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."
Pike was watching him through a fine pair of Zeiss binoculars. "He's not reading. He's just looking at the pictures."
I nodded. "Geniuses rarely go into crime."
We sat on plastic poncho liners amid the sumac and the small plants of the forest's floor and let the day unfold. The heat rose, and with the heat the air grew heavy and damp, and a thick gray buildup of rain clouds appeared overhead. The woods were alive with the sounds of bees and lizards and squirrels and swamp martins, and only occasionally did we catch the voices of the people before us, moving through their labors in the ponds and pools of the fish farm. It was ordinary business and none of it appeared illegal or suspicious, but maybe all of it was.
About midmorning Milt Rossier came out of his house, and he and Bennett strolled down past the ponds to the processing sheds. Milt stopped and spoke with each of the foremen, nodding as they spoke and once taking off his hat and mopping his brow, but that was probably not an actionable offense. René La-Borde came out of the processing shed and lurched his way over to them and followed them around, but no one spoke to him. I hadn't seen him arrive, and Pike hadn't mentioned him, so maybe he had been in the processing shed all along. Maybe he lived there.
The guy who bossed the processing shed came out when Rossier and Bennett got down there, and the three of them spoke. René stood outside their circle for a time, then walked to the turtle pond and waded in up to his knees. The straw boss saw him first, and everybody got excited as LeRoy ran over to the edge of the pool, yelling, "Goddammit, René, get outta there! C'mon, 'fore Luther bites you!" René came back to the shore but stared down at the murky water, his shoes and pants muddy and dripping. He didn't seem to know what he had done or to understand why he'd been made to stop. Pike shook his head. "Man."
After a while, Rossier and LeRoy started back to the main house and everyone went back to work. René continued staring down at the water, his large body giving the occasional lurch as if his synapses had misfired. Halfway up to the house, Rossier saw that René wasn't following, slapped at LeRoy, and LeRoy trotted back for René. René followed LeRoy back to the main house, and the two of them sat in the white chairs, passing the day, the water and mud drying on René's pants, LeRoy looking at the pictures in his magazine.
The clouds continued to build, and by three o'clock the sky was dark. Lightning arced somewhere in the trees behind us, producing a deep-throated rumble, and it rained, slowly at first but with increasing intensity. LeRoy and René went into the main house and, one by one, the people working the ponds sought shelter in the processing sheds. Pike and I pulled on ponchos and made our way out to the car. We were leaving earlier than we had planned, but with everyone hiding from the rain the possibility of crime seemed remote. We stopped at an AM/PM Minimart on the state road to Reddell, and I used a pay phone to call Lucy at her office. She was with a client, and Darlene asked if I wanted to leave a message. I said to tell her that I had called and would call her again when I had the chance. Darlene said that that wasn't much of a message, considering. I said considering what? Darlene laughed and hung up. Do women always tell each other everything?
The sky was the color of sun-bright tarmac, and forks of lightning were dancing along the horizon when Pike and I again moved into the bait shop across from the Bayou Lounge. The rain hammered down in a steady, thunderous assault, and leaked in tap-water streams through the roof, but it was better than standing in the woods. By seven that night, the only people in the place were a couple of old codgers who'd come in a white Bronco. By eight they were gone, and by nine the same green wagon once more came around for the Hispanic couple. By 9:30 the Bayou Lounge was closed. Maybe the rain had kept people away. Maybe if it rained all year round, the crime rate would be zero.
Pike and I went through it again the next day and the day after, with no great variety of pattern. Every morning I would wait for LeRoy Bennett outside his house, and every morning he would beeline first to the Dunkin' Donuts and then to the crawfish farm where he would sit and wait and page through his magazines. Working off the sugar high, no doubt. Once Milt Rossier came out at midday and said something to LeRoy, and LeRoy hopped into his Polara and brodied away. I ran back through the woods to the car in time to see LeRoy hauling ass up the road toward town. I followed him directly to the Ville Platte MacDonald's where he loaded up on a couple of bags worth of stuff, then hauled ass back to Rossier's. I guess even criminals like Big Macs.
If the days were bad, the nights were worse. We would sit in the dust on the bait shop floor, watching the cars come and go, and noting the people within them, but the people within them were never LeRoy Bennett or Milt Rossier, nor did anything happen to point to or indicate illegal activity. Once, a fat man in a cheap suit and a thin woman with Dolly Parton hair had sex in the backseat of a Buick Regal, and two nights later the same woman had sex with a skinny guy with a straw Stetson in the back of an Isuzu Trooper, but you probably couldn't indict Milt Rossier for that. Another time, three guys staggered out of the bar, laughing and hooting, while a fourth guy in a white ball cap stumbled out into the center of the road, dropped his pants, and took a dump. He lost his balance about midway.through and fell in it, and the other three guys laughed louder and threw a beer can at him. Nothing like a night out with the boys.