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But she kept wading in. “You was a lot smarter than him, you. You know how to put t’oughts in somebody’s head, make him full of guilt, fix it so he cain’t go nowhere in his head except t’rew one door. So it ain’t enough leprosy eat him up and turn his hands to nutria feet. Man like you got to come along and push him and push him and push him till he so full of misery he gonna do what you want.”
Then I remembered the duck-shaped blind woman who had been hanging wash behind the cabin of Bobby Cale, the ex-constable, down by Point au Fer.
“Did something happen to Bobby?” I said.
She couldn’t answer. She started weeping into the phone.
“Ma’am, tell me what it is,” I said.
“I smelled it on the wind. Out in the persimmon trees. He was gone t’ree days, then I found him and touched him and he swung in my hands, light as bird shell. You done this, suh. Don’t be telling yourself you innocent, no. ’Cause you ain’t.”
The side of my head felt numb after I hung up, as though a dirty revelation about myself had just been whispered in my ear. But I wasn’t sure if my sense of regret was over the possibility that I was a contributing factor in the suicide of Bobby Cale or the fact I had just lost my only tangible lead back to my mother’s killers.
25
The Shrimp Festival was held each year at the end of summer down by the bay. On Friday, when the day cooled and the summer light filled the evening sky, shrimp boats festooned with pennants and flags blew their horns in the canal and a cleric blessed the fleet while thousands wandered up and down a carnival midway, drinking from beer cups and eating shrimp off paper plates. College students, the working classes, and politicians from all over the state took part. Inside the cacophony of calliopes and the popping of .22 rifles in the shooting galleries and the happy
shrieks that cascaded down from a Ferris wheel, the celebrants took on the characteristics of figures in a Brueghel painting, any intimations about mortality they may have possessed now lost in the balm of the season.
Belmont Pugh was there, and Jim Gable and his wife, and by the Tilt-A-Whirl I saw Connie Deshotel in an evening dress, carrying a pair of silver shoes in one hand, her other on her escort’s arm for balance, her cleavage deep with shadow.
But the figure who caught my eye was outside the circle of noise and light that rose into the sky from the midway. Micah, Cora Gable’s chauffeur, sat beside the Gables’ limo on a folding canvas stool, tossing pieces of dirt at a beer can, his jaws slack, like a man who doesn’t care what others think of his appearance or state of mind. A rolled comic book protruded from the side pocket of his black coat.
I left Bootsie at the drink pavilion and walked into the parking area and stood no more than three feet in front of him. He raised his eyes, then tinked a dirt clod against the beer can, his face indifferent.
“Looks like you’re in the dumps, partner,” I said.
He flexed his mouth, as though working a bite of food out of his gums. “I’m finishing out my last week,” he replied.
“You’re not working for Ms. Gable anymore?”
“She thinks I sassed her. It was a misunderstanding. But I guess it helped her husband.”
“Sassed her?”
“We were passing all these shacks where the sugarcane workers used to live. Ms. Perez says to herself, ‘The glory that was Rome.’
“So I say, ‘It sure wasn’t any glory, was it?’
“She says, ‘Beg your pardon?’
“I say, ‘Rich man got the poor whites to fight with the coloreds so the whole bunch would work for near nothing while the rich man got richer.’ It got real quiet in the car.”
“Sounds like you got your hand on it, Micah,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” he said resentfully. “I looked in the rearview mirror and her face was tight as paper, like it had got slapped. She says, ‘This land belonged to my family. So I suggest you keep your own counsel.’ ”
He removed the comic book from his pocket and tapped it in his palm, his anger seeming to rise and fall, as though it could not find an acceptable target.
“Doesn’t seem like that’s enough to get a person fired,” I said.
“Gable’s been acting good to her lately. I think she’s gonna let him have the money to build that racetrack out in New Mexico. I had to be a smart-ass at the wrong time and give him what he needed to get me canned.”
“You cut up Axel Jennings, Micah?”
He opened his comic book and flopped the pages back on his knee, thinking, his deformed face like a melted candied apple in the glow from the midway.
“You’re always trying to get another inch, aren’t you? I’ll give you something better to chew on,” he said. “You know a woman named Maggie Glick, runs a bar full of colored whores in Algiers? It was Jim Gable got her out of prison. Gable’s got a whole network of whores and dope peddlers working for him. That’s the man gonna be head of your state police, Mr. Robicheaux. Play your cards right and there might be a little pissant job in it for you somewhere.”
