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He spiked his clippers into the lawn and blotted his neck with a folded handkerchief. “Come wit’ me. They in the backyard,” he said.
I followed him around the side of the house. The three children I had seen flying a kite behind Bello’s property were playing croquet in the shade of oak trees. “You guys remember me?” I said.
They looked at one another, then at Chereen’s grandfather. “Tell him what he want to know,” he said.
I squatted down so I was eye level with the children. “When y’all were having your picnic at your fort, you opened a can of tuna fish, didn’t you?” I said.
All three of them nodded, but their eyes didn’t meet mine. I pointed to the little boy who had opened the can. “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Freddy.”
“What did you use to open the can, Freddy?”
“Can opener,” he replied.
“Was it an unusual can opener?” I said, smiling at him now.
“A little bit, maybe,” he said.
“Where’d you get it?” I said.
“I found it,” Chereen said, before her friend could answer. “In the field behind the horse barn.”
“Do you still have it?”
“It’s at the fort. Wit’ the crucifix and the broke chain it was on,” she said.
“A crucifix and a chain? Those things and the can opener were all together?” I said.
“Yes, suh, lying in the weeds. Not far from the fence,” Freddy said.
“I’m glad you guys found and saved those things for me. But you should have told me this yesterday. A man was killed and his killer is still out there, maybe preparing to hurt someone else. When I asked y’all if you had been inside the tape, you told me you hadn’t. So I had to figure all this out on my own. By keeping silent about the things you had found, you were telling me a lie. Indirectly, you were helping a very bad man get away with a terrible crime.”
“They got the point,” the grandfather said.
When I stood up, I could hear my knees pop. “How old are you, sir?” I asked.
“Sixty-one,” he replied.
I wanted to ask him how much value he set on pride. Was it worth the innocent lives of others in danger? I wanted to ask him if he thought he could negotiate with the kind of evil that dwells in a man who could tear a fellow human being apart with a steel pick. I wanted to tell him I was not the source of his discontent and enmity and that as a child of poor and illiterate Cajuns I shared his background and had done nothing to warrant his irritability.
I had all these vituperative thoughts, but I expressed none of them. Instead, I shook his hand without his having offered it. He stared at me blankly.
“Will you accompany me and the children to their fort, sir?” I said.
He brushed some garden cuttings off his shirt with the backs of his fingers. “Yeah, I could use a break. I’ll get some Popsicles out of the icebox to take along. Appreciate the job you doing even though I don’t probably show it,” he said.
space
AFTER I DROVE WITH THE CHILDREN and their grandfather to the plywood fort, I returned to the office and logged the neck chain, crucifix, and the small P-38 army-issue can opener into an evidence locker. Then I called Helen Soileau at home.
“Bello Lujan’s killer is a guy from the Islands. He’s a friend of Lefty Raguza,” I said.
“How do you know?” she said.
“Some kids playing on Bello Lujan’s property found a chain and crucifix and G.I. can opener by Bello’s back fence. I saw this guy wearing this stuff the night I had a run-in with Lefty at that zebra club in Lafayette.”
“You’re sure?” she asked.
