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"Mr. Guidry, I know you got power round here. But my boy ain't coming after you. Suh, please don't walk away," Mout' said.
"Does somebody have a cell phone?" Guidry asked his friends.
"Alex, we can go over here and have a smoke," one of them said.
"I didn't join this club to have an old nigger follow me around the golf course," Guidry replied.
"Suh, my boy blamed himself twenty years for Ida's death. I just want you to talk wit' me for five minutes. I apologize to these gentlemen here," Mout' said.
Guidry began walking toward the next tee, his golf cart rattling behind him.
For the next hour Mout' followed him, perspiration leaking out of the leather brace that held his umbrella hat in place, the sun lighting the pink-and-white discoloration that afflicted one side of his face.
Finally Guidry sliced a ball into the rough, speared his club angrily into his golf bag, walked to the clubhouse, and went into the bar.
It took Mout' twenty minutes to cover the same amount of ground and he was sweating and breathing heavily when he came inside the bar. He stood in the center of the room, amid the felt-covered card tables and click of poker chips and muted conversation, and removed his umbrella hat and fixed his blue, cataract-frosted eyes on Guidry's face.
Guidry kept signaling the manager with one finger.
"Mr. Robicheaux say you held a wet towel over Ida's nose and mout' and made her heart stop. He gonna prove it, so that mean my boy don't have to do nothing, he ain't no threat to you," Mout' said.
"Somebody get this guy out of here," Guidry said.
"I'm going, suh. You can tell these people here anyt'ing you want. But I knowed you when you was buying black girls for t'ree dol'ars over on Hopkins. So you ain't had to go after Ida. You ain't had to take my boy's wife, suh."
The room was totally quiet. Alex Guidry's face burned like a red lamp. Mout' Broussard walked back outside, his body bent forward at the middle, his expression as blank as the grated door on a woodstove.
* * *
TWENTY-FIVE
LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON I RECEIVED a call from John Nash in Trinidad.
"Our friend Jubal Breedlove checked out of the clinic in Raton and is nowhere to be found," he said.
"Did he hook up with Scruggs?" I asked.
"It's my feeling he probably di
d."
The line was silent.
"Why do you feel that, Mr. Nash?" I asked.
"His car's at his house. His clothes seem undisturbed. He didn't make a withdrawal from his bank account. What does that suggest to you, Mr. Robicheaux?"
"Breedlove's under a pile of rock?"
"Didn't Vikings put a dog at the foot of a dead warrior?" he asked.
"Excuse me?"
"I was thinking about the family he murdered in the campground. The father put up a terrific fight to protect his daughter. I hope Breedlove's under a pile of rock by that campground."
AFTER WORK I HAD to go after a boat a drunk smashed into a stump and left with a wrenched propeller on a sandbar. I tilted the engine's housing into the stern of the boat and was about to slide the hull back into the water when I saw why the drunk had waded through the shallows to dry land and walked back to his car: the aluminum bottom had a gash in it like a twisted smile.
I wedged a float cushion into the leak so I could pull the boat across the bayou into the reeds and return with a boat trailer to pick it up. Behind me I heard an outboard come around the corner and then slow when the man in the stern saw me standing among the flooded willows.
