Voodoo River (1995) (24 page)

Sandi Bergeron crossed her arms over her middle. She said, "Am I going to get in trouble?"

I looked at her. "Maybe, but not because of us. The cops are going to investigate Jimmie's murder, and they may find you the way we found you, but it won't be because we told them. We won't."

She nodded and looked at her coffee. "I know that what I did was wrong. I'm really sorry."

"Sure."

"I think I'm going home. I don't feel well." We walked to the elevator with her. She pressed the button for up. We pressed for down. The up elevator came first, but she didn't get on right away. She stopped in the door and said, "I know what you're thinking, but it's not so. Jimmie Ray didn't use me. He loved me. We were goin' to get married." She stood straight when she said it, as if she were challenging me to disagree.

I said, "Sandi?"

She stared at me.

"I got to know Jimmie Ray a little bit before he died. You were all he talked about. He did want to marry you. He told me so."

She blinked hard twice and her eyes filled. She stepped backward into the elevator, the doors closed, and she was gone.

We stood in silence for a moment, and then Pike said, "Is that true?"

The down elevator came. We got aboard, and I did not answer.

Chapter
25

W e drove back to the Riverfront Ho-Jo, checked out, then called Lucy at her office and told her that we were on our way to Ville Platte. She said, "Do you know what you're going to do when you get there?""Sit on the Bayou Lounge and establish a pattern for Rossier and his people. It could take a while."

She didn't say anything for a moment. "Yes. I guess it could."

"I'm going to miss you."

"Me, too, Studly. Try not to get shot."

At a little bit before two o'clock that afternoon, Pike and I took the same room I had used before in Ville Platte and unloaded our things. I changed into waterproof Cabela boots and a black T-shirt. Pike stayed in the same clothes, but took a Colt .357 Python out of his duffel and put it under his sweatshirt. I put my Dan Wesson into a clip-on holster, put the clip-on on the inside of my waistband, and left the T-shirt out to cover it. My T-shirt didn't hide the Dan Wesson as well as Pike's sweatshirt hid the Python. People would probably think I was wearing a colostomy bag.

We went down to the Pig Stand for a couple of catfish poboys, then walked across to the little superette, bought a cheap Styrofoam ice chest, ice, and enough Diet Coke, Charrnin, and sandwich stuff to last a couple of days. Pike went for the cheese and peanut butter, I went for the pressed chicken and Spam. Pike shook his head when he saw the Spam. He was shaking his head about the Spam even before he was a vegetarian. The woman at the register thought we must be going fishing, and we said sure. She said the sac-+a-lait were biting real good. She said her husband went out just last night and got a couple dozen on the bayou just over there by Chataignier. We thanked her and said we'd give it a try. Walking out, Pike said, "What's a sac-+a-lait?"

"I think it's a kind of white perch. Like a crappie."

Pike grunted.

I said, "They eat gar balls down here, too."

Pike gave me a look like, yeah, sure.

Lucy had provided us with a current address for LeRoy Bennett. We got the Bayou Lounge address from Information. Pike and I decided to split our time between LeRoy's and the crawfish farm during the day, then watch the lounge together at night. We went to LeRoy's first.

LeRoy Bennett lived on a narrow residential street on the west side of Ville Platte in a tiny clapboard house that was dusty and dirty and overgrown by weeds. All of the houses on the street were small, but most were well kept with neatly trimmed lawns and edged walkways. The St. Augustine at LeRoy's place had to be a good eight inches tall, the crabgrass and weed sprouts even taller. Twin tire ruts were cut into the yard, with great black dead spots between them where LeRoy had parked the Polara and the engine had dripped. There was a drive, but why use the drive when you can park on the grass? I was hoping that LeRoy and his car would be there so that Pike could see them, but they weren't. Of course, maybe they were hidden behind all the foliage. I said, "That's LeRoy's place."

Pike shook his head. "No self-esteem."

I stopped at the mouth of LeRoy's drive. "He drives a gold Polara widi a lot of sun damage." I looked up and down the street. Cars were parked along both sides of the street. "Best place for a stake would be on the next block, under that oak."

Pike looked and approved. Next door to LeRoy's, a man in his mid-sixties was working Bond-o into the side of a beige '64 Chevelle. His home and his lawn were immaculate, but the weeds from LeRoy's crappy yard hung over onto his property like shaggy hair curling over a collar. He looked at us, taking a break from the Bond-o, and we drove away.

We went to Milt Rossier's crawfish farm. I cruised the front gate to let Pike have a look, then parked the car on a little gravel road maybe a quarter mile away.

We worked our way through the trees to the edge of Milt's property and crouched by a fallen pine. We could see pretty much everything, from the ponds and the processing buildings on our left up to Milt's home on the little knoll to our right. When we were in position and looking, I said, "Well, well. The gang's all here."

LeRoy Bennett was talking to a heavyset woman by the processing buildings and Milt Rossier was driving a little golf cart between the ponds with one of his skinny foremen. LeRoy's Polara was parked up by the house, and Ren+! LaBorde was at the house, too, sitting in a white lawn chair, either sleeping or staring at his crotch. Pike squinted when he saw Rend "This is some operation."

"Uh-huh."

We watched as people waded into ponds, scattering what was probably crawfish food and pulling weeds and keeping the bottoms stirred. In other ponds, people used trucks with winches to seine out slick gray catfish or dark red crawfish, emptying filled nets into little trailers with open tops. Some of the people working the ponds were African-American women, but most of them were short, blocky Hispanics. A couple of older, skinny white guys in wide-brimmed straw hats moved between the pools, telling everybody else what to do. Upper management. I said, "Seen enough?"

Pike nodded.

We made our way back to the Thunderbird, then drove to the Bayou Lounge, just west of Ville Platte off the State 10 near Reddeli. It was a small, white building set back from the road in a little clearing carved into the woods. An abandoned bait shop sat nearby, its windows boarded over, painted ground to roof with ICE and WORMS in ten-foot letters. Both buildings were surrounded by crushed oyster shells and little patches of grass and weeds, and felt sort of like LeRoy Bennett's place. Crummy. A rusted steel pole jutted up from the side of the bar with a sign that said SCHLITZ. The Bayou Lounge didn't look like a hotbed of criminal activity, but you never know.

We eased off the road past the bait shop, stopped, and looked back. It was thirty-six minutes after three. A blue Ford Ranger was parked on the side of the lounge and a Lone Star truck was parked out front. If there was a bayou around, you couldn't see it from the road. A guy in a blue-and-white Lone Star uniform pushed a hand truck out the door, followed by a woman with a clipboard. The woman with the clipboard had a lot of bright red Clairol hair piled atop her head and red nails and red lipstick. Thin in the shoulders and wide in the butt, with white denim pants that were ten years and fifteen pounds too tight. She talked with the guy as he loaded the dolly onto his truck, then watched him drive away before she went back inside. Pike said, "I make it for her Ford. You want to check it, or me?"

"Me."

We pulled around to the front of the lounge and parked by the Schlitz sign, and I went in. Six cases of Lone Star were stacked at the end of the bar, and the woman was frowning at a thin Hispanic guy as he lugged them one at a time behind the counter. Eight or nine small square tables were scattered around the place, all with upended chairs on top of them, and a Rockola jukebox was against the back wall beside a door that said RESTROOMS. An industrial wash bucket was by the jukebox, and the back door was open for the breeze. The woman looked over at me and said, "Sorry, sugah. We closed."

"I'm supposed to meet a guy here. What time you open?"

"Bout five, give or take. Who you lookin' by?" She gave me a loose smile. She was maybe forty-five, but looked older, with rubbery skin pulled tight by all the smiling. The Hispanic guy stopped working to look at us.

"Oh, just a friend." Mr. Mysterious.

"You keepin' it a big secret or what, sug? I'm here all the time." When she said it she noticed the Hispanic guy and snapped at him. "Don't just stand there, goddammit! Put that stuff away! Endelay!"The Hispanic guy spun back to his work with a vengeance. I wasn't sure if he understood what had been said to him, but he understood that she was pissed. The Clairol Queen flipped her hand at him, disgusted. "These spics are somethin'. Gimme a good nigger any day."

I said, "A guy named LeRoy Bennett said I could find him here."

She went back to the smiling and folded herself against the bar. It was probably a pose that played well with the older guys after a dozen or so beers. "Oh, yeah. LeRoy's here all the time. I can take a message, you want."

"Nah. I'm on my way to Biloxi. I'll catch him on the way back."

I went back to the car and climbed in beside Pike. "They open at five. LeRoy's here all the time."

"Who could blame him?"

We drove up the road for a mile and a half, then turned around and went back. One hundred yards past the bait shop I eased onto the shoulder, and Pike got out with his duffel and moved into the trees. I drove on for maybe another four hundred yards until I found a gravel timber road running across a plank bridge, and pulled off. I locked the car, then trotted back to the bait shop. By the time I got back Pike was inside and set up, watching the bar through a clean spot he'd made on the dusty plate glass.

The Bayou Lounge might have opened at five, but no one showed up until six, and then it was mostly younger guys with deep tans and ball caps, looking like they had just gotten off work and wanted to have a couple of cold ones before heading home. Someone cranked up the Rockola at nine minutes before seven, and we could hear Doug Kershaw singing in French.

Pike and I made cold sandwiches and drank Diet Coke and watched the people come and go, but none of them were Milt Rossier or LeRoy Bennett or even Ren+! LaBorde. Crime might have been rampant, but if it was, we didn't see it.

The bait shop was an empty cinder-block shell containing the remnants of a counter and a couple of free standing shelves and a cement floor. We sat on the floor, surrounded by the odd-cut piece of plywood and about a million rat pellets. Everything was covered with a thick layer of heretofore undisturbed dust, and everything smelled of mildew. "Just think, Joe, some guys have to wear a tie and punch a time clock."

Pike didn't answer.

At 8:15 that night, seven cars were parked in the oyster shell lot and maybe a dozen people were inside the Bayou Lounge, but Milt Rossier and LeRoy Bennett were not among them. Pike rarely spoke, and there wasn't a great deal to do in our watching, and I found myself thinking of Lucy, wondering where she was and what she was doing, seeing her in her office, seeing her on the couch in her family room, seeing her snuggled with Ben watching Star Trek. After a while I got tired of all the thinking about it and tried to stop, but then I thought that maybe I could walk across to the Bayou and use the pay phone to call her. Of course, if I did, ol' Milt and LeRoy would probably amble in at exactly that time. It's one of those laws of nature. Pike said, "You deserve someone."

"What are you talking about?"

"Ms. Chenier."

I stared at him. Do you think he reads minds? "We enjoy each other's company."

He nodded.

"I like her and she likes me. It's nothing more or less than that."

He nodded again.

By 9:15 we were down to two cars, and by ten the lot was empty except for the blue Ford Ranger. Pike said, "This place is a gold mine."

At twenty minutes before eleven, a beat-up Mercury station wagon bumped into the lot and sat with its engine running. The little Hispanic man and a Hispanic woman I had not seen came out, got in, and the wagon lurched away. The woman was carrying what looked like a brown paper grocery bag. Pike said, "Latin guy driving."

I squinted, but couldn't be sure. "Joe? Do you find it odd that there are so many Latin people down here on the bayou?"

Pike shrugged.

At ten minutes after eleven, the Bayou Lounge went dark, and the woman who ran the place got into her Ford and drove away. Pike and I gathered our things, walked up the road to our car, then returned to the motel. I wanted to phone Lucy, but it was just before midnight, and I thought I might wake her or, if not her, Ben.

The last thing I remember that night was the sound of Lucy's laugh and the smell of her skin, and the deep, hollow feeling of her absence.

Chapter
26

A t eighteen minutes after five the next morning, Joe Pike slipped into the woods fronting Milt Rossier's crawfish farm. I went back to Ville Platte and parked beneath the oak tree one block down from LeRoy Bennett's house. The sky began to lighten at twenty minutes after six, and by 7:30 the old man who lived next to LeRoy was again working at the beige Chevelle with the Bond-o and the putty knife. A fluffy white cat strolled up to the old man, shoulder bumped against his legs, and the old man scratched at the cat's head. The old man and the cat seemed to be enjoying each other when LeRoy Bennett came out with a little green towel, hawked up a lugey, and let'r fly into the overgrown front lawn. The old man stopped with the cat and scowled at Bennett. Bennett had to see him but pretended he didn't, and neither of them spoke to the other. LeRoy wiped the dew off his front and back windshields, then tossed the wet towel up onto his front steps, climbed into the Polara, and drove away. The old man watched him drive off, then looked at the towel and at LeRoy's crummy yard. The towel looked like hell, just thrown there. The old man looked at his own immaculate yard and shook his head. Probably wondering why he should bother with all the yard work if LeRoy was going to let his place look like a shit hole, probably thinking that all the stuff you hear on the talk radio was right; America was going to hell in a handbasket and he was stuck with living proof of it. The plan had been for me to stay on LeRoy until four, whereupon I would break contact and pick up Pike to return to the Bayou Lounge. We hoped that LeRoy would, in his capacity as Milt Rossier's right-hand man, have a variety of important errands to accomplish through the day, perhaps one or more of said errands providing a clue as to Milt Rossier's criminal operation. When LeRoy Bennett cleared the corner, I pulled a quick U-turn, took it easy going around the corner to make sure he wouldn't see me, then followed him directly to the Ville Platte Dunkin" Donuts. LeRoy stoked up on crullers with sprinkles, then bought four dollars of gas at the Sunoco self-serve and tooled directly to Rossier's place. By 8:36 that morning, LeRoy was sitting in the white lawn chairs outside Rossier's main house, flipping through a magazine, and I was crouching behind the fallen pine tree with Joe Pike. So much for clues. I said, "Some operation."