Cajun Waltz (18 page)

“He was never too cheerful.”

“Gotta feel sorry for him.” She sounded as if she did. “I guess a funeral's in order.”

“After you go down to ID him.”

“Excuse me?”

“Next o' kin. I believe that's policy.”

“Body has no head, the man said.”

“It's got a head.”

“How do you know?”

He caught himself. “I seen stuff. Hardly ever a shot takes off the whole thing.”

“And his face and hands all chewed? Jesus God.”

It can't be overstated how distressed Alvin was. He dreaded that Bonnie, on viewing the corpse, would realize it wasn't R.J. and deduce that her brother had murdered a man to stage his own suicide. Believing him a killer would, Alvin worried, further spook her skittish heart. His one hope was that the resemblance between Freddy and R.J. had been improved by exposure outdoors, leaving Alvin and Bonnie's love affair to continue its upward course.

*   *   *

S
ALLIE
H
OOKER HAD
had no contact with her daughter after Angel left Hancock Bayou with Richie Bainard in 1938. She'd learned they were married only after chancing on a copy of
The Lake Charles American
with a photo of the couple as honorary king and queen of the Calcasieu-Cameron Fair in 1948. She guessed right away that the little boy in the picture was Angel and Richie's child. To not know her grandson or have any hope of meeting him didn't depress her as much as you'd think. She was pleased for Angel and grateful for God's miracle that a child of her blood could have so brilliant a future.

She was saddened by R.J.'s suicide. He'd come by her facility at the start of duck season last fall and declared right away who he was. Her memory of him as a child was entirely warm and she saw no reason to pretend otherwise. She'd asked about Angel, which took him aback since he had no idea of the women's connection. Thus it was R.J. who first gave her the news, as Alvin Dupree had given it to him, that her daughter, his stepmother, had died in a car crash. “An' the child?” Sallie had asked.

“They call him Seth. He got hurt but is okay, what I hear.”

Her closed eyes indicated she was thanking the Lord. “My grandson a Bainard. Ain't that a thing.”

R.J. had put his hand on Sallie's shoulder. “We're related now, you and me.”

“Now you jus' silly,” she'd said. She'd begun to cry, remembering her daughter, still you could tell his words had pleased her.

Those had been their first exchanges. There'd come a subsequent moment when he confessed he was on the run from the law.

“Hadda wonder why you here, actin' poor,” Sallie said.

He'd felt relieved that she didn't ask what crime he'd committed. Robbery or fighting she could probably accept, but to think that the little boy she'd raised could have harmed a girl would have been a sore disappointment.

And now that boy was dead, his remains found on the marsh in condition that would have been worse if not for chill winter temperatures. Muskrats and carrion birds had consumed much of the face and fingers, but insects, gators, and rot weren't a factor this time of year; the body was decently preserved inside layered hunting clothes. The trapper had brought it in his flatbed to Sallie's cold locker for storage pending collection by the sheriff. Men lugged it in like a sack of grain and laid it on a worktable in the middle of the locker. Though the upper skull was gone, Sallie didn't hesitate to touch the stringy hair at the temple, remembering its lovely chestnut color when R.J. was a baby.

She was preparing to spread a tarp over him when her niece's son came in from outside, where he'd been listening to the trapper describe his big find. Tarzy studied the body with chagrin. “Why you gone kilt your dog, too?”

“Who you talkin' to, child?” Sallie said. The locker's open front door had let out cold air and the compressor came on with a diesel cough. “That man he can't hear you.”

“Kilt his dog.”

“His name was R. J. Bainard, and jus' you remember times he nice to you. Not for us to understan' what make a soul go down.”

Tarzy studied the remaining face. What was his great-aunt talking about? He'd never seen this guy before.

Sallie covered the body and stepped back. “God's will not ours be done.” She shut her eyes. “Tarzy?”

“Yes, ma'am?”

“Give a prayer. Even 'bout his dog's okay. Good Lord love His creatures, too.”

Tarzy closed his eyes. “I'm sorry you dead,” he said aloud, adding in his mind, whoever you are.

*   *   *

T
HE
L
AKE
C
HARLES
American
reported R. J. Bainard's suicide the day after his body was found. The next afternoon a sputtering brown Oldsmobile pulled up at Sallie's place. A fat man in a linen suit clambered out looking like a food critic lost in Provence. The rest of the world might buy the suicide story, but Abe Percy dearly hoped it was wrong. He'd come to Hancock Bayou to investigate.

Tarzy was there alone, his mother and great-aunt doing errands in town. His chore today was to clean the plucking machine behind the cold locker. He pulled feathers by the fistful from the exhaust vent and stuffed them into burlap sacks, the feathers itching to his elbow and clinging like a furry rash. The locker loomed nearby with the loaded presence of a room someone died in, presence conferred by an actual corpse. Tarzy was curious for another peek. When the visitor waved a dollar bill and asked if he might look inside, the boy led him around back with an air of authority.

Abe walked with a cane and breathed in a musical wheeze. He grimaced at the smell of feathers and offal and held a handkerchief over his nose. Tarzy unbolted the door and swung it open. The locker was an eight-by-eight box with a six-foot ceiling. Entering, Abe started to shut the door behind them to keep cold air from escaping. Tarzy leaped to prevent it from closing. “Of course,” Abe said. “No light.”

“No air!” Tarzy said. “No gettin' out either.” He indicated the locker's latch mechanism—it opened only from the outside.

“Good heavens! That's a frightful hazard.”

“Ready see'm now?” Like a magician unveiling his showstopper, Tarzy yanked off the tarp with flourish.

There were bloodstains on the collar of the canvas jacket; otherwise it wasn't as gruesome as Abe had feared. Weeks outdoors under freezing rain had cleansed the gore. The blast had penetrated the forehead above and slightly to one side of the bridge of the nose, suggesting R.J. had faltered at the last instant before leaning on the trigger. Abe examined the result. “Grew a beard, I see.”

“'Kay,” the boy said.

“Yes?”

“Gotta go.”

“My time is up?”

“Family comin' today. Take him home.”

“Really?”

“My aunt said. She be mad we in here.”

Abe sighed. For this he'd paid a dollar? “Pity the beard. It hides a man's finer features, which I suppose was the intent.”

“He had a beard, same.”

Abe regarded the boy. “Who had a beard?”

Tarzy went quiet.

“Did you know R. J. Bainard?”

“He brung his birds.”

“And this is he?”

Tarzy sensed snares being set. “Who else?”

“Indeed.”

“Kilt his dog.”

“I heard. Perfectly vile.”

“I like dogs.”

“So do I.”

The boy drew the tarp back over the dead man's face out of respect for this sacred new topic. “Never had m'own.”

“Never had a dog? Every little boy should have a dog.”

Tarzy nodded. The old lawyer said to him gently, “I believe you and I are in sympathy, young fellow. I believe if you gave full vent to your distress at the death of this man's dog, you might consent to help me catch the animal's true murderer.”

“Help how?”

“Just leave me alone with this …
evidence
for a moment. Guard the door, and take care I'm not entombed by that latch.”

Tarzy hesitated. “Man kilt his dog. Then hisself.”

“As you say. I wish merely to confirm the fact so that no dogs will suffer from our negligence in the future.”

Tarzy stepped outside the locker, leaving the door partway open to let in light. Abe, with the lofty disdain of an English butler confronting a clogged toilet, unbuttoned the fly of the dead man's woolen trousers. He then fished out the penis with a charcoal pencil and examined it, poking it with the pencil as if separating mushrooms from peas on a dinner plate. He looked up to see Tarzy gaping at him through the doorway.

“Oughtn't be spying, boy!” He had another thought. “Come. Your testimony could prove useful.”

Tarzy entered, his expression full of misgiving.

Abe lifted the penis, pale as pasta but intact thanks to its frigid confinement in the man's undershorts. “Are you familiar with term
circumcision
?”

Tarzy was not.

Abe unzipped his pants. “Circumcised.” He indicated the table. “
Un
circumcised. Do you understand?”

Tarzy's eyes went back and forth. He nodded.

Abe put himself in order, repositioned the dead man's organ and buttoned the fly. He put his pencil back in his pocket. “I realize that was nasty,” he said to the boy. “Just remember, I'm an attorney.”

*   *   *

A
BE WATCHED FROM
a distance up the road when Bonnie Bainard and her chauffeur arrived at Sallie Hooker's later that day in the company of two Cameron Parish sheriff's deputies and a Lake Charles hearse. The chauffeur, an imposing fellow with hands like slabs of meat, opened Bonnie's door, glaring at the deputies when their vehicle splashed through a puddle and almost soiled her.

Alvin had seen the original damage done, so inside the cold locker knew to hold his breath and tighten his anus before the tarp was removed. But how could Bonnie have prepared for the ravaged thing she was expected to call her kin? She didn't flinch. She sniffled once before instructing the funeral parlor attendants to load the body. “Cremate,” she added. “Tonight.”

From there, the deputies escorted her and Alvin to the single room above a saloon that their investigation had turned up as R.J.'s hideout in Hancock Bayou. Bonnie wanted none of her brother's effects but Alvin said take his guitar at least, the old steel resonator that Richie had bought from Joe Falcon. “It'll be sentimental one day, you watch.”

“Sentimental? Me?” The quip was high humor for Bonnie. “Sure, throw it in the car.” Thus did Alvin fulfill R.J.'s one order when they'd parted ways after Freddy—don't forget the National.

R.J.'s burial urn was interred at Orange Grove near his mother, stepmother, and grandfather. Reporters had been advised that Richie Bainard was unable to attend due to extreme grief. In reality, Bonnie had told him nothing about her brother's death; she wanted to limit to one at a time the family traumas she had to juggle. A photographer got some distant shots of her bending to the earth in white gloves as the pastor and a stocky attendant looked on. The pictures ran in the Sunday paper and were condemned by many as invasive of the Bainards' bereavement. Rumors circulated that the photographer worked for a publicity firm in the family employ.

The limousine windows were dark-tinted, denying snoopers at the graveyard gate any glimpse of the passengers inside. One of the snoopers was Abe Percy. He would have been intrigued by Bonnie's look of pinched amusement as the limo pulled away, though what conclusion he might have drawn is debatable. Everyone mourns in his own way.

*   *   *

C
ORINNE
M
EERS VISITED
her son Joey at the hospital annex every other day. She dressed smartly for these outings—today, a camel waistcoat and skirt with a matching pillbox hat—on the chance that she might meet a young medical man who would ask her to join him for coffee. She'd never been unfaithful to her husband, but her discontent with Donald had carved a hollow inside her that rather than fill with PTA or charity work Corinne had left optimistically empty.

She was annoyed to find her son absent. There came a tap on the door as she stood in the empty room. “If you want Joey, he's out,” she griped.

The visitor entered. “I'm looking for Mr. Hooker.”

“He's out walkin' with my son evidently.”

“Ah. Taking advantage of our warm spell.”

“Mus' be a sight, coupla gimps on a sidewalk.”

“At least they won't get far.”

She laughed. “I shouldn't laugh.”

“Got to sometimes, in a hospital.”

“You a medical man?”

“Lord, no. Too dumb.”

“Business with Mr. Hooker, then?” She saw the man's reaction. “Was that nosy?”

“I'd say.”

Corinne blushed, more perturbed than embarrassed now that he'd confessed he was no doctor.

“But since you ask,” he went on, “I'm here to beat his brains in.”

“A fistfight?”

“Was thinking a boot or a chair.”

“The man is blind.”

“Didn't say I'd fight fair.”

Next, to her surprise, she said what she felt. “You got a scary way, kinda.”

“Not once you know me.” He arched an eyebrow. “Cuppa coffee?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Seeing as how you've been stood up.”

“I have not been stood up! I am waitin' on my son.”

“And I'm waiting on you. Coffee or no? It's not gonna change the world either way.”

He wore loafers, chinos, and a pinstripe fedora cocked to one side like a salesman who loves his job. His beard was crisply sculpted, giving him the look of an evil duke. Extending her hand, she realized it was damp with nerves. “My name's Corinne Meers.
Mrs
. Corinne Meers.”