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“Maybe, maybe not.”
“There’s no maybe about it. My advice is you should talk to the DEA or to Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. I know a pretty good agent in Lafayette.”
“That’s about all you can suggest, huh? No magic answers.”
“You won’t confide in me. I’m at a loss to help you.”
“If I did confide in you, I’d probably be under arrest.”
He smiled wanly and started to drink from his glass, then set it back down.
“I’ll give what you said some thought, Dave.”
“No, I doubt that, Weldon. You’ll go your own way until you beat your head into jelly.”
“I wish I always knew what was going on inside other people. It’d be a great asset in the oil business.”
BEFORE I DROVE back to the office I walked across the drawbridge over the Teche and watched the current running through the pilings and the backs of the garfish breaking the water in the sunlight. The air was hot, the sky bright with haze, the humidity so intense that my eyes burned with salt and my skin felt like insects were crawling on it. Even under the trees by the old brick firehouse in the park, the air felt close and moist, like steam rising off a stove.
Weldon had his problems, but I had mine, too. This case went far beyond Iberia Parish, and it appeared to involve people and power and politics of a kind that our small law-enforcement agencies were hardly adequate to deal with. Once again, I felt like the outside world was having its way with us, that it had found something vulnerable or weak or perhaps even desirous in us that allowed the venal and the meretricious to leave us with less of ourselves, less of a way of life that had been as sweet in the mouth as peeled sugarcane, as poignant and heartbreaking in its passing as the words to “La Jolie Blonde” on Tee Neg’s jukebox:
Jolie blonde, gardez donc c’est t’as fait.
Ta m’as quit-té pour t’en aller,
Pour t’en aller avec un autre que moi.
Jolie blonde, pretty girl,
Flower of my heart
I’ll love you forever,
My jolie blonde.
Still, Joey Gouza was in the city of New Iberia’s custody, and if the prosecutor’s office had its way he would be hoeing sweet potatoes on Angola Farm the rest of his life.
But something that had bothered me at noon while I had watched Alafair playing in the park was troubling me again, this time because of an idle glance across the bayou at a young man fishing under a cypress tree. I was watching him because he reminded me of so many working-class Cajun boys I had grown up with. He stood while he fished, bare-chested, lean, olive-skinned, his body knotted with muscle, his Marine Corps utilities low on his stomach, smoking a cigarette in the center of his mouth without taking it out. His bobber went under, and he jerked his pole up and pulled a catfish through the lily pads. Then I noticed that his left hand was gone at the wrist and he had to unhook the catfish and string it with one hand. But he was quite good at it. He laid the fish across a rock, pressed the sole of his boot down on its stomach, slipped the hook loose from the corner of its mouth, and worked a shaved willow fork through the gills until the hard white point emerged bloody and coated with membrane from the mouth. Then with his good hand he flopped the fish into the shallows and sank the willow fork deep into the mud.
THE SHERIFF WAS sitting sideways in his swivel chair, reading a diet book, punching at his stomach with three fingers, when I walked into his office. He looked up at me, then put the book in his drawer and began fiddling with some papers on his blotter. Like many Cajun men, his chin was round and dimpled and his cheeks ruddy and flecked with small veins.
“I was thinking about going on a diet myself,” I said.
“Somebody left that in here. I don’t know who it belongs to.”
“Oh.”
“What’s up?”
I told him I was going out to Drew Sonnier’s again and my suspicions about what had happened at the gazebo.
“All right, Dave, but make sure you get her permission to look around on the property. If she won’t give it to you, let’s get a warrant. We don’t want any tainted evidence.”
He saw me raise my eyebrows.
“What?” he said.
“You’re talking about evidence we might use against her?”
