Chapter 22

22

“This is my case,” Stokes grumbled. “I could talk to the wife myself.”

Annie rolled her eyes. “Her name is Tulsie, and I already have a relationship with her. If you weren’t such a damn couillon , you’d see that this is a good thing. I’m helping you. You should mark this day on your calendar. I’m happy to leave Cody to you, but you won’t get anything out of this girl. She doesn’t know you.”

“I talk girls into saying things all the time. I’m actually very good at it.”

“Yeah. ‘ Ooh, ah, you’re so good! ’ doesn’t really count.”

“Very funny.”

“I know you’re a big hit with horny drunk women at the Voodoo Lounge, but I’m invested in this girl, Chaz. I don’t want her withdrawing because she’s feeling overwhelmed by a male detective she doesn’t know.”

“The least you could do was let me drive,” he pouted.

“Oh, my God, you’re such a child,” Annie snapped. “You don’t even know where we’re going! And you’re too much of a tête dure to ask for directions. We’d be driving around in circles all night. I should have made you and your ego ride in a separate car.”

She hit the blinker and turned off the main road to the gravel road that led to the Parcelles’ place. “Tulsie and her hired hand both told me Cody left for Houston Sunday morning. And he for sure gave her a beating as a parting gift. Now we know why.”

“I take it this isn’t the first time.”

“No. I got called out here a while ago. She wouldn’t press charges. I told her this morning she should think about leaving him. She didn’t want to hear it.”

“They never do. What’s wrong with women, putting up with that shit?”

“Mostly they’re more scared of what will happen to them without the guy than they are scared of the guy himself,” Annie said. “You know, people have a hard time envisioning their own death. They don’t really think it’ll ever happen. It’s like that OD I had today. That girl knew plenty of people who died taking drugs. She did it anyway. She never thought it’d be her dead on the floor. Tulsie still believes she can navigate around Cody’s temper and keep the rest of her life in place.”

The lights were on in the barn as they came up the Circle P driveway. Annie pulled in alongside the old white Chevy truck with the rusted wheel wells as the dogs came running, singing their song of greeting.

The Chicks were playing on the radio as she and Stokes walked in—“Set Me Free.” Izzy Guidry was grooming the little palomino Tulsie had been riding in the morning. Tulsie was in the aisle struggling to unfold a stable sheet with her one good arm. She looked up with shock, her gaze darting from Annie to Stokes and back.

“Hey, Tulsie,” Annie said. “This is Detective Stokes. Sorry to interrupt your evening.”

“What’s going on?”

“We need to ask you some questions about Cody. Is there somewhere we can go sit down and talk?”

“Is Cody all right?” Izzy asked, abandoning her task and stepping out of the grooming bay into the aisle. “Did something happen to him?”

“Oh, my God,” Tulsie said. “Was he in a car wreck or something?”

“No,” Annie said. “Nothing like that.”

“Well, you can ask me here, can’t you? We’re trying to get the horses tucked in for the night. It’s supposed to get cold tonight.”

“I’ll get their blankets on,” Izzy said. “You can go in the lounge.”

“Right,” Tulsie said. “Okay. We can go right in here.”

The lounge was directly across from the grooming area, a small room with barnwood walls and a grouping of a beat-up leather couch and a pair of armchairs, their worn upholstery covered with saddle blankets. The overhead light was a fake wagon wheel set with fake lanterns. Tulsie went to a corner of the couch and tucked herself into it. She looked terrified.

“You’re scaring me,” she admitted.

“I don’t want you to be scared, Tulsie,” Annie said, taking a seat. “You haven’t done anything wrong. We just have some questions. We’ve seen a video from Outlaw, from Saturday night.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. You wanna tell us what went on there?”

She gave a nervous little laugh and dodged eye contact. “Well, it wasn’t what it looked like. It was just…”

“Just start from the beginning,” Annie said. “You and Cody went out…”

“No, actually, it was a girls’ night with a couple friends. Cody didn’t want me to go, but it was my friend Celeste’s night out to celebrate her divorce—which Cody didn’t think was anything anyone should celebrate, so he was mad about it, and he didn’t want me to go. But then I got mad, and I went anyway, which I shouldn’t have done. I should have just stayed home. Cody’s been working extra hours, nights lately, and he was tired, and I just should have stayed home with him. So, it’s my fault what happened.”

“So you and your girlfriends went dancing at Outlaw…”

“Yeah, and we were just dancing with a bunch of different people. Guys that we knew. It didn’t mean anything. We were just having fun.”

“So, you know Marc Mercier?” Stokes asked.

“I know him through Cody. The Parcelles do construction. They take down old houses and do remodels and stuff, so they do business with the Merciers all the time, selling them the salvage. Cody and Marc have been friendly since Marc came back to town. I didn’t think he’d mind so much. We were just dancing.”

“So why did Cody show up if he didn’t want to go out?” Annie asked, already knowing the answer.

Tulsie shrugged with her good shoulder and looked down at a scratch on the leather couch, trying to rub it away with a fingertip.

“He doesn’t trust you?”

She kept her head down, fighting the rise of tears. “He just gets jealous. That’s just how he is,” she said in a tiny voice. “It’s just because he wants me all to himself. He doesn’t want other guys thinking that they could have me, ’cause I’m his.”

She was his, a piece of property, his toy to play with and no one else’s. She didn’t own herself, wasn’t supposed to think or feel or do anything separate from him. She was a possession. As demure as she was being in her explanation, Annie had no doubt there was a side of Tulsie that rebelled, at least internally, a side that pushed at Cody’s boundaries and probably even goaded him a little. She was a cute, sassy little thing with a flirty smile, and Cody Parcelle had not ground that out of her altogether. Yet.

“So Cody came looking for you,” Stokes said. “And he and Marc got into it.”

“It was so stupid,” Tulsie said, rolling her eyes. “We were just having fun dancing. Marc’s married, too. Nothing was gonna happen. But Cody had been drinking, and he gets mean when he drinks. He’s not really like that.”

“It looked like Cody hit Marc pretty hard,” Stokes said. “And then the bouncer broke it up. What happened then?”

“They both got thrown out.”

“Did they keep fighting in the parking lot?”

“No. Cody was just mouthing off.”

“What’d he say?”

“Just dumb stuff. Dumb stuff boys say trying to sound tough.”

“Like what?”

She hesitated, clearly not comfortable with repeating the words.

“We’ll be interviewing other people who were there, Tulsie,” Annie said. “You might as well tell us.”

The girl swiped a tear from her cheek. “He told Marc if he ever caught him messing around with me again he’d kill him. He didn’t mean it,” she hastened to add. “He would never do that.”

The guy who had beaten the shit out of her on more than one occasion would never be violent. Annie couldn’t stop herself from shaking her head a little.

“Marc just walked away and left.”

“And what did you and Cody do?” Annie asked.

“I went home,” she said simply, though Annie was willing to bet there had been nothing simple about it. When they interviewed other bar patrons who had been there, they were going to say the couple had fought. Cody had probably ordered her to go home, and she had gone, knowing full well he wasn’t done taking his anger out on her.

“And Cody?” Stokes asked. “Did he go home, too?”

“No. Not right away.”

“What time did he get home?”

“Around two, two thirty.”

Ample time for him to have gone after Marc Mercier to settle the demented jealous score in his head.

“Mrs. Parcelle, does your husband own a shotgun?” Stokes asked.

Tulsie pressed her hand across her mouth as if to keep from crying out and squeezed her eyes closed tight. She nodded.

“Do you know where it is?”

“In his truck,” she said, her breath hitching unevenly. She pulled her feet up on the couch, tucking herself into a ball, making herself as small as possible.

“Have you talked to your husband today?” Stokes asked.

She shook her head. “He doesn’t want me to bother him when he’s away.”

“We’ll need his cell number,” Stokes said.

Annie moved from the chair to the couch, to be a little nearer, a silent show of support. “We just need to talk to him,” she said. “He’ll need to fill in that timeline. If he hasn’t done anything, it won’t be a problem.”

Tulsie started to cry in earnest, as if her world was ending right then and there. Annie slipped an arm around her shoulders.

“It’ll be all right,” she said quietly, though that seemed unlikely.

“Tulsie,” she asked, knowing this was the moment to press, but hating doing it, just the same, “when Cody got home that night, did he hurt you?”

Nodding, the girl turned into her, buried her face in Annie’s shoulder, and sobbed her heart out.

—

Dozer Cormier lived in a single-wide trailer in the Country Estates mobile home park halfway between Bayou Breaux and Luck. It was definitely in the country, but there was nothing estate-like about it. The collection of old mobile homes squatted over five acres like so many rusty metal toadstools. The most impressive thing about the place was that it had somehow managed not to be swept away by a tornado or a flood in forty-odd years.

Lights were on in Dozer’s place. Nick pulled in alongside a nice tricked-out white Chevy Silverado pickup truck that was easily worth more than the house it was parked in front of. Good ol’ boy priorities.

Dozer answered the door in boxer shorts and a Ragin’ Cajuns T-shirt that didn’t quite accommodate his belly. His eyes went round at the sight of Nick.

“Expecting company?” Nick asked, arching a brow at the getup.

“What the hell do you want?” Dozer asked. His breath reeked of beer and boudin sausage.

“I have a couple more questions for you, Mr. Cormier. May I come in?”

“Why?”

“Because me, I think you may not want your neighbors to look out their windows and see you being questioned by a sheriff’s detective on your front porch. I’ve been all over the news lately. They might get the wrong idea about you.”

“Fuck ’em,” Dozer said, but he stepped back just the same.

The trailer stank of decades of cigarette smoke that had soaked into the acoustic tile ceiling and the cheap fake wood paneling. Dozer stood in the middle of the kitchen looking like a giant in a dollhouse. The seven-foot ceilings barely cleared the top of his bald head. For sure he had to duck to get through the doorways. He probably had to walk sideways to get down the hall to the bedrooms.

“Mr. Bichon, he’s gonna be disappointed in you, Dozer,” Nick said, nodding at the collection of beer cans on the kitchen table.

Dozer frowned. “Ain’t against the law to have a beer.”

“ Mais non , it’s not. But he’s under the impression you’re walking the straight and narrow during the week so you can give your best while working for him, the man who wants to take a chance on you. And here you are, clearly under the influence on a Tuesday night, and it ain’t even hardly past suppertime. You gonna go through another six-pack before you pass out? Mr. Bichon gonna be sad to hear it.”

“Why would you tell him?” Dozer asked, leaning back against the kitchen counter to disguise the fact that he wasn’t quite steady on his feet.

“Because me, I’m an asshole,” Nick said bluntly. “You don’t give me some straight answers, I’m gonna fuck up your life any way I can.”

“Answers about what? I already told you, I don’t know nothing! I ain’t done nothing wrong!”

“Really, though?” Nick asked making a face. “I think maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough yet.”

He looked down at the family room end of the trailer, where an enormous flat-screen TV showing Wheel of Fortune took up almost the entire end of the narrow room.

“You see, I pull up next to that fancy truck outside. That’s gotta be what? Forty, fifty grand? And then I come in here and you got that big-screen TV. Watching football on that gotta be like sitting on the fifty-yard line. Those are some expensive toys. And I’m gonna bet you got a boat somewhere, too.”

“So? I got a good job, me. Ain’t none of your business how I spend my money!”

“Yeah, well, all these toys look like more than you make hammering nails,” Nick said, though he didn’t truly find it all that suspicious. Dozer Cormier wasn’t wasting his money on his accommodations or on an expensive wardrobe. He wasn’t wearing a Rolex or diamond-crusted neck chains. He didn’t have a wife or children to eat up his income. He spent his earnings on the things that mattered to him—his truck and his sports—like many a young man in these parts.

“You got a second income, Dozer?” he asked, just to keep digging. Just to make him nervous. “You got a side job? You might be more ambitious than anyone gives you credit for.”

Cormier looked away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Copper. That’s what I’m talking about,” Nick said, prowling around the room, making a show of looking at random pieces of mail on the kitchen table, spying a little burner cell phone half hidden by a take-out menu from a Cajun restaurant in Luck.

Dozer stepped over and snatched away a pile of junk mail. “Quit touching my stuff!”

Nick gave him a hard look. “You want me to go get a warrant and come back here in a bad mood?”

There was nothing in this house he had the least bit of interest in. Nor did he expect there was much worth finding with regard to his case. It was an empty threat made for no other reason than to make Dozer Cormier uncomfortable.

“I want you to fuck the fuck off,” Dozer said, taking a menacing step toward him. Everyone Nick had spoken to had said Dozer could make bad choices when he was drinking, that he could get mean and reckless, and there he was.

Nick stood his ground and smiled. “You gonna try to intimidate me, Dozer? Because I’ll tell you right now, I don’t care that you’re the size of a goddamn elephant. You don’t scare me.”

Cormier didn’t know what to make of that. He had six inches and 150 pounds on Nick. How could a man that much smaller than him, and a dozen or more years older, not be intimidated by him?

“You can’t bully me, Dozer,” Nick said. “And no matter how mean you think you are, you will never in your wildest dreams be meaner than I am.”

But he was just drunk enough to take another step forward. With two quick moves, Nick swept the big man’s feet out from under him and landed him on his ass on the kitchen floor with a thud that shook the house.

“You just had to, didn’t you?” Nick said, shaking his head. “Now we’ll see if you’re smart enough to learn a lesson. I’ll give you that one for free, but you need to rethink your attitude here, Dozer. I guarantee you do not want me for an enemy.”

“I wouldn’t want you for a friend, either,” Dozer grumbled, heaving himself up off the floor. He staggered a step to the table, picked up an open can of Michelob, and drained it.

“Why are you drinking so much?” Nick asked. “Your crew boss says you’ve been a bit off these days. He’s keeping that from Donnie Bichon, you know. Giving you a chance to straighten up. Is something bothering you? You seem stressed. What’s that about?”

“Nothing,” Dozer said, scowling. It was clear he wanted to get physically away, but there was nowhere for him to go unless he retreated down the hall. Nick blocked his way out of the kitchen, and now he at least knew enough not to test that boundary again.

“Have you gotten yourself into something you can’t get out of?”

“No.”

“Are you and Marc mixed up in something?”

“No! Like what?”

“Here’s the thing, Dozer: I’m looking for Marc Mercier, who runs a salvage business that for sure deals in copper. You work for Donnie Bichon, who tells me he’s getting materials ripped off on a regular basis. And I’m looking for Robbie Fontenot, who told a cop he might have a line on some copper thieves. And as it happens, y’all know each other. And that all smells about as good to me as this house trailer.”

“If you don’t like it here, leave.”

“Are you stealing from Donnie?”

“No!”

“And then there’s Marc driving around in his fancy new Ford Raptor, pulling a boat I couldn’t afford,” Nick went on. “Is Marc dealing in stolen copper?”

“How would I know? I don’t work for him. Ask Luc. If anybody’s up to something, it’d be him. Marc’s a straight shooter. Everybody knows that.”

“Well, everybody says it, at least,” Nick said. “What about Robbie Fontenot?”

“I told you, I haven’t seen him.”

“I know what you told me, Dozer. That don’t mean I believe you.”

“Nothing I can do about that.”

“No, but you should know that my detectives are even now looking at surveillance video from downtown from Monster Bash. They will look at every store video, every bar video, every Ring doorbell video, every cell phone video taken by a citizen. And if they find even ten seconds of video with you, Marc, and Robbie together, you will have some serious explaining to do.”

“We wouldn’t hang out with him,” Dozer said. “We ain’t been friends in years.”

“Because you ruined his life?” Nick asked bluntly.

Dozer looked at the floor. “That was an accident.”

“Doesn’t really matter, does it? Damage is damage. Does he hold a grudge?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Dozer said. “Can you leave now? I need to use the bathroom.”

“I’m not done. You told me you went out with Marc Saturday night,” Nick said. “Where’d you go?”

“I don’t remember.”

Nick took a big deep breath and huffed an impatient sigh. “Mr. Cormier, my people will go to every fucking rathole bar in this parish until they find out where you were Saturday night. But the more work you make us do, the less friendly I get. Now, did you go to Outlaw Saturday night with Marc?”

“No. I don’t dance.”

“How embarrassing,” Nick remarked. “A Cajun boy who can’t dance. How’d that happen?” He shook his head at the shame of it. “Did you talk to Marc after he’d been there?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Really? He got in a fight over a girl, got punched in the face, and he got thrown out of the bar. I think you’d remember him telling you that.”

“Then he must not have.”

“Do you know Cody Parcelle?”

“Yeah. What about him?”

“Cody Parcelle busted Marc right in the mouth for dancing with his wife.”

Dozer shrugged. “Am I supposed to care?”

“You maybe should, yeah,” Nick said, “?’cause you’re telling me you haven’t heard from your best friend since Saturday night, when he apparently dumped your sorry ass to go dancing, and the last anyone saw of him was him getting punched in the face and thrown out of a bar, and now some people think he’s lying in the morgue at Our Lady with his face shot off with a shotgun. So yeah, me, I think you would care about that. You have a curious lack of response, Mr. Cormier. I wonder why that is.”

“Maybe we’re not as close as you think,” Dozer said.

“Maybe you’re the one killed him,” Nick said, mostly just to see the reaction.

The shock on Dozer’s face seemed genuine. “What?! No! No fucking way! Are you out of your head? Why would I kill Marc?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you were mad he went dancing without you. Maybe you were mad he didn’t invite you to go hunting Sunday. You’ve demonstrated to me here tonight that you have a temper when you drink, you’re impulsive, and you don’t make the best choices.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” the big man muttered to himself, turning around in the kitchen as if to look for witnesses to this madness. “You’re crazy, Fourcade.”

“You’re not the first to say it,” Nick remarked. “But a lot of them that did, they’re sitting in prison now. So the joke is on them, yeah?”

He smiled that unnerving, predatory smile.

A fine sheen of sweat glazed Cormier’s bald head. “I need to go to the bathroom,” he said, looking longingly down the dark hall.

The little burner phone on the table began to vibrate, and Dozer’s face dropped.

“And there’s that phone you told me you don’t have,” Nick said. He picked it up and tossed it across to Cormier, who caught it like he was catching a hand grenade.

“You really shouldn’t lie to me, Dozer,” Nick said. “That’s not gonna work out for you.”

Dozer stared at the phone like it might explode.

“Aren’t you gonna answer?”

“No. They’ll call back,” he said stupidly.

“I bet they will,” Nick said, moving toward the door. “If it turns out to be Marc, you give him my regards and tell him to call his wife.”