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“I’m taking my wife out tonight. I’m already late. I’m trying to get home before the storm breaks,” he replied.
“You saw the guy in cowboy boots go out the back door?” I said.
“I didn’t say that. I saw a man playing pinball. I didn’t pay any attention to him. I heard the shots, then I went into the rest room. I wish I hadn’t gotten mixed up in this.”
“You saw no one else?” Dronet asked.
“No. I feel sorry for the man who died. But I don’t know anything. The guy with the cowboy boots, they were green and red. I remember that. Like a Mexican might wear. But I didn’t see his face. Can’t we do this tomorrow?”
“If you didn’t bother to look at his face, why’d you look at his boots?” Helen asked.
“Because his pants were tucked inside them. Can I go now?”
“Yeah. You and your wife have a good time,” Dronet said.
“Who’s Johnny?” the liquor distributor asked.
“Say again?” I said.
“The man on the floor was still alive when I got to him. He said, ‘Hey, Johnny, some guy took me down hard.’ It was funny, because my first name is Johnny. My wife’s not gonna believe this.”
“Get out of here,” Helen said.
The bartender was an over-the-hill ex-wrestler and competition weight lifter from New Orleans, with a walleye and a polished round head and strands of braided barbed wire tattooed around both his upper arms.
“You got a look at the cowboy?” I asked him.
“It’s a dump. I don’t concentrate on the faces that come in here. Short version, I failed Braille school. You guys finished back there? I got to mop out the shitter,” he replied.
Helen was thoughtful and quiet on the way back into New Iberia. Rain was falling on Spanish Lake, and fog rolled off the water and hung in the trees and smudged the lit windows in the houses set back from the road. “You think it was a Mob hit?” she asked.
“Nope. Frankie was a made guy, Joe Zeroski’s number one man.”
She yawned and steered the cruiser around a possum that was crossing the road in the headlights, the windshield wipers beating hard against the rain.
“Long day, bwana. You want to hang it up for tonight?” she said
“How about a visit to our local Bible salesman first?”
“Surprise, surprise,” she said.
Marvin Oates lived downtown on St. Peter Street in a rented shotgun house, one with ventilated shutters, left over from the 1890s. Banana trees were wedged in a cluster against one side of his gallery, and on the other side bougainvillea with stems as thick as broomsticks had tangled itself in the railings so that the front of the house looked like an impacted tooth.
An ancient Buick, one side burned black by a fire, the entire paint job encrusted with soot and rust, sat in the shell drive, the rain pinging on the metal. Helen placed her hand on the hood.
“Still ticking,” she said.
Marvin Oates answered the door in pajama bottoms and a pajama shirt that was unbuttoned on his chest, barefoot, his face full of sleep, his breath sweet with mouthwash through the screen.
“Can we come in?” I asked.
“I was sleeping. I get up early.”
“We’d sure like to come in. It’s wet out here,” I said.
He pushed open the door, then stepped back in the shadows and removed a pair of blue jeans from a hat rack and put them on with his back to us.
“I got to get my shirt. Excuse me,” he said.
