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He turned at an angle to me, his hands and fingers moving with the fluidity of snakes, the sun-bleached tips of his hair tousling in the wind, a smell like dried salt wafting off his skin.
I winked at him and said nothing. His eyes dropped to my waist. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“This?”
“Yeah.” He had stopped his martial arts routine.
“That’s the strap that holds my holster on my belt. I have to unsnap it to take off my holster.”
“Yeah, I know that. What are you doing with it?”
“You have to ask?”
“This isn’t Tombstone, Arizona, and you’re not Wyatt Earp.”
“You’re right. I don’t trust myself,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t like to carry a weapon when I was alone with Herman Stanga. Want to hold it? I brought it back from Saigon. I got it for twenty-five dollars from a prostitute in Bring Cash Alley. The prostitutes there were all VC. They dosed us with clap and sold us our own guns. Go ahead, get the feel of it. It’s a little heavy, but I bet you can handle it.”
His gaze shifted from me to the house, then to the empty road on the far side of the wood bridge. “You’re an old man. That’s what all this is about.”
“I’m old, but I can lift five hundred pounds across my shoulders. Did you know there’s a twitch in your face?” I stepped closer to him, smiling, touching the holstered grips of the .45 against his breastbone. “Go on. It won’t bite. You’ve been jailing all your life, fading the action inside and outside, taking on all comers. You know how to handle a gun.”
“Your problem is with Kermit, not me.”
“No, I want you to tell me some more about my daughter. You were just getting started.”
“No.”
“I really want you to. It will be a big favor to me. Hold on a second.” I walked to the cruiser and threw the .45 on the seat. “There. Now say whatever you wish. We’re all pals here, aren’t we?”
He shook his head, stepping back from me, his hands useless at his sides, his head turning to look at a motorboat out on the bay, a tiny wad of fear sliding down his windpipe.
“I watched your bud Vidor Perkins die,” I said. “I think he was hit by a toppling round. His brains exploded out of a big exit wound right above his eye. I watched a couple of guys in rain hoods pick him up like a sack of fertilizer and throw him in a van. Think that might happen to you, Mr. Weingart? I suspect you never met any cleaners inside. Know why that is? Cleaners don’t do time. They’re protected by the government or corporate people who use third-world countries to wipe their ass. Guys who are disposable do their time. You ready to go back inside for this bunch? How long has it been since you had your knee pads on?”
When you step on a snake, don’t expect him to run. Even in death, he’ll try to wrap his body around your ankle and sink his fangs in your foot. I had watched Weingart’s face shrink in the wind and become hard and tight, like the skin on an apple. But now he glanced upward at the clumps of pale red mimosa blooming against a blue sky, then fixed his gaze on me, his smirk once again crawling across his cheek, his fear in check.
“There’s something else Kermit mentioned,” he said. “Alafair is your adopted daughter, not your real daughter. Which is probably how you justified your visits into her bedroom when she was thirteen and just getting her menses. According to Kermit, Daddy helped her into her womanhood and kept helping her all the way through high school. Daddy is quite a guy.”
I took a stick of gum out of my shirt pocket and peeled the foil off and fed it into my mouth. “Everybody gets to the barn,” I said.
“Oh, really? What’s the profound implication there, Detective Robicheaux?”
“When I check out, I’m going to make sure you’re on board,” I said. “Kind of like a Viking funeral, know what I mean? A dead dog at the foot of the corpse. Welcome to the bow-wow club, podjo.”
THAT NIGHT I couldn’t sleep. The air was like wet cotton, the moon down, the clouds flaring with pools of yellow lightning that gave no sound. Also, I was haunted by the words of Jewel Laveau. Was she prescient or just superstitious and grandiose, melodramat
ically laying claim to the powers of her ancestor, an iconic voodoo priestess who today is entombed in an oven off Basin Street? Don’t let anyone tell you that age purchases you freedom from fear of death. As Clete Purcel once said in describing his experience in a battalion aid station in the Central Highlands, it’s a sonofabitch. Men cry out for their mothers; they grip your hands with an intensity that can break bones; their breath covers your face like damp cobwebs and tries to draw you inside them. As George Orwell suggested long ago, if you can choose the manner of your death, let it be in hot blood and not in bed.
I got up at two in the morning and sat in the kitchen in the dark and listened to the wind in the trees and the clink of Tripod’s chain attached to a wire I had strung between two live oaks. The windows were open, and I could smell the heavy odor of the bayou and bream spawning under the clusters of lily pads along the bank. I heard an alligator flop in the water and the drawbridge opening upstream, the great cogged wheels clanking together, a boat with a deep draft laboring against the incoming tide.
I saw the night-light go on in our bedroom, then Molly’s silhouette emerge from the hallway. She stood behind me and placed one hand on my shoulder, her hip touching my back. She was wearing a pink bathrobe and fluffy slippers, and I could feel a level of heat and solidity in her presence that seemed to exist separately from her body. “Something bothering you, troop?” she said.
“I get wired up sometimes. You know how it is,” I replied. I put my arm across the broadness of her rump.
“You were talking in your sleep,” she said.
“That kind of talk doesn’t mean anything.”
“You said, ‘I’m not ready.’ Then you asked where Alafair was. You called her Alf.”
