maybe I can help,” Connell temporized.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Walt!” Amelia beamed through her tears. “I knew you’d take care of me.”
She thrust into his hands a paper-wrapped parcel.
“I baked y’all a chocolate cake for lunch when you go to get that no-good man! And I fixed up some salted cashew nuts, too.”
Her guile had caught him totally off guard. He had accepted the present. Nothing to do but resign himself to a sixty-mile drive down the Mississippi Delta where the Cajuns convert undersized oranges into fragrant, blasting wine; a no-man’s land, where a century or more ago, Lafitte’s pirates found refuge.
* * * *
The next morning Connell thrust Amelia’s gift of chocolate cake and cashew nuts into the parcel compartment and headed down the west bank. He spent the forenoon searching small town jails as he worked his way down the Delta, but no news of Plato. His last chance was Venice, at the end of the highway.
Venice was half a dozen shacks plus a general store not much larger than a piano box. The girl behind the counter was uncommonly attractive. One of those substantial Cajun women, with luxurious curves, and plump, firm breasts as inviting as her amiable smile. Connell, however, managed to shift his glance to her dark eyes and began his oft repeated query concerning Plato and his red flivver.
Marie shook her head. Her eyes suddenly became somber as she said, “You’re too late.”
“What do you mean?” Connell, catching her by the wrist, felt her tremble.
“I didn’t have any orange wine,” she began, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. “So he went back.”
Something was distinctly salty.
“You’d better tell me,” he said in a quiet voice that impelled her attention.
Marie was wavering, but she was afraid. Finally she compromised, “We can talk better in back here.”
Connell followed her to the rear of the tiny store. The crude, primitive room contained an oil stove, a small wooden table. In the further corner was a bed.
“You won’t never see your man again,” began Marie, drawing up a chair for Connell. “Not with walking dead men like they got at Ducoin’s plantation.”
“Walking dead men!” he echoed, leaping to his feet. “Who’s Ducoin? What—”
But Connell’s query was cut short. The Cajun girl’s hand closed about his arm, drawing him to her side.
“I’ll tell you later,” she whispered. Her dark, smouldering eyes were still haunted, but her lips suggested reasons for delay.
Under other circumstances, Connell would have welcomed the hint, but something about her furtive glance and unnatural eagerness combined with her sinister remarks to repel him. But Connell made little progress. As he drew away, her arm slipped about his neck and her ripe, voluptuous curves pressed him closely as she pleaded, “Don’t go…I’m terribly scared…”
She was. But Connell wasn’t. And that warm, plump body was as inflaming as orange wine. He drew her to him, stroked her black hair, caressed firm flesh that trembled at his touch, and tried to entice her further remarks about walking dead men.
However, it did not work as he intended. His presence did reassure her, but the contact made his pulse pound like like a rivetting hammer, and the sudden rise and fall of her breasts showed that it was becoming mutual.…
Marie’s dark eyes were no longer haunted by anything but a desire to get closer. Presently she forgot to brush away an exploring hand, and yielded her eager lips.
And then Connell learned that the Delta offers more than orange wine.…
* * * *
It was close to sunset before he remembered Plato and renewed his inqueries.
“Honest, I couldn’t help it,” Marie protested. “I didn’t have any wine left and just as that man was going to leave, in comes Ducoin with a load. And he tells Plato to come along, he’d fix him up. And I didn’t dare warn him.”
“Wait till I get at Ducoin!”
“Don’t!” implored Marie. “He’ll know I told you. And you can’t do nothing. Plato’s a walking corpse by now—and I’ll be one, too, if Ducoin finds out—”
She tried to detain Connell, but he broke clear before her full-blown fascinations could conspire with her sinister hints. She had merely delayed the quest; and Connell headed up the river, toward that mysterious plantation.
Ducoin’s house loomed up above the surrounding orange groves, nearly a quarter of a mile from the highway. Its remnants of white paint made it resemble a gaunt, ancient tomb. As Connell pulled up, he saw a Model T parked in a clump of shrubbery. Plato’s decrepit red Lizzie!
And then Connell received a shock. A file of blacks emerged from the orange groves. Their black faces were vacant. They shambled toward the left wing of the house with the grotesque gait of animated dummies.
The sodden, lifeless clump, clump, clump of their feet sounded like clods of earth dropping on a coffin. Their arms dangled limp as rags.
Connell shuddered. No wonder that the ignorant Cajuns considered them walking dead men.
Clump, clump, clump. The most poverty stricken and oppressed black laborers jest and chatter at the end of a day’s work; but these black men stalked in silence broken only by the shuffling crunch of their flat feet.
Following the file came a white man who wore boots and riding breeches. His heartless, handsome face was tanned and deeply lined. Intelligent but relentless. His dark eyes were as cryptic as his smile as he confronted Connell.
“Looking for someone?”
“Yes. A man named Plato,” said Connell. “Are you Pierre Ducoin?”
“That’s the name,” admitted the taskmaster. “But there are no strangers on this plantation.”
The more Connell saw of Ducoin, the less he liked him. There was something uncanny about the man.
As Connell hesitated, something compelled him to glance towards the veranda that ran the full length of the house, some ten feet above the ground level. Framed by a French window was a girl whose dark eyes and lovely, delicate features for an instant made him forget that she was clad only in a chiffon robe which, half parted, revealed enticing glimpses of silken legs, and a body to which clung the caressing haze of sheer fabric that betrayed slender, olive-tinted curves…the amorous inward sweep of her waist…pert breasts that any hand larger than her own could conceal.…
Her lips were silently moving, and she was gesturing for him to leave at once. But she had overlooked her own loveliness. Connell was staying.
“I’m Walt Connell, and I think you’re mistaken,” was the retort. “Let me talk to your men. One of them might know about him.”
That play was better than making a liar of Ducoin by mentioning Plato’s flivver, half concealed in the shadows.
For a moment Ducoin’s eyes flared with a light that Connell was certain could not be the reddish sunset glow; his aquiline features tightened, then suddenly he smiled and amiably agreed.
“Do that in the morning. Too late now. This plantation reaches all the way out to the bay, and most of my crew is quartered at the further end. Take us an hour or more to go out, and it’s getting dark. Make yourself at home—there is plenty of room here, and you can look in the morning.”
A grim-faced black woman served dinner in a vast, high-ceiled room facing the west. Fried chicken, Creole gumbo, rice, and corn bread. All tastily seasoned, except for an utter lack of salt. Connell, reaching for the only shaker on the table, then noticed it contained only