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I could hear her breathing in the receiver.
“Lyle told you?” she said.
“As well as Lyle can tell me anything, without trying to sell glow-in-the-dark Bibles at the same time. I’ll tell you the truth, Drew, I’ve pretty well had it with your family’s attitude. I don’t want to be unkind, but the three of you behave like y’all have been shooting up with liquid Drano.”
She was quiet again, then I heard her begin to weep.
“Drew?”
But she continued to cry without answering, the kind of unrelieved and subdued sobbing that comes from deep down in the breast.
“Drew, I apologize. I’ve had some bad concerns on my mind and I was taking them out on you. I’m truly sorry for what I said. It was thoughtless and stupid.”
I squeezed my temples with my thumb and forefinger.
“Drew?”
I heard her swallow and take a deep breath.
“Sometimes I’m not very smart,” I said. “You know I’ve always admired you. You have more political courage than anybody I’ve ever known.”
“I don’t know what to do. I’ve always had choices before. Now I don’t. I can’t deal with that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sometimes you get caught. Sometimes there’s no way out. I’ve never let that happen to me.”
“Do you want to come into the office? Do you want me to come out there? Tell me what you want to do.”
“I don’t know what I want to do.”
“I’m going to come over there now. Is that all right?”
“I have to take the maid home, and I promised to stop by the market with her. Can you come out about four?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No, of course not.”
“It doesn’t make you uncomfortable?”
“No, not at all. That’s silly. Don’t think that way.”
After I had hung up the phone, I looked wanly at the damp imprint of my hand on the receiver. Were her tears for her brother or herself, I wondered. But then what right had I to be judgmental?
Oh Lord, I thought.
I was almost out the door when the dispatcher caught me in the hallway.
“Pick up your line,” he said. “A sergeant in the First District in New Orleans has been holding for you.”
“Take a message. I’ll call him back.”
“You’d better get it, Dave. He says somebody stomped the shit out of Cletus Purcel.”
AFTER I HAD finished talking with the sergeant in New Orleans, who had not been the investigative officer and who couldn’t tell me much other than Clete’s room number in the hospital off St. Charles and the fact that Clete wanted to see me, that somebody had worked him over bad with a piece of pipe, I told the dispatcher to send a uniformed deputy out to Drew’s house and to call Bootsie and tell her that I would be home late and would call her from New Orleans.
