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“I say don’t trust him.”
“Check with you later.”
“I’ll let you in on a secret, Streak. These guys know you’ve got an invisible Roman collar around your neck. They use it against you.”
“Thigpin has chewing tobacco for brains. You give him too much credit.”
“You never listen.”
“Yeah, I do. I just don’t agree with you,” I said.
I called Molly and told her I’d be home for supper a little late. Then I drove down a long two-lane road between oak trees into a chain of freshwater bays that bordered the Atchafalaya Basin. I wasn’t worried about Thigpin. He may have been an anachronism, but I had known many like him. Most of them had become as institutionalized in their mind-set and way of life as the convicts they supervised. Some, when drunk or in a moment of moral clarity, admitted they had gone to work in the prison system before they ended up hoeing soybeans and chopping cotton themselves. Some, upon retirement, looked over their shoulders every day of their lives. Years ago, I knew a guard at Angola who had put men on anthills when they fell out on the work detail. He also shot and killed inmates on the Red Hat gang, sometimes for no other reason than pure meanness. The prison administration allowed him to work at the gate until he was almost eighty because there was not a town in Mississippi or Louisiana he could retire to. The day he was finally forced to leave Angola, he paid one week’s rent at a roominghouse in New Orleans, shut the windows, stuffed newspaper under the doors, and went to sleep with his head in the oven, the gas jets flowing.
I drove up on the levee, my windows down, to my left a wide bay dotted with cypress trees, to my right a string of fish camps on a green bib that sloped down to another bay, this one reddening with the sunset, the fluted trunks of the tupelo gums flaring at the waterline, moss lifting in their limbs. The road atop the levee bent into an arbor of trees where the shadows were thicker, the water along the shore skimmed with a gray film, the tracings of a cottonmouth zigzagging through the algae that had clustered among the storm trash left over from Rita.
I passed a yellow school bus with no wheels, all of its windows pocked by BB guns or .22 rounds, its sides scaled with vine. Then I saw a clapboard shack in the gloom, banana fronds bending over the tin roof, a bright red Coca-Cola machine sweating under the porte cochere, a deck built on pilings over the water, a small barbecue pit smoking greasily in the breeze.
I parked in the yard. Thigpin came out the back of the house and greeted me with a can of beer in his hand. He wore his tall-crown cowboy hat, the same one he was wearing when I interviewed Elmore Latiolais on the brush gang. Perhaps it was the diminished nature of the sunlight, but one side of Thigpin’s face seemed even more shriveled from skin cancer than the last time I had seen him, to the extent that his grin looked like a surgical wound in the corrupted tissue.
When he shook hands, his grip was too strong, biting into mine like that of a man whose energies are not quite under control. “I cain’t crack you a cold one?” he said.
“No, thanks.”
“You in one of them twelve-step programs?” he said.
“That pretty well sums it up.”
He released my hand. “Nobody is looking. I got some Johnnie Walker, too.”
“You said you had a heads-up for me.”
“Come on in the kitchen. I got to get me a fresh beer. I’ll set out some plates for us.”
“I need to get on it, Cap.”
“Too bad. I was looking forward to dining with you.”
His eyebrows and sideburns were freshly clipped, his jaw shaved. I thought I could smell cologne on his skin. He didn’t strike me as a man who had spent much time at his fish camp. The only vehicle in the yard was a pristine Dodge Ram, the tires clean and thick-treaded, the dealer’s tag still in the back window. There was no boat in the water. I glanced at the barbecue pit. The chicken on it was black except for a pink slash where a drumstick had been torn off. “You coming?” he said over his shoulder.
I followed him inside and let the screen door slam shut behind me. The linoleum floor was cracked and wedged upward in places, spiderwebs feathering in the breeze along the jambs of the open windows. I waited for him to speak. Instead, he began clattering around in a cabinet, pulling out coffee cups and a coffeepot, fiddling with the feed on the propane stove. I stepped into his line of sight. “You said you had a problem of conscience of some kind. You want to tell me what this is about, or should I leave?”
He clanked the coffeepot down on the stove and released it as though the handle were burning his fingers. “I think Elmore Latiolais was aiming to kill me. I had it on good authority. He walked to the truck and reached inside. I told him to put his hands where I could see them and to back the hell off. He didn’t do it. So I punched his ticket.”
“From what ‘good authority’ did you get your information?” I asked.
“I got to be friends with a powerful man in Jackson. I invested my money with his bank. A lot of people lost their money in that bank. But I didn’t. I took this man hunting and fishing, and he treated me as a friend.” He was breathing audibly, the way ignorant and defensive people do when no one has challenged their statement.
“I think you’re talking about Layton Blanchet,” I said. “I think you were paid to kill Elmore Latiolais because he was bringing down too much heat on a coalition of lowlifes who are responsible for the deaths of two innocent girls. Is that the problem of conscience we’re talking about, Cap?”
“If you’re saying I was bribed, you’re a goddamn liar.” He still wore his hat; his profile was as chiseled as an Indian’s, his eyes as clear as glass. But even while he denied his guilt, his thoughts seemed elsewhere, as though he had already moved on in the conversation.
“What’
s the heads-up?” I asked.
“People like us do what we’re told. You go along, you get along.”
“Until you start killing people for hire.”
