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“The same one who gave her the Maltese cross she tied on her daughter’s ankle.”
“Yeah, but who’s the guy?”
“Anybody can buy tarot cards in the Quarter or on the Internet.”
Clete kept fiddling with his hands, running his fingers over his knuckles. They were the size of quarters. “What’s he after? It’s not sex.”
“Maybe she’ll get hurt again and tell us.”
“So just leave her alone?”
“It’s her choice,” I said.
“What about this guy Butterworth? Your cop friend in West Hollywood says he’s a bucket of vomit.”
“He’s hard to read. He spends a lot of time hanging out his signs.”
Clete stood up. “I got to go.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Not sure. Did Mon Tee Coon come back?”
“No.”
“I’m going to have a chat with Axel Devereaux.”
“Bad idea.”
“The guy beats up on women. He’s about to stop. Same with hurting people’s pets.”
I was sitting in his shadow now, the tree limbs above us clicking with hail, the last of the sunset shrinking inside clouds that were dark and swollen with rain and quivering with thunder. “What I say won’t make any difference, will it.”
“You can’t always wait out the batter, Dave. Sometimes you have to take it to him. Devereaux is overdue.” Clete’s porkpie hat slanted on his forehead, and an unlit cigarette hung from his mouth.
“The key is the tarot,” I said. “Devereaux is an asshole and a distraction.”
“Not if you’re a woman and he’s pounding your face into marmalade.”
After Clete backed into the street and drove away, the hail stopped and the rain began, big drops flattening on the heat trapped in the sidewalk and the street, filling the air with a sweetness like the summers of our youth. I got up and went inside and turned off the air-conditioning units and opened the windows, letting the house swell with wind. Then a strange sensation overtook me, in the same fashion it had on the evening I’d walked without purpose to the home of Bailey Ribbons and could give no explanation for my behavior other than the
fact that I seemed to have stepped into a vacuum in which the only sounds I heard were inside my head.
The rain fell like drops of lead on the tin roof and the bayou. From the hall closet, I removed an old sweat-stained Stetson that had belonged to my father. I put it on and walked down to the bayou, the brim wilting with rain.
I told myself I didn’t know why I was standing on the bank of a tidal stream in rain that was coming down harder by the second. That wasn’t true. For me, the rain has always been the conduit between the visible and the unseen worlds. Years ago my murdered wife, Annie, spoke to me in the rain, and dead members of my platoon called me on the phone during electrical storms, their voices hardly audible in the static, and my father who died in an offshore blowout appeared in the surf during a squall, still wearing his hard hat and strap overalls and steel-toed boots, giving me a thumbs-up while the waves slid across his knees, the oil rig that killed him stenciled against the sky.
The rain was about death. It defined it. It was an old friend, and I welcomed its presence. I knew its smell when I walked past a storm drain in cold weather, or sat down to rest in an Oregon rain forest filled with lichen-covered boulders that never saw sunlight, or saw a spectral figure on the St. Charles streetcar, his head hooded, his face like gray rubber, his lips curled whimsically in a lopsided figure eight, as though he were saying Whenever you’re ready, sport.
I heard leaves thrashing and looked upward into the live oak. Mon Tee Coon had just slipped on a branch and crashed on top of the limb below. Looking down at him was a smaller raccoon, her tail hanging off the branch.
“Comment la vie?” I said. “Bienvenu, mon raton laveur et votre tee amis, aussi.”
Both of them stared down at me, their coats slick with rain.
“How about a celebratory can of sardines?” I said.
They looked at each other, then at me.
