“Why?” I said.
“The governor was running for president. Guys who want to be president don’t get elected by being kind to guys charged with murdering their family.”
“What was the black woman’s last name?” I said.
“He called her Miss Lucinda. That’s all.”
“A rage-a-holic wouldn’t set fire to his house?” I said.
“Maybe a guy like me would. Tillinger didn’t belong in the system. Everybody knew it. You know what con-wise is, right?”
I didn’t reply.
“I did double nickels back to back. I did them straight up and went out max time. I burnt up my brother-in-law in his car and did a guy inside. In the chow line. For one of these teardrops on my face. I didn’t mean to kill my brother-in-law, but that’s the way it worked out. I deserved what I got. Tillinger is what we call a virgin. He never got his cherry busted. That means he was never in the life. He belongs in the PTA and shit like that.”
“We don’t need all that information,” I said.
“About the hit in the chow line?” he said. “You don’t like that? You think I give a shit if anybody knows?”
I didn’t answer.
“Look at me, man,” he said. “You got any idea of what those fucking black animals did to me? My best friends sold me for two cartons of smokes. They said, ‘Rip his feathers off.’ I got to live with what they did every night of my life. Fuck you, asshole.”
His eyes were brimming.
• • •
AFTER TRAVIS WAS gone, Clete and I walked down the street under the colonnade to Bojangles’ and had coffee and a piece of pecan pie in a back corner of the room.
“You believe him?” I said.
“He’s on the square most of the time,” Clete said. “He doesn’t want to lose the few connections he has. He knows the Aryan Brotherhood will probably get him down the road.”
“I don’t buy Tillinger’s innocence.”
“Here’s what happened,” Clete said. “Tillinger’s house was a hundred years old and dry as kindling. The flames were in the second story when he came home. The daughter and the mother were upstairs. He claimed he tried to get them out, but the heat was too great. Later, he told the fire inspector some of the wiring in the walls needed replacing, but he didn’t have the money for repairs.
“So far, so good. Then the inspector finds signs of an accelerant trailing from the gallery into the hallway, or at least that’s what he thought he saw. He said the fire started on the first floor and climbed the walls to the ceiling and up the stairwell. One of the neighbors said Tillinger never tried to go inside the house. Instead, he moved his new Ford F-150 away from the fire.
“On top of it, Tillinger had a fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy on both the wife and daughter. He also shot off his mouth in the Walmart and told a group of churchgoers his family had better straighten up or he would burn the house down.
“It looked more and more like arson and homicide. Then an ACLU lawyer showed up and began looking at the evidence. The guy who called himself a fire inspector wasn’t certified and had little experience in arson investigation. The accelerant was a can of charcoal lighter that somebody had left next to the portable barbecue pit on the gallery. There was no accelerant trail in the hall. Also, the heat marks on the baseboards were probably caused by an explosion of flame from the stairwell, not from a fire that started on the first floor.
“The defense lawyer was from the ACLU and went over like elephant turds in a punch bowl.”
Customers at other tables turned and looked at us.
“What’s your opinion?” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. I should have called 911 when I saw a guy in jailhouse whites bail off the train.”
“We can’t be sure the guy was Tillinger. Why would he jump off in the Mermentau River? Why wouldn’t he keep going until he was in Florida?”
“I checked that out. There were some gandy dancers working on the track. He could see them from the top of the boxcar. Helen is pretty hot about this, isn’t she?”
“You’re a good cop, Clete. She knows that.”
“I’m not a cop. I blew it.”
“Don’t say that. Not now. Not ever.”
He looked at nothing. The whites of his eyes were shiny and tinged with a pink glaze. He glanced up at the air-conditioning vent. “It’s too cold in here. Let’s take a walk. I feel like I walked through cobwebs. Sorry about the way Travis talked to you. He was a bar of soap in the shower at Huntsville.”
• • •
AS ALWAYS, I walked to work the next morning. Desmond Cormier was waiting for me in the shady driveway that led past the city library and the grotto devoted to the mother of Jesus. He was sitting in the passenger seat of a Subaru convertible with California plates driven by Antoine Butterworth.
Desmond got out and shook my hand. His friend winked at me. “I have to talk with you, Dave,” Desmond said.
I didn’t answer. Butterworth lifted a gold-tipped cigarette from the car’s ashtray, took one puff, and flipped it into the flower bed surrounding the grotto.
“I feel so foolish,” Desmond said. He was wearing tennis shorts and a yellow T-shirt and a panama straw hat. “About that business with the telescope and the woman on the cross. My right eye is weak and I have a cataract on the left. That’s why I didn’t see her. I should have explained.”
“How about your friend there? He didn’t see her, either.”
“It’s just his way,” Desmond said. “He’s contrary. He’s been in a couple of wars. Somalia and the old Belgian Congo. You’d find him quite a guy if you’d give him a chance. Have lunch with us.”
“Another time.”
“Dave, you were one of the few I looked up to.”
“Few what?”
“The regular ebb and flow.”
“There’s some pretty good people here, Desmond.”
“See you around, I guess.”
“You ever hear of a guy named Hugo Tillinger?” I asked.
“No. Who is he?”
“An escaped convict. He knew the dead woman. He may be in the vicinity.”
“I wish I could be of help,” he said. “This is an awful thing.”
“Before you go—that still shot you have on your wall of Henry Fonda standing on the roadside saying goodbye to Clementine?”
“What about it?”
“That scene is about failed love, about the coming of death, isn’t it?”
“For me it’s about the conflict between light and shadow. Each seeks dominion. Neither is satisfied with its share.”
I looked at him. I didn’t try to follow his line of thought. “I saw the picture at the Evangeline Theater in 1946. My mother took me.”
He nodded.
“I think a scene like that could almost take a guy over the edge,” I said.
“I never heard it put that way.”
“It’s strange what happens when a guy gets too deep into his own mind,” I said.
“Maybe you think too much,” he said.
“Probably.” I reached down and picked up the burning cigarette Butterworth had thrown in the flower bed. I mashed it out on the horn button of the Subaru and stuck it in Butterworth’s shirt pocket. “We’re heck on littering.”