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"I talked to my cousin last night. The wrong people think you got dials on me. There's a black guy, out of Miami, a freelance 'cause Miami's an open city. He's supposed to look like a six-and-a-half-foot stack of apeshit. The word is, maybe he's the guy did this screenwriter in the Quarter. My cousin says the Miami guy's got the whack and is gonna piece it off to some boons inside the jail."
"You're the hit?"
He stared at the floor, put his little finger in his ear as though there were water in it.
"I never broke no rules. It feels funny," he said.
"Who's setting it up, Mingo?"
"How many guys could I put inside? You figure it out."
"You ever hear of a bugarron?" I asked.
"No . . . Don't ask me about crazy stuff I don't know anything about. I'm not up for it." His shoulders were rounded, his chest caved-in. "You've read a lot, haven't you, I mean books in college, stuff like that?"
"Some."
"I read something once, in the public library, up on St. Charles. It said . . . in your life you end up back where you started, maybe way back when you were little. The difference is you understand it the second time around. But it don't do you no good."
"Yes?"
"That never made sense to me before."
That night a guard escorted Mingo Bloomberg down to the shower in his flipflops and skivvies. The guard ate a sandwich and read a magazine on a wood bench outside the shower wall. The steam billowed out on the concrete, then the sound of the water became steady and uninterrupted on the shower floor. The guard put down his magazine and peered around the opening in the wall. He looked at Mingo's face and the rivulets of water running down it, dropped the sandwich, and ran back down the corridor to get the count man from the cage.
CHAPTER 12
IT was sunrise when I turned into Buford LaRose's house the next morning. I saw him at the back of his property, inside a widely spaced stand of pine trees, a gray English riding cap on his head, walking with a hackamore in his hand toward a dozen horses that were bolting and turning in the trees. The temperature had dropped during the night, and their backs steamed like smoke in the early light. I drove my truck along the edge of a cleared cane field and climbed through the railed fence and walked across the pine needles into the shade that smelled of churned sod and fresh horse droppings.
I didn't wait for him to greet me. I took a photograph from my shirt pocket and showed it to him.
"You recognize this man?" I asked.
"No. Who is he, a convict?"
"Mingo Bloomberg. He told me he delivered money to your house for Jerry Joe Plumb."
"Sorry. I don't know him."
I took a second photograph from my pocket, a Polaroid, and held it out in my palm.
"That was taken last night," I said. "We had him in lockup for his own protection. But he hanged himself with a towel in the shower."
"You really know how to get a jump start on the day, Dave. Look, Jerry Joe's connect
ed to a number of labor unions. If I refuse his contribution, maybe I lose several thousand union votes in Jefferson and Orleans parishes."
"It sure sounds innocent enough."
"I'm sorry it doesn't fit into your moral perspective . . . Don't go yet. I want to show you something."
He walked deeper into the trees. Even though there had been frost on the cane stubble that morning, he wore only a T-shirt with his khakis and half-topped boots and riding cap. His triceps looked thick and hard and were ridged with flaking skin from his early fall redfish-ing trips out on West Cote Blanche Bay. He turned and waited for me.
"Come on, Dave. You made a point of bringing your photographic horror show to my house. You can give me five more minutes of your time," he said.
The land sloped down through persimmon trees and palmettos and a dry coulee bed that was choked with leaves. I could hear the horses nickering behind us, their hooves thudding on the sod. Ahead, I could see the sunlight on the bayou and the silhouette of a black marble crypt surrounded by headstones and a carpet of mushrooms and a broken iron fence. The headstones were green with moss, the chiseled French inscriptions worn into faint tracings.
Buford pushed open the iron gate and waited for me to step inside.
