Chapter Text
#
May 1st, 2012
Coors and a bowl of salted peanuts, stale, tired like the dead air between them: a lot of it tastes different, a lot of it the same. Schlitz was the cop beer in the old days but Rust didn’t drink. He smoked, and he smokes now, and he watches Marty watch him like he’s a feral thing found on the side of the road. Contempt turned into wariness, or maybe the other way around. Where were they ever headed, except here? Except running on to this? Sticky tables and beer and angel of the fucking morning.
After ordering, they don’t speak for a while. Just sort of stare. And when Rust talks, when Rust does talk, Marty looks like he wasn’t expecting that. For him to break the silence, hell, he used to like a silence. World was just so much fucking noise. But then you get to hating it, marinate in it too long. Ice-dark silences provoking only dust. So he says, “You look like you’re doing alright.”
“Father Time has his way with us all. Looks like you must’ve pissed him off.”
Rust takes a long drag of smoke in answer. There ain’t no such thing, he doesn’t say, being that the world is regulated by cosmic impassivity and among those forces time ranks only as an illusion, a snide joke. Marty heard it all already. There’s that, that Marty heard it all already. What new does Rust have to say? What ain’t he said already?
“Why we here?” Marty says. Spreading his hands wide.
This, maybe. Rust shifts. “Alright. Y’know that thing the State PD is asking about, the Lake Charles murder. Shouldn’t that’ve been in the papers or online somewhere by now? I mean, we can’t trust them. If they’re gonna cover something like that up, who knows what else they’ve covered up. What you think?”
“I think you don’t look particularly healthy. Listening to you talk, your eyes–” Rust looks away from him “–you seem kinda brittle, Rust.”
“Most of the last decade I spent stone drunk. Functional, but hammered.” Marty don’t look like he agrees with that, the functionality; Rust also doesn’t say, fuck’d you know about what I look like not functional. And, you weren’t there. “Went back to Alaska. Spent eight years working fishing boats, bars.”
“Oh, I thought you didn’t like the cold.”
“I hate it. Alright, and I come back here to Louisiana for the first time in 2010.”
“And why is that?”
“The same reason I’m sitting across the table from you now. A man remembers his debts.”
Marty, pathological: “I don’t dwell in the past.”
“Well, it must be nice.”
“I’m not–” Somebody brushes by their table, close enough there’s the drag of old perfume, cheap shit to paint the roof of Rust’s mouth blue lavender. Honey-blonde hair and tight calves disappearing down into cowboy boots, hell, things Rust notices because Marty notices because Rust’s expecting him to notice, watching for it, and the corners of Marty’s mouth tighten with the knowledge that he’s watching for it. Never did like being judged. Marty snaps, “I ain’t fucking interested in whatever it is you think you owe me. I certainly don’t owe you shit and the way I figure it I’m happy to let your end of that contract go unful-fucking-filled.”
“Contract. You figure this a contract?”
“Deal with the goddamn devil, whoever tied me to you.”
“Blame Quesada, if you want. Or whoever arranged my transfer that first time. Nah, but I didn’t fucking choose this either. Didn’t choose you. But I’m here now, I am still here, and you done tied me to you the moment you popped Ledoux in the head and I cleared up your goddamn mess for you all nice and pretty. So maybe blame yourself.”
“Blame my– God, you’re still a prick. Yeah, no, I’m not hanging around to have this conversation with you. Figure I’m gonna finish this beer and say so long. I’m not much of a drinker nowadays. In fact, I hadn’t had a drop in three weeks before I ran into you.”
Rust swallows this. Leaning forward, Marty’s mad, Rust is too. But there’s this. “I don’t need you to drink, Marty. I need you to help me.”
“Why would I? They say you can’t account for your time. They got eyewitnesses, placing you at the Lake Charles crime scene. You got some storage shed that you won’t let ‘em look at.”
“That’s right.”
“Why not? Why not shoot straight with them? You’re innocent. Help them stop wasting their time.”
“Fucking since when did guilt and innocence define the State PD, huh? Come the fuck on. I don’t know the sprawl of this thing, alright? The people I’m after, they’re all over. They’re in a lot of different things. Pieces. Family trees. The only way for you to understand what I’m onto here is for me to show you. You gotta come see what I got.”
“No. You know what? I don’t think I’ve been very clear with you, Rust. If you were drowning, I’d throw you a fucking barbell. Why would I ever help you?”
There, there ain’t much Rust ain’t heard these long years, these days, these endless days. Times in Alaska when the sun don’t rise, or else don’t set. Eternal times. Who says time’s not purgatory, not punishment, they’re lying to themselves, they’re deluding themselves by the rationality of the clock which ain’t rational, which ain’t real. Marty used to watch the clock til five sometimes, the slow days. Rust could’ve told him, you ain’t even wasting it, time. You got shit all but sand in a broken hourglass. And Rust doesn’t like him and certainly doesn’t rely on him but also, also, he thinks maybe this will kill him. And not in the way he’s always been waiting for.
Marty stands up. Rust doesn’t follow. Rust’s not even thinking, deep into the day’s fourth drink and the abstract stinging of his own eyes, Alaska maybe loosened something inside him, gave him that worst of abilities back, the ability to cry: “Because you have a debt.”
Marty stops, his shoulders stiffen. Maybe he’ll turn. Rust — Rust a fool — allows himself to imagine a world in which he turns. A world in which they solve this together, they grind it out and start thinking, really thinking, pavements and hard man-hours, answer to nobody but themselves, they solve it. Marty turns. Let this be that world — it’s the world of shit-all else, it’s the world where Rust wakes up wishing he hadn’t every fucking morning, the world in which he knows the sound a child’s bones, still soft, make under the wheels of an ‘84 Mercedes 230CE — let him have this, just this. Only this.
Marty doesn’t turn. Marty mutters under his breath, “Sanctimonious prick,” and Marty leaves.
They arrest Rust twenty-one days later.
#
TRANSCRIPT OF RECORDED INTERVIEW: COHLE, RUSTIN SPENCER
DATE/TIME:
Tuesday, May 22, 2012, 1610 hours
OFFICERS CONDUCTING INTERVIEW:
Detective Maynard Gilbough (MG), badge number ████████
Detective Thomas Papania (TP), badge number ████████
PERSON BEING INTERVIEWED:
Rustin Spencer Cohle (RC), date of birth November 6, 1964, Louisiana driver’s license number ████████████, social security number █████████
ALSO PRESENT:
Lucas Bellefontaine (LB), public defender
MG: Okay, Cohle. I think we all know why we’re here.
RC: What, I gotta answer that one? Defendant is refusing to answer. Yeah, I guess he is.
MG: We’ve talked before. Or, we were having a productive conversation, but you cut it short.
RC: Took it as a challenge, huh?
LB: Cohle.
RC: Nah, man, if the state’s interested in jamming somebody up there ain’t a lick of good you can do about it. Way I figure it, you’re a part of this circus just as much as the next guy. Just as much as him. Do I gotta ask who hired you?
LB: I’m a public defender. I’m here to–
RC: Ah, but defending the public from who?
MG: Cohle. You wanna talk about what you did?
RC: Why don’t you tell me more about what y’all think I did, and we can go from there.
TP: You killed somebody.
RC: I did. I killed a tweaker in a Motel 6 off I-10 and I paid for that, it’s all in that report still sealed under the desk of somebody way above any of our paygrades. Maybe they wouldn’t like me talking about that. Hell, maybe somebody should ask.
TP: You’re calling in favors now? Really? Surely you gotta know that time’s long past.
RC: Oh, I ain’t calling in favors. Debts, neither. You know I get to wondering, sometimes, deep places of the night, the things we owe to each other, as a species, as men. I think about it. Most of the time I wind up figuring it don’t even matter at all. We’re connected to each other by the shit we do to and for each other but all that’s just on accident, unhappy coincidence of brain and biology. What do I mean to you, ‘cept maybe a closed case, a commendation, a payrise? What’re you gonna owe me for giving it to you? I get shit all outta this deal.
MG: So you think we got a case.
RC: It don’t matter if you got a fucking case. You ain’t been listening?
MG: But you’re acknowledging the possibility that we could have a case.
RC: I’m acknowledging the possibility that fucking anything could happen, sure, like the State PD could roll over and admit when it’s wrong just the same as I could confess to eight murders and have it be true, how about that? But you ain’t gonna admit it and I ain’t gonna confess. If that means you don’t got a case, then you don’t got a case.
TP: Eight murders. That’s a lotta murders. See, I’m counting, we got the Motel 6 tweaker, then there’s the three you shot in Port Houston, what was that, February ‘93? Makes four. Who’re the other four?
LB: I’m sure my client was being hyperbolic for effect.
MG: Eight don’t come outta thin air.
RC: And how about this supposed case against me, huh? Does that come outta thin air? ‘Cause the way I see it, you’re pointing one way when they’re all escaping out the other, like a compass done got itself demagnetised. I ain’t your guy.
TP: What about Billy Lee Tuttle? Was he your guy?
RC: You really chose him for this, huh. Billy Lee Tuttle. I mean, I guess I shoulda known. Can’t nothing happen to them people without somebody taking the fall for it. Guess that somebody’s gonna be me.
MG: They say he overdosed.
TP: 2010.
MG: Same year you came on back to Louisiana.
TP: Somebody broke into his house. Know anything about that?
MG: You worked robbery back in Texas. Pick up any tricks?
TP: And then there’s your history of emptying a clip in the heads of people you don’t agree with.
RC: People I don’t agree with.
MG: You were talking about the Tuttles in 2002, right? Billy Lee in particular. You interviewed him. They suspended you pretty soon after.
RC: What do you agree with, detectives? While we’re on the subject. What are you willing to let fly?
MG: Seems to me like you’re willing to do just about anything in the interest of justice.
RC: Are you?
TP: We wanna see justice done, yeah. I mean, why be on the force if that ain’t what you’re looking for.
RC: Nah, see, that’s why you don’t fucking get it. It ain’t about looking for nothing. You walk in here looking for something and you already lost, you already fucking failed. You’re looking for something and it ain’t the truth, it’s your idea of the truth, it’s what you as a body think you oughta want and oughta find, entirely shaped by your own perceptions and your own desire to be a self, to impose yourself on that narrative. To find your own truth in that narrative. Justice, nah. Fucking justice. It’s a kangaroo court. A puppet show. And who’s pulling the strings? ‘Cause it ain’t you. Either you’re stupid or you’re lying if you’re saying it’s you.
LB: Detectives, I think it’s pretty clear my client isn’t going to answer these unfounded and frankly vague accusations. You’ve charged him, so question him on the charge.
MG: Alright. Did you kill Billy Lee Tuttle?
RC: No.
TP: You sure about that?
RC: See, here I’m getting the notion it don’t matter how I answer that question.
MG: Cohle–
RC: I want a phone call. And a different lawyer.
#
May 27th, 2012
It’s a Sunday when the prick comes leering out of the shadows, like Jesus, like a persecuting angel, martyr, whatever the fuck, here to chastise Marty for not going to church today the same as all the intervening Sundays since maybe 2009. Marty’s driving home with groceries (frozen), beers (cold), and the lazy warm feeling of an evening to be spent watching a Sergio Leone movie, maybe scanning the dating profiles, jerking off in the shower. This lazy warm feeling being one he’s trying to pull all the way over his head. He puts his keys in the door and only realizes it’s already open when he’s halfway through it. Drops the groceries — not the beers — on the floor and reaches for his gun at his hip and Rust fucking Cohle says, drawls, “Maybe you should just do it now. Sure would make everybody’s fucking day.”
Marty sags back against the wall. Scrubs a hand over his forehead, gun held in his fingers. “Jesus fucking Christ. Is this one of those things I oughta seen coming?”
“So you ain’t gonna shoot me? ‘Cause–”
“Rust,” he says. Gathering his strength. Finds it enough to close the door, switch on a light. Rust’s sprawled on the couch like he belongs there. One leg crossed over the other, elbow balanced on the arm of the couch as he smokes, which, looks like he’s been here smoking a long while, by the number of extinguished Camel Blues smoldering into ash in one of Marty’s ill-used cereal bowls. Profile stark and hair dirty, escaping out his ponytail. He looks tired. “Fuck are you doing here, really?”
“Don’t reckon I got much else left.”
“You don’t got this. I mean, shit, how do you know I won’t turn you in?”
“Guess I’m counting on your good nature.” The corners of his lips turn up, like that’s funny. He nods to the beers, still clinking in the bag. “Thought you said you weren’t much of a drinker no more.”
“Yeah, well, this last week I got a lot on my mind.”
He doesn’t look at all apologetic about that. “Well, since you got ‘em–”
Marty stares at him. Almost moves forward to pass him one and then stops, then remembers himself. The reason he’s been carrying his gun to the grocery store. “Did you kill Billy Lee Tuttle?”
Rust puts a fresh cigarette in his mouth. Lights it without breaking eye contact — that’s kinda new — and then looks away as he exhales, holds it between forefinger and thumb. “What you think?”
“What I– I ain’t PD no more. It don’t matter what I think. I can’t help you, man. You’re lucky it ain’t been in the news yet, lucky they don’t got ordinary civilians out looking for you, pointing you out in gas stations.”
“And why is that, huh? ‘Cause you know I ain’t a lucky person.”
“Maybe they’re embarrassed. It’s embarrassing, State PD hunting one of their own.”
“I ain’t one of their own.”
“No. No, figure you never were, not really.” Marty rubs a hand across the back of his neck, considers the beers again. “Really, man, what the fuck are you doing here, because if you piss me off then I’m gonna call Gilbough and Papania and I don’t wanna do that nearly as much as you don’t want me to do that, so. Where the fuck are we.”
“Didn’t wanna bother you with this. Really. Shit, you think I wanted to–” Rust closes his mouth. Waves a hand, the left hand, and then his face twists, fuck has he done to himself now? “Didn’t start with you. Started with people I knew working the corridor, a lot of the people are dead now but the noble crackhouse, now, that’s eternal. Only I can’t be around it, not when I got a job to do.”
“A job to do.”
“Our guy been out there, Marty. Our guy been killing all these long years and laughing at us, ‘cause we thought it was Ledoux. It wasn’t Ledoux.”
Marty can’t take this. “Ledoux–”
“Shit, I gotta nurse your fucking ego on this? Ledoux was a good kill, sure, but only if you got another good kill left in you. Keep a bullet back for the man who killed Dora Lange.”
“The Lake Charles thing.”
“Yeah, the Lake Charles thing.” Rust uncrosses his legs, sits forward. Lost none of that languid intensity, long ropey limbs poised like an idle threat. “There was no physical evidence connecting Dora to Ledoux’s place out in the woods. Meaning it probably didn’t happen out there. Nobody was in a hurry to bring that up.”
“Including you.”
He waves his cigarette, conceding it as much as he concedes anything. “Then you got women and children going missing, all taken from areas within a ten mile radius of schools that were funded by Tuttle’s Wellspring Initiative.”
“Well, that’s correlation, not causation, and you’re bringing up Tuttle to me now? Right fucking now?”
“Can’t hardly not, can I? Being as you’re looking at that phone like you think I did it.”
Marty takes his eyes off his landline. Not that he’d been thinking of calling, hell, would chafe worse than sandpaper to call. More an awareness of what he should be doing. What he ought.
“Listen, why was Tuttle so interested in the Lange case, huh? Remember Charlie Lange said what Ledoux told him, said there’s a group of men, sacrifices, well, I think Tuttle recognised the scene. That’s why he came down there jiminy quick with a fucking taskforce and that’s why he tripped out when I talked to him in ‘02.”
“What did you do, Rust?”
Rust looks at him a long moment. Sits back on the couch, crosses his legs at the knee again. “I talked to somebody went to one of those schools, man. Said they took pictures, when the kids were asleep. The kinda pictures it ain’t legal to take. This whole thing, it goes back to those schools. Like the school Rianne Oliver attended, and Marie Fontenot. Those old Tuttle schools.”
“Fuck are you saying to me? You saying– you saying Billy Lee Tuttle’s our killer? ‘Cause, shit, something bad must’ve happened to you out there in Alaska if you think you’re gonna get anywhere spouting that shit to me.”
“This whole thing started in Erath. That little township around there, alright, that’s where the Tuttle family is from. Now, it used to be a pirate hideout. Then they turned it into plantations and whatnot. Had a very rural sense of Mardi Gras. Y’know, the men on horses, animal masks, and such.”
“Courir de Mardi Gras.”
“That’s right. Now, they had an annual winter festival, alright, heavy on the Saturnalia, a place where that Santeria and Voudon all mashed together. Now, I got–” He reaches into the satchel slung on the couch beside him, old beat up thing probably came right out of the old red footlocker, Crash’s footlocker, why’s Marty remembered that? And he brings out a stack of photos and he hands them over and Marty doesn’t want to see but he does, he sees, he looks. Antlers and devil traps and context they didn’t have, they didn’t have it. That’s not fucking on him.
“Why didn’t you give these to Papania and Gilbough while you still could, man? Before they hauled you in and made it so–”
“Made it so I can’t do nothing without it being in some way incriminating, huh? Glad to see you ain’t gone totally dull. No, even before they arrested me, they’re wrapped up in this thing. Pawns in it, maybe.”
“Come on.”
“Look, Eddie Tuttle is the goddamn senator of this state. The late Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle is his cousin. I’m telling you, it’s a fucking family thing. Eddie Tuttle is the reason the Lake Charles thing never made the wire. And then there’s me.”
Marty’s looking at the photos again. Girl in a blindfold, antlers. Sometimes things just look like something else. He says, “What did you do to Billy Lee Tuttle?”
“Marty. You gotta help me out on this. Only way they hold off looking at me is if they’re looking at somebody else, the guy actually did all this. The guy we shoulda got seventeen years back. And the only way they’re gonna look at him is if they got no choice, if we make ‘em look at him.”
“We. There is no we, man, how can I make you fucking get this? Listen, maybe you got something, maybe you don’t. But the way you’re talking about the Tuttles, State PD, you gotta forgive me if I’m thinking maybe this is you taking it a little bit personal. And that’s me being generous. ‘Cause it sounds fucking delusional.”
“Personal, it ain’t personal. Don’t none of this got shit to do with me. I’m here trying to do right by what we done wrong. And I tried it without you, Marty, I didn’t wanna bother you with it but I figure now I got no choice.”
“It’s got shit to do with you,” Marty says. “They gotta have something, if they charged you with it. Killing Tuttle.”
Rust looks at him a long moment. Takes something else out of the bag, a VHS tape in a plastic bag. “You got gloves?”
“I got–”
He just gestures with the tape. Marty doesn’t want to know what the fuck is on it, but still, he crosses the room to the kitchen, finds the rubber gloves he uses when he’s bleaching the fucking drains, puts the tape in the player.
Regrets it within a second; loathes it a minute later.
Watches them rape, murder. Watches with the sense that he’s separating from some past self he used to be, through the looking glass into a different fucking world. There ain’t no going back after this. And part of him hates Rust for making him watch it and more of him hates himself for even indulging this, for staying his hand on his phone to call Papania, Gilbough, 911. For not throwing Rust out when he had the chance. Chance, he had a chance to do a lot of things, once.
“That little girl’s Marie Fontenot,” Rust says. Coming back around from the kitchen, where he’d taken the bowl of cigarette butts, trailing smoke with him. Holding the bowl and his smoke in just one hand.
“You– did you watch all of that?”
“I had to, to see if any of the men took off their masks. None did. Marty, I won’t avert my eyes, not again.”
There is no fucking again. Marty would kill after this; Marty wants to kill. Marty says, “Did you kill Tuttle?”
Rust just looks at him.
Figure maybe that’s answer enough.
“Fuck, Rust. You got something– you got something more than just conjecture, tying him to that tape? ‘Cause I can’t– you gotta be sure.”
“I found this in his safe in Baton Rouge. He been doing this, man, they all been doing this. We know they been doing this with just as much certainty as you had when you clipped Ledoux in ‘95: you telling me that weren’t enough certainty? You telling me you been struggling to get to sleep nights?”
“Rust,” Marty says. Not sure what he’s asking now. There’s no calling Gilbough, no calling Papania. No calling 911. He knows Rust is on the run because word travels, grapevine, Marty still got friends in high cop places. Hears things. Heard this: you know your old partner, Cohle, they charged him with murder. Can you believe that? You ever think– I mean, there was always rumors he was screwy, junkie burnout, but a killer– killed a Tuttle, no less– and they’re looking for him. He got away. If anybody was gonna get away–
“I ain’t asking you to fight State PD for me, man. Just need a little interference. Resources, checking names, checking tax records. I need time so I can fix this. So they can’t cover it up no more.”
“And that’ll get them off your back?”
Rust shrugs. “Maybe.”
Maybe. Billy Lee Tuttle, no, there ain’t no maybe, but Marty doesn’t say this. Rust, eyeing the grave like a lover, likely already knows. Marty wants to hit him. Marty wants to throw him out, let him suffer in the hot night, maybe send him back to those tweakers he was crashing with in the first place, did he get high? Is he high? Marty looks closer. Got some mania about him, in the dim light, but his pupils are the ordinary size. That strangled twitchiness about him, it’s only the standard, for a Rust scared of his own shadow, a Rust Marty mainly saw at the Longhorn, at office Christmas parties. Thing Marty has missed. It hits him hard, that he’s missed it. Why the fuck has he missed it.
He says, before he thinks, “Fuck, okay. Fine.”
“Fine?” Rust repeats. Gone a little wary, eyes wide, like he don’t believe it. Hell, Marty don’t believe it himself.
“Yeah. Shit, just–” Marty goes to the VCR, takes out the tape. “You shouldn’t have this. Especially not– you know this is evidence? You know this is a motive right fucking here, wrapped up in a nice neat bow for ‘em?”
“Nobody should have that,” Rust says. Holds out the ziploc bag; Marty drops it in there, strips off the gloves. Resigns it to him in the sense that–
In the sense that he’s trusting him, which doesn’t make any fucking sense, but still. But still. Marty sucks in a deep breath. Hands off one of the beers. Swallows his own in close to one long gulp, watches Rust struggle to open it using only one hand, says, “Fuck’s wrong with you?”
Rust says, “Had to get outta the cuffs somehow.”
“You’re telling me–”
“You don’t wanna know what I’m telling you.”
“No. I guess I don’t.”
Rust gets the beer open. Downs it. Surfaces somehow more desperate behind the eyes, more tired. Marty doesn’t want him to look like that. Doesn’t want him to roll up his sleeves, doesn’t want to fucking know. There’s so much he never wanted to know. Got mandated to anyway, dragged down into the swirling shitstorm of hell. That same shitstorm that is Rust’s life, and here he is eking it out, defying the inevitable just a couple days longer. Ain’t there such thing as a mercy kill?
Still. They drink another beer each and then Marty says, “You can’t stay here. They’re gonna be looking at me. If they ain’t already.”
“What, you gave ‘em the impression you got some lingering fondness for your old partner?” Rust says it scornfully. Negates any warmth, not that Marty was looking for it, but he’s outta practice these days. Talking the language of Rust.
“No. But they gonna watch me anyways. Come on.” He moves forward, takes Rust’s satchel. Rust flinches but doesn’t fight him for it, just watches him from the couch, cornered, trapped animal. Blue eyes so murky in the half-lit gloom they’re almost black. “Come on. I got a place you can go.”
Now isn’t the time for Rust to lose faith; still, Rust hesitates. Curling the fingers of his good hand around the edge of the couch cushions. How many nights has Marty spent there, just there, slouching before Clint Eastwood, Yul Brynner, John Wayne? How many hours with a beer bottle slipping from between his fingers, sliding down into a daze? How long in complacency, how long forgetting?
That same TV with Marie Fontenot burned into it like a brand. Maybe he’ll throw the fucking thing out.
“C’mon,” he says again, quieter. Less like dragging Rust towards the gauntlet. And Rust looks at him — all hollowed-out, done-for, this his last hurrah — and Rust follows.