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“Big revelation,” Helen said. “What else is bothering you today?”
“I set up an ambush on Johnny Remeta last night.”
“You did what?”
“I was going to flush his grits. I couldn’t pull the trigger.”
She cleaned up our mess from the table and walked to the trash basket and stuffed it inside and came back to the table.
“This is a noisy place full of teenagers and echoes and cooks yelling and I couldn’t quite make out what you were saying. See you around, bwana,” she said.
She walked out to her cruiser and drove away.
I slept that night with the remote phone under the bed. It rang just after 11 P.M. I picked it up and went into the kitchen before I clicked it on.
“You’re in it for the long haul,” I said without waiting for him to speak.
“I figured you wrong last night. I thought honor required I tell you that, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Honor?”
“I said you didn’t have in it you to drop the hammer on me. I know who popped your mother. That’s why you let me live.”
“You’re not even close, partner.”
I could hear him breathing on the mouth of the receiver. “We’re alike. I’ve seen it in your eyes,” he said.
“I always thought my mother betrayed me, Johnny. But I learned to forgive her. I did that so I don’t have to be a drunk anymore.”
“You saying something about my mother now?”
“You’re smart. Read Chaucer’s story about the three guys who set out to find Death and slay him once and for all. They found him, all right. But things didn’t work out as they expected.”
“Let me tell you what real revenge is. I’m gonna shake down the people who did your mother, then I’m gonna leave the country and have them killed by somebody else. But you’ll never know for sure who they were.”
“Pull on your own pud, Johnny. This stuff is a real drag,” I said, and clicked off the phone. Then I walked through the house and pulled the phone connections from all the wall jacks.
The sheriff lived up Bayou Teche in a yellow and gray frame house with a wide gallery, set back under huge cedar and oak trees. When I drove out there Saturday afternoon, he was trimming back the climbing roses in his flower bed while his grandchildren played in the side yard. He wore a tattered straw hat to protect his head from the thorns, and his stomach hung heavily over his belt. In his home setting, clipping flowers and placing them gingerly in a bowl of water, his clothes stained with fungicide and house paint, the sheriff looked much older than he did at the department and nothing like a law officer.
I sat down on the front steps and picked up some pieces of bark from a bag of mulch and flicked them out into the grass.
“I made an ass out of myself when I attacked Jim Gable. I also brought shame on the department. I want to apologize,” I said.
“You got to rein it in, Dave.”
“I believe you.”
“Five-day suspension without pay, effective last Monday. A letter of reprimand in your jacket. Is that fair?”
“There’s something else I have to tell you,” I said. “Passion Labiche told me she helped her sister kill Vachel Carmouche.” I waited for him to speak but he didn’t. “Number two, I had the chance to plant one in Johnny Remeta’s cauliflower and didn’t do it.”
He paused in his work but his face showed no expression.
“You froze?” he asked.
“I had him set up. I was going to cut all his motors.”
A mosquito buzzed at his face and he rubbed his cheek with the back of his wrist.
