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In Vietnam I knew a self-declared Buddhist and quasi-psychotic warrant officer who would fly a Huey into places the devil wouldn’t go. He used to say, “The way to keep your house safe from tigers is to return the tiger to its owner’s house.”
I got Connie Deshotel’s address from our local state representative, then drove to Baton Rouge late Sunday afternoon. She lived off Dalrymple, in the lake district north of the LSU campus, in a gabled two-story white house with azaleas and willows and blooming crepe myrtle in the yard. Her Sunday paper still lay on the front porch, wrapped tightly in a plastic rain bag.
I didn’t try to call before I arrived. Even if she wasn’t home, I felt my business card in her mailbox would indicate, if indeed she was the money behind Axel Jennings, that her intentions were known, and another visit from one of her emissaries would lead right back to her door.
I lifted the brass door knocker and heard chimes deep inside the house. But no one came to the door. I dropped my card through the mail slot and was headed back down the walk when I heard the spring of a diving board and a loud splash from the rear of the house.
I walked through a side yard under a long trellis that was wrapped with trumpet vine. I opened the gate into the backyard and saw Connie Deshotel in a purple two-piece bathing suit, mounting the tile steps at the shallow end of her swimming pool.
She picked a towel off a sun chair and shook out her hair, then dried her face and neck and blotted the towel on her thighs and the backs of her legs. She placed her feet inside her sandals and poured a Bloody Mary from a pitcher into a red-streaked glass with a stick of celery blossoming out of the ice.
I started to speak, then realized she had seen me out of the corner of her eye.
“Did you bring Bootsie with you this time?” she asked.
“No, it’s still all business,” I replied.
“Well,” she said, touching the towel to her forehead, her chin raised, as though taking pause with an unacceptable intrusion rather than allowing herself to be undone by it. “What is it that’s of such great concern to us this Sunday afternoon?”
“Can I sit down?”
“Please do. Yes, indeed,” she said.
She sat across from me at a glass-topped table under an umbrella that was made from wide, multicolored strips of tin.
“Friday the sheriff and I were talking about an interesting attribute everyone of our generation seems to share,” I said.
“Oh?” she said, her interest wandering out into the yard.
“What were you doing when you heard John Kennedy had been shot?”
“I was coming out of gym class. Some girls were crying in the hallway.”
“See?” I said, smiling. “Everybody remembers that exact moment in his or her life. They never hesitate when they’re asked.”
“What’s the point?”
“It’s that photo taken of you with the parents of the Labiche girls. It troubles the heck out of me. Here, I brought it along,” I said, and removed a manila envelope from the pocket of my coat.
But before I could pull the photo out, she leaned forward and took both of my hands in hers, pressing down hard with her thumbs, her eyes fastened on mine.
“Dave, give this up. You’re a good man. But you’ve developed a fixation about something that means absolutely nothing,” she said.
I took my hands from hers and slipped the photo out of the envelope and lay it flat on the table.
“You remember being with the Labiches?” I asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“See, up here in the corner, someone wrote, ‘Christmas, 1967.’ So here you are in a nightclub, back in the civil rights era, in an evening dress, with a corsage on, at Christmastime, with a notorious mulatto couple who pimped for a living, and you have no memory of it. Does that seem strange to you?”
She picked up a big leather bag with drawstrings on it from the flagstones and dug a package of cigarettes and a gold lighter out of it and set them on the tabletop.
“I really don’t have anything more to say on the matter. Would you like a Diet Coke or lemonade or decaffeinated coffee or ice water or whatever it is you drink?”
“In ’67 you hadn’t been out of the police academy too long. Does it make sense that a young cop could be around the Labiches, perhaps on Christmas Eve, and not remember it? Look me in the face and tell me that.”
“Do me a great favor, Dave. Go home to your wife. Sell worms to your friends. Play mind games with your sheriff. Just … go.”
