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“Slim and Tony did this?”
“And about ten more like them.”
“Why didn’t you tell me all this earlier?” I said.
“’Cause you ain’t axed me,” he replied, biting into a fried pie.
I drove Monarch to his house up on Loreauville Road, then went to the department and in the Saturday-morning quietness of my office pulled out all my files and notes and photographs dealing with the unsolved vehicular homicide of Crustacean Man.
Just before noon I called Koko Hebert at his home. Strangely enough, he acted halfway normal, making me wonder if much of his public persona wasn’t manufactured.
“Do I think the fatal wound is consistent with a blow from a baseball bat?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“It could be.”
“Come on, Koko. I need a warrant. Give me something I can use.”
“The bone was crushed, the damage massive. All kinds of shit can happen in a high-speed hit-and-run we can’t reconstruct. It’s like somebody getting caught inside a concrete mixer.”
“I’ll bring you the photos. The wound is concave and lateral in nature, the indentation uniform along the edges.”
“Stop telling me what I already know. Yeah, a baseball bat could have done it. I’ll come down and make an addendum to the file if you need it.”
“Thanks, partner.”
“Who’s the warrant on?”
“Some kids who would like to pour the rest of us into soap molds,” I said.
I DOUBTED IF I’d be able to get the warrant until Monday morning, but there were other things to be done that weekend, other elements in the dream that had caused me to sit up as though a piece of crystal had shattered in my sleep.
I drove to Loreauville and crossed a drawbridge and passed a shipyard where steel boats that service offshore oil rigs are manufactured. I drove down an undulating two-lane road through water oaks and palmettos and asked an older black man clipping a tangle of bougainvillea from the trellised entrance to his yard if he knew a little girl by the name of Chereen. The house behind him was made of brick and well maintained. A speedboat mounted on a trailer was parked in his porte cocher
e.
“That’s my granddaughter’s name. Why you want to know?” he said.
I opened my badge holder and hung it out the window. “My name is Dave Robicheaux. I’m with the Iberia Sheriff’s Department. I thought she might have some information that could be helpful to us,” I said.
The black man wore old slacks and tennis shoes, but his shirt was pressed, his back erect. The distrust in his eyes was unmistakable. “She’s nine years old. What information she gonna have?”
“It concerns evidence she and two other children may have found at a crime scene,” I said.
“You talking about the Lujan farm?”
“I need to talk to your granddaughter, sir.”
“Maybe I need to call my lawyer, too.”
I pulled my truck in his driveway and cut the engine. I opened the door and stepped out on the grass. “She and her friends were playing in a plywood fort by Bello Lujan’s back fence. Mr. Lujan was murdered. Where’s your granddaughter?”
“She don’t know nothing about no murder.”
I could feel my patience draining and my old nemesis, anger, blooming like an infection in my chest. Like most southern white people, I did not like paying the price for what my antecedents may have done.
“The man who killed Bello Lujan is still out there. You want him prowling around your neighborhood? You want him looking for your granddaughter, sir?” I said.
