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She slowed her walk for just a moment, glancing at the flowers in the beds along the edge of the cement.
“I just wish I could get my hydrangeas to bloom like that,” she said.
We walked up the steps and into a foyer that served as a waiting area. I could see our newly elected woman mayor and the sheriff and three men in business suits and Cora Gable at a table in a banquet room. At the head of the table, his face obscured by the angle of the door, sat a man in a blue blazer, with French cuffs and a heavy gold watch on his wrist.
“I have to go into the ladies’ room a minute,” Bootsie said.
A moment later I looked through the glass in the front door and saw Micah, the chauffeur, come up the walk and sit in a wicker chair at the far end of the gallery and light a cigarette.
I went back outside and stood by the arm of his chair. He smoked with his face averted and showed no recognition of my presence. Even though his forehead was freckled with perspiration, he did not remove his black coat or loosen his tie or unbutton his starched collar.
“Miss Cora said you won’t press charges against the two NOPD cops who worked you over,” I said.
“I’m not sure who they were. Waste of time, anyway,” he replied, and tipped his ashes into his cupped palm.
“Why?”
He moved his neck slightly, so that the skin brushed like sandpaper against the stiff edges of his collar.
“I got a sheet,” he said.
“People with records sue the system all the time. It’s a way of life around here.”
“New Orleans cops have murdered their own snitches. They’ve committed robberies and murdered the witnesses to the robberies. Go work your joint somewhere else,” he said, and leaned over the railing and raked the ashes off his palm.
“You afraid of Gable?” I asked.
He brushed at the ashes that had blown back on his black clothes. Sweat leaked out of his hair; the right side of his face glistened like a broken strawberry cake.
I went back inside just as Bootsie was emerging from the ladies’ room. We walked through the tables in the main dining area to the banquet room in back where Jim Gable stood at the head of the table, pouring white wine into his wife’s glass.
“Jim says y’all know each other,” the sheriff said to me.
“We sure do,” I said.
“Bootsie’s an old acquaintance, too. From when she lived in New Orleans,” Gable said, the corners of his eyes threading with lines.
“You look overheated, Dave. Take off your coat. We’re not formal here,” the mayor said. She was an attractive and gentle and intelligent woman, and her manners were sincere and not political. But the way she smiled pleasantly at Jim Gable while he poured wine into her glass made me wonder in awe at the willingness of good people to suspend all their self-protective instincts and accept the worst members of the human race into their midst.
There was something obscene about his manner that I couldn’t translate into words. His mouth constricted to a slight pucker when he lifted the neck of the wine bottle from the mayor’s glass. He removed a rose that was floating in a silver center bowl and shook the water from it and placed it by her plate, his feigned boyishness an insult to a mature woman’s intelligence. During the luncheon conversation his tongue often lolled on his teeth, as though he were about to speak; then his eyes would smile with an unspoken, mischievous thought and he would remain silent while his listener tried to guess at what had been left unsaid.
With regularity his eyes came back to Bootsie, examining her profile, her clothes, a morsel of food she was about to place on her lips.
When he realized I was looking at him, his face became suffused with an avuncular warmth, like an old friend of the family sharing a mutual affection.
“Y’all are fine people, Dave,” he said.
Just before coffee was served, he tinked his glass with a spoon.
“Ms. Mayor and Sheriff, let me state the business side of our visit real quickly,” he said. “Our people are looking into that mess on the Atchafalaya. Obviously some procedures weren’t followed. That’s our fault and not y’all’s. We just want y’all to know we’re doing everything possible to get to the bottom of what happened … Dave, you want to say something?”
“No,” I said.
“Sure?” he said.
“I don’t have anything to say, Gable.”
“Friends don’t call each other by their last names,” he said.
