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Clete was wrong. I disengaged from thoughts about Ida Durbin. During the week, I bass-fished on Bayou Benoit, repaired the roof on the shotgun house I had just taken a mortgage on, and each dawn jogged three miles through the mist-shrouded trees in City Park. In fact, listening to Clete's advice and forgetting Ida was easier than I thought. I even wondered if my ability to give up an obsession was less a virtue than a sign of either age or a newly acquired callousness.
But airliners crash because a twenty-cent lightbulb burns out on the instrument panel; a Civil War campaign is lost because a Confederate courier wraps three cigars in a secret communique; and a morally demented man takes a job in a Texas book depository and changes world history.
It was early the next Monday, the rain hitting hard on the tin roof of my house, when the phone rang. I picked up the receiver on the kitchen counter, a cup of coffee in one hand. Between the trees on the back slope of my property, I could see the rain dancing on the bayou, the mist blowing into the cattails. "Hello?" I said.
"Hey, Robicheaux. What do you say we buy you breakfast?" the voice said.
"Who's this?" I asked, although I already knew the answer.
"J. W. Shockly. Talked to you outside Baptist Hospital last week? Billy Joe and I have to do a favor for the boss. I'd really appreciate your help on this."
"I'm pretty jammed up, partner."
"It'll take ten minutes. We're at the public library, a half block down the street. What's to lose?"
I put on a hat and raincoat and walked under the dripping limbs of the live oaks that formed a canopy over East Main. I passed the site of what had once been the residence of the writer and former Confederate soldier George Washington Cable and the grotto dedicated to Christ's mother next to the city library. J. W. Shockly and the other sheriff's deputy from the hospital parking lot, both in civilian clothes, were standing under the shelter at the library entrance, smiles fixed on their faces inside the mist, like brothers-in-arms happy to see an old friend.
"Can we go somewhere?" Shockly said, extending his hand. "You remember Billy Joe Pitts."
So I had to shake hands with his partner as well. When I did, he squeezed hard on the ends of my fingers.
"That's quite a grip you've got," I said.
"Sorry," he said. "How about coffee and a beignet down at Victor's?"
I shook my head.
"Here's what it is," Shockly said. "The sheriff sent me down here because me and you go back. See, the nurse who was in Troy's hospital room with you is the sheriff's cousin. She says Troy was telling you some bullcrap about a crime involving a prostitute. The sheriff thinks maybe you're working for the defense. That maybe the restaurant owner's family has hired you to prove Troy was a lowlife or procurer or something, that maybe he was propositioning the waitress and the restaurant owner went apeshit. You following me?"
"No, not at all," I replied.
Shockly's hair was buzz-cut, his pale blue suit spotted with rain. His breath smelled like cigarettes and mints. His gaze seemed to search the mist for the right words to use. "Nobody wants to see the restaurant owner ride the needle. But he's not going to skate, either. So how about it?"
"How about what?" I said.
"You working for the defense or not?" Billy Joe, his friend, said. He was a shorter man than Shockly, but tougher in appearance, his eye sockets recessed, the skin of his face grainy, his teeth too large for his mouth.
"I already explained my purpose in visiting the hospital. I think we're done here," I said.
Billy Joe raised his hands and grinned. "Enough said, then." He popped me on the arm, hard enough to sting through my raincoat.
When I got back home, I washed my hands and dried them on a dish towel. I fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts and berries and milk and sat down to eat by the kitchen window. The air blowing through the screen was cool and smelled of flowers and wet trees and fish spawning in the bayou, and in a few minutes I had almost forgotten about Shockly and Pitts and their shabby attempt to convince me their visit to New Iberia was an innocuous one.
But just as I started to wash my dishes I heard footsteps on the gallery. I opened the front door and looked down at Billy Joe Pitts, who was squatted on his haunches, scraping the contents from a pet food can onto a sheet of newspaper for my cat, Snuggs. J. W. Shockly waited at the curb in a black SUV, the exhaust pipe smoking in the rain. "What do you think you're doing?" I said.
"Had this can in the vehicle and saw your cat. Thought I'd treat him to a meal," Pitts said, twisting around, his bottom teeth exposed with his grin.
Snuggs had just started to eat, but I scooped him up and cradled him in one arm. He was a white, short-haired, unneutered male, thick-necked, heavy, ropy with muscle, his ears chewed, his head notched with pink scars. He was the best cat I ever owned. "Snuggs says thanks but he's on a diet. And I say adios, bud."
I kicked the pet food and newspaper into the flower bed.
"Just trying to do a good deed. But to each his own," Billy Joe Pitts said, getting to his feet, his face close to mine now, his skin as damp-smelling as mold.
chapter FOUR
It was still raining that afternoon when I drove across the train tracks and parked my pickup behind the courthouse, a short distance from the crumbling, whitewashed crypts in St. Peter's Cemetery. Helen Soileau, my old colleague, had become the parish's first female sheriff. She was either bisexual or a lesbian, I was never sure which, and had the perfect physique for a man. I mention her sexuality not to define her but only to indicate that her life as a law officer was not always an easy one. She started her career as a meter maid at NOPD and became a patrolwoman in Gird Town and the neighb
orhood surrounding the Desire Project. The notoriety of the latter has no equal in the United States, except perhaps for Cabrini Green in Chicago and neighborhoods in the South Bronx. A white female cop who can enter the Desire at night, by herself, is an extraordinary person. Helen Soileau earned respect from people who do not grant it easily. After I told her the story about Troy Bordelon's death and the visit to my house by J. W. Shockly and Billy Joe Pitts, she leaned back in her swivel chair and looked at me for a long time. She wore blue slacks and a starched white shirt, with a gold badge hung on the pocket. Her hair was blond and natural but for some reason it had always looked like a wig when she wore it long. So now she had it cut short and tapered on the sides and back, and it gave her an attractive appearance that for the first time in her life caused men to turn and look at her. "You're asking for your job back? Over these two characters coming to your house?" she said.
