Bring Him Back Dead (7 page)

Latour lighted a cigarette. “I discovered that when I chopped up his outfit. You know he’s made bail?”

Big Boy was philosophical about it. “So one of the boys who was in town was sayin'. But the way you smashed up his outfit, hit’s goin’ t’ be a long time afore we have any more trouble with Mr. Turner.” He explained, “Not that I wished him any harm. Hit’s just a matter of business. What with taxes as high as they are on red whisky, a man who’s tryin’ to run a respectable place cain’t compete with a swamp rat whose only investment is a sack or two of sugar, some shorts, and some copper tubing and a cooker.”

Latour came to the subject of his call. “What time do you open for business?”

“Usually ‘bout seven-thirty. Between then an’ eight. Hit hain’t no use openin’ afore then. The boys have t’ git in from the fields an’ eat an’ go call for their girls. Aside from a few stragglers, I’d say hit was about nine afore we git jumpin'.”

“But you’re around here about seven-forty-five?”

“Me an’ my ol’ woman live in back.”

“Did you see me drive by with Turner?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Did you see any other car pass, probably with a white man driving?”

Big Boy’s face wrinkled in thought. “N-no. I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I heard a car or two go by but I didn’t bother t’ look out. Right ‘bout then I was busy icin’ my beer coils an’ cold box. Why?”

Latour pushed his hat back on his head. “I just wondered.”

According to local custom, Big Boy couldn’t buy him a drink. He could offer him a cigar. He took a box from the back bar. “Favor me, Mr. Latour. They’re good ‘uns. Just come in on a boat from Tampa today.”

He took two cigars from the box and laid them on the bar. He’d been expecting someone to call, and both cigars were wrapped in fifty-dollar bills.

“Sure appreciate what you done for us.”

Latour started to put the cigars in his shirt pocket and found he couldn’t.

He peeled the bill from one of the cigars and put the cigar in his mouth. It was a good cigar. The smoke of it tasted pleasant. He dropped the bill and the other cigar on the bar.

Trailing a plume of cigar smoke, he walked out of the bar, and the babble of voices, male and female, resumed. Someone turned up the record player and the night was filled with the tinkle of piano keys and the blare of brass.

Latour backed his car from the parking place and drove on down the muddy road.

Progress hadn’t extended this far. This section of the delta hadn’t changed. The only sign of human habitation was an occasional unlighted tenant farmer’s shack or a trapper’s hut built on stilts along one of the countless waterways that crossed and crisscrossed the parish.

When he came to the big bay tree marking the brake where his would-be killer had stood, he pulled off the road and parked his car on the shoulder, turning his spotlight on the cane.

The black water between the road and the brake looked uninviting. Latour waded the knee-deep water gingerly, being careful not to confuse the roots protruding from it
for a nocturnal cottonmouth moccasin. All he needed now was to be bitten by a snake.

He was glad when he reached solid ground. The spot for which he was looking was a few feet back from the water. The shooting hadn’t been providential. His would-be killer hadn’t just happened to look up and see him driving by. The man had waited in ambush for him.

Latour moved the beam of his flashlight around the small square of mashed-down cane and picked up four cigarette butts. All had been lighted on the wrong end. The brand name had been burned off. The man who’d shot at him made a habit of picking a cigarette from a package and putting it into his mouth in one continuous movement.

Latour put the cigarette ends in his pocket and flashed his light over the ground again. A bit of brass reflected his light. He picked up an ejected shell casing and looked again, but the other two cases had been either ejected into the water or trampled into the mud, too deep to be visible.

Latour added the shell casing to the cigarette butts and the piece of malformed lead that had starred the windshield of his car. Then, wading the water again, he turned off the spotlight and headlights of his car and walked down the road to the clearing where Jacques Lacosta kept his trailer.

He was relieved to find there was no car there. His fears for Rita had been ungrounded. The red-haired girl had blown out the lamp. The clearing was dark, quiet, and serene.

When Latour reached the stoop he listened. Lacosta’s blubbering breathing sounded less stentorous than it had been. He mentally checked the time elapsed since he’d driven the showman home.

Lacosta had passed out between eight and eight-thirty. It was now after two. More than five hours had passed, the period of time the sheriff’s office considered it necessary to detain a drunk before he was sober enough to be admitted to bail.

Latour considered the situation. Now that he had decided not to have an affair with Rita, it didn’t matter when he talked to Lacosta. If Lacosta was sober enough to talk, he might as well talk to him right now.

Lacosta had been in the clearing when the shots were fired. Rita had heard, or thought she’d heard, him talking to someone. Lacosta could have seen the man and assumed he was merely a hunter tramping over the unposted acreage.

Latour sucked his cigar to a glow, then knocked gently on the wood of the screen door, so as not to startle the girl.

“Rita,” he called softly.

The girl failed to answer him.

Latour flashed his light through the screen, then sucked in his breath sharply. He wasn’t as physically replete as he’d thought.

The girl, completely nude with one knee slightly raised and pressed against the wall, was sleeping on the sofa with her feet toward him. She was lovely, very lovely.

Latour switched off his light and knocked again.

“Rita.” He called more loudly this time.

The white blur on the sofa moved as the girl sat up. Her voice was throaty. “Yes?” Then she realized the voice had come from outside the trailer and she said, “Who are you? What do you want? Go away.”

Latour identified himself. “It’s Latour. Unlock the door and let me in. I want to talk to Jacques.”

There was a rustle of nylon as if the girl were slipping into a robe. The rustle came closer to the screen. “How do I know you’re Latour?” she asked.

He flashed the light on his face.

“I hoped you’d come back,” she said simply.

Latour was sorry that she was going to be disappointed. “I just want to talk to Jacques.” He tugged at the locked screen door impatiently. “Come on. Open up. Let me in.”

Rita came still closer to the door. Either she hadn’t heard what he said or her mind was still fogged with sleep. “Shh. For God’s sake, not so loud,” she whispered. “You’ll wake up Jacques.”

Her warning came too late. The sibilant whispering and the knocking had already awakened the old man. There was a squeaking of bedsprings as he sat up. He sounded comparatively sober.

“What the hell is going on out there?”

“Now you’ve torn it,” Rita whispered. “This will probably cost me a beating.”

Lacosta clomped down the narrow aisle of the trailer. “Who are you? What do you want?”

Latour started to answer him and suddenly lost the power to form words.

The blow came from one side behind him. He heard, rather than felt, the vicious thud of the blackjack against the back of his head. It was a strange, hollow sound and the blow left him mentally alert but completely inarticulate.

His flashlight fell from his hand. His cigar dropped from his slack lips and hissed wetly in the mud.

The blackjack swung again and he and Olga were in a free fall, their close-coupled bodies attempting to keep contact as they fell, and Olga was screaming, not in rapture this time, but in terror.

Latour wondered why Olga was screaming. This was what she’d wanted.

Then his fall ended abruptly and he was lying alone in the mud, his dying cigar burning a brand on his cheek.

His body twitched once, convulsively.

Then he lay face down, inert, in the weeds growing out of the mud in front of the trailer.

A deep silence drowned out the screams still battering at his subconscious.

T
HERE WAS
a small rubbery substance in Latour’s mouth. It felt like a hollow baby’s nipple. He tried to spit it out and someone hit him on the side of the head.

“Blow, you bastard,” Jack Pringle said. “Blow hard.”

Latour did as he was ordered, then opened his eyes with an effort. He was sitting on a straight-backed chair in Sheriff Belluche’s office, surrounded by a circle of familiar but unfriendly faces.

Jack Pringle was studying the gauge of the drunkometer set up on Belluche’s desk. “Well, we know one thing,” the night deputy said. “His pretending to be drunk is just a gag. Most of the whisky is on the outside.”

Latour spat out the tube in his mouth. His lips felt numb. It was difficult for him to form words and more difficult for him to get them out of his mouth.

“What goes on here?” he asked.

One of the men broke the circle and slapped his face with a calloused palm. “He asks us what goes on. Suppose you tell us.”

Latour tried to orient himself. He hadn’t the least idea of how he’d got from the clearing to Sheriff Belluche’s office. The pain in his head made it impossible for him to think coherently.

“Tell you what?” he asked.

Mullen’s florid face swam into the limited range of his vision as the beefy first deputy swung a chair away from the wall and straddled it, facing him. “Come off it, Andy.”

“I’ve nothing to come off of.”

“You don’t remember a thing?”

“No,” Latour said thickly. “The last I remember I was standing in front of the door of Jacques Lacosta’s trailer.”

Sheriff Belluche was standing in back of Mullen. The old man ran his fingers through his lank white hair. “Of course, I could be wrong, but from where I stand, I’d say there goes the ball game. Even if we wanted to, there’s no way we can hush this up.”

“Not very well,” Mullen agreed. “The siren on that ambulance sure didn’t sound like the bell of a Good Humor man. The story is all over town by now. And by morning it will be all over Louisiana. Out-of-state papers please copy.”

Latour wished he knew what they were talking about.

Mullen turned back to him. “You admit going out to the Lacosta place? That’s where you were headed when you left me?”

The pain in his head was still intense, but some of the fog lifted from Latour’s mind. “That’s right.”

“Did you make any stops on the way?”

“One stop.”

“Where?”

“At Big Boy’s.” Latour tried to work the cotton out of his mouth. “I wonder if I could have a drink.”

Pringle took a bottle of Bourbon from the bottom drawer of Belluche’s desk and handed it to Todd Kelly. “Give him a belt. It won’t hurt him. According to the reading on the gauge, he hasn’t enough alcohol in him to make a sick parakeet giddy.”

Kelly held the bottle to Latour’s lips. “Go ahead. Drink. Then you have a lot of talking to do. And talk straight. The thing I hate most in this world is a sanctimonious son-of-a-bitch who talks out of both sides of his mouth.”

The whisky escaped Latour’s mouth and trickled down his chin. He raised his hands to steady the bottle and discovered that his wrists were manacled. “What’s the idea of the cuffs?”

Kelly screwed the cap back on the bottle. “As if you didn’t know.”

“He knows, all right,” Pringle said. “He’s too lah-de-lah. He’s too Simon-pure to take an honest buck. Then he pulls something like this and queers it for all of us.”

Latour looked at the faces of the men standing around his chair. Jim Claiborne, Jean de la Ronde, Bill Ducros, Sam Peddie, Matt Rousseau, Jack Rafignac, and Tony Louaillier, every deputy on the force except those on sick call, looking as if they had dressed hastily, stared back at him coldly.

“What’s the idea?” he repeated.

Mullen said, “That’s for you to tell us. If you needed it so bad, why didn’t you jump one of the girls watching the poker game? Any of them would have been glad to oblige you. That’s what they were there for. But no. You had to be different.”

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

“I’ll bet. You do admit you went out to Lacosta’s?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

Latour’s head was beginning to clear. The pain was less intense. “I wanted to look at that patch of cane where those three shots were fired at me. I wanted to talk to Lacosta.”

“At two o’clock in the morning?”

“It doesn’t matter what time you die. You’re just as dead at two o’clock as you are if you’re shot at noon.”

Sheriff Belluche’s voice was dry and brittle. It had the same dead tonal quality as a piece of last year’s cane when it was stepped on. “Come off it, Andy. You’re not fooling anyone. Those alleged attempts that Tom tells me you claim were made on your life are as phony as the holier-than-thou attitude you pinned on with your shield.”

Latour protested, “That isn’t so. I was shot at this morning and again this evening. And I found four cigarette butts and a thirty-thirty shell casing in the patch of cane where the man waited in ambush.”

“Where are they?”

“In my left-hand shirt pocket.”

“Well, they aren’t there now,” Belluche said. “Any of you boys find any cigarette butts or a shell casing on the floor of Lacosta’s trailer?”

“No,” Pringle said.

Mullen pointed to a small pile of personal possessions on the blotter of Belluche’s desk. “That’s everything he had on him.” He enumerated the items. “One revolver, a wallet, a handful of change. His identification papers, a flashlight, and a half bottle of white lightning.”

On the floor of the trailer? Latour thought.

He hadn’t been inside the trailer. All he’d done was knock on the door. Returning memory pierced the fog clouding his mind. Lacosta had awakened. He’d asked who was there and what he wanted. Then someone had slugged him with a blackjack.

He said, “I was slugged.” He lifted his manacled hands and tried to feel his head. “That’s how I got these lumps.”