Bring Him Back Dead (4 page)

“No,” Rita said. “But neither is being a waitress in a small-town café. That’s why I married Jacques. Big joke. I was trying to better myself.” She helped herself to a cigarette from the package that Latour had laid on the table. “How about you? Are you married?”

“A little over two years.”

“To a local girl?”

Latour hesitated. It was difficult to catalogue Olga. “No. I imagine you’d call her a White Russian. Her grandparents were big shots. You know, years ago. The old man was a baron or something, until the Commies took over the country. But both she and her parents were born in Japan.”

“She’s pretty?”

“Very pretty.”

“How did you happen to meet her?”

“At a party.”

“Where?”

“In Singapore. She was working as a secretary at the British Embassy. And I was a captain in the C.I.D.”

“What’s that?”

“The Criminal Intelligence Division of the Army.”

“Like a military cop, huh?”

“Something like that.”

Rita started to say something and changed her mind.

Latour looked sideways at her. She was young. She was lonely. She wanted a man. She wasn’t cheap, but in spite of what she’d said, she was his if he wanted her. All he had to do was lay his hand on the bare thigh next to his. She would say, “No,” and “Don’t,” a few times, but he could have her.

He was tempted. It would be nice, for a change, to make
love to a woman who didn’t act as if she were doing him a favor. Still, having an affair, even a one-night quickie, with a seventeen-year-old girl who wanted out of an impossible marriage would only complicate matters. So many things could happen.

He picked his hat from the sofa and stood up.

Rita stood up with him. “What’s the idea?”

“I think I’d better go.”

The red-haired girl’s eyes turned sullen. “That’s up to you.” She walked to the door with him. “Thanks for everything.”

“You’ll see me again,” Latour said. “In the morning. I want to talk to Jacques.”

“About those shots I heard?”

“That’s right.”

“You were one of the men in that car?”

“I was.”

“And the shots were fired at you?”

“They were.”

“Who fired them?”

“I’m hoping Jacques may know. Well, until morning.”

Rita’s smile was twisted. “I’ll be here.” She seemed to be trying to come to some decision. She made it. “O.K. So I’m being cheap, I’m being cheap. You’ve been nice to me, Latour. I like you. I could like you a lot. You’re the kind of guy I always hoped I’d meet.” She wet her lips with her tongue. “And here’s something for you to think over until I see you again. You remember how Jacques talked back there on the street?”

“Of course.”

“There was a reason. Frustration.”

“Frustration?”

“Let’s just say the bottled stuff he sells is just so much colored water.”

Latour pulled her to him and kissed her.

“You know what you’re saying?”

“I know.”

Latour was practical. “O.K. But not here. You can’t ever tell about drunks. The old man might come to and walk in on us. We’ll make some arrangement in the morning, maybe drive up to Grand Isle.”

“I’d like that.”

Latour opened the door and walked the few feet to his car. He should feel good. He didn’t. He didn’t even feel particularly amorous. For some reason he felt sad, perhaps because, as strained as his relations with Olga were, when and if he did take Rita, it would be the first time he’d gone to bed with another woman since he and Olga had been married.

He almost wished he’d gone straight home after he’d locked up Lant Turner. He wished he hadn’t walked up Lafitte Street.

T
HERE WAS
a light in the sheriff’s office but no deputy in back of the duty desk. As far as Latour could tell, the five-gallon demijohn of whisky he’d labeled in evidence was gone.

He walked down the hall to the cell block.

A middle-aged prostitute screamed obscenities at him from the women’s section. There were the usual drunks in the tank. George Villere had got into another fight. His face and shirt matted with blood, he was lying on his back on the floor of one of the cells. But Lant Turner was as nonexistent as the missing demijohn.

I should have taken his money, Latour said to himself.

Jack Pringle was in the office when he returned to the front of the jail. “What happened to Turner?” Latour asked him.

The night deputy glanced at the docket. “It says here he made bail.”

“I’ll bet. Who was on the desk?”

“Mullen, I imagine. Right after I came on duty I had to go over to Amy’s and put the arm on a drunk who got into a brawl with one of the girls.”

“George Villere?”

Pringle adjusted his gun belt. “If he’s the lad with the
blood all over him. He was too drunk to give me his name and he wasn’t carrying any identification.”

“He looks like he could stand some patching.”

Pringle shrugged. “I’ve been trying to locate Doc Walker. That’s where I was just now.”

“You have to work him over?”

Pringle shook his head. “No. He was that way when I got there. The way I get the story, he bit one of the cats, you’d be surprised where, and she let him have it with a pair of four-inch heels.” The night deputy in charge looked out the open window of the office at the men milling on the walks on both sides of Lafitte Street. “Some fun, eh, Andy?”

“Yeah,” Latour agreed. “Fun.”

“All for two hundred and fifty bucks a month.”

Latour wondered whom Pringle thought he was fooling. Pringle was one of the boys who were getting rich, along with Tom Mullen and Sheriff Belluche. They didn’t need to own oil wells. They had their own private gold mine.

It had been a long day. He was tired. He had to go home sometime. “Well, I guess I’ll shove on.”

Pringle’s voice, sly and oily, stopped him in the doorway of the office. “How was she?”

“How was who?”

The night deputy grinned. “Stop being so modest. The story is all over town.”

Latour realized what Pringle was talking about. “Oh. You mean me driving Lacosta home.”

“That and his crying in his beer the way he did. A man that old is a fool to marry a young girl. The boys tell me she’s cute.”

“She is.”

“Red-haired?”

“Red-haired.”

“And young?”

“I’d say about seventeen.”

Pringle had a front gold tooth. He sucked it. “I don’t know what it is. Some guys have all the luck. Now me, when I want quail I have to settle for a professional.” He added, “On the house, of course.”

Beyond the square oasis of comparative darkness containing
the whitewashed-brick city hall and the municipal court and fire station and jail, a clarinet player in one of the all-night clubs hit a hot lick on his licorice stick and held it. It was a high, thin, reedy sound, more of a wail than a musical note.

Latour was suddenly sick of the whole business. He felt dirty. He wished he hadn’t come home. He wished he hadn’t brought Olga to French Bayou. He wished he’d stayed in the Army.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he told Pringle, and walked down the back steps of the jail and across the unlighted parking lot to his car.

The heavy gun in his holster sagged comfortingly against his thigh. The more he thought about the two attempts on his life, the less sense they made. True, he’d pushed around a lot of petty punks during his two years as a deputy sheriff. But if any of them wanted to kill him, why had they waited till now?

Latour drove slowly out of town, the lights and the blare of the music fading until they were absorbed by the chirping of the cicadas and the creaking of the tree frogs.

There was something almost amateurish about the two attempts on his life, amateurish and hurried. His would-be killer didn’t want him to die tomorrow or next week. He wanted him to die right now.

He could be a punk he’d pushed around. He could be Georgi. Still, most of the punks in the delta were good shots. They hit what they shot at. And Georgi didn’t have a car, nor did he know the back country.

Then there were Belluche and Tom Mullen. By refusing to take what they offered, he was a pain in their necks, a potential witness against them. Still he doubted, he doubted very much, if either of them wanted him dead, at least violently so. Mullen had said as much in so many words when he’d asked him to walk a little more lightly. The last thing that they wanted was to call state-wide or national attention to French Bayou.

Latour stopped and looked in his mailbox. There was no mail. Getting the mail was one of the self-appointed chores that Georgi had taken upon himself to help pay for his board and keep. Latour hoped he wasn’t straining himself.
There was usually nothing in the mail but bills, and God knew there were plenty of them.

He turned into the tree-lined lane leading back to the old manor house that had been in his family’s possession for over 150 years. Time was when he’d hoped to remodel and refurbish it, restore it to its former grandeur — for Olga. It was just another one of the dreams that had died in that dry hole.

It was dark here and quiet. The only sounds were the chirping of insects and the soft lap of the tide on the beach. The only light was a distant glow from the powerful lights on one of the floating platforms belonging to an oil rig out in the Gulf. The night air was fresh with salt and spiced with the fragrance of jasmine and climbing honeysuckle.

This was the French Bayou he knew, the French Bayou he’d hoped Olga would learn to love.

Latour got out of his car and crossed the open gallery to look through one of the sagging French windows. With her pale golden hair drawn straight back from her forehead and fastened in a shining chignon, wearing a simple white cotton dress that accentuated the curves and hollows of her body, Olga was watching a television program. Latour smiled wryly as he thought of the price he’d paid for the massive combination television receiver, radio, and record changer he’d bought when he first came home, when he still thought he’d be rich.

Latour looked from his wife to his brother-in-law, and burned, as he did every time he looked at Georgi.

He walked into the living room. Olga arose from her chair. “Oh, you are home.”

Latour laid his hat on a table. “So it would seem.”

“Quiet, please,” Georgi reproved them. “They are just coming to the interesting part of the story.”

Latour started to tell him off and thought better of it. Every time he opened his mouth he merely dug himself in deeper. It was incredible how both Olga and Georgi, by a single word or gesture, could make him feel like a field hand in his own house.

Olga ignored her brother. “You are probably hungry. I have kept some food warm for you.”

“Thanks,” Latour said shortly, “but I ate in one of the cafés uptown.”

He walked into the wood-paneled den to build himself a drink before going to bed. Georgi had been working on the bottle. There was a scant inch of whisky left. It had been almost full that morning. It was possible, just possible, that Georgi had something on his mind.

Latour took his rifle from its pegs. The .30-.30 Winchester had been used and cleaned recently, just how recently he had no way of knowing. He returned the gun to the wall and walked upstairs to the bedroom that he and Olga shared.

It was as hot in the high-ceilinged room as it had been in Lacosta’s trailer. Latour unbuckled his gun belt and took the gun from its holster and laid it on the night stand beside the double bed. Then, stripping, he showered and threw himself on the bed. It was too hot to wear his pajamas.

He tried to sleep. He couldn’t. He was awake and staring at the ceiling when Olga climbed the stairs and came into the room. Despite her sincere effort to Americanize herself, she still had a trace of accent. At one time he’d thought it was cute.

“I wondered if you had gone to bed. You had a tiring day?”

Latour shrugged. “So-so. And you?”

Olga pulled her dress over her head. “As they say on the television, it was a day like all days. And I was here.” She removed her underclothing and sat at her dressing table to brush her hair.

Latour watched her with sullen eyes. He wondered how he could have been so blind. Even during the first months of their marriage, Olga had felt no real emotion for him. Her simulated passion, the frenetic writhings of her beautiful body, had merely been part of the merchandise she had exchanged for a wealthy husband.

The chump had laid his money on the line. Give the sucker a good time.

It had been years since her family had had money, but she’d been raised with the idea that her beauty was to be the aces that would put them back in the yellow chips.
And when she’d learned that her wealthy captain was just another guy, a guy who had to grab the first job he could get to put grits and side meat on their table, her passion had run as dry as the oil wells on which he’d built his dreams.

Jean Avart had seemed to feel almost as bad as Latour.

“I’m sorry, so sorry, Andy,” Jean had told him. “But according to the geologists I’ve consulted, it seems such things do happen. The drillers are stopping work and dismantling their rigs today. With oil all around you, they’ve hit a dry pocket.”

Latour covered the lower part of his body with the top sheet. It seemed to give Olga a sadistic kick to flaunt herself in front of him, smugly secure in the knowledge that except for the infrequent occasions when his need overcame his pride, she was safe from further unpleasant intimacies.

She fastened her hair in a pony’s tail and came over to the bed. The revolver on the night stand puzzled her.

“Why do you put your gun there?”

Latour told her. “Someone tried to kill me today.”

“That shot I heard this morning?”

“That’s right. And again this afternoon.”

For a moment he could swear there was quick concern in her blue eyes, then decided he was mistaken.

“Oh,” she said quietly. “Oh.”

Latour waited for the next scene in the farce. He felt that Olga despised him because in her eyes he’d cheated her, but she’d been born and raised in Japan, in the old Japan where a girl was taught from her cradle that her first duty was to please her husband, that no matter how distasteful the act might be to her, her body belonged to her husband to do with as he pleased.