“Say that about Patin again?”
“There were two rifle slugs in the remains. He was probably trying to escape from his abductors when they popped him. He told me about an island run by people who made a tape of a guy being squeezed to death inside an iron maiden. I think he was probably telling me the truth. Wake up, Cletus. Compared to what we’re dealing with, Bix Golightly is the Dalai Lama.”
“Dave?”
“Yeah?”
“You know all that stuff you hear about getting it on with a young woman so you can feel young again?”
“What about it?”
“It works fine. Until you come out of the shower the next morning and look in the mirror and see a mummy looking back at you.”
CLETE HUNG UP his desk phone and gazed out the back window at the bayou. A black man seated on an inverted bucket was fishing with a cane pole in the shade of the drawbridge. Water hyacinths grew thickly along the banks, and on the far side was the old gray hospital and convent that had been converted into business offices, all of it shadowed by giant live oaks. The wind was up and the moss was straightening in the trees and the oak leaves were tumbling on the manicured lawn. Clete rubbed the heel of his hand into his eye and felt a great weariness that seemed to have no origin. He lit his Zippo lighter and placed it in the center of an ashtray and, with a pair of tweezers, held the memory cards he had retrieved from Varina Leboeuf’s property over the flame.
He had left his office door open. He failed to notice that Gretchen Horowitz had returned from the errands he had sent her on. She tapped on the doorjamb before entering his office. “I wasn’t deliberately listening, but I heard your conversation,” she said.
He watched the second memory card curl and blacken in the flame of his Zippo. He dropped it into the ashtray. “What about it?” he asked.
“I wish you would trust me more.”
“About what?”
“Everything. If you trusted me, maybe I could help.”
“You’re a kid and you don’t know what you’re talking about, no matter how much you’ve been around.”
“I told you not to call me that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a kid. That’s what we all want to be. That’s why we screw up our lives, always trying to be something we’re not.”
“I don’t like to hear you talk like that. I don’t like what this woman is doing to you.”
“Did you get the mail?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go to FedEx in Lafayette?”
“Yes.”
“Then you did your job. We’re done on this subject.”
“Can I have the rest of the afternoon off?”
“To do what?”
She leaned down on his desk. Her shoulders were too big for her shirt, her upper arms taut with muscle. The violet tint of her eyes seemed to deepen as she looked into his face. “Personal business.”
“I think you should hang around.”
“I want to buy a vehicle for myself. Maybe a secondhand pickup.”
“Stay away from Varina Leboeuf,” he said.
“How about taking your own advice? You’re unbelievable.”
He watched her walk out the front door into the brightness of the day, a cute olive-drab cap tilted on her head, her wide-ass jeans stretched tight on her bottom, her tote bag swinging from her shoulder.
THREE HOURS LATER, Alafair’s cell phone rang. “Are you working on your novel right now?” Gretchen asked.
“I’ve finished the galleys on the first one. I’ve started a new one,” Alafair replied.
“What’s it about?”
“I’m not sure. I never am. I make it up each day. I never see more than two scenes ahead.”
“You don’t make an outline?”
“No, I think the story is written in the unconscious. You discover it a day at a time. At least that’s the way it seems to work for me.”
“I’ll buy you dinner if you drive me to a couple of car lots,” Gretchen said. “I took a cab to three but didn’t find anything interesting. I don’t want to waste the rest of the day waiting on more cabs.”
“Dave says you tore up Pierre Dupree and two other guys with a blackjack.”
“Shit like that happens sometimes.”
“Where are you?”
Alafair picked up Gretchen at a car lot out by the four-lane. She was standing on the corner, wearing dull red cowboy boots, her jeans stuffed into the tops, cars whizzing by her. She pulled open the passenger door and got inside. “Do the drivers around here drop acid before they get in their automobiles?” she said.
“What kind of car are you looking for?” Alafair asked.
“Something that’s cheap with a hot engine.” Gretchen gave directions to a car lot on the edge of town.
“You know a lot about cars?” Alafair said.
“A little. But forget about that. Clete told me you were number one in your class at Stanford Law.”
“There’s no official rating of graduates at Stanford, but I had a four-point GPA. My adviser said if I was ranked, I’d probably be first in my class.”
“You were born in a grass hut? You make me feel like a basket case. I’m sending in my application forms to the University of Texas. I think you have to be interviewed to get into the film program. I’m a little nervous about that.”
“Why should you be nervous?”
“Because I’ve always had a tendency of sending certain kinds of signals to men when I wanted something from them. Like maybe they could get into my pants if things went right for me. I pretended to myself that wasn’t what I was doing, but it was. I’d find a middle-aged guy who couldn’t control where his eyes went and home in on him.”
“Stop talking about yourself like that. If you have to go to Austin for an interview, I’ll go with you.”
“You’d do that?”
“Gretchen, talent doesn’t have anything to do with a person’s background or education. Did you ever see Amadeus? It’s the story of Mozart and his rivalry with Antonio Salieri. Salieri hated Mozart because he thought God had given this great talent to an undeserving idiot. Talent isn’t earned, it’s given. It’s like getting hit by lightning in the middle of a wet pasture. People don’t sign up for it.”
“If I could talk like you.”
“I told you to quit demeaning yourself. You’re the kind of person writers steal lines from. What kind of people do you think make movies? Most of them belong in detox or electroshock. The rest are narcissists and nonpathological schizophrenics. That’s why Los Angeles has more twelve-step meetings than any other county in the United States. Can you see your local Kiwanis Club making Pulp Fiction?”
“I’ve got to write that down.”
“No, you don’t. You have better lines in your own head.”
“I’m one of the people you just mentioned?”
“Anybody can be normal. Count your blessings,” Alafair said.
She turned in to a used-car lot that, only two weeks earlier, had been a cow pasture. The car seller was a notorious local character by the name of T. Coon Bassireau. His business enterprises had ranged from burial insurance to car-title loans to storefront counseling centers that billed Medicaid to treat street people who had to be taught the names of their illnesses. He also patented a vitamin tonic that contained 20 percent alcohol and was guaranteed to make the consumer feel better. He swindled pensioners out of their savings in a Mexican biotech scam and once dumped a bargeload of construction debris in a pristine swamp. But the big score for T. Coon came in the form of deteriorating train tracks across southern Louisiana. Whenever there was a freight derailment, particularly one involving tanker cars, he and his brother, a liability lawyer, distributed T-shirts to people in the neighborhoods along the tracks. The message printed on the back read: HAVE TOXIC SMELLS IN YOUR HOUSE FROM THE TRAIN WRECK? YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR A LARGE CASH SETTLEMENT. CALL T. COON BASSIREAU. T. COON IS YOUR FRIEND. The 800 number was emblazoned in red on the
front and back.
He stood proudly under the vinyl banner that stretched across his new car lot. Half a dozen American flags, their staffs speared into the ground, popped in the breeze. A battery-lit portable sign that read WE SUPPORT THE TROOPS glittered by the entranceway. T. Coon wore sideburns that flared like grease pencil on his cheeks, and a Stetson and a shiny magenta shirt with pearl snap buttons and a Stars and Bars belt buckle as big as the bronze plate on a heliograph. He rocked back and forth on the heels of his boots, a man at peace with both Caesar and God.
Gretchen walked past him without speaking and examined the two rows of junker cars and trucks T. Coon had assembled in the pasture. “You ladies want to go for a test drive?” he said. “You can do anyt’ing you want here. Just ax. For ladies like y’all, I’ll lower my price any day of the week and twice on Sunday and t’ree times on Monday.” He crossed his heart. “If I’m lying, dig me up and spit in my mout’.”
“Tell your mechanic to wipe the sawdust off the transmission cases,” Gretchen said.
“I’m lost here,” T. Coon said.
“You packed the transmission cases with sludge and sawdust to tighten up the gears. I bet you put oil on the brake linings to keep them from squeaking. The odometer numbers are a joke. I wouldn’t sit on the seats unless they’d been sprayed for crab lice.”
“I’m blown away by this,” he said.
“There’s not a car on the lot that’s not a shitbox. Your tires are so thin, the air is showing through. I think some of these cars came from Florida. They’re rusted with salt from the bottom up.”
“This is some kind of put-on.”
“Who are you that I should put you on?”
T. Coon’s eyes shifted nervously back and forth. “I’m making a living here.”
“You see that Ford truck with the chrome engine?”
“It’s a hot rod. It belongs to my nephew.”
“I ran the plate two days ago. It’s registered in your name. You use it as a leader and claim your nephew won’t sell it unless the figures are right. What are the right figures?”
“My nephew might take fifteen t’ousand.”
“Give me the keys,” Gretchen said.
She got in the pickup and fired it up and spun rubber on the grass and swung out on the highway, the dual exhausts throbbing on the asphalt. A few minutes later, she was back, the exposed chrome engine ticking with heat. She left the keys in the ignition and got out of the cab. “I’ll give you eight. In cash, right now. It’ll have to be re-primed and painted and the interior entirely redone. The only things good about it are the chop and channel jobs and the Merc engine and the Hollywood mufflers. The rest of it blows.”
“I cain’t believe I’m being verbally assaulted like this. I feel like I inebriated a whole bottle of whiskey and am having delusions.”
She opened her tote bag and removed a brown envelope stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. “Tell me what you want to do,” she said.
“Make it nine,” he said.
“Make it eight.”
“Make it eighty-five hunnerd. The tires are almost brand-new.”
“That’s why you’re not getting seventy-five hundred,” she said. “Stop trying to see down my shirt.”
T. Coon wore a stupefied expression, like a man who had just gotten off a centrifuge. “We got to do some paperwork in my office, that li’l trailer over there. Don’t look at me like that. I’ll leave the door open. Jesus Christ, where you from, lady? You got your spaceship parked somewhere? You need a job? I’m serious here. I got an entry-level position we can talk about.” He looked at her expression to see what effect his words were having. “Okay, I was just axing.”
Half an hour later, Gretchen followed Alafair to a restaurant on the highway and bought seafood dinners for both of them. Through the window, Alafair could see a blue-black darkness taking hold in the sky and gulls that had been blown inland circling over a cane field. “I’ve got another favor to ask you,” Gretchen said. “I don’t want to embarrass you, but I’d like to live my life the way you do. Maybe you could give me a reading list and some tips on things.”
“That’s flattering, but why not just be your own person?”
“If I was who I started out to be, I’d be in prison or worse. I’ve got an advantage over other people who write novels and make movies. I lived inside a world that most people couldn’t imagine. Did you ever see Wind Across the Everglades, the story of James Audubon trying to put the bird poachers out of business? I know those kinds of people, how they think and talk and spend their time. I know about racetracks and drug smuggling in the Keys and CIA people in Little Havana and the money that gets laundered through the pari-mutuel windows.”
“I think you’re probably a real artist, Gretchen. You don’t have to model yourself on me. Just stay true to your own principles.”
“I need you to go with me to see Varina Leboeuf.”
“You want to do this because of Clete?”
“Varina Leboeuf tapes the men she goes to bed with. Clete doesn’t have any judgment about women. I need to have a talk with her, but in the way you would do it, not in the way I usually do things. I need you there as a witness, too. I don’t want her making up lies about me later.”
Alafair was eating a deep-fried soft-shell crab. She put it down and gazed at the seagulls cawing above the cane field. The sky was completely dark now, the clouds rippling with flashes of yellow light. “Clete can take care of himself. Maybe you should leave things alone.”
“You’re smarter than me about almost everything, Alafair, but you’re wrong about this. Most people think society is run by lawyers and politicians. We believe this because those are the people we see on the news. But the only reason we see these people on the news is because they own the media, not people like us. When things have to be taken care of—I’m talking about the kind of things nobody wants to know about—there’s a small bunch that does the dirty work. Maybe you don’t believe this.”
“That’s the way cynics think. And they think that way because it’s uncomplicated and easy,” Alafair said.
“Did you see Mississippi Burning, the story of the boys who were murdered by the Klan and buried in an earthen dam?” Gretchen said. “In the movie, the FBI outsmarts the Klan and turns them against each other and gets them to start copping pleas. But that’s not what happened. Hoover sent a Mafia hit man down there, and he beat the crap out of three guys who were only too glad to turn over the names of the killers.”
“What are you going to say to Varina?”
“Not much. You don’t have to go. I’ve asked a lot of you already.”
“Maybe it’s better I not.”
“I can’t blame you. I try to stay out of other people’s lives. But I don’t think Clete has much chance against Varina Leboeuf. I don’t think he sees everything that’s involved, either.”
“What’s that last part mean?” Alafair asked.
“I’ve known a lot of bad people in Florida. They all had connections in Louisiana. Some of them may have been involved with the murder of John Kennedy. How do you think the crack got in the projects here? It just showed up one day? The money from the crack paid for AK-47s that went to Nicaragua. But who gives a shit, right?”
“This is becoming an expensive dinner.”
“That’s why I said you don’t have to go with me.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Alafair said.
GRETCHEN HOROWITZ HAD never understood what people called “shades of gray.” In her opinion, there were two kinds of people in the world, doers and takers. The doers did a number on the takers. Maybe there were some people in between, but not many. She liked to think she was among the not many. The not many set their own boundaries, fought under their own flag, gave no quarter and asked for none in return. Until recently, she had never met a man who had not tried to use her. Even the best of them, a high school counselor and a professor at the community college, had turned out to be unhappily marr
ied and, in a weak moment, filled with greater need than charity in their attitude toward her, one of them groping her in his office, the other begging her to go with him to a motel in Key Largo, then weeping with remorse on her breast.
That was when she tried women. In each instance she felt mildly curious before the experience and empty and vaguely embarrassed after, as though she had been a spectator rather than a participant in her own tryst. She saw a psychiatrist in Coral Cables who treated her with pharmaceuticals. He also told her that she had never been loved and, as a consequence, was incapable of intimacy. “What can I do about that?” she asked.
“It’s not all bad. Eighty percent of my patients are trying to escape emotional entanglements,” he replied. “You’re already there. What I think you need is an older and wiser man, namely a paternal figure in your life.”
“I have feelings I didn’t tell you about, Doc,” she said. “On a bright, clear day out on the ocean, without a problem in the world, I have this urge to do some payback. On a couple of occasions I acted on my urge, one time with a guy who owned a skin joint and asked me out on his boat. Things got pretty entangled. At least for him. Want to hear about it?”
Later that day the receptionist called Gretchen and told her that the psychiatrist was overloaded and would be referring her to a colleague.
Alafair left her car in town and rode with Gretchen down to Cypremort Point. On the western horizon a thin band of blue light was sealed under clouds as black as a skillet’s lid, and waves were sliding across the darkness of the bay, smacking against the shoals. Gretchen could smell the salt in the air and the rain in the trees and the leaves that had been blown onto the asphalt and run over by other vehicles. But inside the coldness of the smell and the freshness of the evening, she could not take her eyes off the rain rings on the surface of the swells. They reminded her of a dream she’d been having since she was a child. In it, giant hard-bodied fish with the grayish-blue skin of dolphins rose from the depths and burst through the surface, then arched down into the rings they had created with their own bodies, slipping into darkness again, their steel-like skin glistening. The dream had always filled her with dread.