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"Snuggs might not appreciate your expression of charity at his expense," I said, walking down the steps into the yard.
"I already checked with him. He said the eats you buy him are third-rate, anyway," he replied.
I was always amazed at how much we resembled one another, even though we were only half brothers. He didn't have a white patch in his hair, as I did, and his prosthetic eye had a peculiar gleam trapped inside it, but our height, skin coloring, posture, facial structure, even the way we walked, were the same. I sometimes felt a reflection had stepped out of the mirror and would not allow me to be who I thought I was.
"I just got back from talking with Valentine Chalons. I've caught him in at least two lies," I said.
"Why does he want to lie about Ida Durbin? He wasn't even born in 'fifty-eight."
"The Chalonses supposedly had business ties to the Giacanos. The Giacanos had part of the hot pillow action in Galveston. Ida was working in one of their joints," I replied.
"That doesn't make sense. If Ida was killed by a pimp or some cops on a pad, why would the Chalonses care? They wouldn't even know her name."
"When they lie, they're guilty. Val Chalons is lying," I said.
"Maybe. Maybe not, Dave. You don't like rich guys. I'm not sure how objective you are."
I picked up Tripod and set him inside his cage. He felt heavy and solid in my hands, his tail flipping in my face. I started to speak, but this time kept my own counsel.
Jimmie latched Tripod's cage door and poked one finger through the screen to scratch his head. Jimmie's jaws were closely shaved, the small cleft in his chin filled with shadow. "I keep thinking maybe she got away from whoever abducted her. A few times I thought I heard her voice on a jukebox, singing backup maybe or even doing a solo. I always wanted to believe those demos we sent to Sun Records got her out of the life. Kind of a crazy way to think, huh?"
No different from my thoughts, I started to say. He waited for me to speak. "What are you thinking?" he asked.
"She's dead. That's why the Chalonses are running scared," I said.
"No, there's some other explanation," he replied, wagging one finger back and forth, as though he had the power to change the past.
That night I dreamed of Galveston, Texas, in the year 1958. In the dream I saw the salt-eaten frame houses where girls with piney-woods accents took on all comers for five dollars a pop, while down by the beach snub-nosed hot rods roared past a drive-in restaurant, their exposed V-8 engines chrome-plated and iridescent with an oily sheen, their twin exhausts thundering in a dirty echo off the asphalt. The sky was purple, streaked with fire, the palm trees like scorched tin cutouts against the sun. I woke at four in the morning and could not sleep again, my heart congealed with a sense of mortality that I could not explain.
In the darkness I drove to the cemetery in St. Martinville where my third wife, Bootsie, was buried. Bayou Teche was coated with fog, the crypts beaded with moisture as big as marbles. Downstream I could see the steeple of the old French church impaled against the stars, and the massive Evangeline oak under which I first kissed Bootsie Mouton and discovered how the world could become a cathedral in the time it takes for two people to press their mouths against one another.
I sat on a steel bench by Bootsie's tomb, my head in my hands, unable to pray or even to think. I did not want the sun to rise or the starlight to go out of the sky. I wanted to stay inside the darkness, the coolness of the fog, the smell of nightdamp and old brick stained with mold. I wanted to be with my dead wife.
At eight o'clock I sat down at my desk and went to work again on the case of the Baton Rouge serial killer. So far, all of his known victims had been women. Almost all of them had been abducted from their homes or driveways in upscale neighborhoods, often in broad daylight. There were no eyewitnesses. With the exception of the black woman whose body had been found not far from the convent at Grand Coteau, all of the victims had been white and educated.
One woman evidently was taken out of her front yard while she was watering her flowers. One had parked her SUV in the driveway and left a sack of groceries on the kitchen counter and another on the passenger seat of her vehicle before she disappeared. The door to the SUV was open; a solitary jar of gourmet barbecue sauce was broken on the cement.
Another victim must have opened her front door to retrieve her mail, then had spilled a handful of envelopes down the brick steps. Her three-year-old daughter, who was playing in the sunroom, wandered out on the street, looking for her mother, and was stopped from walking into traffic by a passing police officer. A female graduate student jogging along the chain lakes north of the LSU campus rounded a bend, waved at friends eating lunch on a bench, and jogged up a path between a bank of azalea bushes. She was not seen again until her body, dressed only in underwear, was found floating in a pond under a railroad trestle in the Atchafalaya Basin.
Each abduction took place when no male friend or adult family member was at the crime scene. Baton Rouge police and parish sheriff's deputies had interviewed hundreds of people in the neighborhoods where the victims had lived. The interviews had contributed absolutely nothing to the investigation. Obviously an individual who inspired trust was threading himself in and out of residential enclaves where suspicion and exclusion came with the house deed. Could a black man walk up a driveway to a four-hundred-thousand-dollar home, at three in the afternoon, and drag a woman to his vehicle and not be noticed? Could a delivery man, a telephone worker, an inspector from the gas company? Could a police officer? Could a minister wearing a Roman collar?
But no one saw a delivery or official vehicle parked near the crime scene. The black and Hispanic lawn men who worked nearby were questioned and excluded. Every known sex offender in the area was pulled in and run through the ringer. Oddly, the perpetrator had given a free pass to the groups who are usually the targets of misogynistic predators. None of his victims had been a prostitute, runaway, or barroom derelict.
None of the crime scenes showed any sign of struggle or resistance. The broken jar of gourmet barbecue sauce and the spilled mail on a woman's front steps were the only physical indications that in seconds someone's life had turned into a visit to the Abyss.
The serial killer did not have a face or a history that we knew about. His DNA was not in the national database. He had hung Fontaine Belloc's purse in a tree to taunt us and to show his contempt for her and her family. He sought out victims who were reasonably happy and at peace with the world and left society's rejects alone. His body fluids were left behind as a toxic smear on the rest of us.
I read through the autopsy report on Fontaine Belloc again. The details were not of a kind anyone wishes to remember. But one stuck in my mind and would not go away. I picked up my phone and called the office of Koko Hebert, our parish coroner. "She swallowed her wedding ring?" I said.
"From i
ts position, I'd say a couple of hours before she died," he replied.
"He forced her to eat it?"
"Not in my opinion."
"Spell it out, will you, Koko?"
