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“I think he broke into a woman’s house in St. Mary Parish and molested her. I think he should be our primary suspect in the murder of Linda Zeroski.”
I told the sheriff the story of Marie Guilbeau. He leaned back and tapped the heels of his hands on the arms of his chair. He was thinking about the case now and I could see his irritation with me slipping out of his eyes.
“I don’t buy it. Oates is simpleminded. He doesn’t have any history of violence,” he said.
“None we know about. I want to get a warrant and take his place apart.”
“Do it,” the sheriff said. “Are you going to talk to Perry LaSalle?”
“What did Legion say exactly?” I asked.
“I never got it straight. LaSalle doesn’t sound rational. He says this guy Guidry isn’t human. What’s he talking about?”
Helen Soileau went to work on the warrant while I called Perry at his office. Outside the window I could see a round blue place in the sky and birds trapped inside it. Perry’s secretary said he had not come to the office yet. I called his number on Poinciana Island.
“Legion threatened Clete and Barbara?” I said.
“Yeah, on the phone, late last night. He threatened me, too. He thinks I’m writing a book about him,” he replied. I could hear him breathing into the receiver.
“You told Barbara?”
“Yeah, she said she has a pistol and she’s looking forward to parking one in his buckwheats.”
“Did you warn Clete?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I just didn’t.”
Because he’s of no value to you, I thought.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“Nothing. You told the sheriff Legion wasn’t human. What did you mean?”
His voice make an audible click in the phone.
“He can speak in what sounds like an ancient or dead language. He did it last night,” he said.
“It’s probably just bad French,” I said, and quietly hung up.
I looked at the phone, my ears popping, and wondered how Perry enjoyed being lied to for a change, particularly when he was frightened to death.
I called Clete twice and got his answering machine. I left messages both times. By late that afternoon Helen and I had a warrant to search Marvin Oates’s shotgun house on St. Peter Street. Marvin was not at home, but we called the landlord and got him to open the house. It had stopped raining and the sky overhead was blue and ribbed with pink clouds, but out over the Gulf another storm was building and the thunder reverberated dully through Marvin’s tin roof as we dumped out all his drawers, pulled his clothes off hangers, flipped his mattress upside down, raked all the cookware out of his kitchen cabinets, and generally wreaked havoc on the inside of his house. But we found nothing that was of any value to us.
Except five strips of pipe tape hanging loose from an empty niche in the back of the dresser, tape that was strong enough to hold a handgun in place against the wood.
“I bet that’s where he hid the nine-millimeter he used to kill Frankie Dogs,” I said.
“It’s still hard for me to make that guy for anything except a meltdown, Dave,” Helen said.
“I knew an old-time moonshiner who once told me the man who kills you will be at your throat before you ever know it,” I said.
“Yeah? I don’t get it,” she said.
“What kind of guy could get close enough to cap Frankie Dogs?” I said.
