Heaven's Prisoners (20 page)

“You look like you’ve been out in the sun too long,” he said.

“I’m dealing with it. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. If I come in here blowing fumes in your face, pull my plug. That’s all I can tell you. Where do you think those killers are now?”

“I don’t know.”

“They’re doing a few lines, getting laid, maybe sipping juleps at the track. They feel power right now that you and I can’t even guess at. I’ve heard them describe it as being like a heroin rush.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I know how they think. I don’t believe you do. Those other guys out there don’t, either. You know what they did after they murdered Annie? They drove to a bar. Not the first or the second one they saw, but one way down the road where they felt safe, where they could drink Jack Daniel’s and smoke cigarettes without speaking to one another, until that moment when their blood slowed and they looked in each other’s eyes and started laughing.”

“Look at it another way. What evidence do you have in hand?”

“The lead we dug out of the walls, the shotgun shells off the floor, the pry bar they dropped on the porch,” he said.

“But not a print.”

“No.”

“Which means you have almost nothing. Except me. They were out to kill me, not Annie. Every aspect of the investigation will eventually center around that fact. You’ll end up interviewing me every other day.”

He lit a cigarette and smoked it with his elbow on the desk blotter. He looked through the door glass at the deputies in the outer office. One of them leaned to the side of his desk and spit tobacco juice into a cuspidor.

“I’ll have to run it by a couple of other people, but I don’t think there’ll be any trouble,” he said. “But you don’t work on just this one case, Dave. You carry a regular load just like the other detectives and you go by the same rules.”

“All right.”

He puffed on his cigarette and widened his eyes in the smoke, as though dismissing some private concerns from his mind, then he watched my expression closely and said, “Who do you think did it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You told me that the day after it happened, and I accepted that. But you’ve had a lot of time to think in the last ten days. I can’t believe you haven’t come to some conclusion. I wouldn’t want to feel you’re being less than honest here, and that maybe you’re going to try to operate on your own after all.”

“Sheriff, I gave motive to any number or combination of people. The bartender at Smiling Jack’s is the kind of vicious punk who could blow out your light and drink a beer while he was doing it. I not only ran his head into a window fan and cocked a .45 between his eyes, I turned Bubba Rocque loose on him and made him get out of New Orleans. I messed up Eddie Keats with a pool cue in front of his whores, and I went into Bubba Rocque’s house and told him I was going to put my finger in his eye if I found out he sent Keats and the Haitian after me.”

“Maybe it was Toot and a guy I don’t know. Maybe it was two contract men Bubba or Keats brought in from out of state. Maybe it’s somebody out of the past. Once in a while they get out of Angola and keep their promises.”

“New Orleans thinks the bartender went to the Islands.”

“Maybe, but I doubt it. He’s a rat, and a rat goes into a hole. He’s more afraid of Bubba than he is of cops. I don’t believe he’ll be walking around on a beach anywhere. Besides, he’s a mama’s boy. He probably won’t run far from home.”

“I’ll be truthful with you, Dave. I don’t know where to start on this one. We just don’t have this kind of crime around here. I sent two deputies to question Keats, and he picked his nose in front of them and told them to bust him or beat feet. His bartender and one of his hookers said he was in the club when Annie was killed.”

“Did they question the bartender and the hooker separately?”

He looked away from me. “I don’t know,” he said.

“That’s all right. We can talk to them again.”

“I went out to Bubba Rocque’s myself. I don’t know what to think about a guy like that. You could scratch a match on those eyes and I don’t think they’d blink. I remember thirty years ago when he was a kid and he dropped a fly ball in the city park and lost the game for his side. After the game he was eating a snowcone and his daddy slapped it out of his hand and hit him across the ear. His eyes didn’t show any more feeling than a couple of zinc pennies.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He was home asleep.”

“What’d his wife say?”

“She said she was in New Orleans that night. So Bubba doesn’t have an alibi.”

“He knows he doesn’t need one yet. Bubba’s a lot smarter than Eddie Keats.”

“He said he was sorry about Annie. I think maybe he meant it, Dave.”

“Maybe.”

“You think he’s bad through and through, don’t you?”

“Yep.”

“I guess I just don’t have your mileage.”

I started to tell him that any cop who gave the likes of Bubba Rocque an even break would probably not earn much mileage, but fortunately I kept my own counsel and simply asked when I could get a badge.

“Two or three days,” he answered. “In the meantime, take it easy. We’ll get these guys sooner or later.”

As I said, he was a decent man, but the Rotary Club had a larger claim on his soul than the sheriff’s department. The fact is that most criminals are not punished for their crimes. In New York City only around two percent of the crimes are punished, and in Miami the figure is about four percent. If you want to meet a group of people who have a profound distrust of, and hostility toward, our legal system, don’t waste your time on political radicals; interview a random selection of crime victims, and you’ll probably find that they make the former group look like Utopian idealists by comparison.

I shook hands with him and walked out into the hazy noon-day heat and humidity. In the meadows along the road, cattle were bunched in the hot shade of the oak trees, and white egrets were pecking in the dried cow flop out in the grass. I pulled my tie loose, wiped my forehead on my shirt sleeve, and looked at the long wet streaks on the cloth.

Fifteen minutes later I was in a dark, cool bar south of town, a cold, napkin-wrapped collins glass in my hand. But I couldn’t stop perspiring.

Vodka is an old friend to most clandestine drunks. It has neither odor nor color, and it can be mixed with virtually anything without the drinker being detected. But its disadvantage for a whiskey drinker like me was that it went down so smoothly, so innocuously, in glasses filled with crushed ice and fruit slices and syrup and candied cherries, that I could drink almost a fifth of it before I realised that I had gone numb from my hairline to the soles of my feet.

“Didn’t you say you had to leave here at four?” the bartender asked.

“Sure.”

He glanced up at the illuminated clock on the wall above the bar. I tried to focus my eyes on the hands and numbers. I pressed my palm absently to my shirt pocket.

“I guess I left my glasses in my truck,” I said.

“It’s five after.”

“Call me a cab, will you? You mind if I leave my truck in your lot awhile?”

“How long?” He was washing glasses, and he didn’t look at me when he spoke and his voice had the neutral tone that bartenders use to suppress the disdain they feel for some of the people whom they serve.

“I’ll probably get it tomorrow.”

He didn’t bother to answer. He called a cab and went back to washing glasses in the aluminum sink.

Ten minutes later my cab arrived. I finished my drink and set it on the bar.

“I’ll send somebody for my truck, podna,” I said to the bartender.

I rode back to my house in the cab, packed two changes of clothes in my suitcase, got Batist to drive me to the airport in Lafayette, and by six-thirty I was aboard a commercial flight to Key West, by way of Miami, the late red sun reflecting like pools of fire among the clouds.

I sipped from my second double Beam and soda and looked down at the dark blue and turquoise expanse of water off the western tip of the island, where the Gulf and the Atlantic met, and at the waves sliding across the coral reefs below the surface and breaking against the beaches that were as white as ground diamond. The four-engine plane dipped, made a wide turn out over the water, then flattened out for its approach to the airport, and I could see the narrow strip of highway that ran from Key West to Miami, the coconut palms along the beaches, the lagoons full of sailboats and yachts, the kelp rising in the groundswell, the waves bursting in geysers of foam at the ends of the jetties, and then suddenly the tree-lined and neon-lit streets of Key West in the last red wash of sunset.

It was a town of ficus, sea grape, mahogany and umbrella trees, coconut and royal palms, hanging geraniums, Confederate jasmine, and bougainvillea that bloomed as brightly as blood. The town was built on sand and coral, surrounded by water, the wooden buildings eventually made paintless and gray by salt air. At one time or another it has been home to Indians, Jean Lafitte’s pirates, salvagers who deliberately lured commercial ships onto the reefs so they could gut the wrecks, James Audubon, rum runners, Cuban political exiles, painters, homosexuals, dope smugglers, and burnt-out street people who had been pushed so far down in the continent now that they had absolutely no place else to go.

It was a town of clapboard and screened-in beer joints, raw-oyster bars, restaurants that smelled of conch fritters and boiled shrimp and deep-fried red snapper, clearings in the pine trees where fishermen stacked their lobster traps, nineteenth-century brick warehouses and government armories, and shady streets lined with paintless shotgun houses with wooden shutters and sagging galleries. The tourists were gone now because of the summer heat, and the streets were almost empty in the twilight; the town had gone back into itself. The cabdriver had to buy gas on the way to the motel, and I looked out the window at some elderly Negro men sitting on crates in front of a tiny grocery store, at the ficus roots that cracked the sidewalks into concrete peaks, at the dusky purple light on the brick streets and the darkening trees overhead, and for just a moment it was as though I had not left New Iberia, had not taken another step deeper into my problems.

But I had.

I checked into a motel on the southern tip of the island and had a fifth of Beam and a small bucket of ice sent to the room. I had a couple of hits with water, then showered and dressed. Through my window I could see the palm trees thrashing on the deserted beach and the light dying on the horizon. The water had turned as dark as burgundy, and waves were pitching upward against a coral reef that formed a small harbor for a half-dozen sailboats. I opened the glass jalousies wide to let the cool breeze into the room, then I walked downtown to Duval Street and my friend’s restaurant where Robin worked as a waitress.

But my metabolism was on empty before I made it to the foot of Duval. I stopped in at Sloppy Joe’s and had a drink at the bar and tried to examine all the vague thoughts and strange movements of my day. True, not everything I had done had been impetuous. Robin was still the best connection I had to the collection of brain-fried New Orleans people who served Bubba Rocque, and I had called my friend longdistance to make sure she was working at the restaurant, but I could have questioned her on the phone, or at least tried, before deciding I would have to fly to Key West.

Which made me confront, at least temporarily, the real reason I was there: it’s lousy to be alone, particularly when you’re not handling anything properly. Particularly when you’re drunk and starting to fuck up your life again on an enormous scale. And because somebody was playing “Baby Love” on the jukebox.

“Why don’t you put some records on that jukebox that aren’t twenty years old?” I said to the bartender.

“What?”

“Put some new music on there. It’s 1987.”

“The jukebox is broken, pal. You better slip your transmission into neutral.”

I walked back out onto the street, my face warm with bourbon in the wind blowing off the backside of the island. On the dock by the restaurant I watched the waves slide through pilings, small incandescent fish moving about like smoky green lights below the surface. The restaurant was crowded with customers, and the bar was a well-lighted and orderly place where people had two drinks before dinner. When I walked inside I felt like a diver stepping out of a bathysphere into a hostile and glaring brilliance.

The maitre d’ looked at me carefully. I had fixed my tie and tried to smooth the wrinkles in my seersucker coat, but I should have put on sunglasses.

“Do you have a reservation, sir?” he said.

“Tell Robin Dave Robicheaux’s here. I’ll wait in the bar.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Tell her Dave from New Orleans. The last name’s hard to pronounce sometimes.”

“Sir, I think you’d better see her outside of working hours.”

“Say, you’re probably a good judge of people. Do I look like I’m going away?”

I ordered a drink at the bar, and five minutes later I saw her come through the door. She wore a short black dress with a white lace apron over it, and her figure and the way she walked, as though she were still on a burlesque runway, made every man at the bar glance sideways at her. She was smiling at me, but there was a perplexed light in her eyes, too.

“Wow, you come a long way to check up on a girl,” she said.

“How you doing, kiddo?”

“Not bad. It’s turned out to be a pretty good gig. Hey, don’t get up.”

“How long till you’re off?”

“Three hours. Come on and sit in the booth with me. You’re listing pretty heavy to port.”

“A drunk front came through New Iberia this morning.”

“Well, walk over here with mommy and let’s order something to eat.”

“I ate on the plane.”

“Yeah, I can tell,” she said.

We sat in a tan leather booth against the back wall of the bar. She blew out little puffs of air with her lips.

“Dave, what are you doing?” she said.

“What?”

“Like,
this
.” She flicked her fingernail against my highball glass.