The Neon Rain (4 page)

I sat alone in a box at the races that night and looked with the same quiet and tranquil fascination at the lighted track, the dampened and raked sod, the glistening clipped grass in the center field. It was the kind of vague, almost numb euphoria that I used to feel when I slid off the edge of a two-day binge into delirium tremens. I had become omniscient; my white tropical suit glowed from the arc light overhead; I cashed three place bets and two wins in a row. The peach-complexioned waitresses in the clubhouse brought me shelled shrimp on ice, and lobster and steak, and brushed their hips unnecessarily against my arm when they took away my soiled napkin and blood-streaked plate.

Someone once told me that the gambler’s greatest desire, knowledge of the future, would drive us insane. On that warm summer evening as I drove back home, with the moon denting the lake and the fireflies lighting in the palm and oak trees, I felt a thin tremolo inside me, like the faint tinkling of crystal or the almost silent vibration of sympathetic guitar strings, just a hint of Cassandra’s tragic gift, and I tried to ascribe it to my old alcoholic fears that writhed in the unconscious as blind snakes would. But a winner at the track usually cares little for caution or moonlit nuances.

TWO

Early the next morning I drove southwest of New Orleans, into the bayou country. It was the south Louisiana I had grown up in, around New Iberia. Oak, cypress, and willow trees lined the two-lane road; the mist still clung like torn cotton to the half-submerged dead tree trunks back in the marsh; the canebrakes were thick and green, shining in the light, and the lily pads clustered along the bayou’s banks were bursting with flowers, audibly popping, their leaves covered with drops of quicksilver. The bream and bass were still feeding in the shadows close to the cypress roots; egrets were nesting in the sand where the sun had risen above the tree line, and occasionally a heron would lift from its feeding place on the edge of the cattails and glide on gilded wings down the long ribbon of brown water through a corridor of trees.

Now these same bayous, canals, and marshlands where I had grown up were used by the Barataria pirates. But their namesakes, Jean Lafitte’s collection of brigands and slavers, were romantic figures by comparison. The current group was made up of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin smugglers who would murder a whole family out on the Gulf simply for the one-time use of their boat, after which they’d open up the cocks and sink it. Occasionally the Coast Guard would find one half-filled with water and beached on a sandbar, the gunwales painted with blood.

But why should this shock or revile? The same people sometimes killed infants by injection, embalmed the bodies, and filled the stomachs with balloons of heroin so women transporters could walk through customs as though they were carrying their sleeping children.

The Cataouatche Parish sheriff was not at the courthouse. He was at his horse farm outside of town, galoshes on his feet, feeding two Arabians in a side lot. His house had a fresh coat of white paint and a wide screen porch, and Was surrounded by azalea bushes and flaming hibiscus. The long white fence along the back horse pasture was entwined with climbing roses. The sheriff was around fifty, a man in control of his property and his political life. His blue uniform fitted tightly on his compact, hard body, and his round, freshly shaved face and direct eyes gave you the impression of a self-confident rural law officer who dealt easily with outside complexities.

Unfortunately for him, I proved to be the exception.

“She drowned,” he said. “My deputies said a bucket of water came out of her when they flipped her off the gurney.”

“She had tracks on her arms.”

“So? Addicts drown too. You need an autopsy to tell you that?”

“Do you know if she was right-handed or left-handed?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he said.

“She’d been shooting regularly into the left arm, but she had only one needle hole on the right. What’s that tell you?”

“Not a goddamn thing.”

“When a junkie flattens the vein in one arm, he starts on the other. I don’t think she’d been shooting up that long. I think somebody gave her a hotshot.”

“The parish coroner signed the death certificate. It says ‘drowned.’ You take it up with him if you want to pursue it. I’m late for work.” He walked out of the horse lot, pulled off his muddy galoshes on the grass, and slipped on his polished, half-topped boots. His round face was turned away from me as he bent over, but I could hear the repressed anger in his breathing.

“Those are fine Arabians,” I said. “I understand they can bring thirty thousand or so when they’re trained.”

“That wouldn’t touch them, Lieutenant. Like I say, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m late. You want me to introduce you to the coroner?”

“I don’t think so. Tell me, as a matter of speculation, how do you figure a healthy young woman, wearing all her clothes, would come to drown in a narrow bayou?”

“What’s going to make you happy, Lieutenant? You want somebody to write down for you that she died of a hotshot? You want to take that back to New Orleans with you? All right, you have my permission. It’s no skin off our ass. But how about her family? She was raised up in the quarters on a sugar plantation about five miles south of here. Her mother is feeble-minded and her daddy is half-blind. You want to drive out there and tell them their daughter was a junkie?”

“Everything in this case stinks of homicide, Sheriff.”

“I’ve only got two more things to say to you, podna, and it’s important you understand this. I trust what my deputies told me, and if you got a complaint, you take it to the coroner’s office. And number two, this conversation is over.”

Then he looked away at his horses in a distant field, as though I were not there, slipped on his pilot’s sunglasses, got into his Cadillac, and drove down his pea-gravel lane to the blacktop. I felt like a post standing in the ground.

The dead girl’s name had been Lovelace Deshotels. Her parents lived in one of the weathered, paintless shacks along a dirt road on the back of a corporate sugar plantation. All the shacks were identical, their small front porches so evenly aligned that you could fire an arrow through the receding rectangle of posts, roofs, and bannisters for the entire length of the quarters without striking wood. The thick green fields of cane stretched away for miles, broken only by an occasional oak tree and the distant outline of the sugar mill, whose smokestacks in the winter would cover these same shacks with a sickening sweet odor that made the eyes water.

The shack was like thousands of others that I had seen all my life throughout Louisiana and Mississippi. There was no glass in the windows, only hinged board flaps that were propped open on sticks. The walls had been insulated with pages from the Sears catalog, then covered with wallpaper that was now separated and streaked brown with rainwater. The outhouse, which was set next to a small hog lot, had a rusted R.C. Cola sign for a roof.

But there were other things there that leaped at your eye when you walked through the door: a color television set, an imitation Bavarian clock above the woodburning stove, plastic flowers set in jelly glasses, a bright yellow Formica breakfast table next to an ancient brick fireplace filled with trash.

The parents would tell me little. The mother stared vacantly at a game show on television, her huge body stuffed in a pair of lime-green stretch pants and a man’s army shirt cut off at the armpits. The father was gray and old and walked with a cane as though his back were disjointed. He smelled of the cob pipe in his shirt pocket. His eyes were scaled over and frosted with cataracts.

“She gone off to New Orleans. I tolt her a colored girl from the country dint have no business there, her,” he said, sitting on the couch, his hand curved along the top of his cane. “She only a country girl. What she gonna do with them kind of people they got in New Orleans? I tell her that, me.”

“Who did she work for, Mr. Deshotels?”

“What I know about New Orleans? I ain’t got no truck there, me.” He smiled at me, and I saw his toothless blue gums.

“Do you believe she drowned?”

He paused and the smile went out of his face. His eyes seemed to focus on me for the first time.

“You think they care what some old nigger say?” he said.

”
I
do.”

He didn’t answer. He put his dead pipe in his mouth, made a wet sound with his tongue, and stared blankly at the television screen.

“I’ll be going now,” I said, standing up. “I’m sorry about what happened to your daughter. I really am.”

His face turned back toward me.

“We had eleven, us,” he said. “She the baby. I call her
tite cush-chush
cause she always love
cush-cush
when she a little girl. He’p me walk out front, you.”

I put my hand under his arm and we stepped out into the bright sunlight on the porch. The wind was ruffling the green fields of sugarcane on the opposite side of the road. The old man’s arm was webbed with veins. He limped along with me to my automobile before he spoke.

“They kilt her, them, dint they?” he asked.

“I think they did.”

“She just a little colored jellyroll for white mens, then they throw her away,” he said. His eyes became wet. “I tolt her ‘Jellyroll, jellyroll, rollin’ in the cane, lookin’ for a woman ain’t got no man.’ She say ‘Look the television and the clock and the table I give Mama.’ She say that, her. Little girl that don’t know how to read can buy a five-hundred-dollar television set for her mama. What you gonna do when they nineteen? Ain’t no listenin’, not when she got white men’s money, drive a big car down here from New Orleans, tellin’ me she gonna move us up North, her. Little girl that still eat
cush-cush
gonna outsmart the white mens, her, move her old nigger daddy up to New York. What she done they got to kill her for?”

I didn’t have an answer for him.

I was on an empty stretch of road bordered on one side by a flat, shimmering lake and on the other by a flooded woods, when I saw the blue and white patrol car in my rearview mirror. The driver already had on his bubblegum light, and when he drew close to my bumper he gave me a short blast with his siren. I started to pull to the shoulder, but there were shards of beer-bottle glass like amber teeth shining in the weeds and gravel. I tried to drive on to a clear spot before I stopped, and the patrol car leaped abreast of me, the engine roaring, and the deputy in the passenger’s seat pointed to the side of the road with an angry finger. I heard my tires crunch over the beer glass.

Both deputies got out of the car, and I knew it was going to be serious. They were big men, probably Cajuns like myself, but their powerful and sinewy bodies, their tight-fitting, powder-blue uniforms, polished gunbelts and holsters, glinting bullets and revolver butts made you think of backwoods Mississippi and north Louisiana, as though they’d had to go away to learn redneck cruelty.

Neither one of them had a citation book in his hand or pocket.

“The siren means pull over. It don’t mean slow down, Lieutenant,” the driver said. He smiled back at me and took off his sunglasses. He was older than the other deputy. “Step out of the car, please.”

I opened the door and stepped out on the road. They looked at me without speaking.

“All right, I’ll bite. What have you got me for?” I said.

“Sixty in a fifty-five,” the other deputy said. He chewed gum, and his eyes were humorless and intent.

“I didn’t think I ever got over fifty,” I said.

“‘Fraid it creeped up on you,” the older man said. “On a pretty morning like this you get to looking around, maybe looking at the water and the trees, maybe thinking about a piece of ass, and before you know it you got lead in your pecker and foot, both.”

“I don’t guess we’re going to have an instance of professional courtesy here, are we?” I said.

“The judge don’t allow us to let too many slide,” the older man said.

“So write me a ticket and I’ll talk to the judge about it.”

“Lot of people from outside the parish don’t show up in court,” the older deputy said. “Makes him madder than a hornet with shit on its nose. So we got to take them down to the court.”

“You guys didn’t get completely dressed this morning,” I said.

“How’s that?” the other deputy said.

“You forgot to put on your name tags. Now, why would you do that?”

“Don’t worry about any goddamn name tags. You’re coming back to the courthouse with us,” the younger deputy said. He had stopped chewing his gum, and his jawbone was rigid against his cheek.

“You got a flat tire, anyway, Lieutenant,” the older man said. “I figure that’s kind of our fault, so while you ride in with us I’ll radio the tow to come and change it for you.”

“Facts-of-life time,” I said. “You don’t roust a City of New Orleans detective.”

“Our territory, our rules, Lieutenant.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

They were both silent. The sun was shimmering brilliantly on the flat expanse of water behind them. The light was so bright I had to force myself not to blink. I could hear both of them breathing, see their eyes flick at each other uncertainly, almost smell the thin sweat on their skin.

The younger man’s shoe shifted in the gravel and his thumb fluttered toward the strap on the holster that held his chrome-plated .357 Magnum revolver. I tore my .38 out of the clip holster on my belt, squatted, and aimed with two hands into their faces.

“Big mistake, podjo! Hands on your head and down on your knees!” I shouted.

“Look—” the older deputy began.

“Don’t think, do it! I win, you lose!” My breath was coming hard in my throat.

They looked at each other, laced their hands on their heads, and knelt in front of their car. I went behind them, pulled their heavy revolvers from their holsters, and pitched them sideways into the lake.

“Take out your cuffs and lock up to the bumper,” I said.

“You’re in over your head,” the older deputy said. The back of his suntanned neck was beaded with sweat.