Free Gator Aide by Jessica Speart Page B

more human. I told myself I could use a break from my daily routine of chocolate bars and po’boy sandwiches. But deep down inside, I knew it was much more than that.
    We rolled past a succession of sugarcane fields as Santou regaled me with stories from his childhood on Bayou Teche. I heard about his father, who had worked the swamps collecting crawfish and frogs to be sold to pricey New Orleans restaurants, and of his grandmother, who had been a fountain of Cajun folklore for the region. As a blue heron took flight from the bayou’s edge, Santou told me to quickly make a wish before the bird flew out of sight and it would come true.
    “I wish you’d tell me what was so confidential that I had to leave the room for.”
    Santou gave wide berth to a dead cat lying in the middle of the road, all four legs stiffly raised in a salute to the setting sun. “Hillard admitted to sleeping with Vaughn a few times. Says she tempted him till he just broke down and sinned. Made it sound like that little girl couldn’t keep her hands off him. But then Jesus spoke to Hillard and told him to clean up his act, what with the election coming up and all, you know.”
    Santou’s expression remained deadpan.
    “So now, while he lusts after other women in his heart, he’s taken a vow to lie only in the arms of that sweet little wife of his. Hillard said he’s truly sorry about what happened to Vaughn, that he doesn’t know anything, and he sorely hopes she found the comfort of God before she died. Of course, the whole time he was quaking in that big leather chair of his. Seems he’s worried what this kind of information could do to his campaign if it leaked out, to say nothing of his newly acquired upstanding reputation.”
    It was no wonder that Gunter had felt safe leaving the room. I remembered Hillard’s parting promise to Santou of better things to come.
    “And you swallowed that line?”
    Santou pointed out an egret camouflaged in the tall grass, taking in the last rays of day. Behind the bird was a factory exuding exhaust flames as bright as the setting sun.
    “I’m just throwing Hillard a little rope, is all. I thought he might have been paying her rent, but that theory went up in flames.”
    “Why is that?”
    Santou flashed a smile. “I paid a visit to Vaughn’s landlord this morning. He said he always got a check from her promptly on the first of the month. So, there’s no proof there. And Hillard swears he stopped seeing her when he announced his candidacy for mayor and became a soldier for Christ.”
    “Do we have any reason to believe anything Hillard says?”
    “I don’t know,
ch
èr
e
. We have here a former poacher whose previous partner still conducts his business out of a social club in Queens. Then there’s Vinnie Bertucci, who’s playing butler but looks like he cracks heads for a living. And all this is without even taking into account Hillard’s so-called advisor on foreign affairs, Adolph or Gunter or whatever his name is. That guy strikes me as any number of things. Unfortunately, a liaison for business isn’t one of them.”
    The sun had just set, dousing the sky a fluorescent shade of purple as we pulled up to a plain concrete building in Breaux Bridge. The pounding of music telegraphed the fact that there was more to the place than could be seen from outside. The soaring strain of fiddles and the honky-tonk notes of an accordion filled a parking lot jammed with pickup trucks, complete with hound dogs lying in the back, parked next to Grand Ams with couples necking in the front.
    We made our way through the door, squeezing past countless bodies to enter a rustic room lined with long picnic tables set end to end, where the crowd sat together family-style. Overhead fans twirled as men, women, and children two-stepped around the floor in an oblong circle. A flock of business cards tacked to the ceiling fluttered in unison in the artificial breeze, their clatter mimicking an invading army of locusts.