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Hogman heard the deputy slide her baton from the plastic ring on her belt.
“Tell me how you like this. I’ve heard it passes in a week or so,” she said, thrusting the point of the baton with both hands into a spot just above Weingart’s belt.
He let out a groan and slumped against a car fender, barely able to support himself, his mouth open, his face gray.
“One more little poke, in case you didn’t get the message,” the deputy said. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? Happy motoring.”
HOGMAN CALLED AT the office in the morning and told me what he and the waitress had seen and heard at the club the previous night.
“What happened to the girl?” I asked.
“She called a cab.”
“I’m not sure what you’re telling me here, Hogman.”
“Dave, this ain’t just some trashy po’ white shopping for country girls. When a man like that picks up a black girl, it’s ’cause he wants to leave his mark on her.”
“But is something else bothering you about what you saw and heard?”
“The deputy and this Hollywood guy talked like they knew each other. Like the deputy knew about t’ings he’d done before. When she come inside later, I said, ‘A man like that don’t stop being what he is ’cause you poke him wit’ a club, no. He just do what you done to him to the next girl he gets his hands on.’”
“What’d she say?”
“That he hadn’t broke no law. That she run him off and he wouldn’t be back again.”
“What’s this deputy’s name?”
“I just call her Miss Emma,” he replied. “I don’t know her last name.”
GEORGE ORWELL ONCE wrote that people are always better than we think they are. They are more kind, more loving, more brave and decent. They keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber and go down with the decks awash and the guns blazing. I still believe that Orwell was right. But too often there are times when our fellow human beings let us down, and when they do, all of us are the less for it.
After I finished talking to Hogman, I drove to St. Martinville and walked into the sheriff’s department and found Emma at a desk in her cubicle, sorting through a pile of paperwork in her in-basket.
“Sometimes I wrap mine in a paper sack and stuff it in the bottom of the trash can,” I said. “The irony is, it doesn’t seem to make any difference.”
A half-smile lingered on her mouth. “You just passing by?”
“I understand you had a run-in with Robert Weingart last night.”
I hoped she would make a joke about it or indicate convincingly that she was busy. I hoped she would be mildly irritated. I hoped she would do almost anything except pause and think before she replied. But I saw her eyes go flat and bright without cause, and impossible to read. “Who told you that?” she asked.
“You’ve met Weingart before?”
“I know who he is.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Clete told me once that Weingart might be using roofies on local girls. So I invited him out of St. Martin Parish.”
I pulled up a chair and sat down by the side of her desk, not over two feet from her. “Yesterday Weingart wired a huge amount of money to Canada. You think the book business is that go
od?”
“How would I know?”
“Because maybe you have a history with him.”
“I saw him giving a snow job to a young girl who didn’t have enough sense to stay out of his car. So I had a heart-to-heart with him. I don’t know where you get all this other stuff. Have you been talking to the bartender?”
