Clete sat in a metal chair inside the interview room, forty feet from the holding cell where he had spent the last three hours. Dana Magelli was not in a good mood. He was standing across the table from Clete, his right hand on his hip, his coat pushed back. His breath was audible, his groomed appearance and normal composure at odds with the anger he was obviously experiencing. “We have your prints inside the homes of two homicide victims,” he said. “We have witnesses that put you with Frankie Giacano right before his murder. We have a tape you made of a conversation between you and Bix Golightly hours before he was shot in his vehicle in Algiers.”
“Yeah, and you searched my apartment and my office without a warrant,” Clete said.
“Do you deny driving Frankie Gee to the bus depot and buying him a ticket?”
“Getting a safecracker out of New Orleans is a crime?”
“You paid cash for his ticket to L.A. When did you start doing financial favors for sociopaths?”
“I saw Frankie give a quarter to a homeless guy once. So I figured he couldn’t be all bad. Of course, he threw the quarter into the homeless guy’s eye and blinded him.”
“There are people I work with who want to see you hung by your colon from an iron hook.”
“That’s their problem. By the way, do you know Didi Gee actually did that to a guy?”
“I know you didn’t follow the bus to Baton Rouge so you could shoot Frankie in a toilet stall. But some of my colleagues think you’re irrational enough to do anything. When I leave this room, I have to convince these same people you’re the wrong guy. Why did you buy Frankie his ticket out of town?”
“Bix Golightly and Waylon Grimes are both dead because they tried to run a scam on me. Frankie was their partner. I figured he was next. Enough is enough. Frankie was a shitbag, but he didn’t deserve getting his brains blown all over a toilet bowl.”
“You were protecting Frankie out of the goodness of your heart?”
“Characterize it any way you want, Dana.”
“Who do you think killed Grimes and Golightly?”
“I chase bail skips and take pictures of husbands porking the maid.”
“I’m going to square with you. The only thing preventing the prosecutor’s office from charging you with murder is the fact that somebody much smaller than you and wearing western clothes was seen leaving the men’s room right after Frankie was left in a pool of blood. You ought to learn who your friends are, Clete.”
“I can go now?”
“No, you can’t. You’re under arrest.”
“For what?”
“Possession of stolen property. The German Luger under your car seat.”
“I took the Luger off of Frankie Gee. I didn’t want him parking one in my brisket.”
“Well, Frankie screwed you from inside a body bag. How do you like that?”
“Where was the Luger stolen from?”
“See what your lawyer can find out before you enter your plea.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“We can hold you as a material witness indefinitely. The possession charge is a bone for my colleagues. They’ll accuse me of doing favors for you and Dave, but eventually, they’ll forget about it. No, no need to thank me. I like taking the heat for you two.”
“You had my Caddy towed. You rousted me on a phony beef. Your colleagues are bums. I’m supposed to be grateful?” Clete rubbed the fatigue from his face and looked wanly out the window. “Put me in an isolation unit, will you? I’m not up to the tank.”
“You were protecting Frankie Gee from somebody.”
“Yeah, from whoever was trying to smoke him.”
“Who?”
Clete seemed to think for a long time, his forehead propped on the heel of his hand. Then he looked up at Dana Magelli as though he had just come to a profound conclusion. “I saw the trusty headed down to the tank with the food cart. If I don’t go to the tank, can I still have a sandwich and coffee?” he said.
In Clete’s view, few people understood what jails represented or what it was like to be confined in one, regardless of the duration. People were not locked in jails simply because they had committed crimes. The commission of the crime was secondary to the larger issue, namely, that jails provide a home for defective and often hapless people who can’t cut it on the outside. In an era when minor offenders have to get on a waiting list to serve their sentences, almost anyone stacking serious time in a parish, state, or federal prison is not only pathological or brain-dead but would not have it any other way, at least in the gospel according to Clete.
He knew from his own life that in many ways, a jail is like a late-hour low-bottom bar, one with no windows or clocks or direct lighting. Once you are safely inside, time stops, and so do all comparisons. No matter how much damage you have done to your life, no matter how shameful and degrading and cowardly and depraved your conduct has become, there is always somebody on the tier who has been dealt a worse hand or committed worse deeds than you.
The biggest downside of incarceration, however, isn’t stacking the time. It’s the realization that you are in the right place and you put yourself there so someone else could feed and take care of you. Titty-babies come in all stripes, many of them with tats from the wrist to the armpit. It isn’t coincidence that mainline recidivists usually have a heavy commitment to topless bars.
Clete didn’t have all of these thoughts, but he had some of them, and each applied to him. He no longer kept tally of the holding cells and booking rooms he had been in or the times he had been hooked on a chain and transported from jail to morning court, the professional miscreants on the chain eyeing him cautiously. Was it accident that again and again he found himself in their midst, trying to rationalize his behavior, staring at a urine-streaked drainhole in the floor while a night-count man went down the corridor, raking his baton across the bars on the cells? Miscreants broke into the slams, not out of them. They all knew one another, shared needles and women the way ragpickers share clothes, passing their diseases around without remorse or recrimination. The die had been cast for most of them the day they were born. What was Clete’s excuse?
The light fixture outside his holding cell was defective and kept flickering like a damaged insect, causing him to blink constantly, until his eyelids felt like sandpaper. The paint in the cell was a yellowish-gray and still bore the watermarks and soft decay from five days of submersion during Katrina, when the inmates were left by their warders to slosh about in their own feces until they were rescued by a group of deputies from Iberia Parish. Drawings of genitalia were scratched on the walls, and the names of inmates had been burned onto the ceiling with twists of flaming newspaper, probably during the storm. The toilet bowl had no seat, and the rim was encrusted with dried matter that Clete didn’t want to think about. As he lay on the metal bench against the back wall, his arm across his eyes, he wondered why people always felt compassion toward political prisoners. A political prisoner had the solace of knowing he had done nothing to deserve his fate. The miscreant knew he had ferreted his way into the belly of the beast deliberately, in the same way a tumblebug burrows its way into feces. Could a person have worse knowledge about himself?
At eight-fifteen A.M. a screw unlocked Clete’s cell door. The screw was a dour lifetime employee of the system, with creases as deep as a prune’s in his face and five o’clock shadow by ten in the morning. “You just got sprung,” he said.
“Nig Rosewater is out there?” Clete said.
“Nig Rosewater hasn’t been up this early since World War Two.”
“Who bailed me out?”
“A woman.”
“Who?”
“How would I know? Why don’t you take your problems somewhere else, Purcel?”
For some reason, the remark and the flatness of the screw’s tone bothered Clete in a way he couldn’t define. “I do something to set you off?”
“Yeah, you’re here,” the screw said.
The girl he had met in the nightclub way down in Terrebonne Parish was standing in the foyer on the other side of the possessions desk, her chestnut hair backlit by the sunlight out on the street. “You went my bail?” Clete said.
“You’re good for it, aren’t you?”
“How’d you know my name? How’d you know I was in the can?”
“A friend of mine at Motor Vehicles ran your tag. I called your office, and your secretary told me where you were.”
“That doesn’t sound right. Miss Alice doesn’t give out that kind of information.”
“I kind of lied when I said I was your niece and it was an emergency.” A pale blue cloth purse embroidered with an Indian design hung from her shoulder. She opened it and removed Clete’s Zippo lighter. “You left this on the bar at the club. It has the globe and anchor on it. I thought you’d want it back.”
“You bet,” he said.
“Why’d you go charging out of the club? You hurt my feelings.”
“I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
“You’re pretty easy to jerk around. Maybe you should take some happy pills.”
“I used to. That’s why I don’t take them anymore.”
“I’m waiting,” she said.
“On what?”
“Are you gonna invite me to breakfast or not?”
“Let’s go to Cafe du Monde. I love it there in the morning. It’s entirely different from the crowd you see there at night. The whole Quarter is that way. Do you know why I was in the can?”
“Suspicion of theft or something?”
They were out on the street now, in the freshness of the morning and the noise of the city. “They were looking at me for a homicide,” he said.
She was unlocking the passenger door of her rental Honda, her gaze fixed on the traffic, not seeming to listen. “Yeah?” she said.
“A guy by the name of Frankie Giacano got clipped in the Baton Rouge bus terminal. Somebody came up behind him in a toilet stall and put three rounds in his head,” he said.
When they got in her Honda, she put the keys in the ignition but didn’t start the engine. “Say that again?”
“A safecracker, a guy by the name of Frankie Gee, got shot and killed in Baton Rouge. NOPD wanted to put it on me,” Clete said.
In the silence, he held his eyes on hers, barely breathing, studying every aspect of her face. He could feel his lungs tighten and his heart start to swell, as though no oxygen were reaching his blood, as though a vein might pop in his temple. She moistened her lips and returned his stare. “If we go to breakfast, you won’t run off on me again, will you?”
“No.”
“Good. Because I really wouldn’t like that.”
If there was a second meaning in her words, he couldn’t tell. All the way to Cafe du Monde, he watched the side of her face as though seeing part of himself, not necessarily a good one, that he had never recognized.
They got a table under the pavilion with a fine view of Jackson Square and the cathedral and the Pontalba Apartments. The sky was blue, the myrtle bushes and windmill palms and banana plants in the square covered with sunshine. It was the kind of crisp green-gold late-fall day in Louisiana that seems so perfect in its dimensions that winter and even mortality are set at bay. “So you’re a private investigator?” she said.
“I used to be with the NOPD, but I messed up my career. It’s my fault, not theirs. I started over, know what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“I worked for some mobbed-up guys in Reno and Montana. But I got clear of them. I have a friend named Dave Robicheaux. He says it’s always the first inning. You get up one morning and say fuck it and start over.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“Antiques, collectibles, that kind of stuff. I’ve got a little store in Key West, but most of my sales are on the Internet.”
“You didn’t know my name, but you ran my tag and traced me to the jail and got me back on the street. You even brought me my cigarette lighter. Not many people could pull that off. Maybe you have a gift.”
“My mother said my father was a marine who got killed in the first Iraqi war, so that’s why I brought you your lighter. I was never sure if my mother was telling me the truth. She should have had a turnstile on her bedroom door.”
“What I’m saying is I could use an assistant,” Clete said.
“Are you having hot flashes or something?” she asked, biting into a beignet.
“I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. I have blood pressure issues.”
“You ought to take better care of yourself,” she said. “This junk we’re eating isn’t helping either your blood pressure or your cholesterol count.”
“I’ve got two offices, one here and one in New Iberia. That’s on Bayou Teche, about two hours west. How long are you going to be in town?”
“I’m not big on clocks and calendars.”
“You think you could work for a guy like me?”
“You married?”
“Not now. Why do you ask?”
“You act strange. I don’t think you’re on the make, but I can’t quite figure you.”
“What’s to figure?”
“You never asked my name. It’s Gretchen Horowitz.”
“Glad to meet you, Gretchen. Come work for me.”
“I never saw you at Little Yankee Stadium. It was somewhere else, wasn’t it?”
“Who cares?” he said.
“What did you do in the Crotch?”
“Tried to stay alive.”
“You kill any people while you were staying alive?”
“I did two combat tours in Vietnam. Who told you the Corps was called the Crotch?”
“I get around. I picked up some of my mother’s habits. Mostly the bad ones.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that now,” he said.
She gazed at him without replying. He realized her eyes were violet in the daylight as well as in the evening shadows, and they engendered feelings in him that he could not deal with.
“Thanks for the beignets. You don’t mind walking to your office, do you?” she said. “It’s across the square and about a block down, right? See you around, big boy. Keep it in your pants.”
She left five dollars under her plate for the waitress. After she was gone, he pressed his fingers against his temples and tried to put together what she had just said. How did she know where his office was, and how did she know the exact distance? Had she followed the Greyhound to Baton Rouge and popped Frankie Gee in the stall? Had his seed produced a psychopath? Even though a breeze was blowing off the river, the scent of her perfume seemed to hang on every surface she had touched.
That same night in New Iberia, the southern sky was filled with strange lights, flashes of electricity that would ignite inside a solitary black cloud and in seconds ripple across the entirety of the heavens without making a sound. Then a rain front moved across the marshlands and drenched the town and overflowed the gutters on East Main and covered our front yard with a gray and yellow net of dead leaves. At four in the morning, amid the booming of thunder, I thought I heard the telephone ring in the kitchen. I had been dreaming before I woke, and in the dream, large shells fired from an offshore battery were arching out of their trajectory, whistling just before they exploded inside a sodden rain forest.
I felt light-headed when I picked up the phone, part of me still inside the dream that was so real I could not shake it or think my way out of it. “Hello?” I said into the receiver.
At first I could hear only static. I looked at the caller ID, but the number was blocked. “Who is this?” I said.
“It’s Tee Jolie, Mr. Dave. Can you hear me okay? There’s a bad storm where I’m at.”
Through the window, I could see fog rolling off the bayou into the trees, pushing against the windows and doors. I sat down in a chair. “Where are you?” I said.
“A long ways from home. There’s a beautiful beach here. The sea is green. I wanted to tell you everyt’ing is all right. I scared you at the hospital in New Orleans. I wish I ain’t done that.”
“Nothing is right, Tee Jolie.”
“Did you like the songs I left on your iPod? I dropped it before I gave it to you. It don’t always work right.”
“You said everything is all right. Don’t you know about your sister?”
“What about her? Blue is just Blue. She’s sweet. To tell you the troot’, her voice is better than mine.”
“Blue is dead.”
“What’s that?”
“She was murdered. Her body floated up in St. Mary Parish.”
“You’re breaking up, Mr. Dave. What’s that you said about Blue? The storm is tearing up the boathouse on the beach. Can you still hear me, Mr. Dave?”
“Yes.”
“I cain’t hear you, suh. This storm is terrible. It scares me. I got to go now. Tell Blue and my granddaddy hello. Tell them I couldn’t get t’rew.”
The line went dead, and the words “blocked call” disappeared from the caller identification window. Molly was awake when I got back into bed and lay back on the pillow. “Were you fixing something in the kitchen?” she said.
“No, that was Tee Jolie Melton on the phone.”
Molly raised herself up on one elbow. Each time lightning flashed in the clouds, I could see the freckles on her shoulders and the tops of her breasts. “I didn’t hear the phone ring,” she said.
“It woke me up.”
“No, I was awake, Dave. You were talking in your sleep.”
“She said she was sorry for making me worry about her. She doesn’t know her sister is dead.”
“Oh, Dave,” Molly said, her eyes filming.
“These are the things she said. It was Tee Jolie. You think I could forget what her voice sounds like?”
“No, it was not Tee Jolie.”
“She told me she dropped the iPod. That’s why other people can’t hear the songs she put on there.”
“Stop it.”
“I’m telling you what she said. I didn’t imagine it.”
“You’re going to drive us all crazy.”
“You want me to lie to you instead?”
“I almost wish you were drinking again. We could deal with that. But I can’t deal with this.”
“Then don’t,” I said.
I returned to the kitchen and sat in the darkness and looked through the window at the Teche rising over its banks. A pirogue was spinning in the current-empty, with no paddle, rotating over and over as it drifted downstream toward a bend, filling with rainwater that would eventually sink it in the deepest part of the channel. I could not get the image of the sinking pirogue out of my head. I wished I had asked Tee Jolie about the baby she was carrying. I wished I had asked her many things. I felt Molly’s hand on my shoulder.
“Come back to bed,” she said.
“I’ll be along directly.”
“I didn’t mean what I said.”
“Your feelings are justified.”
“I thought you were dreaming about Vietnam. I heard you say ‘incoming.’”
“I don’t remember what I was dreaming about,” I lied, my gaze fixed on the pirogue settling in a frothy whirlpool beneath the current.
Unless a felon walks into a police station and confesses his crime, or unless he is caught in the commission of the crime, there are only two ways, from an evidentiary point of view, that the crime is solved and given prosecutable status. A detective either follows a chain of evidence to the suspect, or the detective begins with the suspect and, in retrograde fashion, follows the evidence back to the crime. So far I had no demonstrable evidence to link Pierre Dupree to Tee Jolie Melton or her sister, Blue. But there was one thing I knew about him for certain: He was a liar. He had denied knowing Tee Jolie, even though his painting of the reclining nude looked very much like her; second, he had claimed that years ago he had gotten rid of the safe from which Frankie Giacano had taken Clete Purcel’s IOU.
So where do you start when you want to find out everything you can about a man whose physical dimensions and latent anger give most men serious pause?
His ex-to-be might be a good beginning.
Varina Leboeuf Dupree had once been known as the wet dream of every fraternity boy on the LSU campus. By the time she was twenty-five, she had proved she could break hearts and bank accounts and succeed at business in a male-oriented culture in which women might be admired but were usually thought of as acquisitions. She was certainly nothing like her father, a retired Iberia sheriff’s detective, the mention of whose name would cause black people to lower their eyes lest they reveal the fear and loathing he instilled in them. Jesse Leboeuf had named his daughter for Jefferson Davis’s wife, I suspect in hopes that it would allow her to occupy the social station that would never be his or his wife’s. Unfortunately for him, Varina Leboeuf did things her own way, couldn’t have cared less about her social station, and made sure everyone knew it. In college she wore her dark brown hair in braids wrapped around her head, sometimes with Mardi Gras beads woven in. She wore peasant dresses to dances, jeans and pink tennis shoes without socks to church, and once, when her pastor asked her to greet a famous televangelical leader at the airport, she arrived barefoot and braless at the Lafayette concourse in an evening gown that looked like sherbet running down her skin.
She was scandalous and beautiful and often had a pout that begged to be kissed. Some condemned her as profligate, but she always seemed to enter into her affairs without anger or need and depart from them in the same fashion. Even though she broke hearts, I had never heard one of her former lovers speak ill of her. In the American South, there is a crude expression often used to define the plantation-bred protocol of both conjugal and extramarital relationships. The statement is offensive and coarse and is of the kind that is whispered with a hand to the mouth, but there is no question about its accuracy inside the world in which I grew up: “You marry up and you screw down.” I heard some women say Varina married up. I didn’t agree. By the same token, I didn’t understand why she had married into the Dupree family or why she had taken up residence in St. Mary Parish, a place where convention and sycophancy and Shintoism were institutions.
On Monday morning I signed out of the office and drove in my pickup down to Cypremort Point, a narrow strip of land extending into West Cote Blanche Bay, where Varina’s father lived among cypress and oak trees in a beachfront house elevated on pilings. Jesse Leboeuf was a Cajun but originally from North Louisiana and the kind of lawman other cops treat with caution rather than respect, in the same way you walk around an unpredictable guard dog, or a gunbull whose presence in the tower can make a convict’s face twitch with anxiety, or a door gunner who volunteers for as much trigger time as possible in free-fire zones. Jesse had abused himself with whiskey and cigarettes for a lifetime but showed no signs of physical decay. When I found him on his back porch, he was smoking an unfiltered cigarette, gazing at the bay, his outboard boat rocking against his small dock. He rose to greet me, his hand enveloping mine, his face as stolid as boilerplate, his hair flat-topped and boxed and shiny with butch wax. “You want to know where my little girl is at?” he said.
I had left a message on his phone and wondered why he had not simply called me back. But Jesse was not a man whose motivations you openly questioned. “It’s a nice day to take a drive, so I thought I’d stop by,” I said.
He pushed a chair toward me. “You want a drink?” he said.
“I just wanted to ask Miss Varina a couple of questions about her husband.”
“If I was you, I’d leave him alone. Unless you’re planning to shoot him.”
“I have reason to believe he might have ties to the Giacano family.”
He puffed on his cigarette and laughed behind the smoke. “Are you serious?”
“You don’t think Pierre would associate with criminals?”
“The Duprees don’t associate with minorities of any kind, particularly New Orleans dagos. My daughter had all of it she could take.”
“All of what?”
“The fact that the Duprees think their shit don’t stink. The only time they make allowances for other groups of people is when a piece of tail floats by that one of them might be interested in.”
“You’re talking about Pierre?”
“My daughter is getting shut of them, that’s all that counts.” He watched a boat with outriggers cutting across the chop. He took a last hit on his cigarette and flicked it out on the water. “Isn’t this oil spill enough to worry about? Yesterday afternoon my crab traps was loaded to the top of the wire. When I put them in the boiler, every one of them had oil inside the shell. I hear it’s the same with the oyster beds. They say there’s shitloads of sludge plumb to the continental shelf.” He lit another cigarette and puffed on it, the smoke leaking slowly from his mouth.
“I think Pierre Dupree is dirty,” I said.
“Dirty for what?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Sounds like you got a problem.”
“You ever see a boat around here with the emblem of a fish on the bow? A Chris-Craft with a white hull?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
I was getting nowhere. I asked for his daughter’s phone number.
“Why not just leave her alone?” he said.
“I think Pierre Dupree may know something about the murder of the girl who floated up inside a block of ice in St. Mary Parish.”
“Then go talk to Pierre. He’s a son of a bitch. I don’t like cluttering up my day talking about a son of a bitch. My daughter don’t need to be talking about him, either. Why don’t y’all let us be, Robicheaux?”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d call me Dave.”
“You’re on my property, and I’ll call you what I goddamn please.”
“Do you want somebody who respects Miss Varina to interview her or some young guy who just got kicked up to plainclothes?”
“You’re a hardtail. You always were. That’s why you got where you are. That’s not meant as a compliment.” He wrote a telephone number on a scrap of newspaper and handed it to me. “She’s in Lafayette.” Then he raised his index finger at me, the nail as pointy as a piece of horn. “Treat her right. If you don’t, you and I will talk again.”
“Tell you what. I’ve got one more question for you, Mr. Jesse. You said the Duprees are snobs and they don’t associate with minorities of any kind. The grandfather is Jewish and a survivor of a Nazi extermination camp. Does it make sense to say the Duprees don’t associate with minorities? Didn’t Pierre buy his office building from a member of the Giacano family? Or are Italian-Americans not minorities? I have a little trouble tracking your thought processes.”
Jesse’s skin was brown and deeply lined, like the skin on a terrapin’s neck, an ugly purple birthmark buried in his hairline. He got up from his chair, taller than I, unstooped by age, an odor of tobacco and dried sweat emanating from his clothes. He looked me in the face with a glower that made me want to step back from him. He rubbed his jaw, his eyes never leaving mine, and I could hear the sound of his whiskers against the calluses on his palm. I wanted him to speak, to indicate what he was thinking; I wanted him to be more than an emotional condition that was impossible to read or understand. More succinctly, I wanted him to be human so I did not have to fear him. But not another word passed from his lips. He climbed the stairs that led into his screened porch and closed and latched the door behind him, never looking back, his shoulders stiff with hatred of his fellow man.
There was a Japanese tulip tree by the edge of the water. A hard gust of wind blew a shower of pink and lavender petals on top of the waves sliding in with the tide. I thought about Blue Melton’s body inside the block of ice and the fact that Jesse Leboeuf had shown no reaction when I mentioned that his son-in-law might be involved with her death. Was he simply obtuse and insensitive? Or was it no accident that his skin was reminiscent of an early reptilian creature cracking its way out of the egg?
I drove back up the road through a corridor of oak and gum trees strung with Spanish moss and caught the four-lane to Lafayette.
The truth was, I had no idea what kind of investigation I was pursuing. I knew that three low-wattage gangsters had tried to run a scam on Clete Purcel and cheat him out of his apartment and office building. I also knew that Clete had creeped Bix Golightly’s condo in the Carrollton district and found e-mails that indicated Golightly was fencing stolen or forged paintings. Was that all I was looking at, a gumball like Golightly selling hot or copied artwork for twenty cents on the dollar at best?
The sugarcane crop was in full harvest, and the highway was ribbed with dried gumbo strung from the fields by tractors and cane wagons. Traffic was backed up from the Lafayette city limits, and I got stuck behind an empty cane wagon blowing dirt and lint all over my windows. I clamped my emergency flasher on the roof of my pickup, but the driver of the tractor either couldn’t see me or didn’t care. I swung around him and tried to stay in the left lane but got caught in another jam after I crossed the bridge over the Vermilion River and entered the city.
I had already called Varina on my cell phone and told her I was on my way. I hit the redial. “I’m delayed, but I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it, Dave. I’ll be by the pool,” she replied. “You said this is about Pierre?”
“You could say that.”
“Y’all must not have much to do in New Iberia,” she said, and hung up. Two minutes later, she called back. “I’m having some ice cream and strawberries. You want some?” Then she hung up again.
I wondered how many young men had wakened in the middle of the night, trying to sort out Varina’s mood swings and the conscious or unconscious signals she sent regarding her affections. I also wondered how many of them woke in the morning throbbing with desire and went to their jobs resenting themselves for emotions they couldn’t control. I thought Varina caused her lovers heartbreak because they believed there was nothing false or manipulative in her nature. They saw a loveliness and innocence in her that reminded them of dreams they’d had in adolescence about an imaginary girl, one who was so pretty and decent and good that they never told others about her or allowed themselves to think inappropriately of her. At least those were the perceptions of an aging man whose retrospective vision was probably no more accurate today than it was when he was young.
I had just turned in to Bengal Gardens, an old upscale apartment neighborhood shaded by live oaks and filled with tropical plants and flowers, when a freezer truck pulled alongside me in the left lane, trapping me behind an elderly driver in a gas-guzzler. I realized the battery had gone out on my flasher when I started to pull around. The freezer truck, the kind with big lockers that delivers frozen steaks and vegetables and pizzas to residential subscribers, inched forward, blocking me in. There were two men in the cab, both smoking and talking, their windows up. “How about it?” I said out my window.
They didn’t hear me. I opened my badge and held it out the window. “Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said.
The freezer truck dropped slightly behind me, and I thought I could swing out to pass. Except now I was only half a block to the entrance of the two-story white stucco apartments where Varina Leboeuf lived. Time to dial it down, I told myself.
The freezer truck pulled abreast of me again, the side panels closer than they should have been. Above me, the sun was shining through the oak limbs that arched over the street, creating a blinding effect on my windshield. I saw the two men in the truck talking to each other, their hands moving in the air, as though they were reaching a humorous conclusion to a joke or a story. Then the passenger turned toward me, rolling down the window, his profile as sharp as razored tin against a shaft of sunlight, his mouth breaking into a grin. “Eat this, shit-for-brains,” he said.
I stomped on the brake. The cut-down shotgun was wrapped in a paper bag. The passenger pulled the trigger, and a load of buckshot blew out my windshield and patterned across the hood and the top of the dashboard and covered me with splinters of glass. My right wheel slammed into the curb, throwing me against the safety belt. I saw the freezer truck stop by the corner while other vehicles veered around it. The passenger got out on the swale and walked toward my pickup, evidently oblivious to the terror he was instilling in others, the bottom of the paper bag curling with flame. I got my. 45 loose from the holster clipped to my belt and opened the passenger door on my pickup and rolled off the seat onto the swale.
My choices were simple. I could shoot from behind the truck at my assailant and, with luck, drop him with the first shot. In all likelihood, that would not happen, and I would end up firing into the traffic and hitting an innocent person. So I crashed through the hedge into the parking lot below Varina Leboeuf’s apartment. In seconds, my assailant was gone, the freezer truck grinding down the speedway that led into Lafayette’s commercial district.
I put away my. 45 and realized my face and arms were bleeding. Cars and SUVs were trying to work their way around my pickup, in the way that people work their way around a fender-bender. The sun was bright through the tree limbs overhead, the wind ruffling the hydrangeas and caladiums in the gardens around me, the ebb and flow and normalcy of the day somehow undisturbed for those who had someplace to be. I sat down on a stone bench by a gate that gave onto the apartment swimming pool and I got out my cell phone, my hands shaking so badly that I had to use my thumb to punch in a 911 call.
In the background, I heard the voice of Jimmy Clanton singing “Just a Dream.” I saw Varina Leboeuf walk toward me in a swimsuit, her elevated sandals clacking on the flagstones. She went to one knee and brushed the broken glass off my face and arms. Then she looked up at me in the same way that I was sure she had melted the defense mechanisms in many a suitor. Her eyes were brown and warm and lustrous and charged with energy all at the same time, her expression so sincere, showing such concern for your welfare, that you would do anything for her. “Oh, Dave, they’ll kill their own mothers. They have no boundaries. I think it involves millions. Don’t be such a foolish man,” she said.
A stereo was playing by the pool, the wind ruffling the water and the palm and banana fronds and the bloom on a potted orchid tree. Jimmy Clanton’s voice had risen out of the year 1958, and for just a moment I believed I was back there with him, in an era of sock hops and roadhouse jukeboxes when the season seemed eternal and none of us thought we would ever die. I removed a sliver of glass from my eyebrow and felt a rivulet of blood on the side of my face. Varina caught my blood on a paper napkin and pushed my hair out of my eyes. “One day your luck is going to run out, Dave,” she said.
“You wouldn’t try to put the slide on a fellow, would you?” I replied.