She didn’t answer. Behind me, I heard Snuggs go out the swinging flap I had cut for him in the kitchen door. I drove back to the office in the heat, my lunch unfinished, the sky bitten with dust, my face burning with shame.
AT THE DEPARTMENT a number of felt-tip notes were taped to my office door. The following excerpts indicated the general sentiments of my colleagues toward Lonnie Marceaux:
WAY TO GO, ROBICHEAUX!
STOMP ASS AND TAKE NAMES, BIG DAVE!
HEY, STREAK, LIKE WAYLON SAYS, IT AINT THE YEAR
THAT COUNTS BUT WHAT’S UNDER THE HOOD.
Helen was not so congratulatory. “He’s at Iberia General now with a concussion. He also has a tooth broken off at the gum,” she said.
She was walking back and forth in front of her office window, her navy blue pants and denim shirt and masculine physique backlit by a sulfurous glare in the sky.
“I’m not sorry I did it. He had it coming. I say fuck him, Helen.”
“What?”
“He treats us like douche bags. He’s been consistently disrespectful to you and the department. You don’t negotiate with a guy like that. You reach down into his wiring and rip it out.”
“Since when is it your job to defend me or this department?”
“It’s not my job. That’s the point.”
She hooked her thumbs in her gunbelt, the question hanging in her eyes. I looked away from her.
“You popped him because of something he said about me?” she said.
“He called you a queer. He accused me of performing cunnilingus on you.” I cleared my throat and shifted in the chair, unconsciously touching my knuckles.
She took her thumbs out of her belt and gazed out the window, her lips pursed. She fooled with one ear, her jaw flexing on a piece of chewing gum. There were ridges of muscle, like rolls of dimes, in the backs of her arms. “He hasn’t filed charges yet,” she said.
“He’s not going to, either.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Because he’s a gutless fraud.”
“Pops, you have one character defect I’ve never been able to deal with.”
“Really?”
“I can never guess what your feelings are on a given subject. God, you’re a case. Dropping the district attorney in his own office. That’s a beaut.” She smiled at me, her face infused with genuine warmth. In fact, it was radiant and filled with the kind of humanity that I suspect is purchased by living in two genders, and lovely in ways I cannot adequately describe.
GOVERNOR HUEY LONG, known as the Kingfish, became the prototype for all the southern demagogues who would follow him. According to legend, Huey kept a little black book he called his “sonofabitch file.” Whenever he met a man he disliked, he wrote his name in it. If someone wondered why Huey had entered the individual’s name in the book, the answer was simple: When the opportunity presented itself, Huey would destroy that man’s life.
What I had not said to Helen was that men like Lonnie Marceaux and Huey Long had ice water in their veins and kept long memories. I still believed Lonnie would not come after me immediately because a public airing of our confrontation would cause him political embarrassment. But for three years he would have the option of filing charges against me, and that option would hang over me during the entirety of our investigation into the murder of Tony Lujan. My guess was Lonnie would eventually have his revenge, but like all cowards, he would use a three-cushion shot to get it.
In the meantime, I had to keep an investigative clarity of line in the death of Tony Lujan, regardless of my feelings about Lonnie Marceaux. I didn’t buy Monarch Little for the murder. He was just too easy a target. Black dirtbags make wonderful dartboards for prosecutors in need of defendants with cartoonlike dimensions. Unfortunately for Monarch, he had the social grace of a hog on ice and was the kind of defendant juries love to boil into grease and pour down a sewer grate. But nevertheless, Monarch was not stupid. Even if he had shot the Lujan boy, he would not have left the murder weapon on the floor of his Firebird. Also, Monarch was a pragmatist. The person who had murdered Tony Lujan had deliberately disfigured the body postmortem and I suspected had been driven by the kind of insatiable rage we associate with sexually motivated psychopaths.
Just when I had convinced myself that Monarch was being set up, that the old southern incubus of racial scapegoating was once again rearing its head in our midst, I received a telephone call that was like a brick toppling down a stone well.
“Mr. Robicheaux?”
The voice was young, female, threaded with trepidation.
“Yes, this is Dave Robicheaux. What can I do for you?”