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“You think she did it to herself? You’ve got the right guy in jail. Just make sure he stays there.”
“Here’s the problem I have, Weldon. Joey Gouza is what they call a made guy. That’s unusual in his case. He wasn’t born to it, he didn’t have any patrons or political allies greasing the wheels for him. He worked his way up from a reformatory punk. That means that in his world he’s a lot smarter than a lot of the people around him. Come on, you know him, Weldon, do you think he’d set himself up for a fall like this?”
He folded the pink mechanic’s cloth in a neat square and balanced it on the rail. Then he moved it and balanced it again.
“Stonewall time is over,” I said. “Your sister just put the tape on fast forward.”
“So you’ve come out here to tell me she’s a liar?”
“No, I’ve come out here to tell you she’s a victim. I’m using the word in a broad sense, too. There’s a certain kind of victimization that starts in childhood. Then the person grows older and never learns any other role. Except maybe one other. The word for that one is enabler.”
“You better get to it, Dave.” He turned toward me and rested his hand on the metal rail.
“Lyle understands it and he never finished high school.”
“I’m going to ask you to choose each of your words carefully, Dave.”
I took a deep breath. The air was pungent with gas, acrid with the smell of oil sludge and dead weeds in the sunlight.
“Look, Weldon, if I know about your family history, about some of the complexities in it, do you believe that Gouza’s attorneys won’t have access to the same information, that they won’t use it to tear your sister apart?”
“Say it or shut the fuck up and get out of here.”
“She’s not just your sister. In her mind she’s your wife, your lover, your mother. She’ll do anything for you. It’s a way of life for her. You know it, too, you rotten sonofabitch.”
His feet were already set when he swung. He caught me on the chin, and my head snapped back and my hard hat rolled across the rig floor.
I straightened up, held the rail with one hand, and looked into his face. It was stretched tight on the bone, and the suntanned skin at the corners of his eyes was filled with white lines.
The roughnecks on the floor stared at us in disbelief.
I pushed at the side of my chin with my thumb.
“They’ll melt you into lard in the courtroom, Weldon,” I said. “Gouza won’t even have to take the stand. Instead, you and Drew will be on trial, and those defense attorneys will make you sound like a pornographer’s wet dream.”
I saw his hand move, his eyes click again as though he’d been slapped.
“Don’t even think about it,” I said. “The first one was free. You come at me again, and I’ll make sure you do time for assaulting a police officer.” I picked up the hard hat from the rig floor and shoved it into his hands, jammed it into his chest. “Thanks for the tour of the rig. My recommendation is you hire a good lawyer and get some advice about the wisdom of suborning perjury. Or apply for a pilot’s job in a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States. See you around, Weldon.”
I walked down the iron steps to my truck. I could hear the canvas awning flapping in the hot wind, a chain clinking brightly against a piece of pipe, in the embarrassed silence of the roughnecks on the rig floor.
THE NEXT MORNING I drove across the I-10 bridge over the Mississippi to Baton Rouge. The river was high and muddy, almost a mile across, and the oil barges far below looked as tiny as toys. Huge oil refineries and aluminum plants sprawled along the east bank of the river, but what always struck my eye first when I rolled over the apex of the bridge into Baton Rouge was the spire of the capitol building lifting itself out of the flat maze of trees and green parks in the old downtown area. All the state’s political actors since Reconstruction had passed through there: populists in suspenders and clip-on bow ties, demagogues, alcoholic buffoons, virulent racists, a hillbilly singer who would be elected governor twice, another governor who broke out of a mental asylum in order to kill his wife, a recent governor who pardoned a convict in Angola, who repaid the favor by murdering the governor’s brother, and the most famous and enigmatic player of them all, the Kingfish, who might have given FDR a run for his money had he not died, along with his supposed assassin, in a spray of eighty-one machine-gun bullets in a hallway of the old capitol building.
I parked my truck and sat in the gallery during the morning session of the legislature. I watched the regard with which Bobby Earl was treated by many of his peers, the warm handshakes, the pats on the arm and shoulder, the expression of gentlemanly goodwill by men who should have known better. It reminded me of the deference sometimes shown to a small-town poolroom bully or redneck police chief. The people around him well know his hatred of Jews, intellectuals, news people, Asians, blacks; no one doubts his potential with the leaded baton or the hobnailed boot across the neck. But they make friends with the ape in their midst, no matter how violently the tuning fork vibrates inside them; consequently they absorb his dark powers, and secretly gloat at the fear he inspires in others.
They recessed for lunch, and I followed Bobby Earl and a group of his friends one block to the entrance of an expensive restaurant with an awning that extended out over the sidewalk. The windows were filled with ferns and hanging copper pots. After Earl and his group had entered the restaurant, I put on my seersucker coat, tightened my necktie, and walked inside, too. Most of the tables were filled, the air loud with conversation and scented with the smell of gumbo from the kitchen, bourbon and tropical drinks from the bar.
“I don’t think we have a seating for one, sir.
Would you like to wait in the bar?” the maître d’ said.
“I’m with Mr. Earl’s party. Ah, there he is right over there,” I said.
“Very well. Please follow me, sir,” he said.
I walked with the maître d’ to Bobby Earl’s table. The maître d’ set a menu down for me at an empty place setting and walked away. Earl turned away from his conversation with another man, then his mouth opened silently as he looked up and realized who was sitting down at his table.
“Hello, Mr. Earl. I apologize for bothering you again, but I’m just in town briefly and I didn’t want to disturb you at the legislature,” I said. “How are you gentlemen? I’m Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish sheriff’s office. I just need to ask Mr. Earl a question or two. Y’all go right ahead with your lunch.”
