IT TOOK ME almost an hour to reach the levee area where Cesaire had called from. He was waiting in his truck in front of a bar that had been knocked together from unpainted plywood and covered with a tin roof that had been peeled off a barn. On the other side of the levee was a wide bay flanged by flooded woods. To the north I could see car lights crossing the elevated highway that traversed the massive network of bayous, rivers, oxbows, lakes, and cypress swamps that comprised the Atchafalaya Basin. The sky was piled with clouds that had turned purple and gold in the sun, the miles of flooded trees bending steadily in the wind. As I got out of my truck, a smell like burning garbage struck my face.
“Can you show me where they went?” I asked.
“Down the levee and back in them woods,” he said, pointing. “There’s high ground back in them gum trees and palmettos. It don’t never go underwater unless it storms real bad.”
I didn’t shake hands with him, which is considered a personal affront in South Louisiana. But as Molly had suggested, it would have been foolish to dismiss the darker side of this man’s nature. When people seek vengeance, they dig up every biblical platitude imaginable to rationalize their behavior, but their motivations are invariably selfish. More important, they have no regard for the damage and pain they often cause the innocent.
“Why you doing this, Mr. Darbonne?”
“You went my bond. You treated me decent. You cared about my li’l girl.”
“I did those things because I thought you had been unjustly accused. You didn’t kill Bello Lujan, did you?”
“No, suh.”
“But you murdered his son.”
His turquoise eyes were empty, unblinking, his face devoid of any emotion I could detect. “I ain’t never tole you ot’erwise,” he said.
“Then you planted the weapon in Monarch’s car and set fire to it,” I said.
“He ain’t selling dope no more.”
“I wish you had trusted me, Mr. Darbonne.”
“To do what? Still ain’t nobody in jail for what they done to my li’l girl.”
How do you explain to a man whose daughter has killed herself that there is no “they,” that the pitiful, guilt-driven man who raped her was a victim himself, that the fraternity boys who gangbanged her couldn’t think their way out of a wet paper bag, that Slim Bruxal, who had the feral instincts of a vicious street punk, had acted with a degree of conscience and tried to return her safely home? How do you deal with the moral authority of ignorance?
“You’re not setting me up, are you, partner?” I said.
“What you talking about, you?”
“Get in,” I said.
We drove down the levee, the wind buffeting the truck. Out in the swamp I could see black smoke rising out of the trees from trash or stump fires, then flattening above the canopy.
“Turn down the grade,” Cesaire said, pointing at a steep set of vehicle tracks that led down the side of the levee into stands of gum and persimmon trees.
As we dipped down the smooth green incline of the levee, I could see the sunset through the canopy, the leaves of the cypress ruffling in silhouette. But the poetic moment was lost as soon as we entered the shade. Inside the heated enclosure of the woods, an ugly stench hung in the air, one that called to mind a dead bird caught in a flaming chimney.
I drove at least two hundred yards on top of dried-out humus and layers of leaves that had turned gray with damp rot. The trees were strung with air vines, the ground dotted with palmettos. In the distance I could see ponds of water, like greasy oil slicks among the tree trunks, and a spacious cabin elevated on cinder blocks, wind chimes and birdhouses hanging from the eaves of the peaked tin roof.
But the cabin was not the focus of my attention. Off to the left was the scorched hulk of a Cadillac convertible, strings of smoke rising from what had once been a flamingo-pink paint job. The hatch had been popped, perhaps by the heat of the gas tank burning, and the top had collapsed in a soft gray patina of ash on the seats. There was no sound of life around either the Caddy or the cabin. I stopped the truck and cut the ignition.
“I want you to stay here, Mr. Darbonne. I’m going to take a look at my friend’s car, then I’m going inside the cabin. If everything goes all right, I’ll be back in a few minutes. But I want you to stay right where you are.”
“What’s the deal wit’ this Bruxal guy? How come he’s after your friend and his woman?”
“It’s complicated, but the short version is Whitey Bruxal ordered Bello Lujan killed and then put it on you. He did to you, Mr. Darbonne, what you did to Monarch Little.”
Cesaire stared at me in the deepening shadows. A mosquito lit on his neck, sucking his blood, but he gave it no notice. “That’s the man took the pickax out of my toolshed?”
“When we’re finished here, I’m going to help you in whatever way I can. If I don’t return in ten minutes, walk back to the bar and call nine-one-one.”
I opened the door quietly, slipped my cut-down pump from the gun rack behind the seat, and got out of the truck. I walked toward the Cadillac, my heart pounding.
The heat from the fire had curled all the leaves in a water oak that tower