Bring Him Back Dead (2 page)

He felt sorry for Lacosta. The aging carnival man was in much the same position as he was. Theirs were two of the oldest families in the parish. They dated back to the Battle of New Orleans and fifty years before that. But it seemed that what acreage they still held was the only mud in the parish, at least within a five-mile radius of French Bayou, that refused to spout oil.

Obviously, Lacosta had just pulled in. With the help of a red-haired girl wearing a white two-piece play suit, he was attempting to unhitch the house trailer from the station wagon.

Latour drove past the clearing too fast to see the girl’s face distinctly. All he could tell was that she was young. He doubted that she was the girl with whom Lacosta had been living during his last visit. Now that the years were catching up with him, Jacques changed his women almost as often as other men changed their shirts. Every year they were younger.

Seeing the girl made him think of Olga. He thought perhaps they could salvage something of their marriage if they could find some mutual meeting ground. But every time he tried to explain how sorry he was that things had turned out as they had, his pride got the best of him. So Olga was a Russian aristocrat. He was a Latour. He didn’t have to buy any woman’s love.

The country grew wilder the deeper he drove into it. The secondary road pinched out and became a rutted track winding between the trees. He could see the smoke from the cooker and smell the charge that Turner was running a half mile before he reached the still. Having run for a year without being raided, Turner wasn’t bothering to observe the most rudimentary precautions.

Latour left his car and fought his way through the scrub.
As stills went in the back country, Turner had a fairly elaborate outfit. There were barrels, coils, a brick furnace, and drums, the whole setup built on a stout cypress platform spanning Booker Creek.

As Latour watched from behind a tree, the gaunt-faced man finished running a charge and uncapped his cooker and put out the fire. Next he scooped a handful of fermenting liquid from a barrel and tasted it critically. Dissatisfied, he added a handful of chicken manure to aid in the fermentation and recovered the barrel. Then, picking up two five-gallon demijohns of raw whisky, he climbed down from the platform.

Latour stepped out from behind the tree. “You’re getting careless, Lant.”

Turner was annoyed rather than worried. “What you doing here, Latour? What you want with me?”

Latour gave him the warrant. “I think that’s obvious.”

Turner set the demijohns he was holding on the ground. “Now, look here, youngster. You’ve no call to raid me. I paid — ” He thought better of what he’d been about to say and looked at the ax that Latour was carrying. “Don’t tell me you aim t’ chop up my outfit?”

“Those were my orders.”

“Who gave them?”

“First Deputy Tom Mullen.”

Turner scratched at a red-bug bite. “I tell you what. I’ll give you a hundred dollars if you don’t use that ax on my outfit. At least let me talk t’ Tom first.”

Latour was tempted. Turner had obviously been paying off and had felt secure until someone had upped the ante. A hundred dollars would ease his and Olga’s financial position immeasurably. But where did a man stop after he took his first bribe? What did he use for self-respect?

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “But my orders were to put you out of business.”

Turner spat a stream of tobacco juice on the still warm cooker. “Then ax away an’ be damned. But hit seems such a waste.”

Latour stove in the cooker and the drums. Then he swung his ax on the barrels and hot buck gushed out, soaking both legs of his trousers. Finished, he smashed
one demijohn and picked up the other. “Now walk ahead of me,” he ordered Turner. “And don’t give me any trouble.”

Turner protested. “I don’t give anyone any trouble. All I do is make a little drinkin’ likker at a price a boy can afford to pay.”

When they reached his car, Latour drove back the way he’d come. It had taken him longer to locate and demolish the still than he’d realized. Night wasn’t far away. The egrets and herons and limpkins were beginning to roost.

Lacosta was still in the clearing, tinkering with the motor of his station wagon, but the red-haired girl wasn’t in sight.

The shots, three of them this time, came out of a cane brake two hundred yards beyond the clearing in which Lacosta was parked. One of them starred the windshield. The other two grazed Latour’s chin, then whined harmlessly out through the rolled-down window on the far side of the car.

Lant Turner slumped as low as he could in the seat. “Come, Jesus.”

Latour stopped the car and drew his revolver and emptied it at the cane brake. It was like attempting to sprinkle salt on a duck’s tail. He had no way of knowing just where the shots had come from.

There was no motion in the brake.

Latour reloaded his gun but there was still nothing for him to shoot at but cane, one stalk as dark green, as motionless as the stalk growing next to it, and thirty feet of black water between the road and the brake. Only a fool would attempt to wade it. It would mean certain death if he did.

Latour picked the slug that starred the windshield from the floor boards. From its weight he judged it had been fired from a .30-.30 rifle. The fact in itself told nothing. There were many .30-.30 rifles in the delta.

Turner was wryly amused. “Must be someone doesn’t like you.”

Latour wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt. The remark was a masterpiece of understatement. Someone
wanted to kill him. Someone wanted to kill him badly. And that someone wanted him dead right now.

It was one thing to shoot at a moving car and another to shoot at a man armed with a .45-caliber revolver that he knew how to use. No more shots were fired. The cane stalks concealing the hidden rifleman continued to remain motionless. But in a few more minutes it would be dark. Then the odds would change. Latour marked the spot by a big bay tree and drove slowly on.

Whoever wanted him dead had had two tries for him. The third try might be successful. And he hadn’t the least idea who his would-be killer was.

Night was complete when he braked his car in the parking lot behind the jail and ordered Lant Turner to precede him through the door.

Mullen was still on the duty desk. He glanced over the top of the newspaper he was reading and saw Turner, but neither of them spoke. Latour set the demijohn on the desk and labeled it, then walked Turner back to the lockup.

He wasn’t proud of himself. He had a feeling he’d been used. He wished now he’d taken the hundred dollars that Turner had offered him. The chances were that if a squeeze was on, Mullen would get five times that amount.

“No hard feelings?” he asked Turner.

Turner made himself at home in the cell. “No hard feelings,” he said. “In my business a man expects t’ take a fall now and then.” He stretched out on the bunk. “But you have a lot t’ learn, sonny.”

Latour stopped in the washroom before returning to the office. He washed his hands and face and combed his hair, but there was nothing he could do about the sour buck on his trousers. He smelled like a walking distillery.

When he did return to the office, the demijohn had moved from one side of the desk to the other and Mullen was wiping his mouth with the mat of hair on the back of his hand.

“How come you brought Lant in?” he asked.

“I was given a warrant to serve.”

“Smashing his still would have been enough.”

“That wasn’t the way the warrant read.”

From force of habit, Latour unbuckled his gun belt and started to hang it on its hook, then strapped it around his waist again.

Mullen was interested. “How come you’re wearing your gun if you’re going off duty?”

Latour told him. “Because someone is trying to kill me. I was shot at as I walked out of my house this morning, and again a few minutes ago from a cane brake on the Lacosta plantation.”

“You saw the man?”

“No. Neither time.”

“Do you know of any reason why anyone should want to kill you?”

“No.”

Mullen drank from the demijohn again, openly this time, handling it as easy as most men handled a gallon jug. “Look, Andy. The way you run your life is your own affair. But if I were you — ”

“Yes?”

“I’d stop being so damn noble and try being human for a change. There are a lot of men in town, and quite a few in Angola, who have reason not to like you. So if I were you, I’d walk a little lighter.”

“In other words, if I’m found shot to death, it might embarrass certain parties.”

“You could put it that way.”

“There might even be an investigation of how French Bayou is being run.”

“It’s bound to come sooner or later.”

“But you would prefer to have it come later.”

“Much later.”

Latour walked to the front door of the office. When he turned in the doorway, Mullen was drinking from the jug again.

“Oh, by the way,” Latour told him. “Just in case you’re interested, it seems that Lant uses chicken manure to hurry his buck along.”

Mullen spat the whisky in his mouth into a brass cuspidor. His normally red face turned even redder. “You smug son-of-a-bitch. Now you tell me. No wonder people take shots at you.”

L
ATOUR STOOD
on the front steps of the jail and lighted a cigarette. He didn’t feel noble. He certainly wasn’t smug. All he felt was confused, confused and a little frightened.

Between the Army and Olga and a dry hole in the ground, his life had turned out a lot differently than he’d planned it.

He looked at his watch. It was almost eight o’clock, too late to go home for supper. Not that Olga cared if he ever came home.

He crossed the square of lawn in front of the jail and walked up Lafitte Street. If one had never seen a wide-open town, French Bayou was something to see. The street was one long blaze of neon. Music blared from every second doorway. The bars and the clubs and the walk were crowded with men with money burning their pockets. And there were almost as many girls as there were men, pretty young things in bright dresses, weaving in and out of the pack, willing for a price to cater to any desire that couldn’t be served on a plate, poured from a bottle, or rolled out of a dice cup.

Two drunks, one of them a local charter-boat captain named George Villere, were fighting on the walk in front of Portugee Joe’s Café while an enthusiastic crowd urged them on.

Latour cuffed them apart and wished he hadn’t. Villere took exception to the interference with his pleasure and Latour was forced to fight him back across the walk and against a parked car. His back muscles tensed as he fought. The shots from the cane brake had come close. A man with a pistol could do better in a crowd. In the blare of brass and thump of drums and babble of excited voices, the reports wouldn’t even be heard. He was relieved when Villere decided he’d had enough.

“You think you’re God Almighty, don’t you?” Villere panted.

“No,” Latour said. “Just the law.” He tried to get the crowd moving. “Now, come on. Break it up. All of you.”

A little brunette in the front row of the crowd laughed. “Don’t reach for that sawbuck, girls. You heard what the man said. He’s the law.”

The dispersing crowd laughed with her.

The back of Latour’s ears felt hot. First Tom Mullen, now a chippy. He didn’t care how much moonshine the Lant Turners made. He didn’t care if all the chippies in French Bayou were laid end to end. But this trying to walk a tightrope in a wide-open town put him in a strange position. Whatever he did was wrong.

He walked into Joe’s Cafe. Mamma Joe had seen the fight through the window. She brought him a clean wet towel to wipe the blood from his mouth and knuckles.

In her mouth the word sounded dirty. “Oil!”

Latour agreed with her, but he doubted if Joe did. The swarthy restaurant man was netting as much in a week as he’d formerly grossed in a year. He ordered the evening special and a glass of orange wine and sat sipping his wine as he studied the faces in the café.

Most of the old-timers ate at Joe’s, not out of sentiment, but because he had the best food in town.

Both of them so drunk they neither knew nor cared what they were doing,” Sheriff Belluche and a new girl were sitting in a back booth. She was the second girl in a month. Latour tried not to judge the old man. For thirty years Belluche had been an honest and underpaid sheriff. Now, in the last years of his life, Belluche had fallen into a neon-lighted outhouse filled to the crescent with crude oil and had come up with both fists filled with hundred-dollar bills; and every hustler who wanted to work French Bayou was eager to submit her fair white merchandise for his personal stamp of approval.

Closer by, Jean Avart was dining alone.

He saw Latour looking at him and nodded pleasantly. The attorney, a wealthy landowner, was another of the few old-timers who hadn’t changed. All the discovery of oil had done for him was to make him more wealthy.

Latour envied the attorney. For one thing, he was successful in the profession Latour had hoped to enter. For another, the older man was everything Olga had assumed he would be, everything he could have been if the test well on his land hadn’t turned out to be a dry hole.

Avart finished his meal and came over to the table. “Nice to see you, Andy. Mind if I have my coffee with you?”

“Of course not.”

“How’s Olga?”

“Fine.”

“I hear her brother is visiting you, all the way from Singapore.”

“That’s right. He’s been with us for a month.”

“How nice.”

Latour was glad Avart thought so. To him his brother-in-law was merely an added annoyance, an extra mouth to feed on a deputy sheriff’s pay.

The attorney sipped his coffee. He said, “Drop over some evening, the three of you. I’d like to meet Olga’s brother. Better still, let’s make it a definite date. Ask Olga what evening next week will be convenient and we’ll dine together — at my place.”

“Thanks,” Latour said. “I’ll do that.”

He was pleased by the invitation. Olga would be more pleased. She could spend days pondering what to wear to the dinner and afterward more days thinking about it. Jean Avart lived in the style in which she had hoped to live.