A Stained White Radiance

CHAPTER 11

A neighbor had found her seated on the steps, half conscious, white with shock, her left hand impaled on the gazebo floor with a sixteen-penny nail, a pool of vomit in her lap.

"Hey, are you all right?" the sheriff said.

"Yes."

"She's at the hospital, she's doing okay. At least under the circumstances."

"Who did it?"

"I don't know if you're ready for this."

"The guys from the Garrett killing?"

"Joey Gouza himself. Or at least he gave the orders and watched while two of his goons held her down and drove it through her hand."

"What?" I said incredulously.

"She said it was Gouza. She can identify him, she'll testify against him. Maybe we just hit the big one…. What's the matter?"

"She can make Joey Gouza? How does she know him?"

"All I know is what the city cops told me, Dave."

"What's the motive?"

"Since it's your day off, I was going to send somebody else to take her statement. But I think maybe you'd better do it. Or had you rather somebody else do it?"

He was a good man, but he was basically an administrator and more conscious of the need for professional civility than dealing with realities.

"I'll go on over there in a few minutes," I said. "Besides the neighbor, who was the first person at the scene?"

"I think the paramedics got there first, then the city cops." He paused a moment. The rain was clattering on the tin roof of the gallery now. "They're cutting a warrant on Gouza now. I don't care if he's in the city jail or ours, but I want that sonofabitch in a cage. Nobody's going to do that to a woman in this parish while I'm sheriff."

I was surprised. He wasn't given to profanity or anger. I had an idea that Joey Meatballs was about to wish that he had not gotten involved with the Sonnier family and the rural unsophistication of Iberia Parish.

I went to the hospital, but I didn't go up to Drew's room.

Instead, I questioned one of the paramedics who had brought her in. I sat next to him on a wood bench by the emergency-room entrance while he drank coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. He told me he had been a navy corpsman before he had gone to work for the parish as a paramedic.

His face was young and clean-shaved, and he reminded me of most medics, firemen, or U.S. Forest Service smoke jumpers whom I had known. They were enamored of the adrenalin rush, living on the edge, but they tended to be quiet and self-effacing men, and unlike many cops they didn't have self-destructive obsessions.

"What'd you see at the scene besides Miss Sonnier?" I asked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Did you see a hammer?"

He looked out the glass door at the rain falling on the bayou.

"No," he answered. "I don't think so. But it was getting dark."

"What do you think they used to nail her hand down?"

"I don't know. But whoever did it drove it all the way down to the skin. It was a son of a gun to pull out of the boards. I had to press her hand down flat while my partner worked the nail out with a pair of vise grips. She passed out while we were doing it, poor lady."

"Did she look like she had fought with them? Was she bruised or scratched?"

"She could have been, I didn't notice. I was thinking about getting that nail out of her hand."

"Did she tell you anything?"

"She was in trauma. When something like that happens to them, it's like they've been drug behind a car. Maybe you ought to talk with the city cops. They were up there a little while ago."

"I will. Thanks for your time. Here's my telephone number in case you think of anything later that might be important."

"She's a nice lady. She jogs by my house sometimes. She must have got messed up with a bad guy. Maybe they were both drunk when he did it to her. I've seen some bad stuff since I came to work here, but not one like this."

"What do you mean drunk?"

"She must have puked up a fifth of gin and vermouth. There's no mistaking the smell."

I decided not to take a statement from Drew right then.

Sometimes trial attorneys use the axiom "Never ask a question you don't know the answer to." The same is not absolutely true for a police officer, but you do have to know some of the answers in advance in order to gauge the accuracy or truthfulness of the others.

I drove to the city police station and read the report written up by the investigating officer. It was one paragraph long, ungrammatical, full of misspellings, and described almost nothing about the crime scene or the crime itself except the nature of the injury to the victim and the fact that in the hospital she had identified her assailants as two white males of medium height and build and a third white male by the name of Joey Gouza, who had watched the assault from the driver's window of his automobile.

The only evidence recovered or noted at the crime scene was the sixteen-penny nail.

Drew's house was dark and the rain was slanting through the trees as I walked through her side yard with a six-battery flashlight. I squatted down on the floor of the gazebo and shined the bearn on the planks by the top of the steps. They were smeared with miniature horsetails of dried blood, and one was centered with a blond nail hole. I walked back into the rain and searched in the myrtle bushes around the gazebo. The light flicked across a pop bottle impacted with dirt, two broken bricks, and what looked like a shattered slat from an apple crate that lay propped against some myrtle branches at the base of the gazebo.

But there was no hammer.

I stooped into the wet bushes and examined the bricks by turning them over with my pocket knife and shining the light on all their surfaces. But I saw no chip marks or scratches that would indicate that either had been used to drive a nail into a hardwood surface.

I searched among the oak trees, in the flower beds, and over the lawn, and found no hammer there, either, not that I should, I told myself. But it was something else that I didn't see that bothered me most. According to the report, she had told the city cops that Gouza had watched the assault from the window of his automobile. I returned to the gazebo's steps and shined the flashlight back toward the house. The long driveway and garage were obscured from view by a hedge and two huge clumps of banana trees. If Gouza had had a direct line of vision from his car to the gazebo, he would have had to pull it around the garage and park it on the grass behind the house.

And there were no tire tracks on the lawn. But it had rained, I thought, and maybe the depressed blades of grass had sprung back into place.

What I did find, in the weeded area around a lime tree, was a wet handkerchief spotted with blood. I put it in a Ziploc bag, and I had no idea what it meant, if anything.

The next morning I sat by Drew's hospital bed and put a half dozen mug shots face down on the sheets next to her good hand. Her other hand, her left, was wrapped thickly with bandages and rested on top of a pillow. She wore no makeup, and her hair was unbrushed and her face still puffy with sleep.

"I thought you might wait until after breakfast," she said.

"Would you excuse me a minute?"

She went into the bath, then came back out a few minutes later, touching at her face with a towel and widening her eyes. She got back in the bed and pulled the sheet up to her stomach.

"Look at the pictures, Drew."

She turned them over mechanically, one by one. Then she picked up one and dropped it in front of me.

"You have no doubt that's the guy?" I asked.

"Why don't you tell me, Dave? Is that Joey Gouza or not?"

"It's Joey Gouza."

"So arrest him."

"Somebody else is taking care of that. Did the city cops show you mug shots last night?"

"No."

"Then how did you know it was Gouza?"

"He was at a party Weldon gave in New Orleans."

"When I mentioned his name once before, you seemed a little vague about it, Drew."

"That's the man who smoked a cigarette while his two pieces of shit tried to crucify me."

I picked up the photographs and put a rubber band around them. The grass outside the window was bright green, and the sunlight looked hot on the trees, which were still wet from last night's rain.

"Why do you think they did it?" I asked.

"Gouza said, 'Tell your brother to pay his debts.' "

"What's his voice sound like? Does he have an accent?"

"Why are you asking me things like this?"

"A prosecutor is going to ask you, his defense attorney is.

Why do you object to me asking you?"

"He has an accent like any other New Orleans lowlife."

"I see. That'd make sense, wouldn't it?"

"No, what you're really asking is something else. There's something wrong with his voice. He sounds like he has a strep throat. No, it's worse than that. He sounds like his vocal cords were burnt with acid."

"Here are some other mug shots, Drew. See if any of these guys look like the two men who hurt you."

She went through them one at a time, looking carefully at each one. Among the six mug shots were the faces of Jewel Fluck, Eddy Raintree, and Jack Gates. She shook her head.

"I've never seen any of these men," she said. She touched the tops of my fingers as I gathered up the photographs from the sheet. "What happened to your thumb?"

"A man bit it the other night."

"Maybe it's catching."

"He used to be a bodyguard for Bobby Earl."

"What did you do with him, put him in the dog pound?"

"No, I didn't get the chance, Drew. I had him cuffed by a railroad track when a guy named Jewel Fluck blew most of his face off with a shotgun. His name was Eddy Raintree. He was one of the guys I just showed you. Would you describe the two men who hurt you?"

"Do you know what victim rape is?" she asked.

"Yes."

"I'm a little bit used up right now. You said something before about me being a soldier. I'm not. I'm still shaking inside. I don't know if I'll ever stop. If you want to take me over the hurdles, you can. But I think you're acting like a shit."

"The sheriff told me to come up here last night and take a statement. But I didn't. I figured the city cops had pretty well worn you out. Maybe you ought to consider who your real friends are, Drew."

She turned her head on the pillow and looked out the window. I could see a tear secrete brightly in the corner of her eye.

"I'll come back later," I said.

She nodded, her head still turned toward the window. Her skin looked dull in the sunlight.

I paused before I went out the door.

"You're willing to testify against Gouza at a trial, Drew?"

"Yes," she said quietly.

"You know they'll put Weldon on the stand, too, don't you?"

She twisted her head back toward me on the pillow. I saw that her projections about the future had not yet reached the last probability. She drank from a glass of water and pulled her knees up under the sheet. Her face had the divorced, empty look of a person who might have lived one way all her life only to awake one morning and discover that none of her experience counted, that she was cut loose and voiceless in a place where no other people lived.

On the way out of the hospital I stopped by the gift shop and sent a vase of flowers to her room. I signed the card "From your many friends in Amnesty International."

In They brought Joey Gouza from New Orleans in leg and waist chains, got him arraigned that afternoon, and amidst a crowd of photographers, news reporters, and onlookers, who behaved like spectators at a cockfight, virtually trundled him from the courtroom to a city jail cell. Bail was set by Judge James Lefleur, an ill-tempered right-wing coonass also known as Whiskey Jim.

When Gouza came out of the court, in pink shirt, cream slacks, and wide black tie with white polkadots, with cops holding him by both arms, he managed to get one hand loose, grab his phallus, and spit into the lens of a television camera.

I checked my.45 with a guard before he worked the levers that slid the barred door on a corridor that led past three holding cells and the drunk tank.

"I'd like to go inside with him," I said.

"Then you'd better take a stun gun with you," the guard said.

"What's he done?"

"Look for yourself, look at the floor. The sonofabitch."

The corridor in front of one cell was splattered with spaghetti, coffee, and cobbler that had obviously been flung with the plastic tray and Styrofoam containers from the iron apron in the cell door.

I walked down the corridor and propped one arm against the bars of Joey Gouza's cell. Tieless and beltless now, he sat on a bunk that was suspended from wall chains; he smoked a cigarette methodically, his fingers pinched on the paper, his furious black eyes staring into the center of the gloom.

Then he saw me. "It's YOU."

"What's happenin', Joey?"

"I should have figured your nose was in this someplace."

"You're wrong. I'm not a player. It looks like it's between you and other people this time."

"What people? What the fuck is going on, man?"

"You should have stayed out of Iberia Parish."

"Are you out of your mind? You think I got an interest in some shithole that counts the mosquitoes in the population? You tell me what the fuck is going on." His voice rasped and broke wetly in his throat. He breathed deeply to regain his momentum. "Look, I don't sit still while people ream me. You got that, Jack? You tell me what the fucking game is."

"I don't think there is one, Joey. I just think you paddled too far up shit creek this time. That's the way it breaks sometimes."

"The way it breaks? What do you got, yesterday's ice cream for brains? That judge, I've never seen him before and he's got a hard-on for me before they unlock me off the chain. He called me a wild animal, in front of all them people. Bail, one-point-seven-million dollars! That's a hundred and seventy thousand large for a bondsman. You telling me these people ain't trying to run a hook through my balls? Those two guys who busted me, they stuck guns in my face in my own restaurant. You've got a real problem here, some people that's totally out of control."

"You've got good lawyers. They'll get your bail reduced."

He flipped his cigarette in a shower of sparks off the wall and kneaded his hands together. His long neck and shoulders were webbed with veins.

"What are you down here for, to toss peanut shells at the monkeys?" he said. "Go tell that screw there's no toilet paper in here."

"I thought you might want to talk to me."

He rose from the bunk, breathing hard through his nose, and came toward me.

"That broad's lying," he said.

"She's been pretty convincing."

His eyes looked hard into mine and narrowed.

"You know it's a ream. I see it in your face, man," he said. "You offering me something?"

"Somebody did it to her. I don't think it was anybody around here. Everybody I talk to thinks you're the number one candidate, Joey. I think they've got the right person in the cell."

His hand shot out of the bars, knotting my shirt in his fist.

His breath was rife with jailhouse funk. My collar button popped loose on the floor.

"I ain't going down on a phony beef. You tell that broad that," he said. "You tell her brother to get her off my back."

I tore his hand loose.

"You understand me, man?" he said. "I don't roll over. You push me, I'll leave your hair on the wallpaper."

"Tell that to everybody at your trial, Joey. It makes good courtroom theater."

He hit the bars with the heel of his fist. His face was livid, popping with cartilage.

"You're twisting me, man. What's your stake? What's your fucking stake?" he said.

"Why did those guys creep Weldon Sonnier's house?"

He paced back and forth, his nostrils dilating.

"I'll print it out for you in big letters," he said. "I'm a businessman, I don't creep houses, I don't drive out to some hole in the road to stoke up a bunch of small-town jackoffs. They're the kind who send you to the electric chair and then go back to watering their plants. Look, you were a New Orleans cop. You know how it gets done. Somebody keeps getting in your face and don't listen to reason, you tell another guy about it, then you forget it. You don't even want to know who does it. If you're a sick guy, with a real bone on for somebody, you get Polaroids, then you burn them.

"That's how it works. You don't drive into some broad's backyard and nail her to a gazebo. You don't end up in a hick court with Elmer Fudd dropping a one-point-sevenmillion-dollar bond on your head. The point is, when people got dog food between their ears they're dangerous, and I don't fuck with them. Is it starting to clear up for you now?"

He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and hunted in his shirt pockets for a match.

"Gimme a light," he said.

"How'd you get involved with Bobby Earl?" I said.

He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and shook it at me.

"You quit trying to jerk my chain, man," he said. "You want to know how I got this voice? A swinging dick tried to make me his punk when I was a seventeen-year-old fish. I caught him in the shower with a string knife. Except he was a made guy, and I didn't know the rules about made guys back then, and his friends hung me up in my cell with a coat hanger. They crushed my voice box. But I didn't roll over then, man, and I don't roll over now.

"Explain to the broad I'm a three-firne loser. If I go down on the bitch, I got nothing to lose. That means I can cop to anything they want and take Sonnier with me. I'll make sure he gets heavy time, and I'll be inside with him when he does it. Let her think about that."

"You're a hard man, Joey."

"Tell that screw down there to get me processed or send up some toilet paper."

He scratched at the inside of his nostril with his thumbnail and blew air through his nasal passages. He had already lost interest in my presence, but a dark light remained in his face, as though he were breathing bad air, and his heated eyes, the nests of veins in his neck, his unwashed smell, the soft scud of his loafers on the cement, his jug head in silhouette against the cell window, made me think of the circus creatures who pawed the dark while they watched the denouement of Eddy Raintree from their cages.

Later, I called Weldon at his office and was told that he was with a drilling crew at the old Sonnier farm.

I drove down the dirt road past the rusted windmill and crumbled brick supports where the house had stood before Weldon had hired a gang of drunken blacks to tear it apart with crowbars and sledgehammers. I parked my truck by a sludge pond and an open-sided shed stacked with pipe and sacks of drilling mud, and walked up the iron steps of a rig that roared with the noise of the drilling engine.

The roughnecks on the floor were slimy with mud, bent into their work at the wellhead with the concentration of men who know the result of a moment's inattention on a rig, when the tongs or a whirling chain can pinch off your fingers or snap your bones like sticks.

A tool pusher put a hard hat on my head.

"Where's Weldon?" I shouted at him.

"What?"

"Where's Weldon Sonnier?" I shouted again over the engine's roar.

He pointed up into the rig.

High up on the tower I saw Weldon in coveralls and hardhat, working with the derrick man on the monkey board. The derrick man was clipped to the tower with a safety belt. I couldn't see one on Weldon. His face was small and round against his yellow hat as he looked down at me.

A moment later he put one foot out on the hoist, grabbed the cable with one hand, and rode it down to the rig floor.

There was a single smear of bright grease, like war paint, on one of his cheekbones.

"Coffee time," he yelled at the floormen.

Somebody killed the drilling engine, and I opened and closed my mouth to clear my ears. Weldon pulled off his bradded gloves, unzipped his coveralls, and stepped out of them. He was wearing slacks and a polo shirt, and his armpits and the center of his chest were dark with sweat.

"Let's go over here in the shade," he said. "It must be ninety-five today."

We walked to the far end of the platform and leaned against the railing under a canvas awning. The air was sour with natural gas.

"I thought you'd pretty well punched out this field," I said.

"Anyplace there was an ocean, there's oil. You just got to go deep enough to find it."

I looked out at the wells pumping up and down in the distance and the long spans of silver pipe that sweated coldly from the natural gas running inside.

"With the low price of crude, a lot of outfits are shut down now," I said.

"That's them, not me. What are you out here for, Dave?"

"To deliver a message."

"Oh?"

"Actually I'm just passing on an observation. Have you been up to see Drew today?"

"Yeah, a little while ago."

"You know you're going to end up testifying at Gouza's trial, then?"

"So?"

"I get the feeling you think somebody's going to wave a wand over your situation and you won't ever have to explain your dealings with Gouza. He's not copping a plea. He's facing life in Angola. His defense attorneys are going to use a chain saw when they get you and Drew on the stand."

"What am I supposed to do about it?"

"Give some thought to what Drew's doing."

He wiped at the grease on his face with a clean mechanic's cloth.

"Tell Gouza he doesn't want to make bond," he said. "Believe me, he doesn't want to see me unless he's got some cops around him."

"Then you buy it?"

"You think she did it to herself? You've got the right guy in jail. Just make sure he stays there."

"Here's the problem I have, Weldon. Joey Gouza is what they call a made guy. That's unusual in his case. He wasn't born to it, he didn't have any patrons or political allies greasing the wheels for him. He worked his way up from a reformatory punk. That means that in his world he's a lot smarter than a lot of the people around him. Come on, you know him, Weldon, do you think he'd set himself up for a fall like this?"

He folded the pink mechanic's cloth in a neat square and balanced it on the rail. Then he moved it and balanced it again.

"Stonewall time is over," I said. "Your sister just put the tape on fast forward."

"So you've come out here to tell me she's a liar?"

"No, I've come out here to tell you she's a victim. I'm using the word in a broad sense, too. There's a certain kind of victimization that starts in childhood. Then the person grows older and never learns any other role. Except maybe one other. The word for that one is enabler."

"You better get to it, Dave." He turned toward me and rested his hand on the metal rail.

"Lyle understands it and he never finished high school."

"I'm going to ask you to choose each of your words carefully, Dave."

I took a deep breath. The air was pungent with gas, acrid with the smell of oil sludge and dead weeds in the sunlight.

"Look, Weldon, if I know about your family history, about some of the complexities in it, do you believe that Gouza's attorneys won't have access to the same information, that they won't use it to tear your sister apart?"

"Say it or shut the fuck up and get out of here."

"She's not just your sister. In her mind she's your wife, your lover, your mother. She'll do anything for you. It's a way of life for her. You know it, too, you rotten sonofa bitch."

His feet were already set when he swung. He caught me on the chin, and my head snapped back and my hard hat rolled across the rig floor.

I straightened up, held the rail with one hand, and looked into his face. It was stretched tight on the bone, and the suntanned skin at the corners of his eyes was filled with white lines.

The roughnecks on the floor stared at us in disbelief.

I pushed at the side of my chin with my thumb.

"They'll melt you into lard in the courtroom, Weldon," I said. "Gouza won't even have to take the stand. Instead, you and Drew will be on trial, and those defense attorneys will make you sound like a pornographer's wet dream."

I saw his hand move, his eyes click again as though he'd been slapped.

"Don't even think about it," I said. "The first one was free. You come at me again, and I'll make sure you do time for assaulting a police officer." I picked up the hard hat from the rig floor and shoved it into his hands, jammed it into his chest. "Thanks for the tour of the rig. My recommendation is you hire a good lawyer and get some advice about the wisdom of suboming perjury. Or apply for a pilot's job in a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty with the United States, See you around, Weldon."

I walked down the iron steps to my truck. I could hear the canvas awning flapping in the hot wind, a chain clinking brightly against a piece of pipe, in the embarrassed silence of the roughnecks on the rig floor.

The next morning I drove across the I-10 bridge over the Mississippi to Baton Rouge. The river was high and muddy, almost a mile across, and the oil barges far below looked as tiny as toys. Huge oil refineries and aluminum plants sprawled along the east bank of the river, but what always struck my eye first when I rolled over the apex of the bridge into Baton Rouge was the spire of the capitol building lifting itself out of the flat maze of trees and green parks in the old downtown area. All the state's political actors since Reconstruction had passed through there: populists in suspenders and clip-on bow ties, demagogues, alcoholic buffoons, virulent racists, a hillbilly singer who would be elected governor twice, another governor who broke out of a mental asylum in order to kill his wife, a recent governor who pardoned a convict in Angola, who repaid the favor by murdering the governor's brother, and the most famous and enigmatic player of them all, the Kingfish, who might have given FDR a run for his money had he not died, along with his supposed assassin, in a spray of eighty-one machine-gun bullets in a hallway of the old capitol building.

I parked my truck and sat in the gallery during the morning session of the legislature. I watched the regard with which Bobby Earl was treated by many of his peers, the warm handshakes, the pats on the arm and shoulder, the expression of gentlemanly goodwill by men who should have known better. It reminded me of the deference sometimes shown to a small-town poolroom bully or redneck police chief. The people around him well know his hatred of Jews, intellectuals, news people, Asians, blacks; no one doubts his potential with the leaded baton or the hobnailed boot across the neck. But they make friends with the ape in their midst, no matter how violently the tuning fork vibrates inside them; consequently they absorb his dark powers, and secretly gloat at the fear he inspires in others.

They recessed for lunch, and I followed Bobby Earl and a group of his friends one block to the entrance of an expensive restaurant with an awning that extended out over the sidewalk. The windows were filled with ferns and hanging copper pots. After Earl and his group had entered the restaurant, I put on my seersucker coat, tightened my necktie, and walked inside, too. Most of the tables were filled, the air loud with conversation and scented with the smell of gumbo from the kitchen, bourbon and tropical drinks from the bar.

"I don't think we have a seating for one, sir. Would you like to wait in the bar?" the matre d' said.

"I'm with Mr. Earl's party. Ah, there he is right over there," I said.

"Very well. Please follow me, sir," he said.

I walked with the maitre d' to Bobby Earl's table. The maitre d' set a menu down for me at an empty place setting and walked away. Earl turned away from his conversation with another man, then his mouth opened silently as he looked up and realized who was sitting down at his table.

"Hello, Mr. Earl. I apologize for bothering you again, but I'm just in town briefly and I didn't want to disturb you at the legislature," I said. "How are you gentlemen? I'm Detective Dave Robicheaux, with the Iberia Parish sheriff's office. I just need to ask Mr. Earl a question or two. Y'all go right ahead with your lunch."

They went on talking to each other, as though my presence was perfectly natural, but I could see their eyes, the positions of their bodies, already disassociating themselves from the situation.

Bobby Earl wore a brown pinstripe suit and a yellow silk tie, and his thick hair looked blow-dried and recently cut.

"What are you doing here?" he said.

"Do you know that Joey Gouza's in custody?"

"No."

I set my notebook on the tablecloth and peeled back several pages. It contained nothing but notes from old investigations and a grocery list I had made out at the office yesterday.

"I interviewed him in his cell yesterday and your name came up," I said.

"What?"

"Gouza is charged with ordering two men to nail Drew Sonnier's hand to a gazebo. When I questioned him your name came up in the conversation. That fact bothered me, Mr. Earl. Is it your statement that you don't know Joey Gouza?"

"I'm not making a statement. What are you trying to do here?"

A man at the end of the table coughed quietly into his fist and went to the restroom.

"You and Joey Gouza seem to have the same friends. Your lines keep crossing in this case, Mr. Earl. Originally I questioned you about Eddy Raintree. Now someone has blown Eddy's face off with a shotgun. You knew that, didn't you?"

"No, I don't know anything about this. You listen-"

His voice level rose, and the man next to him excused himself to talk with friends at the bar.

"You're harassing me," Earl began again. "I can't prove it, but I suspect you have a political motivation for what you've been doing. It won't work. It just makes my cause stronger. If you doubt me, call the Morning Advocate and check the polls."

"Let me tell you what Gouza said and you can come to your own conclusions. We were talking about you, then he begins to tell me that if he goes down for what is called the 'bitch,' which is a life sentence given to habitual criminals, he's going to take others down with him. What does that seem to suggest to you, Mr. Earl?"

"It suggests you're going to have a lawsuit against you for slander." His monocular right eye, with the enlarged pupil like a spot of India ink, was fixed on my face. The skin along the bottom rim was trembling with anger.

I folded my notebook and put it in my shirt pocket. I picked up a package of crackers from the breadbasket, then dropped it in the basket again.

"You're an intelligent man, and I'll tell you the truth, Mr. Earl," I said. "I think Joey might be in on a bum rap. But unfortunately for him, nobody cares if a guy like Joey is innocent or not. People just want him put away in a cage for a long time, and they don't care how it's done. The prosecutor will probably get a new political career out of it, his lawyers will get rich on his appeals while he's chopping sugarcane at Angola, his wife and mistresses will clean out his bank accounts and sell everything he owns, and his hired stooges will go to work for his competitors and forget they ever heard of him. In the meantime, there are probably some sadistic gunbulls who will ejaculate at the thought of busting Joey's hump on their work gangs.

"Now, if you were Joey Meatballs and facing a prospect like that, wouldn't you be willing to cut a deal, any deal, including maybe putting your mother in harness on a dogsled team?"

The other men at the table had gone quiet now and had given up the pretense of conviviality. They looked at their watches, touched nervously at their mouths with their napkins, stared at a remote part of the restaurant. The cost of their lunch with Bobby Earl was not one they had anticipated.

I rose from the table.

"You like primitive law and vigilante solutions to complex problems, Mr. Earl," I said. "Maybe you've stumbled into one of your own creations this time. But I wouldn't end up as Joey Gouza's fall partner. He doesn't care about political causes. He had his own brother-in-law fed into an airplane propeller. What do you think his lawyers might have planned for you?"

The tables around Bobby Earl's had now become quiet, too. He turned to speak to the men seated next to him, but their eyes were fixed on the flower arrangement in the center of the table. But I learned then that Bobby Earl was not easily undone in a public situation. He rose from the table, put his napkin neatly by his plate, and walked toward the men's room, pausing to let a black drink waiter pass. His gaze was level, his face handsome, almost pleasant-looking, his thick brown hair tousled by the cool currents from the air-conditioner.

I realized then that Bobby Earl might burn inside with banked fires, and that perhaps I had indeed inserted some broken glass in his head that would saw through brain tissue later; but in front of an audience he was a tragedian actor, a protean figure who could create an emanation of himself out of willpower alone and become as benign, photogenic, and seemingly anointed by history as Jefferson Davis in defeat.

I had a feeling this one would go into extra innings.