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He looked at the time on the mahogany grandfather clock at the far end of the dining room, then adjusted the hands on his wristwatch.
“The black kids didn’t have a shotgun, did they?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Did they have a .22?”
“I don’t know, Dave.”
“But that’s what they’d probably have if they were shooting rabbits or mockingbirds, wouldn’t they? At least if they didn’t have a shotgun.”
“Maybe.”
I looked at the hole in the pane of glass toward the top of the French door. I pulled my fountain pen, one almost as thick as my little finger, from my pocket and inserted the end in the hole. Then I crossed the dining room and did the same thing with the hole in the wall. There was a stud behind the wall, and the fountain pen went into the hole three inches before it tapped anything solid.
“Do you believe a .22 round did this?” I asked.
“Maybe it ricocheted and toppled,” he answered.
I walked back to the French doors, opened them onto the flagstone patio, and gazed down the sloping blue-green lawn to the bayou. Among the cypresses and oaks on the bank were a dock and a weathered boat shed. Between the mudbank and the lawn was a low red-brick wall that Weldon had constructed to keep his land from eroding into the Teche.
“I think what you’re doing is dumb, Weldon,” I said, still looking at the brick wall and the trees on the bank silhouetted against the glaze of sunlight on the bayou’s brown surface.
“Excuse me?” he said.
“Who has reason to hurt you?”
“Not a soul.” He smiled. “At least not to my knowledge.”
“I don’t want to be personal, but your brother-in-law is Bobby Earl.”
“Yes?”
“He’s quite a guy. A CBS newsman called him ‘the Robert Redford of racism.’?”
“Yeah, Bobby liked that one.”
“I heard you pulled Bobby across a table in Copeland’s by his necktie and sawed it off with a steak knife.”
“Actually, it was Mason’s over on Magazine.”
“Oh,
I see. How did he like being humiliated in a restaurant full of people?”
“He took it all right. Bobby’s not a bad guy. You just have to define the situation for him once in a while.”
“How about some of his followers—Klansmen, American Nazis, members of the Aryan Nation? You think they’re all-right guys, too?”
“I don’t take Bobby seriously.”
“A lot of people do.”
“That’s their problem. Bobby has about six inches of dong and two of brain. If the press left him alone, he’d be selling debit insurance.”
“I’ve heard another story about you, Weldon, maybe a more serious one.”
“Dave, I don’t want to offend you. I’m sorry you had to come out here. I’m sorry my wife is wired all the time and sees rubber faces leering in the window. I appreciate the job you have to do, but I don’t know who put a hole in my glass. That’s the truth, and I have to go to work.”
