Gator Aide (4 page)

“Why do you think she was killed?”

I watched as the parasols slowly began to sink, having fallen through the bubbles into the lukewarm water. I looked up to see Terri watching me with eyes that had witnessed more on the strip than I would ever know.

“You got it wrong, Rach. The question isn’t why—but why not?”

Driving across the bridge over
Lake Pontchartrain had become almost a religious experience for me. It was the demarcation line between my two different lives. In New Orleans, I was the street-wise city girl, laughing at scams others fell for. Once out in the sticks, I was a goner, a mark for wily poachers and fat, corrupt DAs.

Driving down the Boulevard in Slidell, I passed Wendy’s and Taco Bell but stopped at McDonald’s for a power breakfast in a white paper bag. A midsize town, Slidell is known more for its industrial attractions than its scenic charm. The main strip could be Anywhere, U.S.A., with its proliferation of fast-food joints and discount stores. Pulling into the back lot of the brick building that housed a bank, an insurance company, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife office, I spotted the run-down, white Pontiac Bonneville. With one taillight cracked and red rust eating its way up over the fender, the car’s dented license plate boasted the state’s official motto: Sportsman’s Paradise. No matter how I tried, I could never beat Charlie Hickok into work. He seemed to live in the place. Enid, his receptionist from the turn of the century, hadn’t arrived yet. Neither had the other workers who droned on from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, under fluorescent lights in rooms with no windows. That was the best part of being an agent: I never had to punch a clock. But I was expected to work on my own, morning through night, without having to report in. Requiring a special breed of loner, it suited me just fine.

I heard Charlie before I even entered his office. Hacking and wheezing, he was puttering about, easing into his daily routine. I poked my head in the door as he lowered his body down into his chair and started to scratch.

“Damn chiggers.”

Charlie’s room was a work of art. Free-form, thrown together, but a balancing act that was not to be believed. Books were piled on top of his desk at angles that defied gravity. Perched on top of that were videotapes of past busts in all their glory. Papers were strewn sky-high in piles that were known only to him and nobody dared touch. A Confederate flag hung limply on its pole in a far corner of the room.

The only personal touch to be found was a collection of framed photographs that hung on the walls and occupied most of the spare space on Charlie’s desk. They were all of a woman blessed with long blond hair, a heart-shaped face, and large eyes that a doe would have envied. Rumor had it that she had been Charlie’s wife. A strict Baptist, she had tried her best to keep Charlie in line, forbidding him to smoke, drink, or curse. Charlie abided by her rules as best he could, while still maintaining his normal workload of twenty-four hours, seven days a week—his schedule being the one area to which rules did not apply. Office scuttlebutt maintained that, tired of living alone, his wife packed up one day and disappeared. So did most of their furniture. Charlie simply told people that she had died. Whatever the case, the photos added a tantalizing sense of mystery, giving his office the air of a shrine.

Charlie sat behind his desk, dressed in a short-sleeve pale blue shirt and a pair of blue-and-white-striped seersucker pants. His appearance was topped off by a railroad cap that covered a head going bald. It was Charlie’s way of refusing to acknowledge the fact. His neck was blotched with bright red marks where his fingers kept scratching. A nose that looked like a rose in bloom was testament to his fondness for Old Grand-Dad, and a network of small craters pitting his face proved that his attachment to candy bars had started at a tender age.

Word had it that he had been a powerhouse in his younger days. A one-man vigilante team who had taken on poachers and syndicates alike and won. The failure of his marriage, and a broken heart, had only made him all the more driven and focused where his work was concerned. The roadblock he had finally run up against had been jealousy within his own agency. That, and an abiding weakness for rubbing people’s noses in his triumphs.

Charlie liked to brag that he was a direct descendant of Wild Bill Hickok. If so, he had certainly inherited Wild Bill’s flair for showmanship. He had known how to publicize every sting he had ever done. The Audubon TV special was evidence of that. It led some to call him a living legend in his own mind. When higher-ups finally decided they could take no more, Charlie had been hog-tied by a promotion to a desk job. It was either that or leave the Service. He’d have sooner given up his life.

I cleared off the chair on the other side of his desk and sat down, plunking my breakfast on the only patch of open space that had so far escaped the growing fungus. Charlie joined me, pulling out his own start to the day—a Baby Ruth bar.

“Have a good time last night, Bronx?”

“Yeah. It was great. I actually got to see something that didn’t have feathers on it.”

That brought a smile to his face, and I felt safe in continuing. I told him about Valerie and how she had ended up looking like a demo for Etch-A-Sketch. Filling him in on the gator brought me around to mentioning that I’d heard Val was a local girl from down south in the bayou.

Charlie reached for the Hershey bar beckoning to him from his desk drawer. “Sheeet! I’ll bet the tail on a horse’s ass that she was Marie Vaughn Tuttle’s niece. Pretty little coonass. She left the swamp to become a star. Never got any further than Bourbon Street, discovered her main talent was in twirling her titties. Last I heard, she was hooked on smack.”

The first time I’d heard the expression “coonass” my Northern guilt had reared its ugly head, sure that it was a racist Southern expression for blacks. It was only later that I learned it was a term of affection for the local Cajuns. Especially coming out of Charlie Hickok’s mouth. If he had been given three wishes, one of them would have been to be born Cajun.

“Who’s Marie Tuttle?”

Charlie was a walking bible on the people of the bayou, and I had learned to pump him for information whenever I could. I was quickly picking up on the fact that the only way to get anything done was by befriending the folks in the swamp. Without their help, I might as well pack up my bags and start heading out once more for dog-food commercials back in New York. I was in luck this morning. Charlie was in one of his more talkative moods.

“She’s a little Cajun coonass lives just outside Morgan City. Valerie was her sister’s kid. When her mama died, Marie took her in. I think Valerie moved up to Bourbon Street mainly to get the hell away from Marie and gator skins. You can smell that woman from a mile away. She traffics in buying hot skins from the local outlaws and selling ’em at cut-rate prices to some of our local business scum.”

Charlie scratched a raised armpit and hunkered down farther in his chair, letting the memory of former glory days wash over him.

“I busted her once, but she was out again before you could swallow your stew. A little bitty thing, but she’s as mean as they come. If she were a man, someone woulda killed her by now. Lord knows, she’d as soon shoot you as look at you.”

Whether or not he had put the bait out on purpose, I didn’t know. But I was hooked.

“I’d like to go see her. Maybe dig around a bit and see what I can find out.”

I didn’t know what Charlie’s reaction would be, but he’d opened the door with his call to me last night. It was a Fish and Wildlife case now, as well as N.O.P.D.’s. Still, if I were to pursue the investigation further than just writing up a report on a dead gator, I needed Charlie’s permission. To my surprise, he not only gave me the bait, but pulled the hook tight so it caught in my mouth.

“Sure thing, Bronx. Have a good time.”

I decided to push my luck. “Charlie, there’s something that’s bothering me about that alligator. I can’t see how those bullets could have penetrated the skull. I’d like to have an autopsy done.” Before I even finished I sensed that I had gone too far, forgetting my bounds as a rookie agent.

Leaning forward, Charlie slammed his elbows on top of a pile of papers that shifted slightly to the left. The movement was enough to set off a chain reaction reminiscent of the flicking of a domino. A delicately balanced videotape tumbled from its perch, hitting the edge of one of the photos on Hickok’s desk, which tottered ominously for a moment before tipping backwards into a free fall.

Charlie moved with a speed I hadn’t imagined him capable of. Jumping up from his seat, he dived across the floor and grabbed the frame right before it hit the ground. He carefully straightened the picture inside, then wiped off the glass with a tissue before reverently setting it back in its place on his desk. After a moment, he continued as if there had never been a break in the conversation.

“Well, hot damn. Not only have I got me an experienced agent, but one of those smart-ass forensic scientists as well.” He tugged on his cap. A bad sign.

“Listen, Bronx. The goddamn gator is dead. Where I come from, five slugs to the head will do it everytime. I don’t need no fancy-pants JFK-type conspiracy theories, and I gotta tell ya that I don’t give a rat’s ass about your woman’s intuition. I’ll take a quick look-see for myself, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a done deal. This case is N.O.P.D.’s problem. You wanna go see Tuttle and snoop around for a day or two, I’ll write it off to some R&R. But then I want your rear end back out in that swamp. If I were you, I’d catch me some duck poachers real quick.”

The drive down to Morgan City couldn’t have been better. For once, the rain held off, and the sky was as endless as the Gulf of Mexico. Another scorcher of a day, even the hot breeze felt good against my face as I sped along.

Thick fields of sugar cane stood tall and green, their sweetness wafting on air usually filled with the black smoke of old, dingy factories whose stacks spewed a rank brew of toxic gumbo. Weathered shacks with corrugated tin roofs lined each side of the road, flaring rays of sunlight into my eyes with all the brightness of mini-nuclear explosions. The poverty was reminiscent of a backroad in a third-world country.

But this was southern Louisiana, where each shanty contained a family bursting at the seams. Dogs lazed in the middle of the road, rarely bothering to look up as I beeped my horn, finally swerving into the fields to go around them. Chickens pecked in the dirt, squawking their disapproval as I crept by. Children came out to stare as they heard me approach, as though it was an event not to be missed, their scantily clad bodies running alongside my car until they dropped off one by one. I beeped the horn in farewell as each figure disappeared from sight in a cloud of red dust.

Live oaks, heavy with Spanish moss, stood in front of run-down mansions that had seen better days. Bullet-riddled signs announced each small town I passed through, the holes adding a new twist of flavor to their names.

A chain gang of men worked alongside the road, spilling hot tar, their skin glistening with sweat so that their bodies blended in with the liquid they were pouring. One man gave me a smile, his body shimmering in and out of focus in the curling waves of heat, as the other men joked with each other to break up the monotony of one more muggy day in a long line of them. Looking away from the road for a moment, I came nerve-wrackingly close to driving into a ditch, providing cheap entertainment for the men, who whooped with laughter and then broke into a cheer as I quickly veered away from danger.

Stopping in the town of Houma long enough to grab a burger and a Coke, I cooled off in an air-conditioned luncheonette. Local customers unused to strangers stared at me, wondering why I would bother to stop in a town that most others were trying to leave. Laced with waterways, Houma had once been called the Venice of the Bayous. It was now a ghost town, a casualty of the oil bust which had left the area reeling and as polluted as its sister city in Italy.

Hard times could also be blamed on the declining fur trade. Trapping had always been an accepted way of life for Cajun men, and wealthy women with a hankering for skins had unknowingly helped to keep local families fed. But with furs no longer in vogue, Houma had begun a painful economic descent, its oil wealth turned to red-clay poverty.

A fifties feel hung over the place. A number of stores were closed, with their windows boarded up, the victims of recession. Even the movie theaters had felt the sting, their marquees dilapidated as if from the heartache of having been deserted for too long. I could have been passing through a time warp of plywood storefronts at an MGM back lot. But I was in the heart of Cajun country in Terrebonne Parish.

This was the pulse point of alligator country in Louisiana. It was also a hotbed for poachers, past and present, since alligator skins had boomed into fashion in the 1920s. Enterprising poachers in the bayou had been more than happy to fill the growing demand, and by the 1930s, more than half of Louisiana’s alligator population had been decimated in the name of fashion. By the forties, the state’s population of the reptiles had crashed, and by 1964 the hunting of gators was banned in the state. But nobody had bothered telling that to the poachers, who continued killing whatever they could drag out of the swamp.

Charlie Hickok had made a stab at putting a stop to the slaughter for a while. With his inherited showman antics, he mounted one sting operation after another, knocking out the dealers. It hadn’t done much to make him popular, with either the outlaws or the power elite. Cajuns were of the belief that it was their God-given right to hunt whatever wildlife they wanted, and no damn upstart federal agent was about to tell them otherwise. Charlie had.

But he was now stuck behind a desk; a recession was in full swing; and the familiar phrase “fix the damn thing”—be it a parking ticket or an illegal hunt—was once more in vogue. Poaching was on the rise again. When you could make an easy five grand a night hunting gators, it wasn’t hard to see why. Besides, nobody had ever bothered to pay much attention to the law down here. People who were smart didn’t try to enforce it. The bayous of southern Louisiana followed rules all their own.