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“What kind of car was the guy at the DQ driving?”
“They just remembered it was green. Like the stolen one in Des Allemands.”
“Any latents?”
“The owner’s,” she said. “You think the shooter just wanted to scare the hell out of the
m?”
“He parked one in the tank.”
“Maybe he didn’t want them coming after him,” she said.
“Or he wanted to burn them alive,” I said.
“No, I think our boy lost control and went outside his parameters. Like somebody rolling the dice and shutting his eyes. Charlie Manson claims he never killed anyone. That’s because he got somebody else to do it.”
I said earlier that Clete Purcel was the best investigative detective I ever knew—but Helen Soileau was a close second.
“What did the guy at the DQ look like?” I asked.
“Chubby buttocks. A lisp. The kind of guy who hangs around playgrounds.”
“I think these kids have sexual problems of their own,” I said.
“Before they got into it, they said the guy was smiling at everybody in the DQ, particularly at children.”
“The kind of guy somebody might call Smiley?”
“I think this baby is back in town and ready to rock,” she replied.
* * *
SOMETIMES IT IS hard to explain to outsiders the culture of southern Louisiana and the quandary of many of its people. The world in which they grew up is now a decaying memory, but many of them have no place in the present. I know Cajuns who have never been farther than two parishes from their birthplace. There are people here who cannot add and subtract, cannot read a newspaper, and do not know what the term “9/11” means. Over forty percent of children are born to an unwed mother. In terms of heart and kidney disease, infant mortality, fatal highway accidents, and contaminated drinking water, we are ranked among the worst in the nation. Our politicians are an embarrassment and give avarice and mendacity a bad name.
So how do you get angry at someone who was born poor, speaks English so badly that she’s unintelligible to outsiders, has the worldview and religious beliefs of a medieval peasant, cleans houses for a living if she’s lucky, and is obese because of the fat-laced bulk food she feels thankful for?
The temperature had hit ninety-eight degrees at four in the afternoon. The humidity was eye-watering and as bright as spun glass, as tangible as lines of insects crawling on your torso and thighs. At sunset, lightning pulsed in the clouds over the Gulf, but no rain fell, and the wind was dry and hot and smelled of road tar and diesel fuel. I walked down to the bayou and watched the sun shrink into an ember between two black clouds and disappear. Then the wind died and the trees stood still, and the surface of the bayou quivered in the sun’s afterglow, as though a molecular change were taking place in the water.
It’s a phenomenon that seems unique to South Louisiana, like a sea change, as if the natural world is reversing itself and correcting an oversight. The barometer will drop unexpectedly, the bayou will swell and remain placid at the same time, and suddenly, rain rings will dimple the surface from one bank to the other. Fish sense the change in barometric pressure and begin feeding on the surface in anticipation of the rain that will wash food from the trees into the stream or swamp.
The wind sprang to life just as a solitary raindrop struck my face. I went back into the house to get Alafair. “Come outside.”
“What’s going on?” she said.
“It’s actually raining. Let’s walk down to Clementine’s for dessert.”
She was writing in longhand at her worktable, a flat-sided oak door I had nailed onto sawhorses. She looked out the window. The light was almost gone, and leaves were scattering across the yard, and Mon Tee Coon was standing stiff-legged on top of Tripod’s hutch, his nose pointed into the wind. “Wonderful,” Alafair said, and capped her pen.
As we stepped out onto the gallery, we saw a short, stocky woman in a dark dress walk at an angle across Main, carrying a hand-lettered sign, undaunted by the whir of the automobile tires whizzing past her. Her shoulders were humped, the muscles in her calves shaped like upside-down bowling pins, her expression as angry as an uprooted rock. The sign read “D. Robicheaux killed my husbon and was let free. How my family going to live?”
“Let me talk to her, Dave,” Alafair said.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
My expression of confidence was vanity. There in the dying light, trapped in her own rage and madness and the heat radiating through the soles of her cheap shoes, her hair tangled wetly on her face, raindrops spinning down from the stars above oak trees planted by slaves, dredged out of a sixteenth-century mob armed with pitchforks and rakes, Mrs. T. J. Dartez had persevered through time and history and the elements and brought her war to my doorstep and, worse, confronted me again with the bête noire I could not exorcize from my life. I tried to place my hand on her arm.
“Don’t touch me, you,” she said. “Liar. Killer. Fite putin.”
