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She got out of the cruiser and slipped her baton through the ring on her belt. She removed her shades from her shirt pocket and put them back on. Her face looked hot and glazed. Her mouth was a tight line before she spoke. “I forgot you belong to that great fraternity of all-knowing A.A. swinging dicks. If I forget again, remind me,” she said.
We found Herman Stanga at the back of the bar, where he was sipping from a demitasse of coffee, a tiny spoon and a single sugar cube on his saucer, his thin mustache winking with each sip. A big dressing was taped over the split Clete had put in his forehead, but otherwise he looked surprisingly well. “Hey, what is it, Robo?” he said. “Give my man a seltzer and ice and a lime slice, and wash out the glass good so it don’t have no alcohol in it. You ain’t got the Elephant Man out there, have you?”
“My boss wants to talk to you,” I said.
“The champ of the Muff Diver ’69 Olympics? How she been doing?”
“I wouldn’t get on her wrong side.”
“Man, I ain’t getting on no side of that broad,” he said. He looked at the bartender and laughed.
“Want to take a ride with me or sit in the cooler in St. Martinville while we work out legalities?”
Then he surprised me again. “Anyt’ing to he’p. You hear about my suit against that fat cracker? I’m gonna take both of his bidnesses, the apartment he owns in New Orleans, his car, his life insurance policy, his savings account, his guns, his furniture, and the waterfront lot in Biloxi he’s making payments on in his ex-wife’s name. When I get finished wit’ him, he’s gonna have a toot’brush and, if he’s lucky, the tube of toot’paste that goes wit’ it.”
“You’re the man, Herman,” I said.
“You got that right, Jack. You kill me, Robo Man.” He looked again at the bartender and laughed loudly, slapping the bar with the flat of his hand.
Emma Poche went back to the St. Martinville Sheriff’s Department, and Herman Stanga rode with me back to New Iberia. I didn’t like sitting next to him or talking to him or even acknowledging his presence. He smelled of hair cream and the decayed food in his teeth and the deodorant he used to overlay the sweat in his armpits. I cracked the window and kept my eyes on the road and wondered at the level of the enmity I felt toward him.
At the city limits, we entered a long corridor of oak trees. On the right-hand side of the road, set in deep shade, was a two-story antebellum home with a wide veranda, built out of wood in imitation of the columned brick Greek revival mansions down the Teche. The veranda sagged in the middle from either termite damage or settling in the foundation. The paint had turned gray in the smoke of stubble fires or dust blown out of the fields. A wash line was strung across the side yard, the clothes flapping in the wind.
“The man who built that house was a free man of color named Labiche,” I said. “He owned a brick factory in town. He also owned slaves. He got rich selling out his own people. What do you think about that, Herman?”
“Say again? I was just starting to catch some Z’s.”
“The guy who built that home back there was a mulatto who bought and sold slaves and used them to make bricks that went into the construction of the biggest homes in this area before the Civil War. Some people would probably say he was just a creature of his times. My feeling is that he was probably an opportunist and a Judas. Since you’re a man of considerable experience in racial matters, I wondered what your opinion is.”
“What I t’ink is you couldn’t find your own dick if you had a string tied to it. Wake me up when we’re there,” he replied.
It was almost five P.M. when I drove down East Main and turned in to the long driveway that led past the city library to the spacious brick building that served as both City Hall and the sheriff’s department. Between the library and the wall of bamboo was a grotto dedicated to the mother of Jesus. The street and the buildings and the grotto were already deep in shadow under the oak trees. A crowd was gathered around the grotto, and at first I thought they were tourists or religious people; then I recognized Layton Blanchet in their midst and remembered he was a member of a live oak or historical preservation society, the kind of group that he would probably find useful in his machinations.
As I drove past him, he raised his hand in recognition, but I pretended not to see him. I put Herman Stanga in one of our interview rooms and went to Helen’s office and told her I had delivered the freight. “Where you going?” she said.
“To my office, if you don’t mind,” I replied.
“I mind.”
“Talking to Stanga is a waste of time.”
“Humor me.”
“The truth is, everyone would be a lot happier if Clete had taken him off at the neck. Stanga gets high on being rousted. He’ll probably file a harassment charge against us and use it in his suit against Clete. The only thing Stanga understands is a club upside his head or a bullet in the mouth.”
“Bwana no run the department. Bwana shut up. Bwana go into the interview room now.”
Earlier in the day I had given Helen all my notes on the death of Bernadette Latiolais, my interview with her brother on the work gang outside Natchez, and my interview with the store clerk and Bernadette Latiolais’s grandmother in Jeff Davis Parish. I also had given her my files on Robert Weingart and Vidor Perkins. When we entered the interview room, Stanga was sitting at the table, gazing out the window at a speedboat that was towing a girl on skis down the bayou. He put an Altoid in his mouth and sucked on it. “I got about fifteen minutes for this, then I need a ride back to my car. Y’all cool wit’ that?”
“We appreciate your coming in,” Helen said. “You knew a convict in Mississippi by the name of Elmore Latiolais?”
“I been over that wit’ Robo Man here. The answer is yeah, I knew that lying nigger for twenty years. He got hisself capped. Do I know why? Let me guess. He shot off his mout’ to a peckerwood guard and ate a load of buckshot. Do I know anyt’ing about these girls that has gotten themselves killed? Let me guess again. They was working independent and messed wit’ the wrong john and had the kind of date they wasn’t expecting.”
“Why were you
over in Jeff Davis Parish with Robert Weingart?”
“The writer?”
