* * *
I came back out into the bright cemetery, walked over to Katie and took her arm, looked into her eyes. What now?
Katie sighed. “I don’t know. Dean was throwing up beside the crypt all the time you were in there…” she turned to look left, “and Angel looks like…well…”
“She has nothing more to say. Because her son is dead and that’s that. Her only conceivable conciliation this time is that she’s knows the time and place of his death.”
Katie sighed, crossed her arms in frustration. “As opposed to her daughter, for whom we’ve been absolutely no help. Rather, I’ve been no help, being the supposed head of reconnaissance in this wholly fruitless and heartbreaking scenario.”
I took her arm. “It hasn’t been entirely fruitless, Katie. You were there for Angel. Came here at considerable inconvenience and listened when no one else would. When no one else would even talk about it.”
My empathy fell on deaf ears.
“Yeah,” bitterly, “I’ve been thinking about that. People around here aren’t just avoiding the snoopy out-of-town black magic couple. It’s more like they’re avoiding Amy herself!”
I frowned down at her. “What do you mean by that?”
Katie stared at her shoes, toed a blade of saw grass absently, finally raised the pretty grey eyes to mine like a whipped pup. “I don’t know. Nothing. Shit, Elliot and excuse the blasphemy, but all I want to do right now is get the hell out of here.”
“The cemetery or Louisiana?”
She was silent a moment, then: “The other night…in the motel, when you…flipped out…”
“And tried to kiss you against your will?”
She gave me a narrow-eyed, searching look. “You never apologized.”
I took a deep breath. “Well, I assumed you’d forgiven me the next morning when I saw you weren’t carrying a bazooka. I am sorry, Katie.”
“Why didn’t you say so then?”
“I’m saying it now. I’m sorry. I behaved like a jerk.”
Her lower lip trembled, brow knitted deeply. Stop that, I wanted to say, you’ll leave marks on that pretty forehead!
“And I wish I hadn’t run off. Wish I’d hung around to see what she’d really do!”
“She?”
“Oh, come on, Elliot!”
I drew back. “You think I was possessed? By Amy? Is that it?”
“Don’t you?”
I reached for her again. “This is ridiculous! Let’s get in the car—“
She yanked away hard, leaving a red mark across my knuckles with her nails. “Don’t you?”
Somebody was coming; I could see movement from the corner of my eye. One of the men.
“No! I don’t!”
“You don’t want to think you were!”
I had to get her out of there. I reached for her again, she jumped back, raised an arm to strike me, checked herself at the last second. I could see real fear in her eyes now for the first time.
“She wanted to hurt me, Elliot! Don’t you see?”
“Amy? Why? You’ve been supportive of her from the—“
“I’ve been in the way! I’ve been feeling it for some time! She wants me out of the way, wants to get between us, cause us hurt and anger, so I’ll leave! The same way Rita left! She doesn’t want me here, Elliot! She wants you! Only you!”
“Why would she want that?”
Katie seemed to collect herself a little, as if a small spell had been broken. “I don’t know…” she drew back a handful of hair from her face, tucked it behind her ear. “…because of the movie, maybe? Because…she needs very badly to tell someone…show someone, and it has to be the one person who will understand. She can’t stand to tell more than just one!”
“Show someone what?”
Katie’s eyes met mine—at least I think they were Katie’s—her dark mouth opened and I think she was just on the verge of replying when:
“Mr. and Mrs. Bledsoe, isn’t it!”
Katie jumped in shock; I turned to the older man I’d already seen coming.
“Oops! Sorry, Mrs. Bledsoe, didn’t mean to startle you!” He extended a friendly hand. LeBeau Breedlove! Attorney-at-law!” He winked. “Folks around her call me General! Pleased to make your acquaintance!”
Katie, arms still folded tight, uncoiled one and shook his hand lifelessly.
“Lovely funeral, eh folks? I mean…the lovely day, and all!”
He turned and shook my hand. He was tall, tanned maybe late 60’s, with an enviable shock of beautifully white hair, worn fairly long but stylish, and an even more stylish suit with Armani shoes. “Robichous say good things about you two! Specially Angel! Thought I’d pop over and say hi while I had the chance!”
“Nice to meet you. Army or navy?”
“Eh? Oh, Air Force. And only as a lieutenant. Loafed my way around the Pacific.”
“The Pacific? WWII? You look too young.”
“Yeah, well, I started young. Lied about my age. Figured it was my only way to ever earn my wings. Bout lost my britches to those damn Zeroes. Fast little planes! Fragile as hell, though, went up like matchsticks you hit ‘em once! Angel tells me you’re doing some post investigative work on her daughter’s death. Private eyes, are you?”
Katie jumped in to change the subject. “In a way. You’re the Robichous’ lawyer, Mr. Breedlove?”
“Oh, off and on, when they need one, which isn’t often. Good people.”
Katie looked around. “And well off, apparently. We had no idea the Robichous had their own cemetery…or how far back it dates.”
Breedlove winked. “Dean and Angel are proud owners of over three thousand acres of prime Louisiana bayou land that’s been in the family since the Civil War. They just don’t brag about it. Not the people they appear to be to some. No sir, not the people they appear.”
His eyes lingered on mine for a moment.
There was a terrible shriek from the crypt.
I had a mental flash of Roger, rotting and putrescent as one of those old horror comic walking dead, bursting through the massive vault door, clawed hands ready to wreak their revenge. Maybe the creepy place was finally getting to me.
Instead, I—and everyone else in attendance—turned to find Angel Robichou standing before the closed-tight crypt door shrieking at someone--another woman—Angel’s voice so enraged I hardly recognized it.
The other woman was an old hippy type dressed in remnants of those days, no make-up and the long, gray-streaked mane of hair to compliment it. She was about Roger’s age, slim, almost emaciated body rigid at the moment, fists clenched, chalk face a rictus of hate, doing her best to get a scream in edgewise but totally out-shrieked by the Robichou woman. Two alley cats, poised and on the brink of ripping into each other.
“Get the hell away from him, damn you! You have no right here!” Strong words indeed coming from someone like Angel.
“I do have a right! More right than anyone! At least I was his friend!”
And as she raised a threatening arm, I could see the trail of needle tracks like dark freckles from her left wrist to her inner elbow.
‘“Friend’!’ Friend’? Yer a crack house whore who gave him everything but friendship! Yer the reason my Roger’s dead!”
“You’re his mamma! Both their mammas! When you gonna squeeze one out that stays alive?”
“Oh,” Katie whispered, “that’s just cruel.”
And the one that finally did it. Angel launched herself at the other woman and the battle was joined. Their foreheads ricocheted with the crack of a Louisville slugger, and then they were down in the dirt and weeds and rock, scratching and biting, kicking and screaming in the shadow cast from Roger’s mausoleum on this bright and lovely funeral day.
The remaining group of mourners parted around them like the Red Sea; nobody wanted near that fevered dervish.
I expected any moment to see Dean’s big, sun-bronzed hands entering the fray, dragging away his spitting wife, but when
I looked over, the head of the Robichou family stood staring morosely at the flying dust a moment, then turned to give the ground beside the crypt some more of his insides.
I felt a hand touch my shoulder, looked up to find Deputy Jimmy Olson appraising the melee. “You know that woman?”
I shook my head.
Jimmy’s eyes narrowed. “Isn’t that Diane what’s-her-name? The girl from the yearbook?”
I stepped closer. I had only my brief memory to guide me now—both women were covered with dust, streaming tears—but yes, I could see the resemblance, it could have been Diane Murdock from Roger’s high school annual, his old girlfriend.
In a moment one of the scrabbling figures jerked backward magically off her feet and into Cormac’s muscular arms. It turned out to be Diane.
But Angel kept on coming, Cormac forced to hold one woman away by the waist while stiff-arming the other, catching a few raking scratches of his own.
“Goddamnit, Dean!”
But Dean Robichou just stood there, chin dripping bile, a broken memory of a man.
Jimmy sighed and slapped my back, nodded s’cuse-me to Katie and headed on over. “Better get over there…looks like time for reinforcements.”
Katie turned to me, looking a little haggard herself. “Can we go home now?”
TWENTY-ONE
After that, things got really creepy.
There’s a great last line in Chapter 27 of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; it’s when Jem and Scout are heading home Halloween night through the woods and the dark: “Thus began our longest journey together.”
Even now it’s hard for me to think about the evening following Roger Robichou’s funeral without that wonderfully ominous line coming to mind. Would that I could describe what happened to Katie and me that night with such effortless poetry.
The sun was sinking behind the cypress. We climbed into my wilting ’57 T-Bird and the cat jumped immediately into Katie’s lap. “Poor baby. Did you miss us? Do you have to pee?”
“He’d already have done that,” I muttered, starting the engine, taking another look at attorney Breedlove’s card and tucking it in my shirt pocket. “I’d like to have further words with that lawyer.”
A car engine started ahead of us, switching on its headlights as a beat-up 4x4 pulled onto the cemetery exit road. “I’d like to have a few words with Diane Murdock,” Katie nodded at the vehicle through the windshield.
I put the Bird in gear. “You think she knows something about Amy?”
Katie shrugged. “She seems to know a lot about Roger, so yes, by extension, I’d bet she knows something about Amy. She was around at the time of the child’s death.”
“Disappearance.”
“Whatever.”
“All right, let’s go talk with her,” and I followed the 4x4 onto the exit road. Katie grabbed my arm. “Not too close. Let’s just find out where she’s headed.”
I eased off the pedal. “Back to the crack house, probably.”
“Let her show us.”
It wasn’t as easy as it sounds.
Diane Murdock—even with balding truck tires down sharp-curving swamp roads—drove like she was being followed. One might even say chased. It was hard trying to keep a tail on her from a distance even in the fast little T-Bird. Garbanzo dug his claws into Katie’s thigh and meowed protest at every hairpin turn.
More than once I thought I’d lost her in the gathering gloom.
“Christ, where’s the fire?” I grimaced, white-knuckled.
“In her veins, I’d say,” Katie frowned.
“She needs a fix, you think?”
“Look at the taillights of that truck, Elliot—jittering like fireflies on speed—she’s got an appointment somewhere. Question is, where’s she going to get high this time of night? The crack house is way to hell and gone from here.”
“’Way to hell and gone,’” I smiled behind my low beams chasing the dirt road, “you’re beginning to sound like a local, dear heart.”
Katie grunted. “I’ll try to watch it.”
* * *
On the fringe of town we finally did lose her.
“Shit!”
We drove in circles a while, but there was finally nothing for it but to patrol up and down Main Street searching the curb for the 4x4 and squinting into the windows at restaurants and bars with flagging hope.
“There!” Katie exclaimed suddenly, pointing to a dark side street I almost passed for the third time. Halfway down it, a swath of sputtering neon stained the street red and announced Jimbo’s Lounge above a drab, low brick edifice. I could see the tailgate of the dented 4x4 poking out between two other trucks at the broken curb, pulled closer and verified the memorized license plate.
“It’s hers.”
I pulled between the two other vehicles and set the brake.
But when I opened the car door I found Katie still sitting within the Blackbird holding the cat.
“Coming?”
She shook her head. “This will feel like ganging up. I think you’ll do better by your own charming self, professor.”
I hesitated. “She probably saw us at the funeral...”
“Chance we’ll have to take. Get in there now and pour on the testosterone.”
I left the keys in the ignition for Katie and climbed a high, ancient curb and a wobbly set of wooden steps to the bar, green neon in the window announcing Bud on Tap!; also sputtering and buzzing and battling suicidal squadrons of millers.
The joint was small, stunted, but not short on regulars.
I’d go into detail about the bar’s interior but if you’ve seen the inside of a small northern bar (and you know you have) you’ve seen the inside of a southern one; beer and nuts smell the same everywhere. If there was a distinctive odor about Jimbo’s, it was only one of age, all but masked by the thick haze of unfiltered Camels.
The bar stools were full. I found Diane Murdock—mostly by the luminous globes of her low cut bosom—in a darkened corner booth, alone but for the requisite red plastic-webbed candle vote at the table’s scarred center and the red map draughts of a Bloody Mary. She was staring into space. I bought a bottle of bourbon at the bar, grabbed two glasses and approached her booth.
“May I--?”
She started to smile invitation and bent forward to show more bosom when a cloud passed over her lidded brown eyes. “I know you…”
I sat down, set bottle and glasses before me. “Do you? Then we won’t need introductions!”
I poured both of us two fingers, slid her glass to her. She knocked it back without taking her eyes off me, slammed it back down and wiped the back of her fingers across her mouth. When I reached over again with the bottle she covered her glass. “You were at the funeral today.”
I set the bottle in front of her. “Indeed. Elliot Bledsoe. Miss—?“
“With some woman…”
I took a sip. “Talked to a few there, maybe, but I’m in town alone.”
“From?”
“New Orleans.”
“For?”
“Know what a repo man is?”
“You don’t sound like New Orleans.”
“Thank you. Miss—“
She watched me with dead eyes that still hid ample suspicion. Finally, she picked up the bottle, poured two more fingers and two more. She knocked it back, set it down, wiped. “Diane.”
I toasted her as she poured another. “Cheers.”
She clung to her drink. But it wasn’t drink she craved.
“From New Orleans yourself, Diane?”
“Repo’in who? Not the Robichous.”
“No? Are you sure?”
“They ain’t the type gets repoed.”
“Their son is, apparently. Bought a Dodge Ram down in the Big Easy he put a hundred down on. Then skated.”
“Not far.”
I nodded. “Not far. Are you a friend of the family?”
“Are you a cop?”
“Repo man.”
/> She looked down at her drink. “Don’t expect his folks to pay his bills. Tight as a choir boy’s ass at a priest convention.”
“Oh? So you know the family?”
Her eyes narrowed. “You saw the scuffle at the funeral.”
“I did notice that. Bad blood somewhere?”
She started to lift the drink again…put it back. “Hundred for a blow job, three hundred for around-the-world.”
“Sounds reasonable.”
She let me see the cleavage again. “Only, but it’s gotta be now. Upstairs.”
“Got a tight schedule, huh?”
“Got a tighter ass, but that’ll cost you double.”
I shrugged another sip. “Becoming an expensive trip.”
She pushed her glass away suddenly with a smirk, sloshing bourbon, stood up to leave. I stopped her with the fifty I laid on the table.
“I said a hundred. Minimum.”
“Let’s make it five hundred.”
The narrow look again. “I don’t do that violent shit.”
“Don’t want it.”
“The fuck do you want, mister?”
“A quickie. Some quick information.”
She tossed back her hair. “Fuck you.”
I laid down another fifty.
She remained standing. “About?”
“You went to high school with Roger Robichou.”
“Did I?”
I took the polaroid from Roger’s yearbook, slid it across the table to her. A younger Roger then, and a younger Sheriff Cormac. With matching tattoos on their biceps.
She looked at it upside down. “Who’s this?”
I laid down another fifty.
She scooped up the photo. “Couple of fags?”
FEVER DREAMS: A Bracken and Bledsoe Paranormal Mystery Page 21