Dead Man (20 page)

“Yeah,” said Inverness. “Settled in the bayou country to farm, but they got flooded out every spring so they embraced the
swamp—fishing and hunting and moss-gathering and fur-trapping. Very in-turned, family very big with them. For a city boy,
you know a lot about Cajuns.”

“For a New Orleans cop, you know a lot about swamp folk.”

“I’m not married, got no family, so I fish and hunt. That means the bayou country. For damn near five years, every weekend
and holiday and vacation I can wangle, I’m right out here.”

“Couldn’t the Lafayette parish police get her statement?”

Inverness grinned. “This gives me an excuse to get out into the swamp. That explains me, but what about you?”

“She’s worth money to me,” said Dain easily.

“Ah, yes. Money money money. The older I get…” He didn’t finish the thought. “Anyway, I think Broussard’s folks run a little
general store somewhere out of Henderson. But since Broussard is one of the four most common Cajun names, don’t make book
on it.”

“I don’t make book on anything,” said Dain, “not any more.”

“If I’m right, the easiest way to their store is by boat—almost all their trade is with swamp people working the bayous.”
He jerked his head. “Get in. May as well look for her together—it’s a hell of a lot of backwoods out there.”

Dain started to unfasten the painter from the stanchion on the dock. “If we don’t find her?”

“I’ve got a motel room at Lafayette for the night.”

Dain jumped down lightly into the boat, shoved it away from the dock. A slow eddy caught the prow, swung it out into the river.
Inverness was priming the motor.

“What if she takes off into the swamp instead of talking?”

“Then we’ll get to go in after her,” he grinned happily.

Maman’s old-fashioned iron cookstove and oven, once wood- burning, had been converted to butane gas. There was a chipped white
enamel sink, and an ancient white enamel fridge with the cooling coils bare on top instead of being fitted in underneath.

Vangie and Maman sat at the minuscule table, finishing their coffee and fresh
beignet.
A gumbo already simmering on the stove filled the room with rich dark smells. Vangie
leaned back, replete, licked the last of the powdered sugar off her fingers and half stifled a satisfied little belch.

“Oh, Maman, how many years since I’ve had your
beignets!”

Maman drew a deep breath, sniffing. “Tonight, gumbo!”

“Guess I’d better go meet Papa before he starts back, him.” Vangie stood up. “But I have to see the dogs first!”

“And you gotta change your pretty city clothes, you,” said Maman. “Your old clothes still fit you, I bet!”

The stately blue and white bird stood motionless knee-deep on the fringe of the bayou. A far mosquito whine got steadily louder,
but he ignored it to dart his head suddenly down into the water. He came up with a small wriggling silver fish speared on
his bill just as the flat-bottom scow bearing Inverness and Dain appeared around a bend in the stream. He crouched, alarmed.

Dain was in the prow of the skiff, craning down the bayou at the spindly-legged bird bursting off the water on huge flapping
wings, a doomed minnow wriggling in its bill. A heron? A crane? Inverness would know—Inverness probably knew as much about
this swamp as any outsider ever would.

Which made him turn and start to yell a question, but his words were lost in the staccato beat of the motor. Inverness, in
the stern, just pointed at the outboard motor and shrugged. Dain pantomimed turning it off. Inverness frowned, turned it down
to trolling speed.

“For Chrissake, it’s a Louisiana heron,” he snapped.

But Dain said, “Why didn’t you ask the guy you rented the boat from just where the Broussard store was?”

“You had me stop for that? Cajuns are very big on minding their own business and everybody is first cousins. Unless you speak
their patois, better just look, not ask.”

He speeded up the motor again. Every sunken log had its colony of turtles to either slide into the water with barely a ripple
or do a sudden scrabbling noisy belly flop. One had a snow-white egret standing on its back; bird and turtle fled at their
approach, one up into the air, the other down under the
water. Bright-feathered ducks unknown to Dain zipped by on whistling wings. Fish swirled in the shallows when the boat’s waves
touched their exposed backs. He glimpsed a lumbering black bear in the brush along the bayou, several small swamp white-tailed
deer, and a little shambling ring-tailed fellow with a pointy nose he thought was a raccoon but actually was a coatimundi.

A thick-bodied snake Dain took for a water moccasin swam past with whipping sinuous motions. Beauty was edged with death here,
which he realized was what he had come to seek in his own life. As if feeling his thoughts, Inverness suddenly flipped the
motor into neutral. It popped and spluttered as they watched the life going on around them. There was a strange, almost luminous
look on Inverness’s face.

“I tell you, Dain, come retirement, I’m right out here for good—living off the land. This is just about the last place a man
can do it—be entirely on his own, trade what he catches or shoots or traps for whatever store-bought stuff he needs like hooks
and lines and shells and flour…”

“You don’t like people very much, do you?” asked Dain.

“Show me a cop who does.”

Dain could think of one, Randy Solomon; but even with Randy, it was sort of despite himself.

Vangie had her fingers through the chicken wire at the deerhounds’ enclosure, scratching the long floppy ear of a sad-faced,
dewlapped liver and white hound. She was dressed for the bayou, tight jeans and a cotton long-sleeved shirt with her hair
tucked up under a billed gimme cap.

“This bluetick looks good,” she said as the floppy-eared hound crowded the wire for more hands.

“Your papa say he de bes’ deerhound we ever have.”

Vangie came erect. There was disbelief in her voice.

“Better than old Applehead?”

By mutual consent, they turned away toward the river. Maman almost giggled. “You know your papa. Every hound de bes’ one he
ever had, him.”

The dogs pressed against the wire behind them, clamoring,
tails wagging, heads alert, as they left to descend the switchback dirt path from the top of the riverbank. Near the boats
was a big sunken live-box where the fish taken on the setlines were kept until they were sold.

“I look for you two soon after sunset,” said Maman.

Vangie hugged her, unwound the chain painter of the flat-bottom scow from around a tree, pushed it out, then with a final
push jumped lightly into the prow. The ten-year lapse might never have been; she walked expertly back to the rear as the current
moved the boat downstream and away from the bank. She sat down on the rear seat, primed the outboard, started it. Her mother
stood watching on the shore. Vangie put the motor in gear, started off with mutual waves between the two women.

Maman trudged up the path to level ground. Vangie’s boat was just disappearing around a bend in the river downstream. The
diminishing whine of the motor faded away as she went back into the store, picked up the attache case and carelessly stuffed
it under the front counter before going back to tend her gumbo.

At Henderson’s Crossroads, a big four-door sedan came along the blacktop road and stopped just short of the steel bridge.
To the left a seafood restaurant was built over the water, with the inevitable checker-playing geezers on the
galerie.
To the right another road went off on the levee parallel to the bayou.

Trask, behind the wheel, said, “You wanna ask which—”

“We ask no one anything,” snapped Maxton. “I’ll drive from here on. I have directions. First, over the bridge, then take a
right along the top of the levee…”

Inverness got back into their boat, went to the rear seat. Dain cast them off, jumped in as the old Cajun who wasn’t named
Broussard turned away with a wave of his hand.

“Third time unlucky,” Dain said.

Long afternoon shadows were reaching across the swamp. Inverness was setting the start lever on the motor. He shrugged.

“If we don’t find ‘em tonight, we’ll come back in the morning by car, get Vangie’s statement, be on our way…”

The boat had started to drift downstream. Inverness was about to start the motor, but Dain held up a hand to stop him.

“Unless somebody gets her first. Zimmer wasn’t a suicide.”

“What the hell are you—”

“Some hard boys from Chicago were all over the Vieux Carré looking for them yesterday. Last night, Zimmer ended up dead. Maybe
Vangie couldn’t have done it, but a couple
of strongarms could have stuffed him in that bathtub easy enough.”

“Without marking him up? A man fighting for his life?” Inverness shook his head doggedly. “No way.”

He turned back to the motor, but Dain spoke again.

“You shove him in the tub, grab him by the hair, hold his head under.” Inverness was watching him, so he added appropriate
gestures. “He grabs your arm, fighting you, but this gives your backup man a chance to slash his wrist. Clean, one stroke.
Now he’s bleeding to death, even while he’s fighting for air.” Another gesture. “Zip! The other wrist. Then you let go of
the head so he bleeds to death instead of drowns. Instant suicide.”

“You seem to have given this a lot of thought,” said Inverness slowly, as if ideas and questions were moving ponderously about
in his mind.

Dain said, “Their room had been searched.”

“Dammit, that I don’t believe! My men would have noticed if there had been anything—”

“Your men weren’t looking.”

Inverness turned back to the motor, seemed to address it.

“You have anything else?”

Dain gave a low chuckle. “My hunter’s intuition.”

Inverness looked back at him, started to chuckle with him, then suddenly got serious, with an odd expression on his face.

“You trust that really?”

The door crashed open against the wall, the two attackers were framed in it. One of them, sunglasses, curly hair. The other,
ski-masked so no hair showed.

Details of only shadowy recall previously. Was memory coming back, after five long years?

“With my life,” Dain said fervently.

The big sedan came to a stop on the gravel at the dirt turnoff to Broussard’s Store, about a hundred yards shy of the deerhound
pen. No one was visible, nothing was moving.

“So, whadda we do?” asked Trask.

“Wait,” said Maxton.

“For what?” asked Nicky from the backseat.

“Dark.”

The shadows were getting long across the brown reach of Bayou Tremblant. Vangie’s boat had been pulled into shore a bit downstream
from the bend where Papa had run out his trotline. The water was slow enough here for the line, known locally as a float line
because it was supported at intervals by cork floats, to run out at a right angle to the current.

Papa was in the blunt prow of his flat-bottom scow, Vangie on the stern seat. Papa, a short fierce bristling man, very French,
was pulling them along the line, checking the hooks hung from the main line at three-foot intervals on shorter, lighter lines
called stagings.

Almost every hook had a catfish on it. Papa removed them, tossed them into a big wash bucket full of water. Vangie was rebaiting
each hook, using the heads of large shad as her cut-bait. Both were quick and expert at the work. Vangie’s face was intent
but serene, Papa was grinning with delight as he pulled them along the line.

“De bes’ day I have all spring, Vangie.”

“I’ve brought you luck, Papa,” she said gaily.

“Havin’ you home make Papa so happy he wanna bust, him.”

Vangie was silent, thoughtful. “It’s good to be home, Papa, but I hate to see you work so hard.”

Papa laughed. “Not hard, do what you love. It doan make much money, but what you wan’ Papa to do?” His laughter had turned
to indignation. “Go drive a truck? Pump ‘pane in New Orleans? Work on a oil rig with
les Texiens,
him?” He shook his grizzled narrow head. “Time all you got b’longs to you, just you alone. So you gotta use that time lak
you wan’.”

In a sudden terrifying moment, Vangie realized that she had never really planned out what she would do with the bonds. She’d
stolen them more to get back at Maxton than for the money… Oh, some fuzzy thoughts about tropic isles, the great cities of
Europe, the pyramids along the Nile,
Japan, Hong Kong,
freedom
—but mainly it had been, at first, just
taking
them, and then just
getting away
with them. Not much beyond that.

Maybe poor Jimmy had been right. Maybe they should have cashed them in and just started running and living and loving with
the money, until Maxton eventually, inevitably caught up…

But no, she’d thought only of escape. Now Jimmy was dead. He would never escape. She had the bonds but was afraid to cash
them.

No. Not afraid. She knew now, without hesitation or question, what she would do with them. She would cash them somewhere far
away, then send her parents the money. If Maxton
did
ever catch up with her, he would never be led back here to the bayous and to them.

“What if someone
gave
you money, Papa? A lot of money?”

“Doan want a lotta money,” he said with fierce pride. “I do my life damn good, me! Got all I need. Your
maman,
good hounds, good fishin’, food huntin’, dis bayou…”

They had worked their way across the channel to the far shore. He let the cleaned and rebaited line drop back into the water.
Vangie watched him hungrily, as if trying to figure out the secret of life that he had and that she had lost.

“Dat de las’ hook,” he said happily. “We go home now.”

It was dusk. The three men watched Maman as she removed the last of the dried laundry from the line. She picked up the big
wash basket and, leaning sideways to counterbalance its weight, went to the back door of the living area and disappeared.
Two minutes later she emerged with a brimming bucket of scraps for the hounds. They flowed around her in an excited river
of silky tan and white backs, yelping and barking and whining, ravenous as only dogs can be.