Bring Him Back Dead Page 5

  Latour looked at the floor.

  “O.K.,” Mullen said. “I won’t put you on a spot. I’ll admit it. Belluche and I are a pair of dirty crooks. This can’t last. It won’t. But while it does, we’re going to have a good time and get what we can out of it. I’ll tell you why. We feel we have it coming. Belluche put in thirty years and I put in twenty-five trying to maintain order in a goddamn swamp with more alligators than people in it. We risked our lives, time and again, for field hands’ pay. Believe me, you’re just as dead if you’re shot trying to arrest some back-country bastard for laying his own daughter as you are trying to fight your way up a hill in Korea. And, take it from me, I’ve been shot at a lot of times.”

  “But not recently.”

  “No, not recently. You’re how old, Andy? Twenty-seven?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “I’m fifty. And I’ve spent most of those years trying not to go nuts from listening to limpkins squawking and the wind whistling through the cane brakes. I like it this way. I like the music. I like the lights. I like the excitement. I like to have folding money in my pocket. I like to pat a cute little heinie that isn’t calloused from riding a plow horse. So we’re running the town wide open, in certain respects. Who are we hurting? Is it any worse than when Jean Lafitte and his boys put into the bayou to split up the loot from a prize they’d taken?”

  “No, I suppose not,” Latour admitted.

  Mullen continued to be frank. “Like I said before, it can’t last. I give it another year before the men in town like Jean Avart and Sam Tousard and Father Kelly and the churchpeople and women’s clubs vote us out of office and turn French Bayou back into a Sunday-school community where the bluenoses vote dry and drink wet and a young buck with a yen for a dame seduces some high-school girl instead of going to a house.

  “Have you ever known either the old man or me to give a dope-peddler a pass?”

  “No.”

  “What happens to kill-crazy punks?”

  “They’re jugged.”

  “What’s happened the few times a girl has been forced against her will?”

  “You and the old man and the other boys have gone all out.”

  “That’s right. Look at it this way. The hell-raising we’re allowing is as old as the world. You can’t legislate human nature. Men were going to bed with women they weren’t married to before Moses discovered how to make bricks by mixing straw with clay. The Roman soldiers shot dice at the foot of the Cross. One of the first things men did after they stopped living in caves, maybe even before, was to learn how to ferment whatever they had into drinking likker so they could take a swig now and then and things wouldn’t look so bad.

  “We aren’t doing a thing that isn’t being done in every other city and town and village in the country. The only difference is, we’re doing it openly. So smart up, Andy. Get wise. Get yours while the getting is good. There’s plenty for all of us. Make some dough for yourself and that good-looking wife of yours. She deserves a better break than you’re giving her. Forget that you’re a Latour. Forget that one of your ancestors was Andy Jackson’s chief engineer and that the Latours were once big people in this part of the delta. Times change and a man has to change with them. Get what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Latour said soberly.

  Mullen got up from the bed. “I don’t know what’s eating you. Your personal life is none of my business. But you’ve had a chip on your shoulder ever since you came home, ever since those test wells on your land turned out to be dry holes. And it worries me and the other boys. Believe it or not, the old man and I both like you. We liked your father. You’re the last of one of the few old families in town. But for the last two years you’ve been going around as if you were sore at the world and everyone was sore at you. They aren’t. Almost everyone in town likes you, or would if you gave them a chance.”

  Latour said dryly, “Except the lad who’s had four tries for my life. In one day.”

  Mullen was genuinely concerned. “That does worry me. Let’s talk it over in the morning, you and I and the old man, and see if we can’t put our finger on the bastard. And I’m not thinking only of ourselves. I’m thinking of you.” Mullen added, “Although God knows, with your war record and all that fruit salad you brought back with you, and you married to a beautiful White Russian whose grandfather used to be a prince or a count or something, if you get yourself killed, every major newspaper and TV network will have a reporter or commentator down here in twenty-four hours.” Mullen patted his forehead with his handkerchief. “And once they get a good look at French Bayou, good-by, gravy train, good morning, warden.” He grinned. “But I’ll be damned if it hasn’t been worth it.”

  He walked back into the game room and slid his hand under the slip of one of the girls for luck before taking his place at the table. “O.K. Deal me in. I feel something coming up. Maybe it’s four aces.”

  Latour watched the play for a few minutes, then left the suite and walked down the stairs and through the lobby. Talking to Tom Mullen hadn’t got him the name of any man who might have known he was going into the Big Bend country and would have to pass the Lacosta place on his return. It had given him food for thought.

  Instead of getting into his car immediately, he sat on the steps of the white-brick church across from the hotel.

  He did have a chip on his shoulder. He was acting as if he was sore at everyone in the world. The strained relations between him and Olga could be as much his fault as hers.

  He thought back to Singapore and the days when he’d courted Olga. It was true she’d only been a secretary in the British Embassy, but because of her beauty, education, and family background, she’d traveled in the best circles, the kind of circles where she wanted to belong.

  And, confident that oil had been found on his land, he’d promised her the world. He’d promised her a big house and a staff of servants, cars and a yacht. He’d sold her a bill of goods he hadn’t been able to deliver.

  Her house had thirty rooms, but only five of them were tenantable. Her staff of servants was a young Negress who came in once a week to help with the heavy cleaning. Her fleet of cars was a two-year-old Cadillac she never got a chance to drive because he needed it in his work. Her yacht was a twelve-foot skiff with a three-and-a-half-horsepower outboard motor.

  Olga had reason to act as she did.

  Latour pursued the thought further. For that matter, how did she act? Despite her bitter disappointment, she kept and cleaned his house and cooked three meals a day. It wasn’t Olga’s fault if he never went home to eat them.

  The thing he resented most was the feeling that she was patronizing him. Still, all that could be in his mind. She’d never once mentioned the fact that her family were former aristocracy. One of the most important factors in a successful marriage was sex. And, patronizing him or not, Olga had never once denied him her body. She was his to take whenever he wanted her, at any hour of the day or night.

  He thought of the session they had finished such a short while before and a warm glow spread through his body. No woman could allow a man to bed her the way he’d bedded Olga and not have some affection for him.

  Her response had been more than pent-up passion. Her fire had been fueled with tenderness and a desire to please him, a flaming avowal of her willingness and wish to be the favored receptacle into which he poured his love.

  Latour could feel the color creeping into his cheeks. And he hadn’t even thanked her or told her that he loved her. He’d taken her and left her, as he might have taken one of the girls watching the poker game in the hotel across the street. He’d been so busy feeling sorry for himself that he’d never bothered to wonder how she felt.

  For all he knew, the Russian name she’d called him in her mounting ecstasy had been a term of endearment. It could be that she still loved him. It could be that he and not Olga had built the wall between them.

  He thought back to the night when he’d been obliged to tell her what Jean Avart ha
d told him about the dry well. There had been no bitter recriminations. Olga hadn’t raged or stormed or reproached him. She hadn’t even cried. All she’d said was:

  “Oh, Andy. How awful for you!”

  For him.

  He looked back through the past two years. Mullen was right. He had been carrying a chip on his shoulder. He didn’t have to take their dirty money, but he could walk more lightly from now on. He could be more human.

  He studied the crowd milling on the sidewalks. As Mullen had also pointed out, the conditions existing in French Bayou had been going on since the beginning of time. Men and places didn’t really change. They merely went through certain cycles. With a little imagination it was easy to transform the blinking neon signs into flames leaping from piled driftwood and the roughly dressed oil-field workers into members of the swaggering brotherhood that had sailed with Jean Lafitte. And girls in that other era had lived life while it was young and the taste of it sweet in their mouths.

  He smelled perfume and looked up. A girl was standing in front of the church steps.

  “Lonely, honey?” She smiled.

  “No,” Latour told her soberly. “As it happens, I’m not.”

  He walked to his car and drove slowly up the street to the junction of the parish road winding back through the sloughs and canals to the Lacosta plantation.

  He felt better, more hopeful of the future, than he had felt at any previous time during the past two years. As soon as he made certain Rita was all right, he’d have a talk with Olga. Now. Tonight. He’d wake her up if he had to. It could be that a frank talk with her would clear up most of the misunderstanding between them.

  He would tell her how much he loved her.

  Maybe in his own disappointment and pride he’d created a bitch where a queen really existed.

  Chapter Eight

  THE NIGHT was dark and still. It was as moist as the soft fur on the underbelly of a freshly trapped muskrat. Used in the main by trappers and tenant farmers, the road was practically deserted at this time of night.

  Once Latour thought a car was following him. He drove off on the shoulder and parked. A battered pickup truck labored by without stopping. It was too dark for Latour to see much, but the driver of the truck appeared to be wearing one of the crude straw hats worn by most of the field hands in the section.

  Latour drove on for three miles, then turned into the oasis of light coming from the old barn, now sign-plastered, known locally as Big Boy’s.

  The fat Negro who owned it had been one of the juke-joint owners who’d put pressure on Sheriff Belluche to have something done about Lant Turner.

  A Duke Ellington record was blaring from the garish jukebox. The parking space in front of the bar was crowded with cars, a few of them occupied by couples who were either too drunk or too amorous to care if anyone saw them.

  As Latour walked into the bar the babble of conversation became dim, then died away. The presence of a white deputy sheriff in Big Boy’s caused tension and wariness.

  Big Boy was serving a couple at the far end of the bar. He immediately neglected them to come up to Latour.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Deputy. What kin I do for you?”

  “Tell me something, I hope,” Latour said.

  Big Boy wiped the bar with a clean rag. “Anythin’ I kin. An’ thanks a lot for smashin’ Lant Turner’s still. You got no idea how he was cuttin’ int’ my take. Asides, he didn’t make good whisky nohow.”

  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.