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“Lyle Sonnier,” he said, and grinned broadly.
On my way back to my office cubicle I took the small pile of morning letters, memos, and messages from my mailbox, sat down at my desk, and began turning over each item in the stack one at a time on the desk blotter. I couldn’t say exactly why I didn’t want to deal with Lyle. Maybe it was a little bit of guilt, a little intellectual dishonesty. Earlier that morning I had been willing to be humorous with Garrett about Lyle, but I knew in reality that there was nothing funny about him. If you flipped through the late-night cable channels on TV and saw him in his metallic-gray silk suit and gold necktie, his wavy hair conked in the shape of a cake, his voice ranting and his arms flailing in the air before an enrapt audience of blacks and blue-collar whites, you might dismiss him as another religious huckster or fundamentalist fanatic whom the rural South produces with unerring predictability generation after generation.
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Except I remembered Lyle when he was an eighteen-year-old tunnel rat in my platoon who would crawl naked to the waist down a hole with a flashlight in one hand, a .45 automatic in the other, and a rope tied around his ankle as his lifeline. I also remembered the day he squeezed into an opening that was so narrow his pants were almost scraped off his buttocks; then, as the rope uncoiled and disappeared into the hillside with him, we heard a whoomph under the ground, and a red cloud of cordite-laced dust erupted from the hole. When we pulled him back out by his ankle, his arms were still extended straight out in front of him, his hair and face webbed with blood, and two fingers of his right hand were gone as though they had been lopped off with a barber’s razor.
People in New Iberia who knew Lyle usually spoke of him as a flimflam man who preyed on the fear and stupidity of his followers, or they thought of him as an entertaining borderline psychotic who had probably cooked his head with drugs. I didn’t know what the truth was about Lyle, but I always suspected that in that one-hundredth of a second between the time he snapped the tripwire with his outstretched flashlight or army .45 and the instant when the inside of his head roared with white light and sound and the skin of his face felt like it was painted with burning tallow, he thought he saw with a third eye into all the baseless fears, the vortex of mysteries, the mockery that all his preparation for this moment had become.
I looked at his Baton Rouge phone number on the piece of message paper, then turned the piece of paper over in my fingers. No, Lyle Sonnier wasn’t a joke, I thought. I picked up my telephone and started to dial the number, then realized that Garrett, the ex-Houston cop, was standing in the entrance to my cubicle, his eyes slightly askance when I glanced up at him.
“Oh, hi, thanks for dropping by,” I said.
“Sure. What’s up?”
“Not much.” I tapped my fingers idly on the desk blotter, then opened and closed my drawer. “Say, do you have a smoke?”
“Sure,” he said, and took his package out of his shirt pocket. He shook one loose and offered it to me.
“Lucky Strikes are too strong for me,” I said. “Thanks, anyway. How about taking a walk with me?”
“Uh, I’m not quite following this. What are we doing, Dave?”
“Come on, I’ll buy you a snowball. I just need some feedback from you.” I smiled at him.
It was bright and warm outside, and a rainbow haze drifted across the lawn from the water sprinklers. The palm trees were green and etched against the hard blue sky, and on the corner, by a huge live oak tree whose roots had cracked the curb and folded the sidewalk up in a peak, a Negro in a white coat sold snowballs out of a handcart that was topped with a beach umbrella.
I bought two spearmint snowballs, handed one to Garrett, and we sat down side by side on an iron bench in the shade. His holster and gunbelt creaked like a horse’s saddle. He put on his sunglasses, looked away from me, and constantly fiddled with the corner of his mustache.
“The dispatcher was telling me about that IA beef in Houston,” I said. “It sounds like you got a bad deal.”
“I’m not complaining. I like it over here. I like the food and the French people.”
“But maybe you took two steps back in your career,” I said.
“Like I say, I got no complaint.”
I took a bite out of my snowball and looked straight ahead.
“Let me cut straight to it, podna,” I said. “You’re a new man and you’re probably a little ambitious. That’s fine. But you tainted the crime scene out at the Sonniers’.”
He cleared his throat and started to speak, then said nothing.
“Right? You climbed over that brick retaining wall and looked around on the mudbank? You dropped a cigarette butt on the grass?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you find anything?”
“No, sir.”
“You’re sure?” I looked hard at the side of his face. There was a red balloon of color in his throat.
“I’m sure.”
“All right, forget about it. There’s no harm done. Next time out, though, you secure the scene and wait on the investigator.”
He nodded, looking straight ahead at some thought hidden inside his sunglasses, then said, “Does any of this go in my jacket?”
