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“But the truth is you don’t know?” she said.
“In this kind of instance—”
“Don’t patronize me, Mr. Robicheaux.”
My words were of no value. I suspected her grief had now become her only possession and in all probability she would nurse it unto the grave. I looked out the window at the green canopy rippling in the wind and the chain tinkling on the aluminum pole.
“I have a videotape of Yvonne Darbonne dancing at a lawn party. In the background there’s a sound like canvas popping and a chain rattling against metal. I think that video was shot in your yard, Mrs. Lujan.”
She lifted her chin. Her eyes were small and green, recessed unequally in her face. “And what if it was?”
“You knew Yvonne Darbonne?”
“I’m not sure that I did. Would you answer my question, please?”
I felt a
surge of anger in my chest, less because of her imperious attitude than her callousness toward someone else’s loss. “She died of a gunshot wound in the center of her forehead. She was eighteen years old. I think she was at your house the day of her death. She had red hair and was wearing a short skirt and sleeveless blue tank top at the party. She was dancing to a recording of John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boom Boom.’ Does any of that sound familiar to you?”
“I don’t like the way you’re addressing me.”
“Mr. Darbonne lost his child to a violent act, just like you lost yours. Why should you take offense because I ask whether or not the girl was at your house? Why is that a problem for you, Mrs. Lujan?”
“Get out.”
I placed my business card on a glass tabletop next to her wheelchair. There was a small pitcher of orange juice and crushed ice, with sprigs of mint in it, sitting on the table. The refraction of sunlight from the pitcher looked like shards of glass on her skin.
“Either your son or your husband ran over and killed a homeless man. Moral outrage won’t change that fact,” I said.
“Your cruelty seems to have no bounds,” she replied.
space
BELLO HAD GONE FIRST to Monarch Little’s home, located in a blue-collar neighborhood that was gradually becoming all black. A woman had been hanging wash in her backyard when she saw Bello come up the dirt driveway, the rottweiler straining at the leash he had double-wrapped around his fist. “You know where Mr. Little is?” he asked, smiling at her.
“No, suh,” she replied.
“You been out in the yard long? Or maybe at your kitchen window? Or maybe out on your gallery, pounding out your broom?” He was grinning at nothing now, his eyes roving about aimlessly, the dog stringing saliva into the dirt.
“He come in a while ago, then left again,” the woman replied. She was overweight, her dress blowing on her body like a tent, her arms wrapped with a skin infection that leached them of their color.
“Wasn’t driving that Firebird, though, was he? ’Cause it got burnt up,” Bello said.
She wasn’t going to reply, then she looked again at his face and felt the words break involuntarily from her throat. “He was wit’ his cousin, in a beat-up truck. It’s got boards stuck up on the sides to haul yard trash wit’.”
“Where they gone to?” Bello was still grinning, his eyes never quite lighting on her. He lifted up on the dog’s choke chain, tightening it until the dog stiffened and sat down in the dirt. “Tell me where he’s at. I owe him some money.”
“That corner where they always standing around under the tree. I heard them say they was going to the li’l sto’ there,” she said.
“The corner they sell dope at?”
“I don’t know nothing about that.”
“But that’s the corner you’re talking about, isn’t it?”
“Yes, suh.”
“If I don’t find him, you don’t need to tell him I was here, do you?”
