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”You finally axed,“ she said.
I helped her up the steps into the swing. She wrapped one hand around the support chain and pushed herself back and forth in a slowly oscillating arc.
”This is a nice place for your li'l girl to grow up in, ain't it?“ she said.
”Yes, it is.“
”How long your family own this?“
”The land was part of my grandfather's farm. My father built the house in nineteen thirty.“
”How'd you like it if somebody just took it away from you, say you ain't got no proof it was part of your gran'daddy's farm? Run a dozer through the walls and scrape away the ground just like none of y'all was ever here?“
”You've got to give me some time, Bertie. I'm doing the best I
can.
She snapped open the big clasp on her bag and reached inside.
“You don't believe Moleen after some treasure on our land, so I brought you something,” she said. “I dug these out of my li'l garden early this spring.”
One at a time she removed a series of thin eight- or nine-inch objects individually wrapped in tissue paper and bound with rubber bands. Then she rolled the rubber bands off one and peeled back the paper and flattened it against the swing.
“What you think of that?” she said.
The spoon was black as a scorched pot with tarnish, but she had obviously rubbed the metal smooth and free of dirt with rags so you could clearly see the coat of arms and the letter S embossed on the flanged head of the handle.
“That's pretty impressive,” I said. “How deep was this in the soil?”
“From my elbow to the tip of my finger.”
“Have you shown this to anybody else?”
“No, and I ain't going to. Not till I get a piece of paper that say that's my land.”
“There's an antique gun and coin store in New Orleans, Cohen's, it's on Royal Street. Can I take one of these spoons there if I don't tell them where I got it?”
“You give me your word on that?”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“How long that gonna take?” she said, fanning herself with a flowered handkerchief.
Chapter 14
I CHECKED OUT of the office early Tuesday afternoon and drove across the Atchafalaya Basin through Baton Rouge into New Orleans. I went first to Cohen's on Royal, whose collection of antique guns and coins and Civil War ordnance could match a museum's, then I met Clete at his office on St. Ann and we walked through Jackson Square to a small Italian restaurant down from Tujague's on Decatur.
We sat in back at a table with a checkered cloth and ordered, then Clete went to the bar and came back with a shot glass of bourbon and a schooner of draft. He lowered the shot into the schooner with his fingertips and watched it slide and clink down the side to the bottom, the whiskey corkscrewing upward in an amber cloud.
“Why don't you pour some liquid Drano in there while you're at it?” I said.
He took a deep hit and wiped his mouth with his hand.
“I had to pull a bail jumper out of a motel on the Airline Highway this afternoon. He had both his kids with him. I got to lose this PI gig,”
he said.
“You did it when you had your shield.”
