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Our eyes locked on each other’s.
“Maggie Glick? I thought Maggie Glick was doing fifteen in St. Gabriel,” Helen said.
“Let’s take a ride to New Orleans Monday morning.”
She stood a ballpoint pen upside down on its cap and studied it.
“I’ve got a lot of work in my basket, Dave. I think right now this guy is NOPD’s headache.”
I nodded and went back out in the hall and closed her door softly behind me.
She followed me into my office.
“I know I said I’d help, but this stuff is starting to eat you up,” she said.
“What stuff?”
“About your mother. Sometimes you just have to let the bad guys drown in their own shit.”
“You’re probably right,” I said.
Ten minutes before 5 P.M. she opened the door to my office and leaned inside.
“Did you see the B&E report on Passion Labiche’s house?” she asked.
“No.”
“I didn’t know about it, either, not till a few minutes ago. Somebody came through a screen and tore her house up but didn’t take anything except a box of old photos.”
“Photos?”
“Remember I told you about Passion saying she’d seen Connie Deshotel’s face in an old photo?”
“Yeah, but Passion and Connie Deshotel just don’t connect for me,” I said.
“You still want to go to the Big Sleazy?”
“With you, always,” I said.
“Hey, bwana?”
“What?”
“Connie Deshotel’s dirty.”
The next morning, Saturday, I drove out to Passion Labiche’s house. She unlatched the front door and asked me to follow her into the kitchen, where she was canning tomatoes. She lifted a boiling cauldron off the stove with hot pads, pouring into the preserve jars on the drainboard while the steam rose into her face. She had placed a spoon into each of the jars to prevent the glass from cracking, but one of them suddenly popped and stewed tomatoes burst in a pattern like a broken artery on her arm and the front of her dress.
She dropped the cauldron into the sink, her face bright with pain.
“You okay?” I said.
“Sure,” she said, wiping at her arm and dress with a dishrag.
She continued to wash her arm and scrub at her dress, rubbing the stain deeper into the fabric, spreading a huge damp area under her breasts.
“I have to change. Fix yourself something, or do whatever you feel like,” she said, her face sweating, her eyes dilated.
She ran up the stairs. When she came back down she had washed her face and tied her hair up on her head and put on a yellow dress. She cleaned off the drainboard with the heavy-breathing, self-enforced detachment of someone who might have just stepped back from a car wreck.
