All the Devil's Creatures (8 page)

Bobby crossed the street to Steptoe’s Hardware. The store had closed for the day in anticipation of the rally, but when Bobby peeked inside, he saw Old Man Steptoe sitting in lawn chair set up right in front of the counter smoking his pipe and reading a newspaper. A shotgun leaned against the counter at his side.

He kept walking. Around the corner on the side street in the little parking lot across from the Presbyterian Church, Bobby walked up on a red pickup with two men sitting high in the bed drinking beer. The gun rack hanging inside the rear window held two rifles just visible through a translucent Confederate flag window screen. They tossed their beers into the parking lot behind their back as the deputy approached. Bobby decided to let them believe they had gotten away with something.

“You need help keepin’ the peace, deputy?” Long, greasy black hair. White t-shirt over a bulging torso just beginning to go soft. Heavy, colorful tattoos. “These ni-
erk
liable to start a riot.”

He had swallowed the epithet with a mixture of disgust and mischief Bobby understood.
Ignorance playing at sly
, the sheriff would have called it. He said, “There’s not gonna be a riot. Town police got it covered anyways. What’s y’all’s business back here?”

The long-haired man spit tobacco juice over the side of the pickup before answering. “Just keepin an eye on things—our duty as honest citizens.”

The other, silent one had his black hair buzz cut, but Bobby had no trouble seeing the resemblance. “Aren’t y’all the Tatum twins?”

They glanced at each other. “Yeah. Do we know you?”

“Y’all were a couple years ahead of me in school.”
And used to beat the shit out of me. Not that you’d remember—Wayne and Duane Tatum used to beat the shit out of anyone smaller than them
.

“I ain’t much into memory lane.”

“Me neither.” The short-haired one mumbled this, hardly lifting his eyes.

“Well,” Bobby said. “Who’s who?”

“I’m Duane,” said the long-haired one.

“Uh-huh. When did y’all get back to town?”

“You mean, when did ol’ Wayne here get sprung from the pen?” He let out a whooping laugh and elbowed his brother. “Tell him, Wayne.”

“Two weeks ago.” Scowling—he didn’t share his brother’s glee. Bobby thought this made him the less dangerous one.

“And I’m only here for the month,” Duane said.

“Why?”

“What do you care, deputy? Are we under arrest?” He smiled, but his brother turned and glared hard at him. Then he looked back down, never bringing his eyes near Bobby.

Bobby said, “It’s been a long time, that’s all.”

“I am sick of your memory lane bullshit!” Duane turned the color of rage and his eyes popped wide. Bobby moved his hand to hover over his holstered weapon, but then Duane gave another bellowing laugh. “Almost had you there, huh deputy? Almost made you shoot two unarmed good ol’ boys in the back of their own truck.” His face turned to a sneer as quickly as the laughter had come. “You woulda been
screwed
,” he said through gritted teeth. Then the laughter again, just a chuckle this time.

Wayne hung his head straight down now, hands clasped on the back of his neck. In the background, the sermon was over and the guitar player had started up again—a Kris Kristofferson song this time.

Duane said, “Seriously, though. I’m thirty days on, thirty days off, working a rig off shore out of Port Arthur. Bet you can’t say you get six months off a year, can you?”

“Nope.”
And I don’t have to be stuck out in the Gulf for six months a year with the likes of you, either
. “Well. Y’all take care, now.”

Bobby turned to go, taking note of the truck’s license plate. As he walked away, Duane called after him: “Good luck with colored day on the square,
Barbie
!” And there it was. The old obvious, stupid, and infuriating nickname. The twins—Duane at least—remembered him after all. Did they remember lying in wait for him at the dumpster behind the school, pounding his face and throwing him in? Not every day, of course. Just when he least expected it. He kept walking, repeating the license plate number over and over in his head until he got out of view. Then he took out his pad and wrote it down.

•

Sheriff Seastrunk called the number for Willie Kincaid’s daughter, not expecting Willie to be there but hoping his anti-social paranoia didn’t run in the family. He wasn’t disappointed.

A woman’s voice answered hello.

“This is Sheriff John Seastrunk. Ms. Sally Kincaid?”

“Why Sheriff Seastrunk, yes this is Sally. What on Earth can I do for you?”

He was starting to remember Sally—a poor country girl his daughter’s age.
Thick as thieves one summer, hadn’t they been?

“Lord Sally, it’s been a million years. We need to catch up. But I’m afraid right now I need to speak to your father. I’m guessing he’s on the lake?”

“‘Fraid so. I’m not expecting him till Saturday. He likes to come in when my son’s not in school. I swear, sometimes it seems that boy’s the only person he’ll have a conversation with.”

Seastrunk hesitated. He could probably track Kincaid down on China Island that night … and risk spooking the poor fool to death.
Ol’ Willie probably doesn’t have lick of information that’s going to help us solve this case; no sense ticking off constituents without good reason.
“There’s no rush, Sally. Be alright if I came by that Saturday afternoon?”

“Well, sure. Sheriff, this is about that girl that was killed, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But Sally, I’d really rather talk to your father.”

“That’s fine. But, Sheriff, you know daddy had nothing to do with it, right? I mean, he may be crazy as a loon since momma died, but he’s sweet.”

“I know it. He’s not a suspect. I just have a few questions. Easy ones.”

“He told me he found her. But nothing else. He won’t talk about it. Shook him up.” She paused. “Sheriff—John, if he acts scared, it don’t mean anything. He’s just like that, you know?”

“Sure. Like I said, he’s not a suspect—”

“He’s got a lawyer up in Dallas—”

“I’ve met him. And I’m going to call him as soon as I get off the phone with you.”

“Okay, Sheriff.” A pause, and then Sally’s voice grew soft. “He’s more of a child than my boy sometimes …”

The boy.
“Joey his name was, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.” Another pause. And in that space of two breaths, Seastrunk imagined that child’s strange eyes. When Sally spoke again, her cautious voice sounded as if it came across some old and fraying cable to a distant island. “He loves his grandfather and me very much.”

“I don’t doubt it.” The sheriff would not know why the next question came to him. “Sally, do you have any reason to believe Joey might know something about Dalia Bordelon’s murder?”

Silence, as if the cable had finally broken. But when Sally spoke again at last, her voice sounded close and strong and chipper as before, just a grown-up version of the cheerful, ditzy girl he had known years ago. And she laughed with good strong humor. “Why Sheriff that’s just silly. He’s only a little boy, and he never goes out on the water without Daddy. Why in the Lord’s name would you ask such a thing?”

Her voice held no anger, no defensiveness, only surprise and bemusement at the question, which Seastrunk himself now saw as foolish. He rubbed his temples, feeling as if his mind had become dislodged without his awareness and had just at that moment snapped back into place.

“I’m sorry, Sally, no good reason. Good-bye, now.”

•

Standing with his back to his desk, gazing out his window at the brilliant arboreal display on the courthouse lawn, Seastrunk tried to put his thoughts in order before calling Kincaid’s Dallas lawyer, Geoff Waltz. He worried over his conversation with Willie’s daughter.
A mental hic-up, that’s all.
He felt old.

From the outer office, his receptionist:
Why hey Bobby! Yeah, he’s in there.

Sighing, the sheriff turned to see his deputy scribbling onto a piece of stationary from Seastrunk’s own desk. “What is it, son?”

Bobby held up a license plate number. “I’d like to run a tread analysis on this vehicle, Sheriff. Sir.”

Seastrunk took the scrap and laid it on his desk and forced the vigor into his voice, allowing himself to resume and take comfort in the role he had built for himself. “Can you tell me who it belongs to, deputy?”

Bobby nodded and their blue eyes met. “Wayne and Duane Tatum—twins.”

“Lord, the Tatums have been breeding poor white trash in the bottom lands around these parts for generations. What’ve you got on them?”

Bobby picked up the piece of note paper with the number, folded it, and placed it in his breast pocket.
He’s liable to start thinking he’s leading this investigation.
Then the deputy said, “Not much. Their truck’s the right size. And they were hovering around the rally today, just off the square. Seemed hostile. Duane especially.”

“Like half this county.”

“I know, Sheriff.”

Watch your tone, son.
“What I’m hearing is, you’ve got yourself a good old fashioned, shit your britches, call home to momma, hunch.”

“That’s about the size of it.” Bobby grinned a little, which Seastrunk accepted as just a smidge of humility. “But I don’t think we need more than a hunch to check out those treads—they’re in plain view after all. We can talk it over with the D.A.—”

“Shit, son, this isn’t about probable cause and whatnot. It’s about politics. This town is riled up. And we can’t afford any false moves, false leads. We need a clean investigation, clean arrest, the whole thing wrapped up and delivered to Hargrave with a bow on top. Now I’ll tell you what—you need to go out there and start doing some police work.”

G
eoff Waltz pulled into the French Quarter just after sunset and found his hotel. The labor shortage was still acute and there was no valet on duty, so he parked in a loading zone on Bienville and checked in. The concierge gave him directions to a garage, and he moved his car before going upstairs to his room.

It was an old hotel that a national chain had bought out years ago; though the lobby dripped with New Orleans ambience, his room could have been in a Des Moines airport motel. He had a view of a brick wall across a dark alley. He closed the drapes.

He had taken Tony’s advice and hired a private eye—Marisol Solis. She had flown into town that afternoon, and he figured she had already checked in. He had driven down alone, relishing the eight hours alone on the road. Now, he called her cell.

“Hey. I just checked in. How was your flight?”

“Uneventful. Are we having dinner before our appointment at the club?” Her faint Tejano accent gave her purring voice a piquant edge.

“Sure. I know a place right by there. Unless you have another idea …”

“No—I think you know the city better, so I’ll defer to you, Waltz. Meet in the lobby when you’re ready.”

“Fine.”

When he stepped out of the elevator ten minutes later, he saw Marisol sitting in a plush velvet chair flipping through a tourist magazine, slender legs crossed.

“Should we grab a taxi?”

“Let’s walk—I haven’t been here since Katrina. I want to feel the city.”

“Sure.”

They stepped out into the familiar, fermented Vieux Carre air. But Geoff sensed something new underlying the odor—a tart, sanitized smell. It was his first time back in New Orleans since the storm, too, though he had given himself a self-guided devastation tour as he drove in that evening, exiting I-10 onto Carrollton Avenue rather than going straight to the French Quarter. Rounding Riverbend, up the Avenue through uptown, nothing looked much worse for wear nine months out. Insurance money had taken care of the minor damage here, and with a fresh coat of paint, some areas looked better than before the storm. But as he turned away from the historic core of the city along the river to the lower-lying neighborhoods of Mid City and Broadmoor, the devastation closed in around him in a suffocating miasma. Most of the houses stood empty, many a kilter, with the sinister FEMA markings on their doors—circled ‘x’ with numbers indicating the date someone searched the house (often a week or more after the storm) and the number of bodies found inside.

When he made his way into wealthy, suburban Lakeview—Eileen’s neighborhood—he soon felt lost in the destroyed wasteland. Here, the devastation was total. No landmarks, few street signs still standing. The land once belonged to Lake Pontchatrain, and the Lake had exacted revenge. But the city (or, more likely, the property owners), had cleared most the rubble from the lots, and signs of stubborn rebuilding pierced the desolate emptiness of the flat moonscape.

The darkness threatened to take him when he crossed the Industrial Canal into the Lower Ninth Ward. The land in the shadow of the levee breach looked scoured, worse than Lakeview. Further down river, a few lots were cleared but many more were piled high with ruins and debris. No signs of progress, no signs of life. Except—on a single block of Urquhart Street, a pair of shotgun cottages, recently reconstructed and raised high off the ground, with lights on. A middle aged black man waved down at him from the porch of one as he passed.

He waved back. He had been numb and distracted (
Janie, the baby
) when the storm hit and hadn’t registered much emotion. No sense letting it get to him now.

But back in the French Quarter, thinking back to that Ninth Ward stalwart on his raised porch …

Marisol said, “Bourbon Street hasn’t changed.”

They walked past a seedy little strip club, bouncer standing outside with a slutty girl on his arm, beckoning to every male that passed by. “I guess not,” Geoff said, but he knew that in subtle ways, the infamous street was different. At barely eight o’clock the crowd already had a sinister look that wouldn’t have come out till the wee hours in the old days when Geoff lived in the city. This early, the street should be full of retired couples off the cruise ships, families out to dinner, and conventioneers from around the country. But post-Katrina, immigrant laborers—and the rough men they worked for—trolled the street for flesh. As if the storm washed away the naughty-innocent adult playground patina that had built up over the decades of the tourist-based economy, and the working city returned—an open port standing on the edge of dangerous waters.