Bring Him Back Dead (3 page)

Avart inclined his head in the general direction of the booth where Sheriff Belluche was sitting. “Not very pretty, eh, Andy?”

“No, it isn’t.”

Avart confided, “It won’t go on much longer. God knows I’m no prude. Fun’s fun. I like a drink. I like to entertain a pretty girl. But this thing has got out of hand and we’re going to change it. A few of us are working on it now.” His shrewd eyes studied Latour’s face. “What happened to you, Andy? Did someone give you a bad time?”

“I had a fight with a drunk.”

“I saw that. I’m referring to that nick in your chin. It looks like a bullet burn to me.”

“It is. I’ve been shot at four times today.”

“No!”

“Yes. Once when I came out of the house this morning and again about half an hour ago, from a cane brake on the Lacosta plantation.”

“You saw the man?”

Latour took the battered slug from his shirt pocket and laid it on the table. “No. All I know is he’s been using a thirty-thirty rifle.”

Avart examined the piece of lead. “Nasty-looking little thing. Do you know anyone who might want to kill you?”

Latour evaded the question. “Well, as Tom Mullen pointed out, there are quite a few men in town who have reason not to like me.”

“True,” Avart said thoughtfully. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll inquire around. When a lawyer has practiced as long as I have, especially in one town, he develops sources of information that aren’t available to the law.”

“I’d appreciate that, Jean.”

Avart finished his coffee and stood up. “Meanwhile, take care of yourself. You happen to be one of my favorite clients.”

“A lot of business you get out of me.”

The other man smiled. “Unfortunately for both of us. But for a time there, two years ago, I thought you were going to be one of my best accounts.”

“Yeah. Two years ago,” Latour agreed.

He watched the attorney move out of the café. It was nice to know there were men like Jean Avart in French Bayou.

His meal finished, still reluctant to go home, he continued up Lafitte Street. Jacques Lacosta’s red-and-gold station wagon was parked at the curb in front of the Tarpon Bar and he and the red-haired girl were making some sort of pitch.

Latour thumbed a cigarette into his mouth and leaned against the plate-glass window of the bar. The cane brake from which he’d been shot at wasn’t more than two hundred yards from the clearing where the carnival man’s house trailer was parked. Lacosta had been in the clearing when he’d driven by with Lant Turner. It was possible that Lacosta had seen the man who’d fired the three shots at him.

He joined the group of men around the platform built onto the tailgate of the station wagon. The girl was young and pretty. To add to the flash of his act, the carnival man had dressed her in an old-fashioned off-the-shoulder, wasp-waisted, hoop-skirted outfit whose bodice showed plenty of cleavage. And the girl had plenty to show.

She looked like a nice kid. Latour hoped she knew what she was doing. Lacosta had a golden throat. He also had a reputation for being rough on his women. One thing was certain: The minute he got a few dollars he didn’t need for gasoline or food, he invested it in whisky. Right now he was so drunk he could hardly stand.

But drunk or not, he knew his business. While the girl played a banjo and sang, Lacosta talked up a crowd. Then, satisfied with the tip that had formed around the tailgate, he nodded to the girl and went into his talk.

He was pitching medicine this time.

Latour listened to his spiel and was amused. Lacosta was using a lot of big words. He knew how to use them to good effect. But boiled down to fundamentals, the old man was selling a combined cathartic and stimulant guaranteed to keep both ends of a young man active and rejuvenate older Romeos who had lost their pep.

It was the perfect product for French Bayou.

Eternal youth at a dollar a bottle.

L
ATOUR WAITED
for Lacosta to conclude his pitch so he could talk to him. But the showman had overestimated his capacity. In the middle of his spiel the old man, still clutching a bottle of the product he was pitching, crumpled slowly to the platform.

The red-haired girl tried to lift him to his feet. A man in the crowd called for a doctor.

“Doctor, hell,” another man said. “The old goat ain’t sick. He’s stinking.”

Latour forced his way through the crowd and climbed up on the platform. The girl was still trying to lift Lacosta to his feet. “Here. Let me do that,” he said.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Deputy Sheriff Andy Latour.”

“You’re going to arrest him?”

Latour shook his head. Arresting Jacques Lacosta for voluntary public intoxication in a town filled with drunks would be like putting falsies on Gina Lollobrigida.

“No,” he told the girl. “All I want to do is get him off the street. I’ll carry him around to the seat and you can drive him back to the trailer.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot,” the girl said. “We can’t afford a pinch.”

Latour attempted to lift Lacosta and the showman shook off his alcoholic stupor and became a belligerent drunk.

“Take your goddamn hands off me.”

“Shut up,” the girl said. “The officer is trying to help you.”

Lacosta continued to struggle. “I know how he wants to help me. An’ you’re damn anxious for it to happen, aren’t you, baby?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The hell you don’t.” Lacosta appealed to the watching men. “Well, don’t just stand there staring. Don’t let him arrest me, boys.” Lacosta stopped being belligerent and started feeling sorry for himself. “You know why he wants t’ throw me in the tank. So he can crawl in between the sheets with my wife.”

“Please,” the girl pleaded with him.

Lacosta waggled a finger at her. “Please, nothin'. You want the lousy cop t’ pinch me, don’t you?” He stared blearily at the watching men. “An’ that goes for the rest of you, too. Why don’t you all get in line an’ she can take you on, one at a time? Wha’ do you think I am, a fool? I’ve seen the way you crowd aroun’ the platform, tryin’ t’ see up her skirt.” Tears of alcoholic self-pity
trickled down his face. “Jus’ because she’s young an’ pretty an’ married t’ an old man, you want t’ climb into my saddle. An’ for all I know, whenever my back is turned, she lets you.”

The girl began to cry.

Latour lost patience with Lacosta and manhandled him to the walk and onto the front seat of the station wagon. “All right,” he told the girl. “Don’t just stand there bawling. Start the motor and get him out of here or I
will
pinch him.”

Still sobbing, the girl got behind the wheel of the station wagon and backed into the bumper of the car behind. She shifted gears with an effort and smashed into the car in front. Then she leaned her head on her hands and cried.

Latour reached in through the window and shut off the ignition.

“All right,” he said, resigned. “You aren’t in much better condition than he is. Just lock it up and I’ll get my car and drive both of you home.”

• • •

What breeze there had been had died. The back road was hot and black and humid. Latour drove faster than he normally would, ignoring what the chuckholes in the mud might do to Lacosta, who was passed out and snoring in the back seat of his car.

The girl had stopped sobbing.

“What’s your name?” Latour asked her.

“Rita.”

“You and Lacosta are married?”

“I’m not proud of it.”

“How long have you been married to him?”

“Four months.”

Latour stopped feeling put upon and felt sorry for her. As young and pretty as she was, she could have done a lot better for herself.

The girl read his mind. “I know. I’ve made a mess of it, haven’t I? I was waiting table in a grease joint in Ponchatoula and I got damn sick of it and he promised to put me in show business. Some show business. I was better off in Ponchatoula.”

“I see,” Latour said. “When did you and Jacques reach town?”

“This afternoon, about two o’clock.”

“Did you see anyone in or around the clearing when you pulled in?”

“No.”

“But you were still in the trailer up to, say, seven-thirty?”

“I was. Jacques was working on the motor of the station wagon.”

“Did you hear some shots around that time?”

“Yes. Quite a few of them. Right after two men in a big car drove past the clearing.”

“Jacques heard them, too?”

“I suppose he did.”

“Did he say anything about them when he came in?”

Rita shook her head. “No, he didn’t. But just before he came in, I thought I heard him talking to someone. Why? What did he do except get drunk?”

“Nothing,” Latour assured her. “But I want to talk to him when he’s sober. It’s just possible he may know something I want to know.”

He drove past the bay tree by which he’d marked the stand of cane from which the shots had been fired and turned down the weed-grown lane leading to the unlighted house trailer.

“I’ll help you get him inside.”

The girl was completely indifferent. “If he gets inside, you’ll have to help him. I’ve got so I let him lie where he falls. Wait. I’ll light a lamp.”

Latour sat slapping at mosquitoes until the yellow glow of a kerosene lamp outlined the windows and screen door of the trailer. Then he picked up Lacosta’s limp body and carried it inside.

Rita apologized for the poor lighting. “We used to have a gasoline pressure lantern but Jacques knocked it over one night when he was drunker than usual. We’re lucky it didn’t explode.” She inclined her head toward the far end of the trailer. “He sleeps in there.”

Latour carried the showman the length of the trailer and dropped him on the double bed in the small bedroom.
The old man continued to snore. Latour tried to shake him awake, then gave it up as a bad job. It would be morning before Lacosta would be able to answer any questions.

He loosened the old man’s tie and took off his shoes and returned to the living area of the trailer. Rita was dipping water from a pail into a coffeepot and having difficulty moving around in the narrow aisle because of her hoop skirt.

“Thanks a lot.” She smiled. “I can’t offer you a drink. That comes in Jacques’s department. But how about a cup of coffee?”

Latour tossed his Stetson on a built-in sofa behind a narrow table. “Thanks. I could go for a cup of coffee.”

Rita kept having trouble with her hoop skirt. “Damn this thing. I don’t see how women ever put up with them.”

“I’ve often wondered,” Latour admitted. He sat on the sofa next to his hat.

Rita lighted the bottled-gas burner under the coffeepot. It was hotter in the trailer than it was outside. “I sure fell on my head. I mean when I married Jacques.” She opened a drawer of a built-in chest and took out what appeared to be a two-piece white play suit. “Would you excuse me while I put on something cooler than this Scarlett O’Hara outfit?”

What she did was immaterial to Latour. “Go right ahead. It’s your trailer.”

Rita fought her hoop skirt down the aisle. “His trailer. And it’s mortgaged for more than it’s worth. If it wasn’t, believe me, I’d have sold it some night when he was potted — with him in — and would be gone by now.”

She closed the small door of the bedroom firmly behind her.

Latour fanned himself with his hat. The delta had two faces, one for day and one for night. With the rank vegetation rising out of the fertile mud around the trailer, the clearing smelled like some jungles he’d known. Insects, attracted by the light, droned at the screened windows. He could almost hear the pad of fur-bearing night animals. In the distance, the wells continued to pump. Suddenly, somewhere far offshore, after weeks of testing and drilling, a well came in, causing the bedrock connecting the floor
of the Gulf with the mainland to vibrate with the force of the explosion.

The unblocked trailer rocked slightly. The closed door of the bedroom opened on silent hinges.

Standing sideways to him, secure in the knowledge that she’d closed the door, the red-haired girl continued to undress.

It was a lovely, if unintentional, strip tease.

Instinctively Latour compared her to Olga. Where Olga was lush with a touch of the Oriental, Rita was slim, almost lean. Her breasts were firm and peaked. Her stomach was flat and made a perfect juncture with her flared hipbones. Her legs were long and tapering, ending in slim ankles and perfectly formed feet. She was naturally red-haired. He couldn’t help himself. The attraction was basic, primitive. He sucked in his breath.

Rita turned her head at the sound and realized that the door was open. She stood a moment looking at him through the yellow glow of the oil lamp, then reached out and closed the door. When she opened it again she was wearing a pair of white shorts and a matching halter.

“It wasn’t,” she said, “intentional.”

Latour resumed fanning himself. “I know.”

The girl seemed to be trying to convince herself. “When I said coffee, I meant coffee.”

Latour laid his hat back on the sofa and lighted a cigarette. “Have I tried to force myself on you?”

“No,” Rita admitted. She ran her fingers through her hair and they came away moist with perspiration. “No,” she repeated. “You haven’t.” She filled two cups with coffee and set them and a bowl of sugar and a can of evaporated milk on the table in front of Latour. “It’s just that it’s all so damn hopeless. Whenever I let myself think about it, I’m afraid I’ll blow my top.”

“You mean being married to Jacques?”

“What else?” Rita sat beside Latour. “You’ve no idea what it’s like. You couldn’t know.”

“Why don’t you leave him?”

“I intend to, as soon as I get a stake.” Rita spooned sugar into her coffee. “But let’s get one thing straight. Jacques lied back there on the street. Maybe I don’t
amount to much, but I don’t put out to every man who wants me.” She continued to feel sorry for herself. “If that was all I wanted, I could have done it in Ponchatoula. You know how I mean, for money. A lot of guys offered me plenty.”

Latour sipped his coffee. It was strong and fragrant with chickory. Seeing the girl in the nude had affected him more than he’d realized. It was an effort for him to keep his voice level. “Hustling isn’t much of a life.”