It hadn’t occurred to me to look for danger overhead. This sounded like a gag someone thought up to scare a tenderfoot with, but Tosche seemed serious enough.
It was a land of brackish water, freshwater mixed with sea water, and both fresh and salt water fish were taken here. On the shore in an occasional clearing, low palmetto palms could be seen. Tosche called them swamp cabbage and said Cajuns used them like coleslaw. A shallow backwater was crowded with the flower-tipped stalks of arrowroot plants, whose roots were another important Cajun food and medicine source.
Finally we turned into a bayou as narrow as a creek. Trees lined the shore, and arching limbs trailing strands of Spanish moss formed a roof over us. The water was absolutely still until our boat passed. Civilization seemed unimaginably remote, but even this charming place hadn’t completely escaped the corrosion. I counted three beer cans floating near the bank.
When Tosche cut the motor, the silence had the same impact as a door slamming. We drifted around a bend, and ahead of us on the right was a dock. When we came closer, the roofline of Old Jake’s cabon could be made out through the trees.
Tosche seemed puzzled. “Old Jake’s boat is gone,” he remarked. “His pirogue is gone, too.”
“Pirogue?” I echoed.
“Cajun canoe. It’s a small, flat-bottomed boat, doesn’t draw much water, so it’s useful in a swamp. Old Jake may be out fishing, but I don’t know why he would take his pirogue.” He hesitated. “I suppose there’s no point in calling on him if he isn’t there.”
“Might be a good idea to find out whether he has a house guest,” I suggested.
Tosche seemed doubtful, but he used a paddle to turn us toward the dock. I jumped out and tied the boat to a post. Tosche watched disapprovingly but said nothing. Together we went up the path to the cabon.
It was built on a hump of high ground between the bayou and a swamp—a weathered wood shack on high posts with a corrugated iron roof that was in the process of rusting away completely. We mounted the steep steps to the open porch. An old wreck of a lounging chair stood in one corner. The battered table beside it had a couple of charred tobacco pipes, a large coffee can that served as an ashtray, and a clutter of empty beer bottles. I paused and read the labels with raised eyebrows: Blackened Voodoo Lager Beer.
“Local brand?” I asked Tosche.
I thought I was joking, but he said, “Yeah. Dixie Brewing Company.”
He called loudly, “Ho, Jake!” Then he banged on the warped door. There was glass in one of the two windows that looked onto the porch. That one was closed. The other was opened permanently, no glass, but there was a new screen tacked into place over the opening.
Tosche banged on the door again. Then he opened it. “Ho, Jake!” he called. “Anyone—”
He broke off and halted. The stench hit us an instant before we saw what was on the floor. A man lay face down in the center of the room with the end of a long, gray beard showing beside his head. Tosche started forward, but I grabbed his arm and very firmly moved him back out of the way. In the presence of a corpse, he was no longer the expert guide.
I knelt beside the man on the floor. Obviously he had been dead for weeks. To be exact, two of them. If the cabon hadn’t been so well ventilated, the stench would have kept us from entering.
I got to my feet. “I don’t want to turn him over,” I said. “I’m assuming it’s Old Jake because of the beard.”
“Also, the clothes,” Tosche said. “Also, that scar on his hand.”
“What does this area use for police?”
“The Parish Sheriff’s Department.”
“I’ll wait here while you get help. How many hours away are they?”
“They have cars on the road. One drives through the village a couple of times a day. Figure half an hour for me to get back there and telephone, fifteen minutes to half an hour for them to respond, and another half hour to get back here.”
“Make certain they understand the situation—use the word ‘murder.’ I’m sure they would send a doctor in any case, but they’ll also need technicians and lab work.”
“Are you sure it’s murder?”
“That dent in the back of his head wasn’t self-inflicted,” I said.
“Maybe he fell.”
“He had to land on something to acquire a dent like that, and there isn’t anything here. Also, a man who bangs the back of his head badly enough to kill himself usually isn’t found lying on his face. Call it murder. It’ll put them in the proper frame of mind. If they want to correct your spelling later, that’s up to them. One more thing.”
I got out my memo pad and wrote down the telephone number Raina Lambert had given to me. I added Lieutenant George Keig’s name and ripped out the page. “After you call the sheriff, call this number,” I said. “Ask for the lieutenant. If he’s not there, tell whoever answers that this information is for Miss Lambert and Lieutenant Keig. Several people claim to have seen Marc DeVarnay in Pointe Neuve two weeks ago with Old Jake, and we found Old Jake lying on his face with the back of his head bashed.”
“Shall I tell the lieutenant it was murder?”
“No. Miss Lambert likes to draw her own conclusions, and the lieutenant probably does, too. Does Old Jake have a last name?”
He thought for a moment. “I think it was Hemlie or Harmlie or something like that.”
“On your way,” I said. “This is going to be a long day for both of us.” He left in a rush.
As the motor started up, I began my own quick inventory of the cabon’s two small rooms. The one I stood in served as a combined living room, dining room, and kitchen. The old stone fireplace had the charred remnants of a log on the grate, but it had been used for heating only. Old Jake did his cooking on a propane camp stove that stood on a rickety table in one corner. There was a covered, new-looking pan on the stove. A straight-backed chair stood nearby. An old bureau served as a cupboard; on its scarred top were half a loaf of moldy bread in a wrapper, some cans, a couple of pans that were minus their handles, some cracked plates, and three cracked mugs, also without handles, one of which was ornamented with the message, “Sands Hotel Casino Las Vegas.” The only other furnishings were an old sofa and a battery radio.
A cardboard carton packed with groceries had been left on the floor under the table. On top of the carton was an unopened pizza. Old Jake had been dead for two weeks, and the fact that he hadn’t unpacked the groceries DeVarnay bought for him probably meant he had been murdered shortly after they returned to the cabon.
I looked again at Old Jake’s bashed head. If he had been alive when his skull was dented, the blow certainly killed him. I couldn’t learn more without turning him over or going through his pockets, and that might mess things up for the homicide technicians. If I waited patiently, they would tell me more than I could find out myself.
Walking carefully, I moved to one side of the room and followed the wall until I reached the doorway to the tiny back room. The floor was far from clean. Old Jake, or someone, had scattered burnt matches around and ground out an occasional cigarette, and there was spilled food in the kitchen area, but there was no months-old coating of dust to take footprints. Old Jake had swept the floor not too many days before he died. Or his visitor had.
The back room was the bedroom. It contained two new-looking camp cots, each with a new sleeping bag. Near one cot was a wreck of a chest of drawers. Near the other was a suitcase on a rickety chair. Through the window I could see an outhouse in the rear and an open shed with a stack of wood.
The suitcase was an expensive leather job,