He wasn’t sure who Robert Weingart was and in fact could see only the clean lines of his profile and the shine of the tonic on his hair, but while Hogman poured the Diet Cokes and filled the bowls of gumbo Weingart had ordered, he studied Tee Jolie Melton and the glow on her face. It was the look of a girl who knew she was loved and beautiful and desired. Her eyes were bright, as though she was amused by the flattery she was hearing, as though the words of the well-dressed white man did not cause flowers to bloom in her cheeks. Hogman asked the waitress who the white man was.
“A famous writer,” she said.
“He drives that Mustang out front?”
“That’s him.”
“Ax Tee Jolie if she got a minute.”
“She came to his table on her own, Hogman. He ain’t picked her up.”
“I know, he’s probably researching a book. We get a lot of them kind in here.”
Hogman went to the restroom, then had to move two cases of beer from the storage room to the cooler. When he had finished loading the cooler, Tee Jolie and Weingart had left. He wiped his hands on a dish towel and went out on the front porch of the club.
Weingart escorted Tee Jolie to his Mustang and opened the passenger door for her. But instead of getting in, she rested one hand on top of the door and studied his face and the unnatural glaze it had taken on in the glow of the Christmas-tree lights stapled around the club’s front windows, as though the tissue in it had been injected with synthetics. “Can my sister come wit’ us?”
“I thought we got that situation out of the way.”
“I feel a li’l guilty about her not getting to audition, like maybe I’m taking her chance away from her.”
“There’re all kinds of legal problems when you start dealing with minors. Record companies will do it if the prospect is big enough, but they don’t like it. Besides, kids’ voices change.”
“You telling me the troot’?”
“I mean this with all respect: Why would I lie to you? Because I can’t find a girlfriend? I have to go to barrooms on back roads and make up lies like some kind of molester? Is that what I look like?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You’re a nice girl. You’re bright and evidently have talent. But if you don’t want to go to Lafayette, no hard feelings. Maybe you’re right. It’s not meant to be.”
“What isn’t?”
“One of those breakthrough moments. Doors open, and we go through them or we don’t. If a person lets fear dominate his life, he doesn’t deserve the talent he’s been given. Believe me, if that’s the case, with you or me or anybody who has a gift, it will be taken from us and given to somebody else.”
“I never t’ought of it like that. Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“I want you to hear me sing. Let’s go to Lafayette, Robert.”
“You called me by my name. That’s a breakthrough in itself.”
She sat down in the deep black leather of the seat and fastened the safety belt across her chest while he closed the door behind her. Then he turned the ignition, backed in a half circle, and drove slowly across the gravel toward the road.
He got only twenty feet before the female deputy sheriff stepped in front of his headlights, her eyes watering in the glare.
Weingart rolled down his window. “What’s the trouble?”
“Cut your engine and step out of the car, please,” she said. The deputy leaned over and peered inside at Tee Jolie. “You doin’ all right tonight, miss?”
“I’m fine,” Tee Jolie replied.
“Did you hear me, sir?”
“Whatever,” Weingart said, lifting his hands from the steering wheel. He turned off the ignition and the lights and got out of the car.
“Walk over here with me,” the deputy said.
“Can we pull the plug on this?”
“Do you have a hearing impairment?”
Weingart and the deputy went into the shadows by the corner of the club, ignoring the black bartender who stood on the porch. “You leave that girl alone,” she said.
“Somebody made you the patroness of mulatto bar girls?”
“This isn’t St. Mary Parish. Your free ride is over, buster.”
“If I were short and fat, I’d be mad at the world, too.”
“I hope you wise off one more time. I really do. Short of that, you get your sorry ass down the road.”
“Gladly.”
“She stays.”
“That should be up to her.”
“I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’ve taken this attitude. There were a couple of times I wanted to do this, but I didn’t. I’ll always regret that.”
“Whoa,” he said, stepping backward.
Hogman heard the deputy slide her baton from the plastic ring on her belt.
“Tell me how you like this. I’ve heard it passes in a week or so,” she said, thrusting the point of the baton with both hands into a spot just above Weingart’s belt.
He let out a groan and slumped against a car fender, barely able to support himself, his mouth open, his face gray.
“One more little poke, in case you didn’t get the message,” the deputy said. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? Happy motoring.”
HOGMAN CALLED AT the office in the morning and told me what he and the waitress had seen and heard at the club the previous night.
“What happened to the girl?” I asked.
“She called a cab.”
“I’m not sure what you’re telling me here, Hogman.”
“Dave, this ain’t just some trashy po’ white shopping for country girls. When a man like that picks up a black girl, it’s ’cause he wants to leave his mark on her.”
“But is something else bothering you about what you saw and heard?”
“The deputy and this Hollywood guy talked like they knew each other. Like the deputy knew about t’ings he’d done before. When she come inside later, I said, ‘A man like that don’t stop being what he is ’cause you poke him wit’ a club, no. He just do what you done to him to the next girl he gets his hands on.’”
“What’d she say?”
“That he hadn’t broke no law. That she run him off and he wouldn’t be back again.”
“What’s this deputy’s name?”
“I just call her Miss Emma,” he replied. “I don’t know her last name.”
GEORGE ORWELL ONCE wrote that people are always better than we think they are. They are more kind, more loving, more brave and decent. They keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber and go down with the decks awash and the guns blazing. I still believe that Orwell was right. But too often there are times when our fellow human beings let us down, and when they do, all of us are the less for it.
After I finished talking to Hogman, I drove to St. Martinville and walked into the sheriff’s department and found Emma at a desk in her cubicle, sorting through a pile of paperwork in her in-basket.
“Sometimes I wrap mine in a paper sack and stuff it in the bottom of the trash can,” I said. “The irony is, it doesn’t seem to make any difference.”
A half-smile lingered on her mouth. “You just passing by?”
“I understand you had a run-in with Robert Weingart last night.”
I hoped she would make a joke about it or indicate convincingly that she was busy. I hoped she would be mildly irritated. I hoped she would do almost anything except pause and think before she replied. But I saw her eyes go flat and bright without cause, and impossible to read. “Who told you that?” she asked.
“You’ve met Weingart before?”
“I know who he is.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Clete told me once that Weingart might be using roofies on local girls. So I invited him out of St. Martin Parish.”
I pulled up a chair and sat down by the side of her desk, not over two feet from her. “Yesterday Weingart wired a huge amount of money to Canada. You think the book business is that go
od?”
“How would I know?”
“Because maybe you have a history with him.”
“I saw him giving a snow job to a young girl who didn’t have enough sense to stay out of his car. So I had a heart-to-heart with him. I don’t know where you get all this other stuff. Have you been talking to the bartender?”
“You told Weingart he’d gotten a free pass about something. You were talking as though you’d had a chance to put a stop to something but you didn’t. You were talking as though you wanted to make up for what a theologian would call a sin of omission.”
“Run that church-basement psychobabble on somebody else, Dave.”
“Why is it that every person I know who uses that term has something he or she fears discussing?”
“Because most of the people you know are professional victims?”
“Were you talking about the death of Bernadette Latiolais or Fern Michot?”
Emma picked up a thick sheaf of paper from her desktop, work that seemed to be completed, and set it in the in-basket. Her cheeks were flaming. “Why do you do this to me, Dave? I was always your friend.”
“I think you planted Clete’s gold ballpoint in Herman Stanga’s swimming pool. You’re not only a dirty cop, Emma, I think you set up a man you slept with, a man who had great affection for you and who still defends you.”
There was a cup of cold coffee on her desk. She picked it up and threw it in my face. Other deputies, both plainclothes and in uniform, were getting up from their desks, staring through the front of the cubicle. I took two pieces of Kleenex from the box on Emma’s desk and wiped my face with them. “You’re a Judas goat. You lead your own kind down the slaughter chute,” I said. “Tell me if there is anything lower.”
The sheriff placed his hand on my shoulder. “That’s enough, Dave,” he said.
“Not even close,” I replied.
CHAPTER
19
EARLY MORNING IS a bad time for recovering drunks. The wall between the unconscious and the world of sleep is soft and porous, and the gargoyles have a way of slipping into the sunlight and fastening a talon or two into the back of your neck. Perhaps that is why I have always been an early riser, escaping into the blueness of the dawn and its healing properties before the power of memory and the dark energies of my previous life lay claim on my waking day.
But the funk and depression I brought back to town after my encounter with Emma Poche could not be blamed on the unconscious or my history of alcoholism and violence. A time comes in your life when the loudest sound in a room, any room, is the ticking of a clock. And the problem is not the amplified nature of the sound; the problem is that the sound is slowing, each tick a little further away than the one that preceded it. The first time this happened to me, I was in City Park on an autumn day, the smell of chrysanthemums and gas hanging in the trees. The breath went out of my chest and a sweat broke on my forehead. I sat down on a bench, the camellias and the bayou and the ball diamond slipping out of focus. I waited for the moment to pass, my mouth filling with a taste like pennies or blood from a fresh cut. I took off my wristwatch and shook it to make it stop ticking. Then I realized that people were staring at me, their faces disjointed with pity and concern.
“I’ve got malaria,” I said, my hands knotted between my knees, a weak smile on my mouth.
It’s not enough to call this a vision of mortality. In that moment, when watches and clocks misbehave and you feel a cold vapor wrap itself around your heart, you unconsciously draw a line at the bottom of a long column of numbers and come up with a sum. Perhaps it’s one that fills you with contentment and endows you with a level of courage and an acceptance that you didn’t know you possessed.
Or maybe not.
Maybe you wonder if you blew it, if you flipped away your yesterdays like cigarette butts that left a bad aftertaste. Or worst of all, you realize you have to leave the lives of others behind, the one you didn’t live and the ones you did not get to know adequately.
Helen Soileau probably had several women living inside her skin, but I had come to know only one or two of them. My daughter had grown from a terrified five-year-old refugee I had pulled from a submerged plane into an aspiring novelist and law student. My wife, Molly, had been a Catholic nun, a missionary in Central America, a labor organizer in southern Louisiana, and the wife of a police officer who had shed the blood of many men. I suspected that neither woman’s story was over. I also suspected I would not see the rest of their stories written.
Thoughts of this kind rob you of both faith and resolve. And my situation was further complicated by a phone call that Alafair picked up in the kitchen that afternoon. “Just a moment, please,” she said, pressing the mute button on the console. “It’s somebody named Emma. She sounds like she’s had a few drinks.”
I waited, thinking.
“I’ll tell her to call back.”
“That’s all right,” I said, taking the receiver from her. I placed it against my ear. I could hear people talking loudly and a jukebox playing in the background. “What’s shaking, Emma?”
“Screw you, Dave. One day I’ll pay you back for what you did today.”
“Is that the entirety of your message?”
“No. No matter what you think of me, I still have a conscience.”
“I’m listening.”
There was a long silence.
“Emma?”
“They’re gonna cap you and anybody who’s with you.”
“Who is?”
“God, you’re dumb,” she said, and broke the connection.
My ear felt cold when I set the receiver down in the cradle.
“What is it, Dave?” Alafair asked.
“That was Emma Poche. She’s a deputy sheriff in St. Martin Parish. Her boat must have left the dock a little early today.”
But I kept staring at Alafair, my words banal and silly, poorly disguising the portent of Emma’s call.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.
“She said I was in danger, as well as anyone who might be with me.”
“Danger from whom?”
“She hung up without saying.”
“Let’s have a talk with her.”
“I did that this morning. Maybe this is her way of getting even or appeasing her conscience. She’s a drunk, and nothing she says is reliable.”
Alafair sat down at the breakfast table and gazed out the back window. Molly was feeding Tripod on top of his hutch, and Snuggs was watching both of them from a fork in the tree overhead. “I have to tell you something, Dave,” Alafair said.
“What is it?”
“I heard two deputies in uniform talking in the booth next to me in McDonald’s. They were talking about the guys who tried to kill you and Clete in Jeff Davis Parish. One of them said, ‘I wonder if Robicheaux is starting to see black helicopters.’”
“Who cares what he said?”
“I care,” she said.
“Did you say something to this guy?”
“I told him he’d better keep his mouth off you or he’d be wearing his Big Mac on his head.”
I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. Her back was as stiff and hard as a stump. “Even when you were a little bitty girl, you were heck on wheels, Alf.”
When she looked back at me, there were tears in her eyes. “You’re better than all these people, Dave. They don’t deserve you.”
“I’m better than no one.”
“This Poche woman is in St. Martinville?”
“Bad idea,” I said.
“Where does she live?”
“Stay away from her,” I said. “Are you listening, Alf? Come back here.”
IT WAS DARK and rain had started to fall before Alafair found the cypress house on the bayou where Emma Poche lived. Only one light burned in the house, perhaps in a back bedroom. The light fell out into the backyard, where a barbecue pit with an open top smoldered under a live oak, the smoke ris
ing into the leaves in an acrid flume.
The tide was in, and Bayou Teche was high and swollen with mud, the surface chained with rain rings. A speedboat was moored among the flooded elephant ears, a tarp thrown carelessly over the console and the front seat. Alafair could hear music playing inside the cypress house. She could also hear wind chimes tinkling on the gallery and the sound of someone’s voice rising and falling above the music. She stepped up on the gallery and started to tap on the door. Then she realized what she was hearing, a soliloquy of need and debasement, a confession of personal inadequacy made by someone who was either drunk or morally insane or without any vestige of self-respect.
“I’ve done everything you wanted,” the voice said. “But you treat me like fingernail parings. I’m supposed to fuck you on demand and never expect a kind word, and act like that’s normal. I bought a roast and a cake and fixed your potatoes just the way you like them. I thought we’d eat and go out in public or go to New Orleans and stay at the Monteleone. I don’t have a career or a life anymore. All I have is you. Come back to bed. Let me hold you.”
Alafair stepped back, unsure what she should do next. Then she took a breath and knocked hard on the door. The inside of the house went silent. “Ms. Poche, it’s Alafair Robicheaux. I need to speak to you,” she said.
She heard the sound of feet moving across the floor and a door opening in back. She knocked again, this time harder. “Ms. Poche, one way or another, you’re going to talk to me,” she said.
She walked around to the side of the house. Someone wearing a flop hat and a raincoat was walking rapidly through the trees and down the slope to the bayou. The electricity leaping between the clouds lit the moored speedboat and the banks of flooded elephant ears and the small waves capping among the cypress knees. The person picked up the weighted painter and stepped up on the speedboat’s bow in a single motion, then pushed the electric starter on the engine and backed into the current. In seconds, the boat was splitting a trough down the middle of the bayou.