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“Are we going out to dinner?”
“Yeah, sure,” I replied.
“Thanks for confirming that,” she said, her eyes out of focus in the mirror.
A few minutes later we walked out on the gallery. The yard was already in shadow, and on the wind I could smell an odor like cornsilk in a field at the end of the day. It should have been a fine evening, but I knew the white worm eating inside of me was about to ruin it.
“I’ve got to go to a meeting,” I said.
“This isn’t Wednesday night,” she replied.
“I’ll drive to Lafayette,” I said.
She turned and walked back into the bedroom and began changing out of her dress into a pair of blue jeans and a work shirt.
When I came home late that night, she had made a bed on the couch and was asleep with her face turned toward the wall.
The next morning I drove to Perry LaSalle’s office on Main Street. “He’s not in right now. He went out to Mr. Sookie’s camp,” Perry’s secretary said.
“Sookie? Sookie Motrie?” I said.
“Why, yes, sir,” she replied, then saw the look on my face and dropped her eyes.
I drove deep down into Vermilion Parish, where the wetlands of southern Louisiana bleed into the Gulf of Mexico, passing through rice and cattle acreage, then crossing canals and bayous into long stretches of green marshland, where cranes and blue herons stood in the rain ditches, as motionless as lawn ornaments. I turned onto a winding road that led back through gum trees and a brackish swamp, past a paintless, wood-frame church house whose roof had been crushed by a fallen persimmon tree.
But it wasn’t the ruined building that caught my eye. A glass-covered sign in the yard, unblemished except for road dust and a single crack down the center, read, “Twelve Disciples Assembly—Services at 7 p.m. Wednesday and 10 a.m. Sunday. Welcome.”
I stopped the cruiser and backed up, then turned onto the church property. A dirt lane led back to an empty house, now packed to the eaves with bales of hay. A sawhorse with an old Detour sign on it lay sideways in the middle of the lane. Road maintenance equipment and a tree shredder used by parish work crews were parked in a three-sided tin shed, surrounded by water oaks and slash pine. Just past the shed was a railed hog lot that gave onto a thick woods and a dead lake. The hogs in the lot were indescribably filthy, their bristles matted with feces, their snouts glazed with what looked like chicken guts.
I tried to remember the lyrics of the song Marvin Oates was always quoting from but they escaped me. Maybe Bootsie was right, I told myself. Maybe I was so deep in my own head that I saw a dark portent in virtually everyone who had been vaguely connected with the lives of Amanda Boudreau and Linda Zeroski, even to the extent that I had actually begun to think Perry LaSalle, who had represented Linda in court, might bear examination.
I continued on down the paved road and turned onto a grassy knoll and drove through an arbor of oak and pecan and persimmon trees to an old duck-hunting camp that Sookie Motrie had acquired by appointing himself the executor of an elderly lady’s estate.
He was a slight man who kept an equestrian posture and dressed like a horseman, in two-tone cowboy boots and tweed jackets with suede shoulders, to compensate for his lack of physical stature and a chin that receded abruptly into his throat. He wore a mustache and deliberately kept his hair long, combing it back over the collar in a rustic fashion, which gave him an unconventional and cavalier appearance and distracted others from the avarice in his eyes.
He had recently moved his houseboat from Pecan Island to his camp, chainsawing down twenty-five yards of cypresses along the bank to create an instant berth for his boat. Rather than haul his garbage away, he piled it in the center of the knoll and burned it, creating a black sculpture of melted and scorched aluminum wrap, Styrofoam, tin cans, and plastic.
Perry LaSalle stood under shade trees by his parked Gazelle, watching Sookie Motrie, stripped to the waist, bust skeet with a double-barreled Parker twelve-gauge over the water. The popping of the shotgun was almost lost in the wind, and neither man heard me walk up behind them. Sookie triggered the skeet trap with his foot, raised the shotgun to his shoulder, and blew the skeet into a pink mist against the sky.
Then he turned and saw me, the way an animal might when it is alone with its prey and wishes no intrusion into its domain.
“Hello, Dave!” he called, breaking open the breech of his gun, never letting his eyes leave mine, as though he were genuinely glad to see me.
“How do you do, sir?” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb y’all. I just need a minute or two of Perry’s time.”
“We’re gonna have lunch. I got any kind of food you want,” Sookie said.
“Thanks just the same,” I said.
“You want to shoot?” he said, offering me the shotgun.
I shook my head.
“Well, I’m gonna let you gentlemen talk. It’s probably over my head, anyway. Right, Dave?” he said, and winked, inferring an insult that had not been made, casting himself in the role of victim while he kept others off balance. He slipped his shotgun into a sheepskin-lined case and propped it against the back rail of his houseboat, then opened a green bottle of Heineken in the galley and drank it on the deck, his skin healthy and tan in the salt breeze that blew off the Gulf.
/> “What are you doing with a shitpot like that?” I asked Perry.
“What’s your objection to Sookie?”
