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"My God, man, give some thought to what you're saying. You're telling me I'm responsible for a fiend being loose in our midst."
"Call your attorney and come into the office and make a statement. End it now, Mr. Lemoyne. You'll probably get off with minimum time on Prejean's death. You've got a good reputation and a lot of friends. You might even walk."
"Please leave."
"It won't change anything."
He turned away from me and gazed at the approaching storm. Leaves exploded out
of the trees that towered above his garden walls.
"Go do what you have to do, but right now please respect my privacy," he said.
"You strayed out of the gentleman's world a long time ago."
"Don't you have any sense of mercy?"
"Maybe you should come down to my office and look at the morgue photographs of Cherry LeBlanc and a girl we pried out of an oil barrel down in Vermilion Parish."
He didn't answer. As I let myself out his garden gate I glanced back at him. His cheeks were red and streaked with moisture as though his face had been glazed by freezing winds.
That evening the weatherman said the hurricane had become stationary one hundred miles due south of Mobile. As I fell asleep later with the window open on a lightning-charged sky, I thought surely the electricity would bring the general back in my dreams.
Instead, it was Lou Girard who stood under the wind-tormented pecan trees at three in the morning, his jaw shot away at the hinge, a sliver of white bone protruding from a flap of skin by his ear.
He tried to speak, and spittle gurgled on his exposed teeth and tongue and dripped off the point of his chin.
"What is it, Lou?"
The wind whipped and molded his shapeless brown suit against his body. He picked up a long stick that had been blown out of the tree above him and began scratching lines in the layers of dead leaves and pecan husks at his feet. He made an S, and then drew a straight line like an I and then put a half bubble on it and turned it into a P.
He dropped the stick to the ground and stared at me, his deformed face filled with expectation.
Chapter 18
The connection had been there all along. I just hadn't looked in the right place. As soon as I went into the office at 8 a.m. the next morning I called the probation and parole officer in Lafayette and asked the supervising P.O. to pull the file on Cherry LeBlanc.
"Who busted her on the prostitution charge?" I said.
I heard him leafing back and forth through the pages in the file.
"It wasn't one officer. There was a state-police raid on a bar and some trailers out on the Breaux Bridge highway."
S.P. Yes, the state police. Thanks, Lou, old friend.
"Who signed the arrest report?" I asked.
"Let's see. It's pretty hard to read. Somebody set a coffee cup down on the signature."
"It's real important, partner."
"It could be Doucet. Wasn't there a state policeman around here by that name? Yeah, I'd say initial M., then Doucet."
"Can you make copies of her file and lock them in separate places?"
"What's going on?"
"It may become evidence."
