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After he was booked for capital murder, I walked with him to a holding cell and asked the guard to lock me inside with him and to give me a few minutes.
“This is a part of the job I don’t like, Mr. Darbonne,” I said. “I don’t believe you killed Bello Lujan. But even if you did, I and others like me would understand why you did it, even if we considered it wrong.”
“It ain’t your fault, no.”
“Look me in the face, sir.”
He stared at me from the iron bench on which he was seated, perhaps unsure whether my request had contained a veiled insult.
“Tell me again you didn’t know Bello Lujan assaulted your daughter,” I said.
“A man who got to repeat himself don’t respect his own word,” he said.
He looked at the tops of his shoes.
“I suspect your bail could be as high as a quarter million dollars. Do you have any kind of collateral you can offer the court?” I said.
“No, suh, I t’ink I’m gonna be here awhile.”
His intuitions were probably more accurate than he knew. He was in the maw of the system, and anyone who has been caught in it, the guilty or innocent or hapless alike, will be the first to tell you that justice is indeed blind. “I hope it comes out all right for you, sir,” I said.
“Nothing gonna come out all right. Ain’t no way to turn it around now.”
“What do you mean it can’t be turned around?”
“I lost my farm and bidness when the gov’ment let in all that sugar from Central America. Ain’t fair to put all that cheap sugar on the market. Ain’t nothing like it used to be. Li’l people ain’t got no chance.”
His linkage of his own fate to economic factors was probably self-serving, if not self-pitying, and his condemnation of the world for his own misfortune was the stuff of grandiosity. But who can fault a man with no legs for not being able to run?
“I’m going to see what I can do,” I said.
“About what?” he said, his eyes lifting to mine.
MOLLY WAS WASHING her car under the porte cochere when I got home. She wore a pair of blue-jean shorts and an old white shirt that was too tight for her shoulders, and her clothes and hair and skin were damp from the garden hose she was spraying on the car’s surface while she wiped it down with a rag. Molly’s physical firmness, the curvature of her hips, the way her rump flexed against her shorts, the suggestion of sexual power in her thighs and the swell of her breasts, all reminded me of my dead wife Bootsie, and I sometimes wondered if Bootsie’s spirit had not slipped inside Molly’s skin, as though the two women who had not known each o
ther in life had melded together and formed a third personality after Bootsie’s death.
But I didn’t care where Molly came from, as long as she remained in my life, and I loved her as much as I did Bootsie, and I loved them both at the same time and never felt a contradiction or a moment of disloyalty about my feelings.
“Come scratch my back, will you?” Molly said. “A mosquito about six inches long got under my shirt.”
She propped her arms on the car’s roof while I moved my nails back and forth across her shoulder blades. The water from the hose continued to run, spilling back across her fist, trailing down her forearm. She shifted her weight and her rump brushed against my loins.
“I had to put Cesaire Darbonne in jail today,” I said. “I suspect he’ll be arraigned tomorrow for capital murder.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, gazing abstractedly through the shadows in the backyard.
“The guy’s broke. He’ll probably stay in lockdown out at the stockade.”
“And?” she said, removing a strand of damp hair from her eye.
“No bondsman will touch him with a dung fork, at least not without collateral.”
“You hurt my feelings,” she said.
“Pardon?”
She rolled her shoulders to indicate I should continue scratching her back. “I thought you were putting moves on me to get me into the sack,” she said.
