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“There’s no money in selling cooze no more. Herman Stanga is into meth. You got to come to Mis’sippi and interview somebody on a road gang to find that out?”
I stood up, my gaze focused on neutral space. “I have several photographs here I’d like you to look at. Tell me if you know any of these women.”
There were seven photos in my shirt pocket. I removed only six of them. He remained seated on the log and went through them one by one. None of the photos was a mug shot. They had been taken by friends or family members using cheap cameras and one-hour development services. The backdrops were in poor neighborhoods where the residents parked their cars in the yards and the litter in the rain ditches disappeared inside the weeds during the summer and was exposed again during the winter. Two of the victims were white, four were black. Some of them were pretty. All of them were young. None of them looked unhappy. None of them probably had any idea of the fate that awaited them.
“They all lived sout’ of the tracks, didn’t they?” he said.
“That’s right. Do you recognize them?”
“No, I ain’t seen none of them. You ain’t shown me my sister’s picture.”
I removed the seventh photo from my pocket and handed it to him. The girl in it had been seventeen when she died. She was last seen leaving a dollar store at four o’clock in the afternoon. She had a sweet, round face and was smiling in the photograph.
Elmore Latiolais cupped the photo in his palm. He stared at it for a long time, then shielded his eyes as though avoiding the sun’s glare. “Can I keep it?” he said.
“Sorry,” I replied.
He nodded and returned the photo to me, his eyes moist, his gold Brillo pad of a haircut popping with sweat.
“You said you hadn’t seen any of the other victims. How did you know they lived south of the tracks?” I said.
“That’s what I mean when I say you got your head up your ass. If they lived nort’ of the railroad track, y’all would be tearing the state of Lou’sana apart to get the man who killed them.”
Elmore Latiolais was not a likable man. In all probability, he had committed crimes that were worse in nature than those for which he had been punished. But the fact he considered Herman Stanga a cancer indicated, at least to me, that Elmore was still held together by the same glue as the rest of us. Herman Stanga was another matter. Herman Stanga was a man I hated, maybe less for what he was personally than what he represented, but I hated him just the same, to the degree that I did not want to be armed and alone with him.
I said good-bye to Elmore Latiolais.
“You ain’t gonna he’p out?” he said.
“You haven’t told me anything that could be considered of investigative value.”
“‘Investigative value’? Yeah, I like them kind of words. Herman killed a cousin of mine ten years back. He give her a hotshot and blew her heart out. When he knowed I was onto him, he paid a guy to joog me. Y’all wasn’t interested then, y’all ain’t interested now.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I replied.
“Yeah,” he said.
HERMAN WAS ONE of those singular individuals for whom there is no adequate categorical description. He deliberately created addiction among his own people by giving what he called “entrepreneurial start-up flake” to teenage dealers. He encouraged his rock queens to eat fried food so their extra weight would signal to their customers that they were AIDS-free. He pimped off his white girls to black johns and his black girls to white johns. If a perv who liked it rough got into the mix, that was just the way it flushed sometimes. “Harry Truman integrated the United States Army. I’m taking multiculturalism and equal opportunity to a much higher level,”
he liked to say.
By his own definition of himself, he was always rocking to his own rhythms, high on his own rebop and snap-crackle-and-pop, and didn’t “need to slam no gram to be what I am.” He had the face of a pixie, his mustache trimmed into tiny black wings on his upper lip, his eyes bright with innocent mischief, the harmless satyr peeking out of the bushes. His physique was hard and lean, his skin stretched tight on his bones and tendons like a meth addict’s, though he used drugs rarely, and only for recreational purposes. He liked to kick off his clothes by the poolside, down to his white silk boxer shorts, and sunbathe on a floating air mattress in the middle of his swimming pool, wraparound Ray-Bans on his face, a frozen daiquiri balanced on his stomach, his sunblock trailing off the ends of his fingers, his phallus as pronounced as the wood figure on a sailing ship’s prow. The neighbors complained because of the exposure to their children, but Herman literally gave them the finger, hiking it in the air whenever he saw them gazing at him from their windows. Herman Stanga was above convention. Herman Stanga was the iconoclast whose irreverence had made him rich while the assets of his neighbors drained through a sinkhole called the recession of 2009.
He had acquired his home on Bayou Teche, a faux antebellum two-story brick structure with twin chimneys, from a black physician who signed over the property for a minimal sum and left town with his wife and children and was never heard from again. Maintenance of the house and grounds ended the day Herman moved in. The hollow wood pillars were eaten by termites. The ventilated green storm shutters hung askew on their hinges; the rain gutters were clogged with pine needles and bled rust down the window frames. The manicured St. Augustine lawn was destroyed by mold and weed infestation and chains of red-ant mounds. Herman’s Dobermans dug holes in the flower beds and downloaded piles of dog shit on every square inch of dirt they could squat on.
Herman, like a Leonardo da Vinci in reverse, had turned his own home into an emblematic masterpiece of suburban decay.
I rang the chimes, but no one answered. When I walked around back, I saw him cleaning leaves and pine needles out of the pool with a long pole, wearing Speedos that exposed his crack and his pubic hair. He had the most peculiar coloration I had ever seen in a human being. It was like black ivory that someone had poured liquefied gold inside. The afternoon sun had already dipped behind the oak trees on the bayou, and his wet hair and the oily glaze on his skin seemed touched with fire. A chicken was turning on a rotisserie over a bed of charcoals, next to a glass-topped table that was inset with an umbrella. In the shade of the umbrella was a cooler packed with crushed ice and bottles of Mexican and German beer.
“It’s my man RoboCop,” he said. “Sit yourself down, my brother, and open yourself a beer.”
A striped robe like a Bedouin would wear hung over the back of a canvas chair. I picked it up and threw it at him. “Put it on.”
“What for?”
“Your neighbor’s kids are looking through the gate.”
“You’re right, it’s starting to cool off,” he said. He wrapped the robe around his midriff and tied it like a sarong, his chin tilted up into the breeze. The late sun’s yellow glare on the bayou was like a match flame flaring just under the current. “Want to take a swim? I got a suit might fit you.”
