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“Yes.”
&nbs
p; “I ’member him. He use to come in every three, four mont’s. That’s the one. I ain’t forgot him. He’s ’fraid of black people.”
“Why do you think that?”
“He always want me to read his hand. But when I pick it up in my fingers, it twitch just like a frog. I’d tell him, It ain’t shoe polish, darlin’. It ain’t gonna rub off on you. Why you looking for him?”
“He helped murder a sheriff’s deputy.”
She looked out the French doors at the jungle of potted geraniums, philodendron, and banana trees on her balcony.
“You ain’t got to look for him, Mr. Streak. That boy ain’t got a long way to run,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I told him it ain’t no accident he got that tiger on his arm. I told him tiger burning bright in the forests of the night. Just like in the Bible, glowing out there in the trees. That tiger gonna eat him.”
“I respect your wisdom and your experience, Tante Majorie, but I need to find this man.”
She twisted a strand of hair between her fingers and gazed thoughtfully at a calico cat nursing a half-dozen kittens in a cardboard box.
“Every mont’ I send out astrology readings for people on my list,” she said. “He’s one of them people. But Raintree ain’t the name he give me. I don’t ’member the name he give me. Maybe you ain’t suppose to find him, Mr. Streak.”
“My name’s Dave, Tante Majorie. Could I see your list?”
“It ain’t gonna he’p. His kind come with a face, what they get called don’t matter. They come out of the womb without no name, without no place in the house where they’re born, without no place down at a church, a school, a job down at a grocery sto’, there ain’t a place or a person they belong to in this whole round world. Not till that day they turn and look at somebody at the bus stop, or in the saloon, or sitting next to them in the hot-pillow house, and they see that animal that ain’t been fed in that other person’s eyes. That’s when they know who they always been.”
Then she went into the back of the apartment and returned with several sheets of typing paper in her hand.
“I got maybe two hundred people here,” she said. “They’re spread all over Lou’sana and Miss’sippi, too.”
“Well, let’s take a look,” I said. “You see, Tante Majorie, the interesting thing about these guys is their ego. So when they use an alias they usually keep their initials. Or maybe their aliases have the same sound value as their real names.”
Her list was in alphabetical order. I sorted the pages to the “R’s.”
“How about Elton Rubert?” I asked.
“I don’t ’member it, Mr. Davis. My clerk must have put it down, and he don’t work here anymore.”
“My name is Dave, Tante Majorie. Dave Robicheaux. Where’s your clerk now?”
“He moved up to Ohio, or one of them places up North.”
I wrote down the mailing address of Elton Rubert, a tavern in a small settlement out in the Atchafalaya basin west of Baton Rouge.
“Here’s my business card,” I said. “If the man in the photo shows up here again, read his palm or whatever he wants, then call me later. But don’t question him or try to find out anything about him for me, Tante Majorie. You’ve already been a great help.”
“Give me your hand.”
“I beg your pardon?”
She reached out and took my hand, stared into my palm and kneaded it with her fingers. Then she stroked it as though she were smoothing bread dough.
“There’s something I ain’t told you,” she said. “The last time that man was in here, I read his hand, just like I’m reading yours. He axed me what his lifeline was like. What I didn’t tell him, what he didn’t know, was he didn’t have no lifeline. It was gone.”
I looked at her.
