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“I don’t mean to offend you, Huey, but you’re starting to seriously piss me off,” I said.
“The guy who lives next door to the cabin where your friend was at? He’s been inside twice. He ain’t the kind of guy got a real good relationship with the law or dials 911 a lot, know what I mean? He said a big white guy in swim trunks and a Marine Corps cap was cleaning fish on the porch in back when a guy dressed like a cowboy drove into the yard. He said the guy in swim trunks was talking loud and shaking his fish knife at the cowboy, but my friend couldn’t see it too good ’cause the house was in the way.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Baby Huey raised his eyebrows. “A few minutes later the woman drove away wit’ the cowboy. The woman was driving, and the big guy in swim trunks wasn’t nowhere around.”
“What do you mean he wasn’t anywhere around?”
Baby Huey’s eyes went away from me, then came back again.
“My friend thought he might have been in the trunk of the car. A red pickup was parked down the road from the camp. It followed the Cadillac over the levee. My friend thought it look just like the pickup Legion drive,” he said.
“Your friend didn’t bother to tell anyone this until you asked him?” I said.
“That’s the way it go sometimes,” Baby Huey replied.
I pushed a napkin and my ballpoint pen across the bar to Huey.
“Write down your friend’s name so I can thank him personally,” I said.
I used the pay phone in the corner and called Helen Soileau at her house. She dropped the receiver when she answered, then scraped it up again. I described all the events that had occurred since I had seen her late that afternoon.
“Marvin was wearing red and green cowboy boots? Same color as the cowboy in the bar where Frankie Dogs got hit?” she said.
“That’s right,” I replied.
“Why did Legion pick today to go after Clete?”
“He thinks Clete is with Barbara. Barbara stood up to him in the western store. He wants to get them both at one time,” I said.
“I’m still asleep. I can’t think clearly. What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing right now. Look, when I went to see Perry LaSalle at Sookie Motrie’s duck hunting camp down by Pecan Island, I saw an abandoned church that reminded me of the lyrics in a song Marvin Oates is always quoting from. The church has a sign on it that says Twelve Disciples Assembly. Is that just a coincidence?”
“Marvin used to stay with a preacher there when his mother was on a bender. I think the preacher was the only person who ever treated him decent.”
“I’m going to head down there,” I said.
“You sound a little strung out. Let it go till sunlight. There’s a good chance Baby Huey’s source is full of shit.”
“No, the details are too specific,” I said.
There was a pause on the line.
“You’re not having the wrong kind of thoughts, are you?” she asked.
“No, everything’s copacetic here,” I said.
“Streak?”
“I’m telling you the truth. I’m fine,” I said.
But when I hung up, my hands were tingling with fatigue, my mouth dry, my hair damp with sweat, as though my old courtship with the malarial mosquito had taken new life in my blood. I turned around and almost collided with Baby Huey, who was mopping down a table five feet behind me.
“What do you think you just heard?” I said.
“I was listening to the jukebox. That’s Tee Bobby’s new song. Boy got a million-dollar voice. Ain’t been nobody like him since Guitar Slim,” he said.
