Blood in the Lake Read online

  Buddy kept turning one page back to tell what had taken place previously. Tom’s scowl told me the pattern got on his last nerve. Did Buddy do that on purpose? His smile said yes.

  “Meanwhile, back on the ranch. Let’s get to the Falgouts.”

  “Right. The sheriff ordered me to go to the scene of the fire on Captain Cade Road, ASAP. Said they’d taken a vic to Lafayette General Hospital. She wasn’t burned in the fire, but beaten up within an inch of her life. Fucked over pretty good, really. Looked like aggravated battery at a minimum, the sheriff said. Maybe attempted murder or even first degree murder if the lady didn’t make it.” Buddy slapped his pudgy hand on the tabletop. “And then this! ‘Buddy, you’ll need to take statements from the trooper, the victim, any bystanders.’ Can you imagine he said that? As if I didn’t know what to do after thirty-five years on the force. I’ve been at this job with two sheriff’s before that guy, since he was in short pants.”

  “And then?” Tom prodded again.

  “OK. OK. By the time Deuce and I got out there most of the rubberneckers had gone. The trooper, a couple firemen and the patrol deputies hung around. We took a statement from the trooper—I think you have that one—and a couple from firemen. One of the firemen thought the victim had called her assailant Hemmy not Remmy, but both agreed about what she said. ‘Don’t let them do it to me again.’”

  I wondered if Tom caught what I caught. Don’t let them do it to me again. The trooper had told us Mrs. Falgout said him, singular. Sarah was putting out to the press that Richard was present but someone else did the deed. Was a fireman going to make her version credible? I reached for a legal pad and wrote down the detective’s words. I’d give Tom my thoughts later.

  Buddy continued his narrative. “One of the firemen—” He thumbed through a couple of pages of Deuce’s notebook to find the place he wanted. “One of the firemen put it this way. ‘The left side of her face kinda wasn’t there, and the right side looked like a purple sponge smeared with egg yolk. Her left eyeball, bloody white jelly, dangled an inch out of the socket. Bigger than a marble, smaller than a ping pong ball. She was quivering all over.’ The fireman closed his eyes and shuddered. ‘I’ve been a fireman for thirty years so I’ve seen a burned body or two. It’s worse when they’re living mush,’ he said. ‘They shake like Jell-O.’”

  “Deuce took down the fireman’s actual words?” Tom asked.

  “You bet. He can use them on the stand, right?”

  “We’ll find a way. Keep going,” Tom instructed. I checked the tape recorder.

  Buddy said the trooper thought the lady was a goner, but the EMTs who put her in the ambulance found a pulse. Barely. Her house was no more than a pile of smoldering ash.

  Buddy flipped a few more pages of the notebook. “The patrol deputies had talked to bystanders to pick up background. The house belonged to a couple named Falgout, Jim and Lydia. They had no kids but kept two dogs in a pen at the back of the house. ‘Burnt to a crisp, detective,’ one deputy said to me. ‘Don’t go out there unless you got an iron gut.’ I took a look at his snake-belly-grey face and knew he didn’t. Sure enough. At the sight of the crisp animals he’d torn off his mask and made a quick trip behind the bushes to puke.”

  I could never do the job these guys do. I wanted to get the necessary horrible stuff written in words on a clean piece of paper.

  Buddy turned to a drawing in Deuce’s notebook. Deuce had estimated the area as a four-acre tract, five arpents as they say in the country. He sketched in the remains of the house about two thirds back from Captain Cade Road and drew in the side driveway and the wire fence on the left boundary next to the ditch where the trooper found Mrs. Falgout. Two narrow lines marked ruts leading from the shell driveway to the ditch. He gave the distance between the house and the ditch as thirty yards, plus or minus.

  “Any other witnesses have anything for you?” Tom asked. “I’m particularly interested in what was said about this guy Remmy.”

  “Yeah. A grey-haired dude, pressed checked shirt and dress pants, walked toward us from the rear pasture. He identified himself as Frank Delasbour, the one who called in the fire. He’d been on hand when the trooper found the woman, but had to leave to get control of himself. Said it was fuckin’ awful. I asked if he knew where Jim Falgout might be. Probably offshore, Delasbour said. Falgout worked seven and seven for Diamond Services and had been at the house last week. But now everyone was coming in from the Gulf because of the storm.”

  Buddy picked up one of the statements he’d taken out of his folder.

  “Here it is. Delasbour said the last time he actually talked with Remmy was months before. Remmy had come by to pick up the mail Lydia had left for him in a box on the front porch. Delasbour remembered telling his wife Remmy wasn’t looking too good. Thought maybe he’d been sick.”

  “Did he have a last name for Remmy?” Tom asked.

  “Nope, that was our problem. Said he’d never heard it, and of course the name was exactly what we needed to get going on the investigation.”

  “How about a description?”

  “Delasbour said ‘ordinary.’ When I pressed for age, height, hair color, weight, any distinguishing marks, Delasbour came up with this: late thirties, maybe five foot nine, hundred and fifty to a hundred and sixty pounds, thin hair.”

  The folds of Buddy’s bulldog face shifted to accommodate a smile. “I remember a side play here. My partner interrupted to ask if Remmy was a white man. Yes. Delasbour didn’t say ‘of course’, but implied so, and then flushed beet red. We do assume white is the norm.”

  Buddy wasn’t the bigot I first thought. Maybe time with his new partner had brought him along, but he still had the language he grew up with.

  Detective Aymond said they left the patrol deputies on duty at the site, instructing them to get the names of anyone who came by, and ask every one if any version of the name Remmy rang a bell. No one was to get anywhere near what used to be the house or the pile of trash where they’d found Mrs. Falgout. Buddy said he called in to the station.

  “You know what? They didn’t give a fuck. They were all into prep for Hurricane Hannah. So we headed out to Lafayette to find Mrs. Falgout on our own. We needed a last name for the perp and knew Mrs. Falgout would have it.”

  Tom complimented Buddy, but spun his fingers again in a signal to keep the story moving along.

  “The nurse at the window of the emergency room at Lafayette General set up a stone wall. There was absolutely no possibility we could see the patient, she said. A half dozen doctors were back there evaluating her injuries. She invited us to leave our names and someone would call when Mrs. Falgout could have visitors. I got the impression that would never happen. The nurse didn’t care one bit about locating the guy who turned her patient to mush.”

  I checked the tape and saw the end coming up soon. I signaled Tom to hold up a minute. He gave me a nod, waited until I was done, and spun his fingers again for the detective to continue.

  I was loving this.

  Deuce had called the Lafayette sheriff’s office to ask for a courtesy intervention with the hospital bureaucracy. They tried, but the hospital administrator gave the locals the same treatment. The patient was critical. Her condition overrode all other considerations. Mrs. Falgout could not be questioned.

  Buddy said he went to the soft drink machine, got them each a coke, and sat down to think. He came up with a plan. He went to the window and told the nurse that if he had use of a phone, he could help locate the patient’s husband. That got her attention. Finding next of kin probably headed up her to-do list. Open sesame. Buddy found a number for Diamond Services in Lafayette. They said offshore operations came out of the Morgan City dock. A voice at that location said they’d just given the order to secure and shut down the rigs in the eastern Gulf and had dispatched choppers to evacuate all personnel from the platforms. Everyone would be on shore by noon the following day. No, they couldn’t possibly single out one person for special transpor
t. Buddy told them the man’s wife was critical; noon tomorrow might be too late. They said they’d try to get Falgout a spot on board the next chopper.

  “On to plan B,” Buddy continued. “The tag on the nurse’s uniform read Mrs. Dartez. I turned on the charm.”

  Now that was hard for me to imagine.

  “’Mrs. Dartez. Ma’am,’ I said. Could you get the doctor’s permission for us to ask one question, just one?’ Negative. ‘Could a doctor ask the question for us? It’s really urgent, ma’am. We need the name of the guy who did this and she knows it.’ The nurse went through a curtained area and came right back out. ‘Not possible,’ she said. ‘The patient isn’t communicating at all.’ I gave the nurse my card. She said she’d be off tomorrow, but she’d leave it on the station. I was pretty sure that’d be where the card would stay until the end of time.”

  Tom tapped his pen on the tabletop. Aymond smiled.

  “I figured we were at a dead end, but I hadn’t counted on our secret weapon—my partner Deuce. While I was at one end of the nurses’ station charming Mrs. Dartez and working the phone, Deuce was at the other end inching closer and closer to the curtains separating us from the patients. He overheard someone say Mrs. Falgout had been stabilized and would be sent by AirVac to Ben Taub Hospital in Houston. They had a particular kind of specialist in ocular reconstruction. The dozens of broken bones and internal injuries were apparently now a lower priority than the destruction to her face. We came on in to the station. Well, there was nobody there except a grass-green rookie and Murphy, the sheriff’s schnauzer. Do you know Murphy? Wears a badge on his collar, you know. A great dog—”

  “I know him, Buddy. Keep going.”

  Buddy now gave us the weather report. Tropical Storm Hannah had crossed the tip of Cuba and entered the lower Gulf, the path to shore unknown. A named storm in the Gulf required a whole protocol of preparations along the coast. The Sheriff and Big Theriot had gone out to Lake Peigneur; everyone else was across the street at a briefing by Homeland Security. Buddy and Deuce decided to create their own orders. They made a plan to meet the next day at 6 a.m. and drive to Houston to find Lydia Falgout. Deuce went home to his wife and kids and his own hurricane preparations. Buddy stopped at the Mirror Room for a few beers.

  Tom frowned. “Buddy, you know you’re—I know. None of my business.” Tom stood up. “Let’s take a break. I’ll go ask Bonnie to make a new pot of coffee. We got to get to the part where you pick up the last name of our suspect. Sometime in the near future, I hope.”

  We should have given Detective Aymond coffee to start with. Fueled by caffeine, he stepped up the pace of his report.

  “Do you know Ben Taub? The Texas version of Big Charity in New Orleans, but even bigger? The whole place is a fuckin’ Intensive Care Unit. Jim Falgout got there before us, but it took a while to pick him out of the crowd of misery in the waiting room. Oh yes, Falgout knew his friend Remmy’s last name all right. Richard. Bingo! I called back home and found someone at the jail who could get started running the records. Remuald Richard, aka Remmy. Would you believe it? He’d been our guest about five years ago.”

  Tom interrupted. “I’m looking at the paperwork on Lydia Falgout. I see a report but no signed statement. Did you get to talk to her?”

  “They let us in to see her, but we didn’t really see her. If they hadn’t put a sign on the foot of the bed I wouldn’t have known there was a person inside that mummy. No way she could sign her name to an affidavit. Her left leg and left arm, covered in plaster, hung from a contraption over the bed. The one eye not under bandage opened no wider than a pencil. A raspy voice creaked out of the mouth hole. ‘Pleased to meet you, guys. Sorry I can’t get you a cup of coffee.’ Can you imagine?”

  Unfortunately, I could.

  “I asked her how she was doin’. ‘So how you think? Fuckin’ wonderful!’ She made a sound that could have been a laugh. The docs said she was going to lose an eye but they’d build her face back up to look like it did before. ‘You’d think they could at least make me pretty.’ Then just wheezing. Damn courageous broad.”

  They had the name, so Deuce, the softie, wanted to leave the poor woman alone, but Buddy knew the importance of first reports. He asked Mrs. Falgout to tell them more. She managed to get out that Remmy ran over her with his truck and beat the shit out of her with a tire iron. At that, Deuce made Buddy stop, and they told Mrs. Falgout they’d be back for details when she was feeling better.

  “Now, looking through the file, I see we never did get a signed statement. I’ll talk to Deuce about follow-up,” Buddy said.

  “Do that. Top priority.”

  “That it for now?”

  “Not quite.”

  Tom foraged around in the stack of statements and pulled out one signed by Skipper Domingue, the manager at a bunkhouse down near Intracoastal City called The Southern Wave.

  “Speaking of statements, tell me about seeing this guy.”

  The detective started to get up, but Tom put a hand on his arm.

  “You’ve got to move on, Buddy. Past history, water under the bridge. The Southern Wave bunkhouse didn’t even exist back when you worked down there. Vermilion Parish tells me no one’s ever had trouble with The Wave. Skipper Domingue’s testimony is critically important to our case. We need his recollection to stay recollected. I want you to keep him warm, touch base with him every few weeks. Just mention what he says he saw so the story doesn’t fade.”

  A frown cut deeper creases in Buddy’s face.” You made me go over there and we got you the damn statement. Talk to Deuce if you want to know more.”

  I understood what Tom was saying about the critical nature of Skipper Domingue’s testimony, but not why Detective Aymond had a problem. I needed to be brought up to speed.

  Bonnie came to the library door. “Sorry to interrupt, gentlemen. Detective Washington is on the line and he says it’s urgent.”

  Buddy lunged for the phone, clearly anxious to change the topic. He listened, then responded. “Copy that.”

  “I got to go meet my partner, guys,” he said. “Looks like they may have to scrub the drug operation in Lafayette, and Deuce needs a hand shutting it down. The Remmy Richard report is continued to another day.”

  He wanted out of there.

  “Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning. Come at 9 a.m.” Tom said. “We’ve got to go over your trip to Birmingham. We’ll be waiting for you.”

  I had a question. “Could we keep Detective Washington’s notebook? I want to read it with care.”

  Tom looked questioningly at the detective, who nodded. I guess he’d decided I could be trusted. Buddy moved quickly out the door.

  The pages of my Bar Exam notes on eyewitness testimony flipped through my head. A woman who had every reason to expect imminent death had made a clear identification of her assailant, and he was someone she knew well. Three people, the trooper and two firefighters, overheard. Good stuff. But was that her assailant, singular, or one of her assailants, plural? Was there anything to Sarah’s contention that Remmy Richard was at the Falgout house but didn’t hurt her? Mrs. Falgout’s testimony would be critically important to sorting all that out. And all of the above had to do with the search for the man who beat up Mrs. Falgout. Not my main interest, or even what was now on our plate. Trial for PawPaw’s murder would come first.

  “Buddy didn’t seem a bit happy you assigned him to keep in touch with Skipper Domingue. What was that all about?” I asked Tom.

  “He’s not happy to have anything to do with the bunkhouses. All part of the history around here, even before my time, but it’s not important now. I’ll make sure Deuce follows up.”

  “Seemed very important to Detective Aymond.”

  Tom stopped packing up the file and sat down again. “I guess you should know. About ten years ago Vermilion Parish asked for help cleaning up what was going on at the bunkhouses down the road from Delcambre. Prostitution, mainly. The sheriff lent them Buddy to go undercover. He worked over
there for a couple months and did a great job getting evidence on a couple of the managers and on the absentee owners. Charged and convicted. From then on, all Vermilion had to do to keep everything clean was make periodic unannounced checks. But Buddy’s wife ended up leaving him over it, taking his children with her to California. Buddy went through a pretty bad patch after that. In fact, he’s had several bad patches between then and now. Depression, alcohol.”

  “She left him just for doing his job?”

  “He did kind of go overboard. He became obsessed trying to save a fourteen-year old girl caught up in the trade. Instead of letting her go to delinquency court and ending up with a record, he arranged to have her taken into the State welfare system. The girl ran away from her foster home, from a group home, and then just disappeared. You know our kids in care are prime targets for traffickers. For the next six months Buddy spent every off-duty hour trying to find her—and never did. He felt guilty. His wife didn’t understand his obsession.”

  “She shouldn’t have married a cop.”

  Tom dipped his head and fussed with his papers. He wanted to close out the topic. “We’ll talk more another day.”

  I stood up and reached for the detective’s notebook. Tom put his hand on my arm.

  “You can’t take that home for bedtime reading. Originals live in our locked evidence closet under Bonnie’s watchful eye. And we need to get out of this building before the ghost of Honoré walks. Anyway, we might find something better to do with our evening.”

  Tom circled a strong arm around my shoulders.

  “I’ll take the offer,” I said.

  Deuce's Notebook

  THE NEXT MORNING I made a quick detour home to change into a different outfit and took care to arrive at the office fifteen minutes after Tom. Better to risk a comment about being late for work than give the pool of secretaries a juicier topic for their wagging tongues. Tom had warned me they could multi-task, engaging in gossip as they mechanically posted into the Crimes database the stacks of traffic tickets and misdemeanor citations arriving every morning. The requirement for confidentiality apparently applied only to the subject matter of their work, not anyone’s personal life.