"Is it true or not?"
"You want the truth? The truth is your eyes don"t look right. They bother me. There"s a strange light in them. Go home, Dave."
"People used to tell me that in bars. It doesn"t sound too good to hear it where I work, sheriff."
"What can I say?" he said, and held his hands up and turned his face into a rhetorical question mark.
When I walked back down the corridor toward the exit, I stuffed my mail back into my mailbox, unopened, and continued on past my own office without even glancing inside.
MY CLOTHES WERE DAMP WITH SWEAT WHEN I GOT HOME. I took off my shirt, threw it into the dirty-clothes hamper, put on a fresh T-shirt, and took a gla.s.s of iced tea into the backyard where Bootsie was working chemical fertilizer into the roots of the tomato plants by the coulee. She was in the row, on her hands and knees, and the rump of her pink shorts was covered with dirt.
She raised up on her knees and smiled.
"Did you eat yet?" she asked.
"I stopped in Lafayette."
"What were you doing over there?"
"I went to Opelousas to run down a lead on that "57 lynching."
"I thought the sheriff had said-"
"He did. He didn"t take well to my pursuing it."
I sat down at the redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree. On the table were a pad of lined notebook paper and three city library books on Texas and southern history.
"What"s this?" I said.
"Some books I checked out. I found out some interesting things."
She got up from the row of tomato plants, brushing her hands, and sat down across from me. Her hair was damp on her forehead and flecked with grains of dirt. She picked up the note pad and began thumbing back pages. Then she set it down and looked at me uncertainly.
"You know how dreams work?" she said. "I mean, how dates and people and places shift in and out of a mental picture that you wake up with in the morning? The picture seems to have no origin in your experience, but at the same time you"re almost sure you lived it, you know what I mean?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"I looked up some of the things that, well, maybe you believe you saw out there in the mist."
I drank out of my iced tea and looked down the sloping lawn at the duck pond and the bright, humid haze on my neighbor"s sugarcane.
"You see, Dave, according to these books, John Bell Hood never had a command in Louisiana," she said. "He fought at Gettysburg and in Tennessee and Georgia."
"He was all through this country, Boots."
"He lived here but he didn"t fight here. You see, what"s interesting, Dave, is that part of your information is correct but the rest you created from a.s.sociations. Look here-"
She turned the notebook around so I could see the notes she had taken. "You"re right, he commanded the Texas Brigade," she said. "It was a famous cavalry outfit. But look here at this date. When you asked the general what the date was, he told you it was April 21, 1865, right?"
"Right."
"April 21 is Texas Independence Day, the day the battle of San Jacinto was fought between the Mexican army and the Texans in 1836. Don"t you see, your mind mixed up two historical periods. Nothing happened out in that mist, Dave."
"Maybe not," I said. "Wait here a minute, will you?"
I walked to the front of the house, where my boat trailer was still parked, pulled back the tarp, which was dented with pools of rainwater, reached down inside the bow of the boat, and returned to the backyard.
"What is it?"
"Nothing."
"Why"d you go out front?"
"I was going to show you some junk I found out in the marsh."
"What junk?"
"Probably some stuff left by an old lumber crew. It"s not important."
Her face was puzzled, then her eyes cleared and she put her hand on top of mine.
"You want to go inside?" she said.
"Where"s Alf?"
"Playing over at Poteet"s house."
"Sure, let"s go inside."
"I"m kind of dirty."
She waited for me to say something but I didn"t. I stared at my iced-tea gla.s.s.
"What is it, babe?" she said.
"Maybe it"s time to start letting go of the department."
"Let go how?"
"Hang it up."
"Is that what you want?"
"Not really."
"Then why not wait awhile? Don"t make decisions when you"re feeling down, cher."
"I think I"ve already been cut loose, Boots. They look at me like I have lobotomy st.i.tches across my forehead."
"Maybe you read it wrong, Dave. Maybe they want to help but they just don"t know how."
I didn"t answer. Later, after we had made love in the warm afternoon gloom of our bedroom, I rose from the softness of her body and sat listlessly on the side of the bed. A moment later I felt her nails tick lightly on my back.
"Ask the sheriff if he wants your resignation," she said.
"It won"t solve the problem."
"Why won"t it? Let them see how well they"ll do without you."
"You don"t understand. I"m convinced Kelly Drummond"s killer was after me. It"s got something to do with that dead black man. That"s the only thing that makes sense."
"Why?"
"We"ve gotten virtually nowhere in trying to find this serial killer or psychopath or whatever he is. So why would he want to come after me? But the lynched black man is another matter. I"m the only one making noise about it. That"s the connection. Why doesn"t the sheriff see that?"
I felt her nails trace my vertebrae.
"You want to believe that all people are good, Dave," she said. "When your friends don"t act the way they should, you feel all this anger and then it turns inward on you."
"I"m going to take down that guy, Boots. Even if I have to do it outside the department."
It was quiet for a long time. Then I felt her weight shift on the mattress and I thought she was getting up to get dressed. Instead, she rose to her knees, pressed her body hard against my back, and pulled my head against her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.
"I"ll always love you, Dave," she said. "I don"t care if you"re a cop or a commercial fisherman or if you hunt down this b.a.s.t.a.r.d and kill him, I"ll always love you for the man you are."
How do you respond to a statement like that?
THE PHONE CALL CAME AT 9:30 THAT NIGHT. I ANSWERED IT IN the kitchen.
"You"re a hard man to catch," she said.
"Who"s this?"
"The lady who"s been trying to catch you, sugar."
"How about giving me a name?"
"It"s Amber. Who else, darlin"?" Her voice sounded sleepy, indolent, in slow motion.
"Ah, the lady of the mysterious phone messages."
"You don"t remember me? Don"t hurt my feelings."
"No, I"m sorry, I don"t recall who you are. What can I do for you?"
"It"s me that"s going to do you a big favor, darlin". It"s because I like you. It"s because I remember you from New Orleans a long time ago."
"I appreciate all this, but how about we cut to it?"
"I"m gonna give you the guy you want, sweetheart."
"Which guy are we talking about?"
"He"s a nasty ole pimp and he"s been doin" some nasty things to his little girls."
Through the back window I could see my neighbor burning field stumps in the dark. The sparks spun upward against the black sky.
"What"s his name, Amber?"
"I"ve got a temporary problem, though. I want to go back to Florida for a little while, you know what I mean?"
"What do you need?"
"Just the air ticket and a little pin money. Three or four hundred dollars. That"s not a lot to ask, is it?"
"We might be able to arrange that. Would you like to come into my office?"
"Oh, I don"t know if I should do that. All those handsome men make me self-conscious. Do you know where Red"s Bar is in Lafayette?"
"On the north side?"
"You got it, sugar. How about in an hour? I"ll be at the bar, right by the door."
"You wouldn"t try to take me over the hurdles, would you, Amber?"
"Tell me you don"t recognize me and break my heart. Ooou, ooou," she said, and hung up.
Who was she? The rhetoric, the flippant cynicism, the pout in the voice, the feigned little-girlishness, all spelled hooker. And the messages she had left at my office were obviously meant to indicate to others that there was a personal relationship between us. It sounded like the beginning of a good scam. But she had also sounded stoned. Or maybe she was simply crazy, I thought. Or maybe she was both stoned and crazy and simply running a hustle. Why not?
There are always lots of possibilities when you deal with that vast army of psychological mutants for whom police and correctional and parole officers are supposed to be lifetime stewards. I once knew a young psychiatrist from Tulane who wanted to do volunteer counseling in the women"s prison at St. Gabriel. He lasted a month. The inkblot tests hegave his first subjects not only drove him into clinical depression but eventually caused him to drop his membership in the ACLU and join the National Rifle a.s.sociation.
I made a call to the home of an AA friend named Lou Girard who was a detective sergeant in Vice at the Lafayette Police Department. He was one of those who drifted in and out of AA and never quite let go of the old way of life, but he was still a good cop and he would have made lieutenant had he not punched out an obnoxious local politician at Democratic headquarters.
"What"s her name again?" he said.
I told him.
"Yeah, there"s one broad around calls herself Amber, but she"s a Mexican," he said. "You said this one sounds like she"s from around here?"
"Yep."
"Look, Dave, these broads got about two dozen names they trade around-Ginger, Consuela, Candy, Pepper, there"s even a mulatto dancer named Brown Sugar. Anyway, there"re three or four hookers that float in and out of Red"s. They"re low-rent, though. Their Johns are oil-field workers and college boys, mostly."
"I"m going to drive over there in a few minutes. Can you give me some backup?"
"To check out a snitch?"
"Maybe she"s not just a snitch."