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• • •
I WENT INTO HELEN’S office. She was just about to go home. I told her everything I had just learned. She sat back down. “You buy Lautrec offing himself?”
“Maybe he was scared.”
“The only thing Lautrec feared was not getting laid.”
“Cormac is adamant,” I said.
“How about prints on the Sheetrock torn out of the ceiling?”
“None.”
Helen looked tired, older. “You know where this is going, don’t you?”
“Yep, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey time.”
• • •
IN ANY GIVEN situation, the majority of people believe whatever they need to: Up is down, black is white, dog shit tastes good with mashed potatoes. This is how the collective response to an unsolved series of killings works: Shock and anger are followed by fear and the purchase of weapons and security systems, arrest of a scapegoat, rumors that the killer
’s wealthy family has quietly committed him, or sometimes the mind-numbing statement by the investigators that the evidence they could not find proves the homicides are not related and that a serial killer is not at large in the community.
What does an intelligent investigator do? He doesn’t listen to any of it. The detail that stuck with me from my conversation with Cormac was the Maltese cross on Lautrec’s calf. I used the word “collective” regarding the response to killings. For me, the word is always a pejorative. My father spoke a form of English that was hardly a language, but in Cajun French he could speak insightfully. My favorite of his sayings was “Did you ever see a mob rush across town to do a good deed?”
My feelings were stronger than his. Hobnailed boots in unison never bode well for anyone, and the further down the food chain you get, the more heinous the agenda. The Maltese cross meant Lautrec was on board. But with what? He was neither a leader nor a follower; he was an opportunist, a walking gland, a genetic throwback trying to lure a primitive woman in animal skins away from the fire and into the darkness of the cave. What would frighten him so much that he would bail off a chair and swing back and forth on an electrical cord and not pull his wrists loose from the tape that barely restrained them?
Of course, there was another possibility. Maybe he was guilty. I believed then and I believe now that he was one of those made different in the womb. He enjoyed cruelty and visiting it upon women he couldn’t control. I suspected he was capable of inflicting the kind of damage that had been done to Hilary Bienville before she died. Or he could have been a secondary participant in the attack. He had worked in the parish prison during the previous administration, when inmates were badly abused. Once again, I had no answers. I heard the cops who nailed the Hillside Stranglers never had answers either. Or the ones who nailed BTK in Kansas or the Night Stalker in Los Angeles.
I went down to Bailey’s office, but she had left for the day. I drove to her house. The sun had gone out of the sky, and the rainbow arcing into City Park had evaporated, replaced by smoke from the sugar mill that drifted onto the trees and grass like black lint.
• • •
BAILEY WAS IN the backyard, playing with her calico cat, who had the male name of Maxwell Gato. She picked up Maxwell and bounced Maxwell’s rump in her palm and handed her to me. Maxwell was a longhair and must have had twenty pounds of fat on her. I bounced her up and down also. The cat closed her eyes. I could feel her purring.
“What’s going on, sailor?” Bailey said.
“Sailor?”
“You don’t like that?”
“That’s what my wife Bootsie used to call me. Did you eat?”
“No. How about I fix us something? Then we might mess around. How’s that?”
“That’s pretty nice.”
But I was hiding my feelings. I didn’t feel right about Bailey. She was an aging man’s wet dream. Beautiful, intelligent, loving, and full of laughter in bed. Pardon me if my remarks are too personal or if they violate good taste. She smelled like flowers and the ocean when she made love, and she moaned like one of Homer’s Sirens. In the last heart-twisting moment, I felt an electric current inside her that seemed to take control of both of us. Her body and mouth and hands and ragged breath and even her nails hooked in my back became a gift, a prayer rather than an erotic act, a moment so intense I wanted to die inside it and never leave. When I rose from her, I felt unworthy of what had just happened in my life.
I watched her at the stove. Her thick brown hair was piled on her head, spiked with two long wooden pins, the kind that women wore during the Victorian era. I had not noticed earlier that her stove was refashioned from one manufactured to burn wood. It had claw feet, and the porcelain was painted with green tendrils, as it would have been in an earlier time.
“Will you quit staring at me?” she said.
“Sorry.”
“Do I remind you of someone else? The wife you lost?”
“You remind me of everything that’s good.”
