“If I touched your person, Mr. Bledsoe, I would scrub my skin with peroxide and a wire brush. Is it true you get off scaring the hell out of working girls?”
He glanced up at the camera on the wall, clearly wondering if indeed it was turned off and if that was good or bad for him. “Does it seem logical that a man who hires prostitutes would want to scare off prostitutes?” he said.
“Yeah, if everything about him creeps them out,” Helen said.
For the first time I saw a darkness sweep across his face. Helen leaned closer to him, her hip brushing again him, her face intersecting his line of vision. “What did your mother do to you when you were a kid?”
“She didn’t do anything.”
“When you wet the bed, did she make you sleep in your own stink? Did she wash out your mouth with soap when you sassed her? Did she tell you your underwear was inside out and that skid marks were on it, that you made her ashamed you were her son, that you disgusted her?”
He started to get up from the chair.
“Sit down. I’m not through talking to you,” she said. “She did things to you in the dark, didn’t she? Your father wasn’t around and so you were the dildo. Did she ever hold your penis in her hand and then punish you for it later?”
The temperature in the room had grown warmer and I felt myself clearing my throat.
“You’re making this up. You don’t know me,” Bledsoe said.
“You made a mistake coming to this parish. You’re a sick man and you’ll be treated as such. Detective Robicheaux, go get him another cup of coffee. I want to talk to Mr. Bledsoe a little more privately.”
“I don’t want any. I want to return to my cottage now.”
“You know why you keep looking at that camera, Mr. Bledsoe?” she said. “It’s because your identity is self-manufactured and you’re nothing like the person you want the world to see. We know everything about you. You’re genetically and psychologically defective. People like you and Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy should have been flushed down the toilet with the afterbirth five minutes after y’all were born. Unfortunately your mommies didn’t do that and instead raised up big titty babies that everyone else has to take care of.”
I picked up his coffee cup from the table. “You want cream or sugar?”
His bottom lip trembled. Helen had delivered a cut that went to the bone.
“Answer him,” she said.
He sat up in the chair, his eyes blinking and refocusing, like a man who had just undergone a violent decompression inside a bathysphere. Then he huffed air out his nostrils and straightened his shoulders. I suspected that behind that jutting forehead he was rebuilding his mental fortifications a block at a time, a process he had learned in an environment most of us can only guess at. He bit into a doughnut and pushed the custard inside his mouth with his fingers.
“It’s been real nice y’all having me here,” he said. “I won’t hold your words against you. That’s not my way. My mother was a lovely, kind woman and you don’t have any idea of what you’re talking about.”
“You need to talk to us, Mr. Bledsoe,” I said.
“No, sir, I surely don’t. Very harsh things have been said here today.” He got up from the chair and took his pair of dark glasses from his pocket, the ones with the round white frames, and fitted them on his face. “Looks is only skin deep, Ms. Soileau. If you’re a Christian, maybe you should give more thought to the feelings of other people.”
With that, he walked out of the room, down the hall, and out of the courthouse.
“Do you believe that?” Helen said.
“Want me to take him home?” I said.
“Screw him,” she said. She walked in a circle, her hands on her hips. “Think he slipped the punch?”
“You took his skin off.”
“And?”
“Bledsoe’s a psychopath. He’s incapable of accepting injury done to him by others, either real or imagined. He hates our guts and he’ll get even in whatever way he can.”
I think Helen had drawn on her own childhood experience when she turned the screws on Bledsoe. I also suspected some of the images she had used in her interrogation were of a kind she herself did not like to remember.
“Some fun, huh, bwana?” she said.
LATER THAT DAY Bertrand Melancon was sitting on the steps of his grandmother’s gallery, wondering what he should do next, when a blue Mercury turned in to the Quarters and splashed through a puddle, fanning a muddy spray back across its immaculate surface. The driver sighted Bertrand and turned in to his grandmother’s yard.
Another storm front had moved in and the sky overhead was blue-black and blooming with electricity. The driver of the Mercury got out and walked toward the gallery, avoiding the pools of rainwater, lifting his trouser cuffs above his two-tone shoes.
“Hi,” he said.
“What’s happenin’?” Bertrand replied.
“My name is Ronald. What’s yours?”
“Same as it was this morning, when a guy wit’ a face just like yours was following me down by the drawbridge in Jeanerette.”
“You’re smart. I bet you been to college.”
“What you want, man?”
“Can I sit down?”
“No.”
The man with the indented face opened a badge holder with a photo ID and an ornate gold and blue shield inside. “I’m an investigator for an insurance carrier. I’d like to pay you a recovery fee.”
Was this one of the guys who had taken Eddy out of our Lady of the Lake and stolen his mind? Bertrand wondered. Or lured Andre into a car outside the FEMA camp? No, those guys wouldn’t drive up to his grandmother’s house in daylight, in full view of the neighbors.
“Recovery of what?”
The man who had introduced himself as Ronald removed a big envelope from his side pocket. It was thick and crimped tightly in the center with two double-wrapped rubber bands.
“Here, see what’s inside,” he said, holding it in front of Bertrand’s face.
Bertrand folded his hands and pretended to look into the distance.
“Open it up,” Ronald said. “A smart man always gets the information up front before he does his decision making. A smart man sees what’s on the table, then makes an informed choice. You’re a student of people, I can tell that. You a cautious, smart man. I know that, ’Cause I’m a student of people, too.”
The man named Ronald touched the edge of the envelope against the back of Bertrand’s hand. “What you got to lose?” he said. “Think those rich people in those big houses down the road are worried about you and your grandmother?”
Bertrand looked down the street that was lined with shotgun houses and dirt yards in which the people parked their vehicles. Across the state road he could see a field full of green sugarcane and a thoroughbred horse farm bordered by white-painted railed iron fences and dotted with breeding barns that cost more than his grandmother’s entire neighborhood, all of it backdropped by a sky that leaked thunder.
Bertrand reached out and took the envelope. It was heavy and solid and felt good in his hand, the way a stack of money packed into an envelope can feel solid and good.
“How much in here?” he said, his voice suddenly dry and speaking of its own accord, before he could even organize the words in an intelligible fashion.
“Forty thousand. But that’s just for now. You get another forty thousand after we do the recovery. Go ahead. Stick your finger in there. Close your eyes and tell me what it feels like. Make you think of anything else?”
Bertrand cracked the glue on the seal with his thumb and looked at the sheaves of one-hundred-dollar bills inside. “How I know it ain’t counterfeit?”
“Tomorrow morning I’ll drive you to the bank. Or tonight we can go to the casino. We’ll buy some chips with it and see what happens. The people at the casino know counterfeit when they see it. You’re a smart man, all right.”
A camera lens opened in Bertrand’s mind and he saw himse
lf driving a convertible down an ocean highway, waves sliding up on the sand, big coral rocks hissing with foam. He saw girls in bikinis slapping a volleyball back and forth across a net. He heard music pounding from his stereo speakers and felt the salt spray in his face.
“Time to start a new life,” Bledsoe said.
Next door a woman began shouting at her children. Bertrand heard her hit one of them, a bone-deep slap, the kind that sent a child to the floor.
“You right,” he said.
“That’s what I thought.”
“That why I ain’t interested. Besides, you got the wrong guy,” Bertrand said.
He handed the envelope back to Bledsoe and knitted his fingers between his legs. Spots swam before his eyes. He could not believe the amount of money he had just held in his hand and returned to the man who had offered it to him. He spit between his knees and let his mind go empty.
“What you just said is not only illogical, it’s untrue,” Ronald said, mustering his most tolerant voice.
“What’s that suppose to mean?”
“If you’re the wrong guy, you wouldn’t know enough to say you’re not interested. Besides, you look just like your brother.”
Bertrand could hear an electric rip in a cloud, a tearing sound at the bottom of the sky. “How you know what my brother looks like?” he asked.
Ronald’s eyes retained their mirthful brightness, but a pause took place in them, a beat or a blink that was not a blink, a split-second inner recognition that he had made a slip.
“I got both y’all’s mug shots. I got them from a friend at NOPD.”
“Yeah, New Orleans cops that been wading in water up to their chins love to do that for guys who get their badges out of Cracker Jack boxes.”
“I’m trying to be your friend, Bertrand. I want to make you rich. You’re inches away from having the most beautiful women in the world.”
“Hey, man, no hard feelings, but I don’t think you know nothing about beautiful women.”
Bertrand got up from the step and went back in the house. He wondered if he had managed to conceal the fact he had made Ronald as one of the men who had kidnapped Eddy. When he looked back through the screen, Ronald was turning his car around in the yard, one tire mashing over a tomato plant in his grandmother’s garden. The shape of his head reminded Bertrand of a question mark. Then Ronald’s eyes locked on Bertrand’s. The expression on Ronald’s face made Bertrand step back from the screen.
A FEW MINUTES LATER Bertrand drove down to the grocery store in Loreauville and bought a chocolate drink from the soda machine. He drank it in the car, in the parking lot, across from a Catholic church, and tried to think. This dude with a head and face that reminded him of the curved head of a long-reach toothbrush was lying. He was one of the dudes who had grabbed and tortured Eddy. Which meant he was one of the dudes working for Sidney Kovick. But why didn’t they just grab Bertrand, too? They knew where he lived. They knew his movements. They knew who his grandmother was. Bertrand should have been dog food by now.
Because the guy was working his own deal? Because the guy was going to stiff Sidney Kovick?
That was it. Kovick’s hired geek had got off his leash and was going to make his own score, at Kovick’s expense.
Maybe it was time to mess with a couple of people’s heads as well as set things straight with somebody who thinks it’s all right to pop other people in the face, Bertrand thought.
He changed the last five dollars of the money his grandmother had given him into silver and used the pay phone on the front of the grocery store to call long-distance information. “Yeah, Kovick’s Flowers in Algiers, that’s it, you got it,” he said. “Snap it up, too, okay? This is an emergency situation.”
He looked at his watch. It was 4:56. Come on, come on, he thought. “Hey, ain’t y’all heard of computers? What’s the holdup?” he danced up and down on the balls of his feet. “All right, say it again.” he wrote the number on the grocery store wall. “Tell your supervisor to give you a raise. Tell her Bertrand Melancon give her the green light on that.”
He punched the number into the pay phone, his ulcers singing, his head light as a balloon with the adrenaline pumping through his system.
Be there, be there, be there, he prayed, because he knew if he didn’t connect with Kovick now, his courage would wane and fail him later, as it always had.
After the eighth ring, Bertrand almost gave up. Then someone picked up the receiver and said, “Kovick’s Flowers. Could I help you?”
The voice at the other end of the connection made Bertrand’s bowels turn to water.
“Could I help you?” the voice repeated.
“No, you can help yourself, motherfucker.”
There was a pause, more of fatigue than surprise. “Is this who I think it is?”
“Yeah, Bertrand Melancon, the brother of Eddy Melancon, if that name mean anything to you. Know a cracker drives a blue Merc, looks like somebody beat on his face wit’ an ugly stick when he was a kid?”
“No.”
“Think hard. Carries a PI badge. Thinks the niggers are gonna start tap-dancing and spitting watermelon seeds when he rolls the gold on them?”
“You seem to be a slow learner, kid. Why don’t you drop by and let’s have a talk?”
“No, this time you listen to me. Your man was here with a fat envelope full of dead presidents. Guess what he was doing. Cutting his own deal for them blood stones and selling your sorry ass down the drain. Maybe you ought to hire a higher class of circus freaks to do your dirty work.”
“Where can I get in touch with this guy?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. I called for another reason. Maybe I deserved what you done to me. Maybe I went there axing to get bitch-slapped and kicked in the ass in front of people. But I learned something there you ain’t gonna understand. I learned I ain’t no killer. I couldn’t cap you, no matter what you done to me and Eddy. So I come out of this wit’ something you didn’t figure on. I know I ain’t like you, a killer done cut off a man’s legs, and that’s worth more to me than them blood stones.”
The line was silent.
“You there?” Bertrand said.
“Where are you?” the voice said.
“In your head, just like you been in mine. But not no more,” Bertrand said, and hung up.
Wow, he thought, his skin tingling like he’d just walked out of an igloo. Chapter 25
T HE WHITE FLICKER of lightning in the trees surrounding her house made Melanie Baylor think of the summer storms she had known as a child growing up north of Chicago. The family had lived on Lake Michigan, in a neighborhood of hardwood trees and elevated lawns and sailboats tacking in the wind against a background of azure water that seemed as large as the sea. The storms could tear at the lake’s surface and torment the trees, but the big two-story house she had lived in was a safe place, one where her father, a stockbroker, smoked a pipe in front of the fireplace and was always full of good cheer. Even during the winter, when the boathouse was locked up and the lake plated with ice, the house and the small town where they shopped were safe places, far from wars and urban unrest. Melanie knew she would marry and move away one day, perhaps to the East Coast, but she would always remain a midwesterner and her real home would always be located inside chestnut and beech and maple trees on the shores of Lake Michigan.
That was before her father had a massive coronary in the bed of his mistress in Naperville. That was before the Securities and Exchange Commission investigated his brokerage service. That was before his creditors sued the estate and took every cent the family had, including the home on Lake Michigan.
Melanie lifted the bottle of bourbon from the cupboard shelf and poured an inch into her glass. Then she poured again and got ice from the refrigerator and placed three cubes in the glass and added water. She could hear rain on the roof now and the trees in the backyard were wet and dark green when the lightning flickered in the clouds. Otis and Thelma were still at the
grocery store in New Iberia. By Melanie’s estimate, the combination of bad weather and driving distance and the amount of groceries they had to buy ensured they would be gone for at least an hour and a half. She would enjoy her bourbon and her solitude until then, and perhaps fix one strong drink just before they arrived back home, and that would be it for the evening.
She wasn’t an alcoholic. That’s what her first husband had been. One thing was for sure. She would never be like him. That was not up for debate.
Otis didn’t take her to task because she had lost her abstemious ways, nor did he monitor the amount that was gone each day from the Chianti bottle in the pantry or the decanter of brandy in the dining room. Otis was a good man, she told herself with a degree of self-fondness, proud of the way she had come to accept him and his physical ways and the smell of testosterone his clothes sometimes carried.
She showered and washed her hair and dried herself in front of the mirror. She turned sideways and raised herself slightly on her toes and looked at the flatness of her stomach, the firmness of her breasts, the sun-browned, almost tallowlike smoothness of her skin. She felt an imperious sexual urge that made her wet her lips and tilt back her head, creating an erotic self-image in her mind that made her wonder if indeed she wasn’t a narcissist. She bit down sensuously on her lower lip and removed a strand of hair from her eye. Then she slipped her feet into her sandals and, while she watched herself in the mirror, carefully blotted the drops of water off her cheeks and forehead.
She picked up her drink from the top of the toilet tank and drank. Otis thought he knew everything about her, but the reality was otherwise. Maybe she would give him a little lesson one of these nights. Her erotic power was far greater than he knew. The men who looked at her with an adventurous eye were never made to feel they were acting inappropriately. Maybe Otis should become a little more aware of the desire she could stir in others.
She put on her fluffy robe and wrapped her head with a towel and took her drink into the living room. She turned the stereo to the University’s classical music station and opened a book on her knee and sipped from her glass. Outside, the rain was blowing in a vortex that looked like spun glass in the porch light. The two-lane road in front of the house was black and slick, and across the bayou she could see lights in a backyard and a Negro man on a ladder redistributing the bricks that held down the blue felt and canvas that covered a hole in his roof left by Rita.