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“You think I’d forget the guy who said there was a fire at our house and that you were in trouble and that I’d better haul my ass up to the levee?”
She leaned forward on the step, clasping her ankles. She was barefoot and the tops of her feet were pale, and there was a solitary mosquito bite on her skin just above her left big toe. Her hair was raven-black with shades of brown, and I could smell the odor of shampoo in it. “Kermit isn’t a bad person,” she said.
“I have some photos at the office that maybe you should look at. One shows the body of a girl named Bernadette Latiolais. She was an honor student and about to enter the nurses’ program at UL. The guy who killed her virtually sawed her head loose from her shoulders. I also have a picture of a Canadian girl named Fern Michot. She was probably abducted, bound with ligatures, starved, and kept in a state of constant fear, at least according to the coroner. The same person or persons killed both girls. Kermit knew the Latiolais girl but did not indicate that to anyone until we got the information on our own. Robert Weingart was in the Latiolais girl’s neighborhood, probably with Herman Stanga. Maybe these guys are innocent of any wrongdoing, but no matter which turn the investigation takes, their names keep coming up again and again.”
She watched Snuggs and Tripod eating. I put my hand on her back. Her skin was still warm from sleep.
“He was the only one,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Kermit was the only one.”
“You don’t have to go into detail if you don’t want to.”
“He said he’d had other girlfriends, but none like me. He said I was the most talented writer he’d ever met. He said I was a lover and a sister to him. He said our souls knew each other in another time.”
“Kermit was probably being honest with you. But maybe he has problems he can’t overcome. Sometimes we have to let go of certain kinds of people and let them find their own destiny. But that doesn’t mean we have to think less of them or less of ourselves for having known or liked or trusted them.”
“I’m having dinner tonight with Kermit and his agent. Robert is going to be there, too.”
“I see.”
“Do you? Because I don’t. I don’t see anything. I feel stupid and gullible. I’ve never felt like this before.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Alf.”
“When I was growing up, you weren’t home half the time. You were always on a case. It seemed like everybody else’s welfare came first. So I found somebody like Kermit. I never loved anybody as much. But he’s like you.”
“What?”
“Other people come first with him. I let myself see only half of Kermit. The other half belongs to Robert. He let Robert read my manuscript. He didn’t see what Robert wrote at the bottom: ‘This is wonderful. Package it with a free can of female hygiene spray and it should sell at least a hundred copies.’”
I couldn’t think through what she was saying. “You believe I’m no different from Kermit Abelard? You’re saying I put other people ahead of my family?”
She picked Tripod up and set him on her lap. She flipped him on his side, his thick tail slapping at the air. Her gaze seemed focused on him, but I’m not sure she saw anything at all. “You want me to move out?” she asked.
I got up from the steps and walked down to the bayou, wishing I could disappear into the fog and not hear the echoes of Alafair’s words inside my head. I wished I could step onto the deck of a paddle wheeler and disappear inside the nineteenth century.
AS SOON AS Clete Purcel woke in the refrigerated darkness of his cottage at the motor court, he sensed the absence on the other side of the bed even before he touched the empty depression in the mattress and the body warmth that was already dissipating in the sheets. Then he saw the note. When he pulled the pillow toward him and gathered the note in his palm, he could smell the odor of her hair and her perfume on the pillowcase. He felt the dry constriction of desire in his throat, a thickening in his loins, and the sick vapors of desertion and physical betrayal congealing around his heart. The note read:
Dear C.,
Don’t feel bad or worry about anything. I had fun. I put a couple of aspirins and vitamin B’s and a glass of water on the drainboard. You know how to ring a girl’s bell. Sweet dreams, big guy. Call me if you feel like it.
E.
He got into the shower and turned on the water as hot as he could stand it and stayed inside the steam until his skin was red and his pores were running with sweat. Then he turned on the cold water and felt the shock go through him like an icicle. He dried off and put on clean skivvies and slacks and a freshly pressed shirt and tried to eat a half cantaloupe. But his hand trembled on the spoon when he attempted to gouge the meat out of the rind, and he drove the shank of the spoon into his palm with an impact like a nail striking bone and knocked his coffee off the table with his elbow.
He looked at his watch. It was 7:14 A.M. The day had hardly begun, and he felt as though he had already trudged halfway up the path to Golgotha and still had miles to go.
He drove to the office and parked in back. The fog was drifting off the drawbridge at Burke Street, and he could hear car tires crossing the steel-mesh grid and thudding onto the street that led past the old Carmelite convent. He unlocked the back door and sat down behind his desk and did not turn on the lights. He pulled his blue-black, white-handled .38 from his shoulder holster and set it in the middle of the desk blotter, although he could not explain why. He picked it up and felt its cold weight in his grasp and set it down again. He gazed at the round edges of the brass casings that were inserted in t
he cylinder, the sheen of oil on the steel surfaces of the frame, the knurled tip of the hammer, the fine white bead on the barrel sight. He opened the cylinder and rotated it slowly against the heel of his hand and pushed it solidly back into place, notching a loaded chamber under the firing pin.
He set down the .38 and pushed his swivel chair slightly backward, propping his hands against the desk as though positioning himself for an impending impact, perhaps like an air traveler realizing that something has just gone terribly wrong with the flight he is on. He breathed deeply, his blood oxygenating, his head seeming to swell to the size of a basketball, the veins in his scalp tightening against his skull. He picked up the .38 and curled his thumb over the hammer and pulled it back two clicks to full cock. He thought he heard the machinery on the drawbridge ratcheting disjointedly into place and a boat’s horn blowing incessantly inside the fog, as though the elements in his environment had formed a single voice and were saying, It’s time, bub. Aren’t you weary of the hassle? Everybody gets to the barn. It’s only bad when the trip is prolonged and degrading.
He lay the .38’s frame flatly against his upper chest, the barrel aimed upward at a point midway between his throat and chin. He straightened in his chair, his left hand resting on his thigh, his gaze fixed on a 1910 photograph of the St. Charles streetcar headed down the neutral ground through a tunnel of trees, the wood seats loaded with Mardi Gras revelers.
