“I’ll see what I can come up with. Look, on the subject of Whitey Bruxal, I took a strange call from his wife three days ago.”
“You’re not working Vice anymore?”
“We think Bruxal is laundering meth money. For a while I was in charge of a surveillance at his house. Anyway, his old lady seems to be a real nutcase. Check this out: He met her at what’s called the Wild Hog Festival in Collier County, Florida. People who are half-human come out of the Glades and—”
“Joe, I’ve got a time squeeze going here.”
“She tells me in this mushmouth cracker accent that the gas man stole twenty dollars out of her purse. So I told myself this was a good time to see the inside of Bruxal’s house. When I get out there, she tells me she found the twenty-dollar bill on the floor and there was no problem, that the gas man had checked out a leak by the barbecue pit and had come inside to turn off and relight her pilots but she was mistaken about the missing twenty dollars.
“So I say, ‘You had a gas leak out here?’
“She said the meter reader smelled it by the barbecue pit out on the breezeway and a repairman came in to turn off all the pilots on the hot water heaters so they could see if gas was still going through the meter. She said the repairman asked her to sit on the glider in the yard in case there was any danger.
“I said, ‘Your husband wasn’t home?’
“She goes, ‘No, he was out of town. Why you ask that?’
“Then she tells me these guys were in and out of her house for a half hour. I called the gas company when I got back to the department. They said no meter reader had been out to the Bruxal residence since last month.”
“Feds?” I said.
“They’re chasing terrorists.”
“Thanks for your help, Joe.”
“We’re firing pop guns against the side of an aircraft carrier,” he said.
“I don’t see it that way.”
“The gambling industry in this country pulls in hundreds of billions a year. Guys like us earn paychecks that have the purchase power of toilet paper. Who do you think is gonna walk out of the smoke?”
“So we’ll piss in their shoes.”
“That’s why I always liked you, Dave. Innocent all the way to the boneyard.”
I LOOKED AT the case files on my desk and couldn’t begin to compute the amount of time I needed to pursue the investigation into the murder of Tony Lujan, the possible rape and subsequent suicide of Yvonne Darbonne, and the vehicular hit-and-run death of Crustacean Man. I was convinced all three cases were tied to one another, but I wasn’t sure how. To complicate matters, Tony’s part-time girlfriend had told me she was absolutely sure Monarch had called the Lujan home and arranged a meeting with Tony shortly before he was killed at close range with a twelve-gauge shotgun. My earlier belief that Monarch was not a killer now seemed more and more like the thinking of a politically correct fool.
My file folders on Tony Lujan, Yvonne Darbonne, and Crustacean Man were thick with handwritten notes, crime scene photos, summations of witness interviews, postmortem forms, cassette tapes of 911 calls, forensic reports, and national database printouts on firearms and ballistics. The clerical work I had done on all three cases was impressive to look at. The truth was, all three investigations had become circular and virtually worthless in terms of prosecutorial value. But in my opinion there was still one individual out there besides the killer who had knowledge about the causes behind Tony’s death. If so, he had obviously not been willing to come forward, even though he was ostensibly a religious man. I had met him once before, at the home of the Chalons family, one that was notorious for its involvement with casinos on the Texas-Louisiana state line. Maybe it was time to test the legitimacy of Colin Alridge’s claim on spirituality.
I called Alice Werenhaus, Clete’s secretary at his New Orleans office, and in a half hour she called back and told me where I could find Alridge. I signed out of the department and told Helen I would be out of town until at least the next morning. Chapter 17
T HE TWO-STORY HOME that was deeded in the name of his ministry was built of lacquered logs on a bluff that overlooked the Mississippi Sound and a stretch of shell-streaked beach spiked with salt grass. To the west the alluvial flow of the Mississippi River formed an enormous brown cloud of silt and mud along the Louisiana coastline, but just east of the river’s mouth, the Gulf was green, capped with waves all the way to the southern horizon, and pelicans glided above the water like fighter-bombers in formation.
It was almost dusk when I drove down a broken asphalt lane through pine trees to his front gate. I expected that he would have private security in place around his home, but there was none that I could see, only a railed fence around a yard planted with flowers and St. Augustine grass.
I knocked on the front door, but no one answered and I could hear no sound from inside the house. The borders of the deck were hung with baskets of impatiens and geraniums, and inside the railing were iron chairs that had been painted white and a glass-topped table shaded by a canvas umbrella. The sky was aflame with the sunset, the pine trees north of the dunes whipping in the evening wind. The fragrance of the flowers, the salt air, the resinous smell of the trees that reminded the viewer he was still in the state of Mississippi were like a perfect moment in time, an encapsulation of everything that was aesthetic in the Deep South.
But there were no people. No children playing on the beach, no woman reading on the deck, no gardener snipping flowers for a vase that would be placed with burning candles on a dining room table. For reasons that perhaps made no sense, I thought of the paintings of the young Adolf Hitler when he had supported himself as a sidewalk artist. Hitler’s street scenes and buildings were geometrically precise, the lines like the edges of knives, but there were no people on the streets or inside the buildings, as though the human family had been vacuumed off the planet.
On the far side of Alridge’s house were a dock and boat slip and a channel that was fed by the bay at high tide. No boat was moored at the dock, but a bright rainbowlike film of gasoline and oil floated next to one of the pilings. A cooler and an orange life jacket and a cheap spinning rod lay in a pile on the planks, as though the owner had started to take them with him in his boat, then had lost interest in his purpose.
I went back to my truck, pushed back the seat, and closed my eyes. As the sun sank behind the pines and the summer light turned green and dark across the sky, I heard the drone of an outboard in the distance. I took my field glasses out of the glove box and focused them on a twelve-foot aluminum b
oat bouncing through the whitecaps, farther out than I would have been willing to go in a boat that size.
As Colin Alridge came up the channel, canted sideways on the rear seat, his hand on the throttle, his expression showed mild curiosity at my presence but no sense of alarm. He cut the gas and let his boat slide into the dock on its wake.
“My name is Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said, opening my badge holder. “We met a year or so ago in Jeanerette.”