AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Let me mention just one thing before you go. Several years ago my second wife was murdered by some drug dealers. You know that, don't you?"
"Yes."
"One way or another, the guys and the woman who killed her went down for it. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and the old anger comes back. Even though these people took a heavy fall, for a couple of them the whole trip, sometimes it still doesn't seem enough. You know the feeling I'm talking about, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Fair enough." Then I said, "You're sure you don't want to come home and have lunch with us today?"
"This isn't the day for it, Dave. Thanks, anyway," she said, and went out the door with her purse clutched under her arm, her face set as impassively as a soldier's.
Elrod Sykes called the office just after I had returned from lunch. His voice was deep, his accent more pronounced.
"You know where there're some ruins of an old plantation house south of your boat dock?" he asked.
"What about it?"
"Can you meet me there in a half hour?"
"What for?"
"I want to talk to you, that's what for."
"Talk to me now, Elrod, or come into the office."
"I get nervous down there. For some reason police uniforms always make me think of a breathalyzer machine. I don't know why that might be."
"You sound like your boat might have caught the early tide."
"Who cares? I want to show you something. Can you be there or not?"
"I don't think so."
"What the fuck is with you? I've got some information about Kelly's death. You want it or not?"
"Maybe you ought to give some thought as to how you talk to people."
"I left my etiquette in Kelly's family plot up in Kentucky. I'll meet you in thirty minutes. If you're not interested, fuck you, Mr. Robicheaux."
He hung up the phone. I had the feeling I was beginning to see the side of Elrod's personality that had earned him the attention of the tabloids.
Twenty minutes later I drove my pickup truck down a dirt lane through a canebrake to the ruins of a sugar planter's home that had been built on the bayou in the 1830s. In 1863 General Banks's federal troops had dragged the piano outside and smashed it apart in the coulee, then as an afterthought had torched the slave quarters and the second story of the planter's home. The roof and cypress timbers had collapsed inside the brick shell, the cisterns and outbuildings had decayed into humus, the smithy's forge was an orange smear in the damp earth, and vandals had knocked down most of the stone markers in the family cemetery and, looking for gold and silver coins, had pried up the flagstones in the fireplaces.
Why spend time with a rude drunk, particularly on the drunk's terms?
Because it's difficult to be hard-nosed or righteous toward a man who, for the rest of his life, will probably wake sweating in the middle of the night with a recurring nightmare or whose series of gray dawns will offer no promise of light except that first shuddering razor-edged rush that comes out of a whiskey glass.
I leaned against the fender of my truck and watched Elrod's lavender Cadillac come down the dirt lane and into the shade of the oak trees that grew in front of the ruined house. The security guard from the set, Murphy Doucet, was behind the wheel, and Elrod sat in the passenger's seat, his tanned arm balanced on the window ledge, a can of Coca-Cola in his hand.
"How you doing today, Detective Robicheaux?" Doucet said.
"Fine. How are you?"
"Like they say, we all chop cotton for the white man one way or another, you know what I mean?" he said, and winked.
He rubbed the white scar that was embossed like a chicken's foot on his throat and opened a newspaper on the steering wheel. Elrod came around the side of the Cadillac in blue swimming shorts, a beige polo shirt, and brand-new Nike running shoes.
He drank from his Coca-Cola can, set it on the hood of the car, then put a breath mint in his mouth. His eyes wandered around the clearing, then focused wanly on the sunlight winking off the bayou beyond the willow trees.
