I heard a faucet squeak in the bathroom, then the sound of the shower water died inside the stall. Helen pushed open the bathroom door and I saw her eyes go up and down the form of someone inside.
"Put a robe on and get out here, ma'am," she said.
"Don't worry. I heard you long before you started banging around inside. Call in the report for me, please. My phone's out of order," Connie Deshotel's voice said.
Helen picked up a pink robe off the toilet tank and flung it at Connie.
"Get your ass out here, ma'am," she said.
A moment later Connie emerged into the bedroom, flattening her hair back wetly on her head with a hairbrush. She wore no makeup, but her face was calm, dispassionate, ruddy from her warm shower.
"I don't know if I can prove this, Dave, but I think you sent this man after me," she said.
"You talked Remeta into the sack, then wasted him," I said.
"He tried to rape me, you idiot. I got my gun out of my bag and shot him through the door. Otherwise I'd be dead." Then she said "God!" between her teeth, and started to walk past us, as though we were only incidental elements in her day. Her slippers tracked Remeta's blood across the floor.
Helen pushed her in the chest with her fingers. "You're tainting a crime scene. You don't do anything until we tell you," she said.
"Touch my person again and you'll be charged with battery," Connie said.
"What?"
"I'm the chief law officer of Louisiana. Does that register with you at all? A psychopath tried to rape and sodomize me. Do you think I'm going to let you come in here and treat me like a perpetrator? Now, get out of my way."
Helen's face was bright with anger, a lump of cartilage flexing against her jaw. But no words came out of her mouth.
"Are you deaf as well as stupid? I told you to get out of my way," Connie said.
Helen held the shotgun at port arms and shoved Connie through the side door onto the deck. "Sit in that chair, you prissy bitch," she said, and snipped a cuff on Connie's left wrist and hooked the other end to the handle on a huge earthen pot that was planted with bougainvillea.
"Are you placing me under arrest? I hope you are, because I'm going to ensure you live in penury the rest of your life," Connie said.
"No, I'm restricting you from a crime scene. You want my job, you can have it," Helen said.
I could hear lightning popping in the swamp and raindrops striking the tin roof. Helen began punching in numbers on her cell phone, then she hit the phone against the wall.
"I can't get through. I'm going out front," she said.
I followed her into the living room.
"Take it easy," I said.
"She's gonna walk."
"There's no statute of limitations on homicide. We'll get her sooner or later."
"That's not enough. When they blow somebody apart and take a shower and then get in your face, it's not enough. It's not nearly enough," she said.
I put my hand on her arm, but she stepped away from me. "Just let me do my job. Not everybody in this world is a member of the walking wounded," she said, and flipped the shotgun's barrel up on her shoulder and pushed open the screen door and went out on the front porch, punching in numbers on her cell phone with her thumb.
I went back through the bedroom onto the deck. Connie Deshotel was gazing into the distance, at a heron, perhaps, or at her plans for her future or perhaps at nothing.
"When you and Jim Gable killed my mother, she took back her married name," I said.
"Excuse me?" Connie said.
"Right before she died she told you her name was Mae Robicheaux. Y'all took her life, Connie, but she took back her soul. She had the kind of courage you and Jim Gable couldn't dream about."
"If you want to charge me with a crime, that's your prerogative. Otherwise, please shut up."
"You ever think about what lies beyond the grave?"
"Yes. Worms. Will you unlock this handcuff and keep that ridiculous woman away from me?"
I looked at her eyes, the sun-bleached tips of her wet hair, the healthy glow of her skin. There was no dark aura surrounding the head, no tuberous growth wrapping its tentacles around the spirit, no guilty attempt to avoid the indictment in my stare. She was one of those who could rise early and rested in the morning, fix tea and buttered toast, and light the ovens in Dachau.
I gave it up. I couldn't look at her face any more. Connie Deshotel's eyes had once contained the reflected image of my mother dying on a strip of frozen ground between fields of sugarcane that creaked with ice, whose clattering in the wind was probably the last sound my mother ever heard. Whatever Connie had done or seen that winter day long ago meant nothing to her, and when I looked into the moral vacuity of her eyes I wanted to kill her.
I turned my back to her and leaned on the deck railing and looked out at the rain falling on the lake. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her shake a cigarette out of her pack and place it in her mouth. Then she picked up her cigarette lighter, the one probably given her by Jim Gable, and snapped it dryly several times. She replaced it on the table and leaned forward, her redwood chair creaking under her, and reached for the box of kitchen matches on which rested the Glock automatic she had used to murder Johnny Remeta.
Simultaneously I heard Helen Soileau say, "Hey, Dave, the St. Martin sheriff's office is trying to patch into you. Clete's going era—"
That was as far as she got. When she reached the door she saw Connie Deshotel's hand lift the Glock to get to the box of kitchen matches.
Connie's unlit filter-tipped cigarette was still hanging from her mouth when Helen blew most of her head off.
Epilogue
JOHNNY REMETA TOOK the fall for Connie Deshotel's death. It wasn't hard to arrange. In fact, Johnny had made it easy. His cut-down Remington was already loaded with double-ought bucks. I fired one round out into the trees, slipped the shotgun under his chest, and let the coroner and the state police and the sheriff's deputies from St. Martin Parish come to their own conclusions.
It was dishonest, certainly, but I don't think it was dishonorable. In fact, it probably saved Helen Soileau's career. Besides, the print and electronic media loved the story we had created for them, and who could be so unkind as to disabuse them of their romantic fantasies? Connie Deshotel was much more likable as a blue-collar heroine in death than the self-serving political functionary she had been in life.
My own role in her death was not one I cared to think about. I wondered why I didn't unlock Connie's handcuff and allow her to walk outside, away from the crime scene, away from any other confrontations with Helen. There was no evidence to disprove her claim that Remeta had tried to assault her. In fact, I believed at the time, as I do now, that she may have told the truth.
Was it natural to turn my back on my mother's murderer, knowing a pistol lay within ten inches of her grasp? Or was I deliberately incautious? Age has brought me few gifts, but one of them has been a degree of humility, at least a sufficient amount so that I no longer feel compelled to take my own inventory and I can surrender that terrible burden to my Higher Power.
It was late when the paramedics and the coroner and the parish deputies and the state troopers finally wrapped up their work at Connie Deshotel's camp on Lake Fausse Point. The sun was below the horizon in the west, and a green aura from the wooded rim of the swamp rose into the sky. I could hear alligators flopping and nutrias screaming back in the flooded trees, and when the moon came up the bass starting hitting the insects in the center of the lake, chaining the lake's surface with water rings.
I had forgotten all about the call from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff's Department. I used Helen's cell phone and got a night deputy at the jail on the line.
"Somebody called earlier. A problem with Clete Purcel," I said.
"Sonofabitch is spreading chaos all over the lockdown unit. You either quiet him down or he's gonna have an accident with a baseball bat."
"Put him on," I said.
"Are
you nuts?"
"How'd you like him to do six months with you guys?" I asked.
There was a brief pause. "Hang on," the deputy replied.
A few moments later I heard a cell door open and the tinkle of waist or leg chains.
"Hello?" Clete said hoarsely.
"You going to tell me what it is now?" I said.
"When I took Passion up to Angola last weekend? For the dinner with Letty and their relatives? She was wearing a raincoat and that bandanna around her neck. There were two gunbulls outside and a matron inside, but nobody with a lot of smarts. Letty and Passion were going in and out of the John. You get my drift?"
"What are you telling me, Clete?"
"On the way back home Passion was like somebody I didn't know. Weirded out. Crying. Looking out the side window into the dark. I told her I'd be there when Letty went to the table. She said she wasn't going back up to the Death House. Just like that. No explanation."
I could hear him breathing against the phone, his chains tinkling.
"I think they've both made their choice. I think it's time to leave it alone," I said.
"You've got to give me a better answer than that," he said.
But I didn't have a better answer. I heard Clete drop the receiver and let it swing on its cord against the wall. Then someone gathered it up and replaced it in the cradle.
It started to rain again after I got home. I listened to no radio or television that night, and at ten minutes after midnight I put on my raincoat and hat and walked down to the bait shop and turned on the string of lights over the dock and the flood lamps that shone on the bayou and every light in every corner of the shop. I fixed coffee and mopped down the floors and cut and trimmed bread for sandwiches and said my rosary on my fingers and listened to the rain beating on the roof until it became the only sound in my head. Then I realized I was not listening to rain anymore but to hail that bounced and smoked on the dock and melted into white string on the flood lamps, and I wanted to stay forever inside the lighted, cool brilliance of the dock and bait shop, and to keep Bootsie and Alafair there with me and let the rest of the world continue in its fashion, its cities and commerce and inhumanity trapped between morning and the blackness of the trees.
But it was I who would not let the world alone. The next day I drove out to the Labiche home and was told by a tall, high-yellow mulatto I had never seen before that Passion was at the nightclub, preparing to open up. He wore a mustache and tasseled, two-tone shoes and dark blue zoot pants with a white stitch in them and a black cowboy snap-button shirt with red flowers on it and a planter's straw hat cocked at an angle on his head. "How's she feeling?" I said.
"Ax her," he said.
"Excuse me, but who are you?"
"What do you care, Jack?" he said, and closed the door in my face.
Passion's pickup truck was the only vehicle in the nightclub's parking lot. I went in the side door and saw a woman at the antique piano by the back wall. She was totally absorbed in her music and was not aware that anyone else was in the building. Her powerful arms lifted and expanded in silhouette as she rolled her fingers up and down the yellowed keys. I couldn't identify the piece she was playing, but the style was unmistakable. It was Albert Ammons, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Moon Mulligan; it was out of the barrelhouse South of fifty years ago; it was Memphis and Texas R&B that could break your heart.
The woman at the piano stool wore jeans and an LSU T-shirt. A streak of gold sunlight fell across her neck like a sword, and on her neck was a tattooed red rose inside a cluster of green leaves.
She finished her song, then seemed to realize someone was standing behind her. She stayed very still, her hair lifting on her neck in the breeze from the fan, then closed the top on the piano keys.
"You want something?" she said, without turning around.
"No. Not really," I replied.
"You figured it out?"
"Like Clete Purcel says, 'What do I know?'"
"You think bad of me?"
"No."
"My sister was brave. A lot braver than me," she said.
"The dude at your house looks like he's in the life."
"It's a life, ain't it?"
"I never heard anybody do 'Pine Top's Boogie' as well as you. Don't sell yourself short, kiddo," I said, and squeezed her on the shoulder and walked outside into the sunlight.
This story has only a brief postscript, and it's not a very dramatic one. Yesterday a package wrapped in white butcher paper arrived in the mail. In it were an old scrapbook with a water-faded purple binder and an envelope taped across the binder's surface. The letter read as follows:
Dear Mr. Robicheaux,
Enclosed please find an item that evidently belonged to your mother. When the quarters were torn down, a number of such personal belongings were placed in a storage shed by my father, who was kind and thoughtful toward his workers, white and Negro alike, regardless of what his detractors have written about him.
It is not my responsibility to hold on to the discarded memorabilia of people to whom it obviously did not have great import. Frankly, you have proved a great disappointment. You besmirched my husband's name, and it would not surprise me that you are responsible for the rumor that I deliberately admitted a murderer to my home in order to rid myself of my husband. I understand you invested much of your life in drunkenness. Perhaps you should seek help.
Sincerely, Cora Gable
I flipped through the pages of the scrapbook, stiff with photos and postcards and ticket stubs and sealed locks of hair and pressed flowers that had been glued in place with brush and jar. There was a wedding photo of her and Big Aldous taken in front of the brick cathedral in Abbeville; a menu from the restaurant in the old Jung Hotel in New Orleans, where she and Big Al had their honeymoon; a newspaper article from the Daily Iberian about my return from Vietnam; another article about my graduating from the New Orleans Police Academy.
The next ten pages, the only ones remaining in the book, were filled with articles from both the Times-Picayune and the Daily Iberian about my career. Inside the back of the binder she had pasted a newspaper photograph of me in uniform, leaning on a cane, and below it a photo of me taken in third grade at the Catholic elementary school. She had created a frame around the two pictures by gluing strips of pink ribbon along the borders of the binder.
My mother had been virtually illiterate and was probably not sure of the content of many of the articles she had saved. Nor was she able to make annotations in her scrapbook to indicate what the articles meant to her. But I knew who my mother was. She had said it to her killers before she died. Her name was Mae Robicheaux.
And I was her son.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Winner of two Edgar Awards, JAMES LEE BURKE is the author of nineteen novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Sunset Limited, Cimarron Rose, Cadillac Jukebox, Burning Angel, and Dixie City Jam. He lives with his wife in Missoula, Montana, and New Iberia, Louisiana.
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