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"Maybe that's what he deserved."
"I tried to kill him because I had become morally insane."
"I don't care what you did later in your life. Why'd you close me out, Dave?"
I let my hands hang between my knees.
"Because I was dumb," I said.
"It's that simple?"
"No, it's not. But how about suffice it to say that I made a terrible mistake, that I've had regret about it all these years."
Her legs were crossed, her arms motionless on the sides of the cushioned iron chair, her face composed now in the tea-colored light. The top of her terry cloth robe was loose, and I could see her breasts rise and fall quietly with her breathing.
"I do have to go," I said.
"Are you coming back?"
"If you'd like to see me again, I'd surely like to see you."
"I'm not moving out of town, cher." Then her face became soft and she said, "But, Dave, I've learned one thing with middle age. I don't try to correct yesterday's mistakes in the present. I mark them off. I truly mark them off. A person hurts me only once."
"No one could ever say they were unsure where you stood on an issue, Boots."
She smiled without answering, then walked me to the front door, put her palms on my shoulders, and kissed me on the cheek. It was an appropriate and kind gesture and would not have meant much in itself, but then she looked into my face and touched my cheek with her fingertips, as though she were saying goodbye to someone forever, and I felt my loins thicken and my heart turn to water.
It was almost dark when I got off the streetcar at the corner of St. Charles and Canal and went into the Pearl and had a poor-boy sandwich filled with oysters, shrimp, sliced tomatoes, shredded lettuce, and sauce piquante. Then I walked to my apartment and paused momentarily outside my door while I found my key. The people upstairs were partying out on the balcony, and one of them accidentally kicked a coffee can of geraniums into the courtyard. But in spite of the noise I thought I heard someone inside my apartment. I put my hand on the .25-caliber Beretta in my coat pocket, unlocked the door, and let it swing all the way back against the wall on its hinges.
Lionel Comeaux, the man I'd found working under his car on the creeper, was in the kitchen, pulling the pots and pans out of the cabinet and placing them on the table. The jolly fat man who called himself Uncle Ray Fontenot and said he used to play trombone at Sharky's Dream Room had emptied the drawers in the bedroom and had laid all my hangered clothes across the bed. My .45 lay on top of a neatly folded shirt. Both of them looked at me with flat, empty expressions, as though I were the intruder.
The fat man, Fontenot, wore a beige suit and a cream turtleneck shirt. I saw his eyes study my face and my right hand; then he smiled and opened his palms in front of him.
"It's just business, Mr. Robicheaux," he said. "Don't take it personal. We've treated your things with respect."
"How'd you get in?"
"It's a simple lock," he said.
"You've got some damn nerve," I said.
"Close the door. There's people out there," Lionel, the man in the kitchen, said. He wore Adidas running shoes, blue jeans with no belt, a gold pullover sweater with the sleeves pushed up over his thick, sun-browned arms.
I could hear my own breathing in the silence.
"Lionel's right," Fontenot said. "We don't need an audience here, do we? Getting mad isn't going to make us any money, either, is it?"
I took my hand out of my coat pocket and opened and closed it at my side.
"Come in, come in," Fontenot said. "Look, we're putting your things back. There's no harm done."
"You toss my place and call it no harm?" I said. I pushed the door shut behind me.
"You knew somebody would check you out. Don't make it a big deal," the younger man said in the kitchen. He lit a dead cigar in his mouth and squatted down and started replacing the pots and pans in the cabinets next to the stove.
"I don't like people smoking in my apartment," I said.
He turned his head at me and paused in his work. The red Navy tattoo on his flexed bicep was ringed with blue stars. He was balanced on the ball of one foot, the cigar between his fingers, a tooth working on a bloodless spot on his lower lip. Fontenot walked out of the other room.
