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“Cute?” I repeated.
“Lighten up, Streak. It’s only rock and roll.” His eyes were still lit with an alcoholic glaze, his throat nicked in two places by his razor, his cheeks bladed with color.
I gave it up, in the way you give up something with such an enormous sense of sadness rushing through you that it leaves no room for any other emotion. “What are we going to do, Cletus?”
“About what?”
“You.”
“We all end up in the same place. Some sooner than others. What the hell. We’re both standing on third base,” he said.
I wanted to say something else, but I couldn’t find the words. I left him there and walked down the street and got in my cruiser and returned to the office, an image in my mind I couldn’t shake: that of a flag being lifted from a coffin and folded into a military tuck by a white-gloved, full-dress marine, his scalped head and hollow eyes as stark as bone. Would Clete Purcel’s life focus into that one bright brassy point of light and then disappear with the firing of blank cartridges into the wind? Was this ultimately the choice we had made for both of us?
KERMIT ABELARD and Robert Weingart and Kermit’s agent, Oliver Fremont, picked up Alafair in a white stretch limo, and all of them headed up the St. Martinville highway toward Breaux Bridge and the Café des Amis. Alafair wore a simple black dress and black sandals and silver earrings, and sat on the rolled leather seat close to the door, while Kermit poured drinks out of a cocktail shaker. Oliver Fremont had a degree in publishing from Hofstra University yet spoke with an accent that was vaguely British. He was blond and tall and handsome, and he had perfect manners, but it was his accent, or rather his candor about it, that became for Alafair his most engaging quality.
“Did yo
u live in England?” she asked.
“I’ve traveled there some, but no, I never lived there,” he replied.
“I see,” she said.
“You’re wondering about my accent?”
“I thought you might have gone to school in the UK.”
“It’s an affectation, I’m afraid. When the upper echelons in publishing have a few drinks, they start sounding like George Plimpton or William and James Buckley. My father sold shoes in Great Neck. He’d be a little amused by me, I think.”
Alafair looked at his profile and the evening light marbling on his skin. He gazed out the tinted window at the oak trees and the sugarcane fields sweeping past. “This is a grand area, isn’t it? I can see why you write with such fondness of it. I love the chapters Kermit sent me. I can’t wait to read more,” he said.
“Her father is a sheriff’s detective,” Robert Weingart said. “I think he gives her a lot of material. It’s pretty feisty stuff, if you ask me.”
“No, my father’s experience doesn’t have much to do with what I write,” Alafair said.
Weingart was on his third mint julep. He wore gray slacks and tassel loafers and a blue-and-white-striped shirt with white French cuffs and a rolled white collar; his plum-colored tie had a gold pin in it. There were abrasions around his temples that disappeared like orange rust into his hairline. When he spoke, his mouth seemed to keep twisting into a bow, as though it were cut or bruised inside.
“I understand you’re writing a sequel to The Green Cage,” Oliver Fremont said to Weingart. “That must be a hard act to follow. I thought The Green Cage was a stupendous accomplishment, better than Soul on Ice, maybe better than On the Yard by Malcolm Braly. Did you ever read Malcolm? He was a great talent.”
“Why do you compare my work to prison writing only?”
“Pardon?”
“You ever see Straight Time? Dustin Hoffman, Gary Busey, Harry Dean Stanton. Box-office bomb. Edward Bunker wrote the novel it was based on. I knew him inside. Good writer, good story, commercial bomb. Why? All prison stories are alike. They’re about professional losers, and if there’s any sin in this country, it’s losing. The Green Cage deals with the entirety of the system, neoliberalism and the culture that creates criminality. It deals with the origins of the existential hero. It’s not an account about jails. If it has any antecedent, it’s Shane, not some crap dictated into a recording machine by an Oakland shine who doesn’t know the difference between Karl and Groucho Marx.”
“I think Oliver was saying your book goes way beyond categorical limits, Rob. That’s why it’s such a great accomplishment,” Kermit said.
“Why don’t we ask Alafair?” Weingart said. “I can’t believe at some point you haven’t been influenced by your father and his colleagues. Do they ever discuss their recreational activities? Do you know that most cops will admit, usually when they’re sloshed, that they would have ended up stacking time if they hadn’t gotten badges?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” Alafair said.
Weingart drank from his julep glass, his eyes never leaving hers. “Daddy doesn’t talk about that at the dinner table?” he said.
“Rob, Alafair isn’t responsible for any disagreements Mr. Robicheaux might have had with others,” Kermit said.
“I probably am,” Alafair said. “My father is a fine man and often comes home exhausted from dealing with people who belong in iron boxes that should be sunk in the ocean. Sometimes I lose sight of that fact and only add to his burden. I’ve done this on many occasions.”
“Oh, wilderness enow,” Weingart said. “I suspect the world of chick lit will wet its pants over sentiment like that. I often thought the best title for one of those books was The Cave, a title that suggests an infinitely receding vagina.”
