying to figure out the greaseballs is like putting your hand in an unflushed toilet.”
He looked down at the report again, then folded his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket.
“There’s something that really disturbs me about this, Dave. I know there’s an answer, but I can’t seem to put my hand on it.”
“Sometimes it’s better not to think about things too much. Just let events unfold.” I placed my hands behind my neck, yawned, and tried to look casually out the window.
“No, what I mean is, Gouza just got off the hook in Iberia Parish. Is this guy crazy enough to send a hit man after another one of our people, right to his house, right at the break of day? It doesn’t fit, does it?”
“I wish Gates were here to tell us. I don’t know what else to say, sheriff.”
“Well, I’m just glad you didn’t get hurt out there. I’ll see you later. Maybe you ought to go home and get some sleep. You look like you haven’t slept since World War II.”
He went out the door. I tried to complete the paperwork that was on my desk, but my eyes burned and I couldn’t concentrate or keep my thoughts straight in my head. Finally I shoved it all into a bottom drawer and fiddled absently with a chain of paper clips on top of my desk blotter.
Had I lied to the sheriff? I asked myself. Not exactly. But then I hadn’t quite told the truth, either.
Was my report dishonest? No, it was worse. It concealed the commission of a homicide.
But some situations involve a trade-off. In this case the fulfillment of a professional obligation would require that my home and family become the center of a morbid story that would live in the community for decades, and Joey Gouza would succeed in inflicting a level of psychological damage on my daughter, in particular, that might never be undone. Saint Augustine once admonished that we should never use the truth to injure. I believe there are dark and uncertain moments in our lives when it’s not wrong for each of us to feel that he wrote those words especially for us.
I LEFT THE OFFICE and drove home on the oak-lined dirt road that followed the bayou past my dock. The first raindrops were starting to fall out of a sunny sky, as they did almost every summer afternoon at three o’clock, and I could feel the air becoming close, suddenly cooler, as the barometric pressure dropped, and the bream and goggle-eye perch started feeding on the bayou’s surface by the edge of the lily pads. I passed the collapsed wire gate that Jack Gates had shredded when he had pointed the Trans Am into the sugarcane field, and I avoided looking at the trashed substation and the bullet-pocked car that a wrecker had winched loose from the transformers and left upside down amid a litter of broken cane stalks. But I wasn’t going to brood upon the death of Jack Gates; I had already turned over yesterday to my Higher Power, and I was determined not to relive it. My problems with Bootsie as well as the sheriff were sufficient to keep my mind occupied today. And if that was not enough, a man ahead of me in a pickup truck was stapling Bobby Earl posters on the tree trunks along the road.
By the time I turned in to my drive, he had just smoothed one to the contours of a two-hundred-year-old live oak at the edge of my yard and hammered staples into each of the corners. I closed the truck door and walked over to him, my hands in my back pockets. I even tried to smile. He looked like an innocuous individual hired out of a labor office.
“Say, podna, that tree’s on my property and I don’t want any nail holes in it.”
A foot above my head was Bobby Earl’s chiseled face, with stage lights shining up into it so that his features had the messianic cast of a Billy Graham. Below was his most oft-quoted statement, LET ME BE YOUR VOICE, LET ME SPEAK YOUR THOUGHTS. Then farther down was some information about a rally and barbecue with Dixieland bands on Friday night in Baton Rouge.
