"No challenge is too much for your talents, Robert. Thanks for coming over," Lonnie said. He handed the barber three ten-dollar bills held crisply between two fingers.
The barber thanked him and folded the ap.r.o.n carefully so that no hair dropped on the floor, then nodded at me and left the room.
"I have a crowded schedule some days," Lonnie said, looking at a steel pocket mirror he kept in his desk drawer.
"It"s that time of year," I said.
He didn"t make the connection. In fact, I didn"t care whether or not there was one to make.
"Bellerophon Lujan is in jail?" he said.
I looked at my watch. "He"s probably out by now."
He made a tent out of his hands and patted the pads of his fingers against one another, a thought buried like an insect between his eyes. "We"re getting reports on this friend of yours, Clete Purcel. Evidently he caused some ma.s.sive property damage at the casino in New Orleans."
"Then that"s between him and them."
"Not if he"s inserting himself into one of our investigations."
"You"ll have to take that up with Clete."
"I don"t need to. I have you. You"re the other half of the coin."
"You brought me over here about Clete Purcel?"
"You"re not hearing me. I got a call from a couple of guys in New Orleans, fraternity brothers who have interests in common with Colin Alridge and want to know why Purcel was ha.s.sling their boy in the tearoom at the Pontchartrain Hotel."
"What"s their problem? From what I understand, Alridge handled himself in a pretty dignified manner," I said.
"I honest-to-G.o.d believe you have trouble with the English language, Dave. My words have no effect on you. If anybody brings down Alridge, it"s going to be us. NOPD might let Purcel wipe his s.h.i.t all over their parish, but that"s not going to happen in New Iberia. If Purcel was bird-d.o.g.g.i.ng Alridge, you knew about it. I"ve already told you every element of this investigation will be coordinated out of this office. But I"ve got a feeling you"re using a surrogate to pursue your own agenda."
"You"re mistaken."
"I"d like to believe that."
"Believe it."
He rocked back in his swivel chair and let his gaze drift out the window. The sky was full of yellow dust and leaves that were gusting out of the trees. "So what did your pal find out?"
"Colin Alridge seems to be a friend of Mrs. Lujan. Maybe a spiritual adviser or something like that."
"Spiritual adviser, my a.s.s."
"Clete said Alridge seemed upset about Tony Lujan"s death, like maybe he felt guilty over it."
Lonnie made a snuffing sound in his nose and brushed a piece of clipped hair out of one nostril. "Did you pa.s.s this information on to Helen?"
"It"s not information. It"s speculation on the part of a private investigator."
"There are a lot of bad traits I can accept in people, Dave, but disingenuousness isn"t one of them." He held his eyes on mine. "No, I"m not going to be euphemistic here. I won"t put up with lying."
I felt a flame spread across my back, the way it can wrap around you when you have shingles. I watched the dust blowing across the tops of the trees out in the street, newspaper swirling off the asphalt. "I hope it rains. It"s been awfully hot," I said. "Give me a call if I can provide you with any more help."
"We"re not finished here," he said.
"That"s what you think."
BUT INDIRECTLY Lonnie Marceaux had made a point. Clete"s speculation about Colin Alridge"s involvement with the Lujan family wasn"t to be ignored. I called Mrs. Lujan and asked if I could visit her at her home again.
"No, you may not," she said.
"I"ll come with a warrant if I have to." I could hear her breathing against the receiver. "Is your husband there, Mrs. Lujan?"
"My husband is in jail. You should know that."
"No, he"s not."
She was silent again. Then she said, "What time did he get out?"
"I"m not sure."
"Find out and call me back," she said, and hung up.
I rang the jail, then redialed Mrs. Lujan"s number.
"He was out at nine-seventeen a.m." It was now a quarter to noon.
"Have you seen him since his release?"
"No, ma"am."
"If you wanted to find him, would you know where to look?"
"I"m not sure."
"I could give you two or three addresses. Guess which part of town they"re in. Guess who lives at those addresses."
"I wouldn"t know, Mrs. Lujan."
"You wouldn"t know? Do you smoke cigarettes?"
"I don"t."
"Do you know where to buy some?"
This time I didn"t answer.
"My husband is an inflexible man and doesn"t allow smoking in our home. Please buy me a package of Camels and bring them to the house. Can you do that for me, Mr. Robicheaux?"
"My pleasure," I said.
"Mr. Robicheaux?"
"Yes?"
"Also bring the video. The one you said shows the Darbonne girl at our garden party. Bring that with the cigarettes."
Thirty minutes later, the maid let me in the front door. Outside, the sun was white in the sky, the windows running with humidity, but the interior of the house was frigid. There was no sign of Bello or his car. Mrs. Lujan gestured at me from the sunporch, her fingers curling back toward her palm.
"Sit," she said. Then she waited, her eyes on my face.
"You want the cigarettes?" I said.
"Take one out and give it to me."
I removed the cellophane from the package and slipped a cigarette loose for her. She held it between two fingers and waited. I took a folder of matches from my shirt pocket and lit her cigarette and blew out the match. There was no ashtray on the gla.s.s tabletop that separated me from her wheelchair, and I set the match on the edge of a coffee saucer and placed the package of cigarettes next to it. She turned her face to one side when she exhaled the smoke, then looked at me quizzically. "You think I"m strange?" she said.
"It"s not my job to make those kinds of judgments."
"Put the video in the machine," she said.
I shoved the ca.s.sette into the VCR and watched the first images come up on the screen. She continued to smoke as I fast-forwarded the tape, her eyes rheumy, sunken like green marbles into bread dough. She seemed to radiate sickness in the same way that an unchanged bandage or an infected wound does. I even wondered if the diminution of her bone structure had less to do with an automobile accident than a cancerous anger that lived inside her.
I stopped the tape on the garden party, backed it up, and recommenced it. Once again, Yvonne Darbonne was dancing to the signature composition of John Lee Hooker, her shoulders powdered with freckles, her pug nose turned up at the sky.
"That"s the girl who shot herself?" Mrs. Lujan said.
"Do you remember her?"
"She was pretty. Tony brought her here. Then he left, and she was dancing by herself. She was wearing that tank top. She spilled sangria on it."
"Go on."
"I was watching the dancers from the upstairs window. She looked up at me and smiled and pointed at the stain on her top. It was wet and dark on the material. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were molded against the cloth and I remember thinking she didn"t belong out there, at least not with the likes of Slim Bruxal. I waved at her to come inside. I wanted to give her a clean blouse to wear."
"Why didn"t you?"
"I saw her talk to Slim, then to Bello. She walked under the orange tree, below my line of vision, then I couldn"t see her anymore. I heard the door slam. The side door is right under my bedroom, and when it slams I can always feel the vibration through the floor. So I know she went into the house. Then I heard the door slam a second time."
Mrs. Lujan drew in on the cigarette and blew out the smoke and watched it flatten against the window. Her makeup was caked, her mouth st.i.tched with wrinkles that were as thin as cat"s whiskers, her eyes looking at an image, imagined or real, trapped inside her head.
"Who followed Yvonne Darbonne into the house?" I asked.
"There"s a game room behind the den. Bello keeps the curtains drawn so the western sun doesn"t get in. It"s the place where he goes to be alone. I heard something thump against the wall down there. I kept waiting to hear another thump, the way you do when a sound wakes you up in the middle of the night. But I didn"t. All I heard were voices."
"Voices?"
"I heard a girl"s. I heard it come up through the pipe in the lavatory. It was loud, then it stopped, and I couldn"t hear anything except the sound of water running. I think somebody turned on the shower down there. I can always tell when it"s the shower in the game room. The stall is made of tin. The water makes a drumming sound on the sides. I wanted to think she was just taking a shower. But that"s not why somebody turned on the water, is it?"
I waited before I spoke again. "What do you think happened down there, Mrs. Lujan?"
"I used the intercom to call Sidney, the colored man in the kitchen. It took over fifteen minutes to get him up here. I told him to go down to the game room and see who was in there. But he refused."
"Pardon?"
"He said he had left a tray of drinks on the landing and had to take them out on the lawn before somebody tripped on them. But I knew he was lying."
"I"m not with you."
"Sidney couldn"t look at me. His eyeb.a.l.l.s kept rolling around in his head. I told him to stop acting like Stepin Fetchit and get down there. Ten minutes later I called him on the intercom again. He still hadn"t gone into the game room."
"Why wouldn"t he do as you told him, Mrs. Lujan?"
She wore dentures, and they looked hard and stiff inside her mouth, her flesh by contrast soft and trembling against them. "Because he was afraid of what he would have to tell me. Because he was afraid of my G.o.dd.a.m.n husband," she said.
Her eyes were moist now, the flat of her fist pressed against her mouth.
"There"s something else I have to ask you, Mrs. Lujan," I said.
When she looked up at me, the whites of her eyes were threaded with tiny red lines.
"I think Colin Alridge has knowledge about your son"s death. I think he may know why Tony was murdered. I believe you gave Alridge information you won"t give us," I said. "Monarch Little didn"t kill your boy, did he?"
She stared into s.p.a.ce, as though reviewing all the words she had said and listened to and all the images her own words had caused her to see inside her head and the confession of personal failure and inadequacy she had just made to a stranger. Her face grew still and composed and she looked up at me again, this time her eyes free of pain, her thoughts clear.
"I"ve been a fool, Mr. Robicheaux. You are what I"ve heard others say of you. You"re a dishonorable and self-serving man, and I should not have confided in you. You"ll leave a black animal on the street while the blood of his victim runs in the gutter. There is only one type of person who does that, sir, someone who feels an intolerable sense of guilt about himself. Take your videoca.s.sette with you when you leave. Don"t return without a warrant, either."
THAT NIGHT I lay beside Molly in the dark and tried to sleep. I have never given much credence to the notion that the dead are held captive by the weight of tombstones placed on their chests. I believe they slip loose from their fastenings of rotted satin and mold board and tree roots and the clay itself and visit us in nocturnal moments that we are allowed to dismiss as dreams. They"re in our midst, still hanging on for reasons of their own. Sometimes I think their visitation has less to do with their own motives than ours. I think sometimes it is we who need the dead rather than the other way around.
Once, I saw the specter of my drowned father standing in the surf, rain dancing on his hard hat while he gave me the thumbs-up sign. Annie, my murdered wife, spoke to me inside the static on a telephone line during an electric storm. Sometimes at dusk, when the wind swirled through the sugarcane in a field, denting and flattening it just like elephant gra.s.s under the downdraft of a helicopter, I was sure I saw men from my platoon, all KIA, waiting for the Jolly Green to descend from the sky.
A therapist told me these experiences were a psychotic reaction to events I couldn"t control. The therapist was a decent and well-meaning man and I didn"t argue with him. But I know what I saw and heard, and just like anyone who has stacked time in what Saint John of the Cross described as the dark night of the soul, I long ago gave up either defending myself or arguing with those who have never had their ticket punched.
It was hot and breathless outside, and the sound of dry thunder, like crackling cellophane, leaked from clouds that gave no rain. Through the back window I could see vapor lamps burning in City Park and a layer of dust floating on the bayou"s surface. I could see the shadows of the oaks moving in my yard when the wind puffed through the canopy. I could see beads of humidity, as bright as quicksilver, slipping down the giant serrated leaves of the philodendron, and the humped shape of a gator lumbering crookedly across the mudbank, suddenly plunging into water and disappearing inside the lily pads. I saw all these things just as I heard helicopter blades roaring by overhead, and for just a second, for no reason that made any sense, I saw Dallas Klein getting to his knees on a hot street swirling with yellow dust in Opa-Locka, Florida, like a man preparing himself for his own decapitation.
I sat up in bed, unsure if I was awake or dreaming. I looked down the slope to the bayou, and all was as it had been a few moments earlier, except my heart was racing and I could smell my own odor rising from inside my T-shirt. I felt Molly"s weight shift in the bed.
"Did you have a dream?" she said.
"A chopper flew over the house and woke me up. It was probably a guy on his way out to a rig."
"Did you dream about the war?"
"No, I don"t dream about it much anymore. It was just the sudden sound of helicopter blades that woke me, that"s all."
But you don"t tell a lie to a Catholic nun and get away with it. Molly went into the kitchen and returned with a gla.s.s of lemonade for each of us. We sat there in the dark and drank the lemonade and watched the trees flare against the sky. She placed her hand on top of mine and squeezed it. "You never have to keep secrets from me," she said.
"I know."