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"Then why do both of you keep calling the Bureau?"
"Because I'm being denied access to a prisoner who escaped from our jail, that's why."
She stared hard into my face, as though searching for the right dials, her back teeth grinding softly, then said, "I want you to look at a few more photos."
"No."
"What's the matter, you don't want to see the wreckage your gal leaves in her wake?"
She pulled the elastic cord loose from the cardboard satchel and spilled half the contents on a spool table. She lifted up a glossy eight-by-ten black-and-white photo of Megan addressing a crowd of Latin peasants from the bed of a produce truck. Megan was leaning forward, her small hands balled into fists, her mouth wide with her oration.
"Here's another picture taken a few days later. If you look closely, you'll recognize some of the dead people in the ditch. They were in the crowd that listened to Megan Flynn. Where was she when this happened? At the Hilton in Mexico City."
"You really hate her, don't you?"
I heard her take a breath, like a person who has stepped into fouled air.
"No, I don't hate her, sir. I hate what she does. Other people die so she can feel good about herself," she said.
I sifted through the photos and news clippings with my fingers. I picked up one that had been taken from the Denver Post and glued on a piece of cardboard backing. Adrien Glazier was two inches away from my skin. I could smell perspiration and body powder in her clothes. The news article was about thirteen-year-old Megan Flynn winning first prize in the Post's essay contest. The photo showed her sitting in a chair, her hands folded demurely in her lap, her essay medal worn proudly on her chest.
"Not bad for a kid in a state orphanage. I guess that's the Megan I always remember. Maybe that's why I still think of her as one of the most admirable people I've ever known. Thanks for coming by," I said, and walked up the slope through the oak and pecan trees on my lawn, and on into my lighted house, where my daughter and wife waited supper for me.
MONDAY MORNING HELEN SOILEAU came into my office and sat on the corner of my desk.
"I was wrong about two things," she said.
"Oh?"
"The mulatto who tried to do Cool Breeze, the guy with the earring through his nipple? I said maybe I bought his story, he thought Breeze was somebody else? I checked the visitors' sheet. A lawyer for the Giacano family visited him the day before."
"You're sure?"
"Whiplash Wineburger. You ever meet him?"
"Whiplash represents other clients, too."
"Pro bono for a mulatto who works in a rice mill?"
"Why would the Giacanos want to do an inside hit on a guy like Cool Breeze Broussard?"
She raised her eyebrows and shrugged.
"Maybe the Feds are squeezing Breeze to bring pressure on the Giacanos," I said, in answer to my own question.
"To make them cooperate in an investigation of the Triads?"
"Why not?"
"The other thing I was going to tell you? Last night Lila Terrebonne went into that new zydeco dump on the parish line. She got into it with the bartender, then pulled a .25 automatic on the bouncer. A couple of uniforms were the first guys to respond. They got her purse from her with the gun in it without any problem. Then one of them brushed against her and she went ape shit.
"Dave, I put my arm around her and walked her out the back door, into the parking lot, with nobody else around, and she cried like a kid in my arms… You following me?"
"Yeah, I think so," I said.
"I don't know who did it, but I know what's been done to her," she said. She stood up, flexed her back, and inverted the flats of her hands inside the back of her gunbelt. The skin was tight around her mouth, her eyes charged with light. My gaze shifted off her face.
"When I was a young woman and finally told people what my father did to me, nobody believed it," she said. "'Your dad was a great guy,' they said. 'Your dad was a wonderful parent.'"
