by Blake Banner
He sighed and spread his hands. “What can I say?”
“You can tell me why he was cool upstairs and shaking like a virgin in a whorehouse downstairs. You can tell me why, instead of wearing gloves, he left his prints all over the crime scene and the weapon, and you can tell me why he thoughtfully left that weapon for you to find in the woods, instead of continuing for ten minutes and pitching it into the bayou.”
He didn’t say anything so I kept leafing through the file. I spoke as I turned the pages.
“You know, if Hays had wanted to, he could have walked into a six-figure job with MI5, MI6, the CIA—or the Mob for that matter—as a professional assassin.” I looked up at him. “There are only about six hundred of us at any one time. We are not the best, Jackson. We are selected from the best. Am I beginning to get through to you?”
I paused. I had seen something that caught my eye. He noticed it and frowned.
“What?”
“Sarah Carmichael had a sister?”
“Yeah. Simone, Simone D’Arcy. She’d been visiting with her that evening.”
“I thought she’d gone to a jazz club?”
He shrugged and made a face. “So she told her husband she was going to a club. Maybe she planned to go with her sister. They used to go out a lot together. They were both into jazz. But instead it looks like they stayed in, talking. Then Sarah went home early. She must have been home by eleven or eleven thirty. Her sister says she left just before eleven. It ain’t that far.”
“Nobody saw her arrive?”
“Nope.”I read on, talking half to myself. “And her sister didn’t go with her, she drove herself.”
“Uh-huh. She left her sister and went home alone in her own car.”
I looked up. “Where does Simone live?”
“About two miles from here. South on 61, just before you come into Hardwood. You gonna see a turn on your right, before the gas station. You follow that to the end, you’ll come to a set of gates. That’s Simone’s house.”
“She’s got money, too, huh?”
“They all got money. Old money.”
I nodded and kept leafing. “So the general consensus on Sarah Carmichael is that she was an angel. An angel who frequented jazz clubs without her older husband. You going to tell me the truth or stick to the party line?”
“I don’t know if you’re a cynic, a wiseass, or both, Walker. I know I don’t like you and I know you’re here to cause trouble to protect your Limey friend. Fact is Sarah Carmichael was a wonderful person, she was faithful to her husband, and if there was some gossip at one time because she used to go out without him, it passed, because she never crossed the line. She was a good woman, and after Katrina, she did a lot, and spent a lot of her own money, to rebuild communities and the environment around here. So in future, keep your wiseass comments to yourself.”
I studied his face a moment. He looked sincere. I dropped the file on his desk.
“Noted.” I stood. “Thanks for your help, Jackson. I’ll try to stay out of your hair.” I stopped at the door and turned back to face him. “By the way, I don’t like you either.” I pointed at the badge he had hung from his belt. “And that badge, you don’t deserve to wear it. You’re either bent or incompetent. I don’t know which yet. But either way, you’re going down.”
The desk sergeant was still watching the weather. Havana was being torn to shreds, but Sarah was not moving, neither south nor north.
I stepped out into the clammy afternoon and climbed into the Zombie. I hit the ignition and the two big engines came silently to life. I slipped out of the lot and, unlike the hurricane, I headed south. The roads were empty under the leaden sky and I hit a hundred, letting the air batter my face through the open windows. Outside Hardwood, I turned right and cruised through the woods until I came to the two tall, cast iron gates. They were open and I slipped silently between them.
The house was Creole, and though you could see it had once been magnificent, now there were subtle signs that the cash just wasn’t there to maintain it. The gardens that surrounded it were running to seed, the lawns were overgrown, and the paint on the white walls and the veranda was beginning to peel in small patches here and there.
She was sitting at the top of the steps that led from the front lawn to the porch, watching me approach. She was wearing white jeans and a white shirt with the cuffs turned up, and she was smoking a cigarette. The brilliant white of her clothes made a stark contrast with the darkness of her skin.
I pulled up and climbed out into the sultry air. She half smiled and half frowned at me as I walked toward her. A trail of smoke rose from her lips. To say she was beautiful would be only half the story. She was graceful, effortlessly elegant in her movements and gestures, and there was an indefinable quality of depth to her smallest expression. She was extraordinary.
“How did you free-wheel down a flat drive, mister?”
“I was drawn by the power of destiny. I’m looking for Simone D’Arcy.”
“You found her. It must have been your destiny.”
“You’re Sarah Carmichael’s sister?”
“You sound surprised.”
I nodded. “You’re black and she was white. You don’t see that often.”
“She was my stepsister. Now you know who I am, how about you tell me who you are?”
It was said without hostility, without challenge, more as an invitation. For a moment, I had to avert my gaze.
“My name is Lacklan Walker. I was Bartholomew Hays’ superior officer when we were in the army together.”
She didn’t so much narrow her eyes, as half close her lids and raise her chin slightly. “You mean you’re his friend.”
“Yeah, I’m his friend.”
“You feel guilty about that?”
I was surprised by the question. “No…” But I said it without conviction and wondered if I was lying.
She heard that in my voice and smiled. “Your body language says otherwise, Lacklan. Why are you here?”
Again, what could have been hostile came across more as an invitation.
“I’d like to ask you some questions about your sister.” I hesitated. “Hays is accused of killing her, but I know he didn’t do it.”
She seemed to study me for a moment, biting her lip. “Do you know that, think it, or feel it?”
I gave a small sigh. “I don’t want to play word games, Ms. D’Arcy…”
“Neither do I, Lacklan. I would like to know whether what you have is knowledge, a suspicion, or a hunch.”
“It’s knowledge. I know Bat Hays didn’t kill her. Can we talk?”
She spread her hands and there was amusement in her eyes, bordering on mischief. “It’s what we’re doing.” She stood. Her body wasn’t perfect. Perfect was banal compared to what her body was. Maybe her breasts were a bit too large, maybe her hips and her ass were a bit too curvaceous. Maybe her legs were too long; but when you put it all together, it was insane.
“You want a beer, Lacklan?”
“Yeah. I could use a beer. Thanks.”
I followed her onto the veranda where there was a white, wooden table against the wall with two white chairs facing out, to the garden. A small, brass bell stood on the table beside a glass ashtray. She rang it as she sat.
I rested my ass on the railing and pulled a cigarette from my pack. While I was lighting it, the door opened and a woman in her fifties stepped out. She had blond hair turning to gray, tied in a knot at the back of her head.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Two beers, Inga. Nice and cold, my love.”
Inga left without saying anything and Simone watched me watching her while she held her lower lip with very white teeth.
“I’m trying to figure out what made Sarah tick.”
“Really?” She looked amused, but not in a flattering way. “That’s pretty vague. She wasn’t a clock. Can you be more precise?”
“I don’t know. Everybody is telling me she was an angel, that
she and Charles adored each other…” I shrugged with one shoulder. “But her behavior, as far as I can make out, doesn’t tie in with that.”
She sucked on her cigarette and squinted through the smoke. “You want me to tell you she had a dark secret, and that was what got her killed?”
“I don’t want you to tell me that, Simone. But so far it’s the only explanation that makes any sense.”
The door opened again and Inga came out with two frosted glasses of beer on a tray. She set them on the table and left. Simone picked up a glass and sipped.
“It seems insane, frosted glasses in November, but this heat is almost oppressive. It’s tropical.” She gazed out at the restless trees. “That made her tick. Not so much climate change, but the effect it was having on Louisiana, on the local environment.”
I raised an eyebrow. I couldn’t keep the irony from my voice. “Is that what she was doing in the jazz clubs on her own, campaigning for the environment?”
She sighed and again dropped her lids over her huge eyes. “Cheap, Lacklan, and I suspect not worthy of you.”
“How do you know what’s worthy of me?”
“You’re here, aren’t you? You’re in your friend’s corner, talking to the sister of the victim, fighting his cause. That’s the kind of man you are, isn’t it? Loyal, committed, true…”
“We were talking about Sarah.”
She puffed her cheeks and blew. I picked up my beer and pulled off half.
“What can I tell you, Lacklan? She was a good person, like you. She cared. She cared about people, about communities of people. She cared about suffering and unhappiness. She was not only a good person, but a beautiful person. And she cared about Charles.” She crushed out her cigarette, streaming smoke from her nose. “But people aren’t just one thing. You know your Shakespeare? Othello was a good, honorable, decent man. But jealousy is triggered in his soul by Iago’s wicked manipulations, and Desdemona’s simple naivety. So, which one is Othello? The good, honorable man, or the crazed, jealous monster?”
“I don’t know.”
She spread her hands. “He is a woven fabric, made of both threads.”
“Is that what Sarah was, a woven fabric?”
“It’s what we all are.”
“So what was she doing in the jazz clubs while her husband was at home, or dining in restaurants?”
“Listening to jazz.”
“Did she have an affair with Bat Hays?”
“Not that I’m aware of, Lacklan.”
“Was she having an affair with anybody?”
She shrugged. “Same answer. I was not my sister’s keeper.”
“You’re stonewalling me.”
She closed her eyes, smiled, and sighed again. “Look, Lacklan, I understand you want to help your friend. But if doing that means dragging Sarah’s name and reputation through the gutter, I am not going to help you do that. We all have our loyalties.”
I looked down into my beer. For the second time in just a few minutes, she’d made me feel ashamed, for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom.
“That’s not what I intended to do.”
“But it’s what you would have done, if I’d let you?”
I looked into her eyes.
She held my gaze, like she was reading a text inside my head. “That’s what you do, Lacklan, isn’t? You see something that needs to be done, and you storm in, guns blazing, leaving death and destruction in your wake, and tell yourself it’s what you had to do to get the job done.”
“How could you know that?”
“Isn’t Bat Hays the same? Isn’t that what all men like you do?”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions, Simone, based on very little.” I took a drag and we were both silent for a moment. I looked at the burning ember on the tip of my cigarette and wondered how much truth there was in what she’d said. I thought probably it was all true. “Hays’ life is over if I can’t help him. He doesn’t deserve what they will do to him. I don’t want to put a slur on Sarah’s memory. I don’t want to hurt you, or anybody. I just want to know the truth.”
She gave a small laugh that was almost bitter. It was the closest thing I had seen in her to an ugly emotion. “You want to know the truth without hurting anybody. Good luck with that.”
She stood and came close beside me, looking out at the garden, and up at the heavy, motionless ceiling of cloud.
“Synchronicity,” she said.
“What is?”
“It’s a Jungian concept. Not an easy one.” She glanced at me, like she was wondering if I would get the concept. “Sarah, she is threatening to destroy us all: Sarah the storm, and Sarah, my sister. There can be no causal link between the two, yet there is a connection in meaning.” She gestured up at the sky. “Both Sarahs have unleashed a destructive force, one from the sky…” She paused and seemed to examine my face, with little darting movements of her eyes. “The other from the earth.”
I wanted to tell her that I was not a destructive force, that I did not want to hurt her, but the words seemed paralyzed in my throat. She was standing close, so close I could feel the warmth of her body.
She closed her eyes and turned away from me, leaning back against the wooden pillar that supported the veranda. I was suddenly hungry for her and had to fight the urge to take hold of her body and crush it to mine. She opened her eyes as though she had sensed my thoughts.
“She’d grown tired of him. She loved him, but he’d become an old man, not in years, but in his mind. In his soul. She was young, alive, hungry….”
“So she was having an affair.”
“I told you, I don’t know. But she was thinking of divorce.” She shook her head. “I think he knew, but don’t let your imagination run away with you, Lacklan. He’s a kind, gentle man.”
“Like Othello?”
“No, not like Othello.”
“That night, was she with you or was she at a club?”
Her eyes trailed down from my face, to my chest and to my hands. “Can I have one of your cigarettes?”
I pulled a Camel from the pack and handed it to her. She put it between her lips and I flipped the Zippo. She leaned into the flame and inhaled. She leaned back as she let out the smoke. “She was with me. We were going to go to the Blue Lagoon.”
“Bat played trumpet there.”
“He’s good. She liked to listen to him. He was playing that night.”
“But you didn’t go.”
She shook her head. “We stayed and talked. She was upset. She didn’t know what to tell Charles. They’d started sleeping in separate rooms.” There was something quietly tragic in her expression. “Servants gossip. I think the whole of Burgundy knew, except poor Charles. He couldn’t accept it, but she couldn’t bring herself to be with him anymore. She thought… she knew, he had realized. She knew she was going to have to tell him. But she still loved him, as a friend. More than a friend. Family.”
“There was somebody else.”
“I keep telling you I don’t know.”
“And I keep not believing you.”
She shrugged, like she didn’t care. “A lot of the time she said she was going out to listen to jazz, she wasn’t. At least not in the clubs.”
“What do you mean?”
“When our parents died, we inherited two houses. This one, which belonged to my stepfather, and another, smaller one, which belonged to my mother. I got this one as my home, because Sarah was married and already had that monstrous mansion, and she got the smaller one. Charles never knew about it.”
I frowned. “Why?”
“She always thought of it as mine because it had belonged to my mother. So it just sat there, closed up. When things started to go wrong with her and Charles, I advised her to use it as a studio. She was a talented watercolorist. Not great, but good. It was a place where she could get away from a relationship that had become a prison; a place where she could be creative, be herself, listen to music. A place where she knew she was emot
ionally safe.”
“You talk like a psychologist.”
“A psychiatrist.”
“So she came to you for help.”
“I advised her to create a space for herself, where she could make a wise choice about the future, about what she wanted to do.”
“Did you go there with her?”
“Once or twice, not often. It was her space. Don’t ask me if she took lovers there. I don’t know.”
“Where is this house?”
“On the Sara Bayou, in the woods north of here. Over the bridge on Tunica Road. It’s called Solitude.”
I felt the heat of the cigarette on my fingers and stepped over to the table to crush it out in the ashtray. As I did it, I asked on impulse, “Are you married, Simone?”
She took a moment to answer, watching me. “And that is relevant how?”
I smiled without much humor, not sure how to answer. “Another perspective…”
“You asking or telling?”
“I don’t know. Are you? Married?”
“No. There are no men in my life.”
I had nothing left to ask her, but I didn’t want to leave. We stood a moment staring at each other, her still leaning back against the wooden column, with the flaking white paint, the cigarette smoldering in her fingers.
I said, “Thanks for the beer. Thanks for being honest. I’ll think about what you said, all of it.”
She watched me go down the steps to my car. As I opened the door, she said, “That’s the most dangerous thing of all, you know?”
I looked up at her. “What is?”
“A destructive force that thinks.”
I didn’t answer. I got in the car, turned silently around, and headed back the way I had come.