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“My husband is an inflexible man and doesn’t allow smoking in our home. Please buy me a package of Camels and bring them to the house. Can you do that for me, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“My pleasure,” I said.
“Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Yes?”
“Also bring the video. The one you said shows the Darbonne girl at our garden party. Bring that with the cigarettes.”
Thirty minutes later, the maid let me in the front door. Outside, the sun was white in the sky, the windows running with humidity, but the interior of the house was frigid. There was no sign of Bello or his car. Mrs. Lujan gestured at me from the sunporch, her fingers curling back toward her palm.
“Sit,” she said. Then she waited, her eyes on my face.
“You want the cigarettes?” I said.
“Take one out and give it to me.”
I removed the cellophane from the package and slipped a cigarette loose for her. She held it between two fingers and waited. I took a folder of matches from my shirt pocket and lit her cigarette and blew out the match. There was no ashtray on the glass tabletop that separated me from her wheelchair, and I set the match on the edge of a coffee saucer and placed the package of cigarettes next to it. She turned her face to one side when she exhaled the smoke, then looked at me quizzically. “You think I’m strange?” she said.
“It’s not my job to make those kinds of judgments.”
“Put the video in th
e machine,” she said.
I shoved the cassette into the VCR and watched the first images come up on the screen. She continued to smoke as I fast-forwarded the tape, her eyes rheumy, sunken like green marbles into bread dough. She seemed to radiate sickness in the same way that an unchanged bandage or an infected wound does. I even wondered if the diminution of her bone structure had less to do with an automobile accident than a cancerous anger that lived inside her.
I stopped the tape on the garden party, backed it up, and recommenced it. Once again, Yvonne Darbonne was dancing to the signature composition of John Lee Hooker, her shoulders powdered with freckles, her pug nose turned up at the sky.
“That’s the girl who shot herself?” Mrs. Lujan said.
“Do you remember her?”
“She was pretty. Tony brought her here. Then he left, and she was dancing by herself. She was wearing that tank top. She spilled sangria on it.”
“Go on.”
“I was watching the dancers from the upstairs window. She looked up at me and smiled and pointed at the stain on her top. It was wet and dark on the material. Her breasts were molded against the cloth and I remember thinking she didn’t belong out there, at least not with the likes of Slim Bruxal. I waved at her to come inside. I wanted to give her a clean blouse to wear.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I saw her talk to Slim, then to Bello. She walked under the orange tree, below my line of vision, then I couldn’t see her anymore. I heard the door slam. The side door is right under my bedroom, and when it slams I can always feel the vibration through the floor. So I know she went into the house. Then I heard the door slam a second time.”
Mrs. Lujan drew in on the cigarette and blew out the smoke and watched it flatten against the window. Her makeup was caked, her mouth stitched with wrinkles that were as thin as cat’s whiskers, her eyes looking at an image, imagined or real, trapped inside her head.
“Who followed Yvonne Darbonne into the house?” I asked.
“There’s a game room behind the den. Bello keeps the curtains drawn so the western sun doesn’t get in. It’s the place where he goes to be alone. I heard something thump against the wall down there. I kept waiting to hear another thump, the way you do when a sound wakes you up in the middle of the night. But I didn’t. All I heard were voices.”
“Voices?”
“I heard a girl’s. I heard it come up through the pipe in the lavatory. It was loud, then it stopped, and I couldn’t hear anything except the sound of water running. I think somebody turned on the shower down there. I can always tell when it’s the shower in the game room. The stall is made of tin. The water makes a drumming sound on the sides. I wanted to think she was just taking a shower. But that’s not why somebody turned on the water, is it?”
I waited before I spoke again. “What do you think happened down there, Mrs. Lujan?”
“I used the intercom to call Sidney, the colored man in the kitchen. It took over fifteen minutes to get him up here. I told him to go down to the game room and see who was in there. But he refused.”
“Pardon?”
