"A Stained White Radiance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)

CHAPTER 2

After I got home from work the following Tuesday Batist Aand I closed up the bait shop early because of an electrical storm that blew up out of the south. Three hours later the rain was still pouring down, lightning bolts were popping all over the marsh, and the air was heavy with the wet, sulfurous smell of ozone. The thunder reverberated like echoing cannon across the drenched countryside, and I could barely hear the dispatcher's voice when I answered the telephone in the kitchen.

"Dave, I think I made a mistake," he said.

"Speak louder. There's a lot of static on the line."

"I put my foot in something. A little bit ago a black man across the bayou from Weldon Sonnier's called in and said he saw somebody behind Weldon's house with a flashlight. He said he knew Mr. Weldon was out of town, so he thought he ought to call us. I was about to send LeBlanc and Thibodeaux, but Garrett was sitting by the cage and said he'd take it. I told him he wasn't on duty yet. He said he'd take it anyway, that he was helping you with the investigation about the shooting. So I let him go out there."

"Okay…"

"Then the old man calls up and wants to know where Garrett is, that he wants to talk with him right now, that there's been another complaint about him. Garrett cuffed a couple of kids and put them in the tank for shooting him the finger. The kids live two houses from the sheriff. That Garrett knows how to do it, doesn't he? Anyway, he doesn't answer his radio now, and I already sent LeBlanc and Thibodeaux somewhere else. You want to help me out?"

"All right, but you shouldn't have sent him out there by himself."

"You ever try to say 'no' to that guy?"

"Send LeBlanc and Thibodeaux for backup as soon as they're loose."

"You got it, Dave."

I put on my raincoat and rain hat, took my army.45 automatic from the dresser drawer in the bedroom, inserted the clip loaded with hollow-points into the magazine, and dropped the automatic and a spare clip in the pocket of my coat. Bootsie was reading under a lamp in the living room, and Alafair was working on a coloring book in front of the television set. The rain was loud on the gallery roof.

"I have to go out. I'll be back shortly," I said.

"What is it?" she said, looking up, her honey-colored hair bright under the lamp.

"It's a prowler report out at Weldon's again."

"Why do you have to go?"

"The dispatcher messed it up and sent this new fellow from Houston. Now he doesn't answer his radio, and the dispatcher doesn't have a backup."

"Then let them mess it up on their own. You're off duty."

"It's my investigation, Boots. I'll be back in a half hour or so. It's probably nothing."

I saw her eyes become thoughtful.

"Dave, this doesn't sound right. What do you mean he doesn't answer his radio? Isn't he supposed to carry one of those portable radios with him?"

"Garrett's not strong on procedure. Y'all be good. I'll be right back."

I ran through the rain and the flooded lawn, jumped in the pickup truck, and headed up the dirt road toward town. The oak limbs overhead thrashed in the wind, and a bright web of lightning lit the whole sky over the marsh. The rain on my cab was deafening, the windows swimming with water, the surface of the bayou dancing with a muddy light.

When I pulled into Weldon's drive, the night was so black and rain-whipped I could barely see his house. I hit my bright lights and drove slowly toward the house in second gear. Leaves were shredding out of the oak trees in front of the porch and cascading across the lawn, and I could hear a boat pitching and knocking loudly against its mooring inside the boathouse on the bayou. Then I saw Garrett's patrol car parked at an angle by one corner of the house. I flipped on my spotlight and played it over his car, then across the side of the house, the windows and the hedges along the walls, and finally the telephone box that was fastened into the white brick by the back entrance.

There was a line of dull silver-green footprints pressed into the lawn from the patrol car to the telephone box.

Smart man, Garrett, I thought. You know a professional second-story creep always hits the phone box first. But you shouldn't have gone in by yourself.

I left my spotlight burning, took a six-battery flashlight from under the seat, pulled back the receiver on my.45, eased a round into the chamber, and stepped out into the rain.

I stopped in a crouch until I was at the back of the house and past the side windows. The wiring at the bottom of the telephone box had been sliced neatly in half. I looked over my shoulder at the blacktop road, which was empty of cars and glazed with a pool of pink light from a neon bar sign.

Where in the hell were LeBlanc and Thibodeaux?

I went up the steps to the back entrance to try the door, but two panes of glass, one by the handle and one by the night chain, had been covered with pipe tape and knocked out of the molding, and the door was open. I eased it back and stepped inside. My flashlight reflected off enamel, brass, and glass surfaces and made rings of yellow-green light all over the kitchen, which was immaculately clean and squared away, but already I could see the disarray that existed deeper in the house.

"Garrett?" I said into the darkness. "It's Dave Robicheaux."

But there was no answer. Outside, I could hear the rain pelting the bamboo that grew along the gravel drive. I moved into the dining room, with the.45 extended in my right hand, and swung the flashlight around the room. All the drawers were pulled out of the cabinets and emptied on the floor, the paintings on the wall were knocked down or askew, and the crystalware had been raked off a shelf and ground into the rug.

The front rooms were even worse. The divans and antique upholstered chairs were slashed and gutted, a secretary bookcase overturned on its face and its back smashed in, the marble mantelpiece pried out of the wall, an enormous grandfather's clock shattered into kindling and pieces of glinting brass. A sheet of lightning trembled on the front yard, and in my mind's eye I saw myself silhouetted against the window just as I heard a foot depress a board in the hardwood floor somewhere behind or above me.

I clicked off my flashlight and went back through the dining room to the stairway. There was a closed door at the top of it, but I could see a faint glow at the bottom of the jamb.

The stairs were carpeted, and I moved as quietly as I could, a step at a time, toward the door and the rim of light at the bottom, my palm sweating on the grips of the.45, my pulse racing in my neck. I turned the doorknob, pushed it lightly with my fingers, and let the door drift back on its hinges.

The hallway was strewn with sheets, mattress stuffing, clothes, and shoes that had been thrown out of the doorways to the bedrooms. The only light came from behind a partially closed door at the end of the hall. Through the opening I could see a desk, a word processor, a black leather chair whose back had been split in a large X. I moved along the wall with the.45 at an upward angle, past two demolished bedrooms, a linen closet, a darkened bathroom, an overturned dirty-clothes hamper, a dumbwaiter, until I reached the last bedroom, which was only ten feet from the lighted room that Weldon probably used as a home office.

I stepped quickly inside the bedroom door and swept my.45 back and forth in the darkness. The room was still intact, except for the fact that the box springs had been shoved halfway off the frame of the canopy bed, a warning that I didn't heed.

I caught my breath, squatted down at the base of the door, wiped the sweat and rainwater out of my eyes with my knuckle, then aimed the.45 along the wall at the lighted opening of the office.

"This is Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department. You're under arrest. Throw your weapons out in the hall. Don't think about it. Do it."

But there was no sound from inside.

"Right now it's breaking and entering," I said. "You can be smart and come out on your own. If we have to come in after you, we'll paint the walls with you. I guarantee it."

Beyond the opening in the door I saw a shadow break across Weldon's desk. I could feel the veins tightening in my head, the sweat dripping out of my hair. It wasn't going to go down right, I thought. When they think about it, they either freeze or become cunning. And my situation was all wrong. I had been forced to take up a position on the right hand side of the hallway, so that I had to extend my right arm at an awkward angle around the doorjamb. I was getting a charley horse in my leg and a muscle twitch in my back. Where were LeBlanc and Thibodeaux?

"Last chance, partner. We're about to shift up into the dirty boogie," I said. But it was hard-guy flimflam. All I could do was contain whoever was in there and wait for backup.

Then the shadow broke across the desk again, a shoe scraped against a piece of furniture, and I straightened my back, stiffened my right arm, and aimed the.45 in the middle of the door, my eyes burning with salt.

But I'd forgotten that old admonition from Vietnam: Don't let them get behind you, Robicheaux.

He came out of the bedroom closet like a spring exploding from a broken clock, a short crowbar raised above his head. His head was huge, his face full of bone, his torso knotted with muscle under his wet T-shirt. I tried to pivot, swing the.45 clear of the doorjamb and aim it at his chest, or simply stand erect and get away from the arch of the crowbar, but my knees popped and burned and seemed to have all the resilience of cobweb. The crowbar thudded into my shoulder and raked down my arm and sent the.45 bouncing across the carpet.

Then he was on me in earnest and I was rolling away from him, toward the canopy bed, my arms wrapped around my head. He hit me once in the back, a blow that felt just like a wild inside pitch that catches you flat and hard in the spine as you try to twist away from it in the batter's box, and I kicked at him with one foot, tripped backward over the box springs, and saw the bone-plated, muddy-eyed resolution in his face as he came toward me again.

"Get away, Eddy! I'm gonna blow up his shit!" a voice behind him said.

A toy of a man stood in the doorway. He looked like a racehorse jockey, except his little body had the rigid lines of a weight lifter's. In his diminutive hand was a blue revolver.

But they had intervened in each other's script and hesitated too long. I saw the.45 on the carpet, next to the hanging box springs, and I grabbed it and tumbled sideways into a half bathroom just as the toy man started firing.

I saw the sparks of gunpowder fly out into the darkness, heard two rounds whock into the tile wall and a third whang off the toilet bowl and blow the tank apart in a cascade of water and splintered ceramic; then he tried to change his angle of fire, and a fourth round ricocheted off a chrome towel rack and collapsed the shower door in a pile of frosted glass.

I was flat on the floor, in a spreading pool of water, my back and hair covered with bits of glass and tile caulking.

But it had turned around on him, and he knew it, because he was already backing fast into the hallway when I raised up and started firing.

The roar of the.45 was deafening, the recoil as powerful and palm-numbing and disconnected as the kick of an air hammer; then the.45 felt suddenly weightless in my hand just before I pulled the trigger again. I fired four times at the bedroom entrance, then stood erect in a tinkle of glass at my feet, opening and closing my mouth to clear my eyes. The bedroom doorway was empty, the layered smoke motionless in the air. Out in the hall, an oil painting lay face down on the carpet, with three holes cored through the back of the canvas.

I could hear them on the stairway, but one of them obviously wanted the game to go into extra innings. He had the high-pitched, metallic voice of a midget.

"Give me your piece! I got that fuck bottled!"

"The boat's leaving, Jewel. Either haul ass or you're on your own," another man said.

I looked around the edge of the doorjamb and let off the.45-too quickly, high and wide, scouring a long trench in the wallpaper. But this time I saw three men-the man with the crowbar, the toy man, who wore black, silver-studded cowboy boots and had short-clipped blond hair that looked like duck down, and a third, older man in a brown windbreaker, black trousers like a priest's, black, razor-trimmed hair, and a mouthful of metal fillings that reflected the light from Weldon's office. Or at least that's how the image of the three men froze itself in my mind just before I heard a sound that I thought was the unmistakable ring of opportunity, the cylinder of a revolver being clicked open and ejected brass cartridges rattling on a wood surface.

I gripped the handle of the.45 with both hands and started to step out into the hall and begin firing, but the man in the windbreaker was a pro and had anticipated me. He had gone to one knee, three steps down from the landing, while the other two men had fled past him, and when he squeezed off his automatic I felt my raincoat leap out from my side as though a gust of air had blown through it. I spun back inside the cover of the doorway and heard him running into the darkness of the house below.

They'll drop you coming down the stairs, I thought.

Think, think. They didn't have a car in front or out on the blacktop. There's no access road in the back. They came on the bayou. They have to go back to it on foot.

I crossed the hallway and went into a bedroom on the opposite side, one with French doors and a verandah that overlooked the driveway, the garage, and the bamboo border of Weldon's backyard. A moment later I heard them running hard on the wet gravel. They were visible for not more than two or three seconds, between the corner of the house and the back of the garage, but I aimed the.45 with both hands across the wood railing and fired until the clip was empty and the breech locked open and a solitary tongue of white smoke rose from the exposed chamber. Just before the three men crashed through the bamboo and disappeared into the rain, just as the man called Eddy was almost home free, the last round in the magazine ripped the corner off the garage and filled his face with a shower of wood splinters. He screamed, and his hand clutched his eye as though he had been scalded.

Then I saw a patrol car turn off the blacktop and head fast up the front drive, the rain spinning in the blue and red kaleidoscopic flashing of emergency lights. I felt in my pocket for my flashlight, but it was gone. I ran down the stairs and out the front door just as LeBlanc and Thibodeaux pulled abreast of the porch, their faces looking at me expectantly through the open passenger window.

"They're headed for the bayou, three of them. They're armed. One guy's hurt. Nail 'em," I said.

The driver stepped on the accelerator, and the car shot around the side of the house, scouring skid marks in the gravel, gutting a big potted plant by the edge of the rose bed. I pulled the empty clip from the magazine of the.45, inserted a full one, and followed them through the rain toward the back of the property.

But it was all comedy now. They drove through Weldon's bamboo, destroyed his vegetable garden, and spun sideways into the coulee. The back wheels of the car whined and smoked in the mud. Out in the darkness I heard an outboard engine roar away from the dock, up the bayou toward St. Martinville.

The driver rolled down his window and looked at me in exasperation.

"Get on the radio," I said.

"Sorry, Dave. I didn't know that goddamn coulee was there."

"Forget about it. Call an ambulance, too."

"Are you all right?"

"Yeah. But I think Garrett's not."

"What happened in there?" the other deputy said, getting out of the passenger's seat.

But I was already walking back toward the house, the rain cold on my head, the.45 heavy and loose in my coat pocket. I found him at the bottom of the cellar stairs. The green dragon on his right forearm was laced with blood. I didn't even want to look at the rest of it.

An hour later the medical examiner and I stood on the colunmed marble front porch and watched the two ambulance attendants load the gurney into the ambulance and close the doors on it. The rain had stopped, and the ambulance lights made swinging red patterns in the oaks. I could hear the frogs out on the bayou.

"Have you ever seen one like that before?" the medical examiner said. He was a thin elderly man who wore goldnmmed glasses and a white shirt and tie and carried a pocket watch on a chain. His sleeves were rolled, and he kept brushing at his wrist with a piece of wet paper towel.

"In New Orleans. When I was at the First District," I said.

He wadded up the towel and threw it into the flower bed.

His face looked disgusted.

"It's a first for me," he said. "Maybe that's why I'll stay in New Iberia. Does he have family here?"

"I think he was single. I don't know if he has relatives back in Houston or not."

"If you have to talk with any of them, you can tell them he was probably out of it with the first shot."

"Is it true?"

"It's what you can tell them, Dave."

"I see."

"His eyes were open when he got the next one. He probably saw it coming. But where's the law say that relatives need to know everything?" A fingerprint man went out the door, and a deputy locked it behind him. They both got in their cars. "So you figure the shooter's from the mob?" the examiner said.

"Who knows? It's their signature."

"Why do they do it that way? Just to be thorough?"

"More likely because most of them are degenerates and sadists. But maybe I say that just because I'm tired." I tried to smile.

"How's your shoulder?"

"All right. I'll put some ice on it."

"I scraped a blood specimen off the corner of the garage.

It might help you later."

"Thanks, doctor. I'd appreciate it if you'd send me a copy of the autopsy report as soon as it's ready."

"You're sure you're all right? It got pretty close in there, didn't it?"

"The bottom line is I should have figured someone was in that bedroom. He'd just started to toss it when he heard me in the hallway. I'm lucky I didn't get my eggs scrambled."

"If it's any consolation, the guy you wounded probably has a sizable slice of wood in his neck or face. He might show up at a hospital. My experience has been that most of these guys are crybabies when it comes to pain."

"Maybe so. Goodnight, doctor."

"Goodnight, Dave. Drive carefully."

The fields were white with mist as I drove back toward New Iberia. My collarbone throbbed and felt swollen and hot when I touched it. The pink neon sign over the roadside bar gleamed softly on the oyster-shell parking lot. In my mind I kept repeating something told me by a platoon sergeant during my first week in Vietnam: don't think about it before it happens, and never think about it afterward. Yes, that was the trick. Just put one logical foot after the other.

I yawned and my ears popped like firecrackers.

Back at the office, I called Weldon at his mother-in-law's home in Baton Rouge. I had waked him up, and he kept asking me to repeat myself.

"Look, I think it's better that you drive back to New Iberia in the morning and then we'll have a long talk."

"About what?"

"I don't think you listen well. The inside of your home is virtually destroyed. Three guys tore it apart because they were looking for something that's obviously important to them. Meanwhile they murdered a sheriff's deputy. Do you want to know how they did it?"

He was silent.

"They shot him through the back, probably when he came down the basement stairs," I said. "Then they put one under his chin, one through his temple, and one through the back of his head. Do you know any low-rent wiseguys named Eddy or Jewel?"

I heard him cough in the back of his throat.

"I'm tied up here with some business for the next few days," he said. "I'm going to send some repair people out to the house. You've got this number if you need me."

"Maybe it's about time you plug into reality, Weldon. You don't make the rules in a murder investigation. That means you'll be in this office before noon tomorrow."

"I don't want to leave Barnaby by herself, and I don't want to bring her back there, either."

"That's a problem you're going to have to work out. We're either going to be talking in my office tomorrow morning, or you're going to be in custody as a material witness."

"Sounds like legalese doodah to me."

"It's easy to find out."

"Yeah, well, I'll check my schedule. You want to have lunch?"

"No."

"You've sure got a dark view of things, Dave. Lighten UP."

"The warrant gets cut one minute after twelve noon," I said, and hung up.

As was typical of Weldon, which was to do everything possible in a contrary and unpredictable fashion, he came up the front walk of the sheriff's department at eight o'clock sharp, dressed in a pair of khakis, sandals without socks, a green-and-red-flowered shirt hanging outside his trousers, and a yellow panama hat at a jaunty angle on his head. His jaws were clean and red with a fresh shave.

He helped himself to a Styrofoarn cup of coffee from the outer office, then sat in a chair across the desk from me, folded one leg over the other, and played with his hat on his knee. My shoulder still throbbed, down in the bone, like a dull toothache.

"What were they after, Weldon?" I asked.

"Search me."

"You have no idea?"

"Nope." He put an unlit cigar in his mouth and turned it in circles with his fingers.

"It wasn't money or jewelry. They left that scattered all over the place."

"There're a lot of weird guys around these days. I think it's got something to do with the times. The country has weirded out on us, Dave."

"I haven't had to talk with any of Deputy Garrett's family yet. It's something I don't want to do, either. But I hope I have something more to offer them than a statement about the country weirding out on us."

He looked momentarily shamefaced.

"What do you want me to say?" he asked.

"Who are these guys?"

"You tell me. You saw them. I didn't."

"Eddy and Jewel. What do those names mean to you?"

"Who's the guy with a mouthful of metal?"

"I'm sorry about your friend in the basement. I wish he hadn't gone in there."

"It was his job."

He gazed out the window at a cloud that hung on the edge of the early sun. His face became melancholy.

"Do you believe in karma? I do. Or at least I came to believe in it when I was in the Orient," he said. His eyes wandered around the room.

"What's the point?"

"I don't know what's the point. You ever hear of a flyer named Earthquake McGoon? His real name was Ed McGovern, from New Jersey. He was kind of a legend among certain people in the Orient. He was a huge fat guy, and one time he and his copilot, this Chinese kid, got locked up in a Chinese jail. Earthquake kept yelling at the guards, 'Goddamn it, you haven't fed me. Give me some goddamn food.' They told him he'd already had his rice bowl and to shut his mouth. That night when the guards went home Earthquake bent the bars apart and told his copilot to beat it, then he pushed the bars back into shape. The guards came back in the morning and said, 'Where's the other guy?' Earthquake said, 'I told you to feed me, and you wouldn't do it, so I ate the sonofabitch.' "

"He was one of those indestructible guys. Except he was doing a supply drop for the French at Dien Bien Phu and he got hit by some ground fire. He tried to get his parachute on but he was too fat. He told his kickers to jump and he was going to set it down on Highway One going into Hanoi.

They said if he was going to ride it down, they would, too.

He came in like a powder puff. It looked like they were home free, then his wing tipped a telephone pole, and they flipped and burned."

He looked at me as though I should find meaning in his face or his story.

"That's what karma is," he said. "Highway One outside of Hanoi is waiting for us. It's all part of a piece. I'm sorry about your friend."

"Have you ever been in jail?" I said.

"No. Why?"

I walked around the side of the desk.

"Let me see your hand," I said.

"What are you talking about?"

"Let me see your hand."

"Which hand?"

"It doesn't matter." I lifted his right hand off the chair arm and snipped one end of my handcuffs around his wrist.

Then I locked the other end to the D-ring on the floor.

"What do you think you're doing, Dave?"

"I'm going to have some breakfast. I'm not sure when I'll be back. Do you want me to bring you anything?"

"You listen-"

"You can start yelling or banging around in here if you want and somebody'll move you to the tank. I think today they have spaghetti for lunch. It's not bad."

He looked simian in the chair, with one shoulder and taut arm stretched down toward the floor, his square face discolored with anger. Before he could speak again I closed the door behind me.

I walked across the street in the sunshine and bought four doughnuts at a caM, then returned to the office. I wasn't gone more than ten minutes. I unlocked the handcuff from his wrist.

"That's what it's like," I said. "Except it's twenty-four hours a day. You want to eat now?"

He opened and closed his right hand and rubbed his wrist.

His eyes measured me as though he were looking down a gun barrel.

"You want a doughnut?" I repeated.

"Yeah, why not?"

"You don't trust people, Weldon. And maybe I can understand that. But it's not a private beef anymore."

"I guess it's not."

"Who are the three guys?"

"I've heard the name Jewel before. In New Orleans."

"In connection with what?"

"I flew for some people. Down in the tropics. A lot of different kinds of stuff goes in and out of there, you get my drift?" He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "I never saw the guy. But you get in bad with the wrong people and guys like that get turned loose on you sometimes."

"Which people?"

One tooth made a white mark on the corner of his lip.

"I can't tell you any more, Dave. If you want to lock me up, that's the breaks. I'm living in a dark place, and I don't know if I'm ever going to get out of it."

His face looked as flat and empty as melted tallow.

That same afternoon I drove out to his sister Drew's place on East Main. East Main in New Iberia is probably one of the most beautiful streets in the Old South or perhaps in the whole country. It runs parallel with Bayou Teche and begins at the old brick post office and the Shadows, an 1831 plantation home that you often see on calendars and in motion pictures set in the antebellum South, and runs through a long corridor of spreading live oaks, whose trunks and root systems are so enormous that the city has long given up trying to contain them with cement and brick. The yards are filled with hibiscus and flaming azaleas, hydrangeas, bamboo, blooming myrtle trees, and trellises covered with roses and bugle vine and purple clumps of wisteria. In the twilight, smoke from crab boils and fish fries drifts across the lawns and through the trees, and across the bayou you can hear a band or kids playing baseball in the city park.

Like the other Sonnier children, Drew had never been one to live a predictable life. She had used her share of Weldon's oil strike on her father's farm to buy a rambling one-story white house, surrounded with screened-in gallerys, on a rolling, tree-shaded lot next to the old Burke home. She had been divorced twice, and any number of other men had drifted in and out of her life, usually to be cut loose unexpectedly and sent back to wherever they came from. She never did anything in moderation. Her love affairs were always public knowledge; she took indigent people of color into her home; she was inflexible in matters of principle and never gave an inch in an argument. She was robust and merry and big-shouldered, and sometimes I'd see her at the health club in Lafayette, clanking the weights up and down on the Nautilus machines, her shorts rolled up high on her thighs, her face hot and bright with purpose, a red bandana tied in her wet black hair.

But she did surprise us once, at least until we thought about it. She gave up men for a while and became a lay missionary with the Maryknolls in Guatemala and El Salvador. Then she almost died of dysentery. When she returned home she formed the first chapter of Amnesty International in New Iberia.

I found her behind her house, trimming back the grapevines on the gazebo with two black children. She was barefoot and wore dirty pink shorts and a white T-shirt, and there were twigs and flecks of dead leaves in her hair.

She had a pair of hedge trimmers extended high up on the vine when she turned her head and saw me.

"Hi, Dave," she said.

"Hello, Drew. How've you been?"

"Pretty good. How's it with you?"

"I've been kind of busy of late."

"I guess you have."

I looked down at the two black children, both of whom were about five or six years old. I have a six-pack of Dr. Pepper on the seat of my truck. Why don't you guys go get it for us?" I said.

"They looked at Drew for approval.

"Y'all go ahead," she said.

"You know a sheriff's deputy was murdered last night at Weldon's house?" I said.

"Yes."

"Why would some people want to kill your brother, Drew?"

"Isn't he the one to ask?"

"He seems to think that being a standup, guy is the same thing as allowing someone to blow his head off. Except now an innocent man is dead."

She wiped the sweat out of her eyebrows with the back of her hand. The sun winked brightly off the bayou.

"Come inside and I'll give you some iced tea," she said, wiped both of her hands on her rump, and walked ahead of me into the shade at the rear of her house. She pulled her damp T-shirt off her breasts with her fingers and shook the cloth as she opened the screen door. There was something too cavalier about her attitude, and I had the feeling that she had anticipated my visit and had already made a private decision about the outcome of our conversation.

She took a pitcher of tea out of the icebox, picked up two glasses, and we walked through a dark, cool room that gave onto a side porch. On the wall above her desk were several framed photographs: Weldon in a navy aviator's uniform; Lyle with his zydeco band, the name CATHAHOULA RAMBLERS written in white letters at the bottom; and a cracked black and-white picture of two little boys and a little girl standing in front of a man and woman, with a Ferris wheel in the background. The little girl had a paper windmill in her hand, and the boys were smiling over the tops of their cotton candy. The woman was expressionless and thick-bodied, her shoulders slightly rounded, her straw purse the only ornament or bright thing on her person. The man was dark and had a narrow face and wore cowboy boots, a bolo tie, and a cowboy hat at a slant on his head. He was looking at something outside the picture.

Drew had stopped in the doorway to the porch.

"I was just admiring your photographs. Are those your parents?"

She didn't answer.

I don't remember them very well," I said.

"What are you asking me, Dave?"

"Lyle says your father's alive."

"My father was a sonofabitch. I don't concern myself thinking about him."

"His picture's hanging here, Drew."

She set down the iced tea and the glasses on the porch and came back in the room.

"I keep it because my brothers and mother are in it," she said. "It's the only one I have of her. the day he drove her out of the house her car went through the railing on the Atchafalaya bridge. She drowned in fifty feet of water, down where it was so dark they had to use electric lights to find her."

"I don't think your father has any connection with this case. But I had to ask anyway. I'm sorry to bring up bad memories."

"It's the past. Who cares about it?"

"But if you thought your father had anything to do with it, you'd tell me, wouldn't you, Drew?" I looked her directly in the eyes. Her stare remained as intent as mine.

"You should discount most of what Lyle tells you, Dave."

"And if you knew, you'd also tell me why three guys would tear Weldon's house apart?"

She pushed her tongue into her cheek and let her eyes rove over my face. No matter what the situation, Drew always gave me the feeling that she was about to step two inches from my face.

"Come outside and sit down," she said.

I followed her out onto the porch, and after I had sat down in a canvas chair, she sat on the corner of a wroughtiron table, with her legs apart, and looked down at me. I looked away through the screening at some bluejays playing in the birdbath on the lawn.

"I'm going to ask you to accept something," she said. "I can't help you out about Weldon. If I try to, I may hurt him. That's something I'm not going to do."

"Maybe it's not yours to decide what degree of involvement you'll have with the law, Drew."

"You want to put that a little more clearly?"

I raised my eyes to hers.

"Earlier today I cuffed your brother to a D-ring in my office. It was for only a few minutes, but I hope the lesson wasn't lost on him."

"A what?"

"It's an iron ring, like a tethering ring, inset in the floor. Sometimes we handcuff people in custody to it until we can move them into a holding area."

"That was supposed to impress Weldon? Are you serious?"

I felt the skin of my face tighten.

"Do you know the kind of life he had growing up?" she said. "I won't even try to describe it to you. But no matter how bad it was, he'd give whatever he had to me and Lyle. And I mean he'd take the food out of his mouth for us."

I looked out at the lawn again.

"You've got something to say?" she said.

"I'm at a loss."

"We perplex you?"

"Your family didn't have the patent on hard times."

She rubbed the heels of her hands idly on her thighs.

"You'll never get my brother to cooperate with you by pushing him," she said.

"What's he into, Drew?"

"Forget the D-ring clown act and maybe one day he'll tell you about it."

"I should revise my methods? That's the problem?"

"Stop acting like a simpleton."

"You always knew how to say it."

I could have pressed on with my questions, but Drew was not one to be taken prisoner. Or at least that's what I told myself. I put my iced tea back on the table and stood up.

"See you around," I said.

"That's it?"

"Why not? You've been straight with me, haven't you?"

I walked across the blue-green lawn through the shade trees and could almost feel her troubled, hot eyes on my neck.

I went back to the office and talked with our fingerprint man, who told me that trying to sort out the prints in Weldon's home was a nightmare. There was no single, significant object, such as a murder weapon, for him to work with, and virtually every inch of space inside the house had been touched, handled, or smeared by family members, house guests, servants, meter readers, and a crew of carpenters that Weldon had evidently hired to refurbish several rooms. The fingerprint man asked me if I would present him with an easier job next time, like recovering prints from the Greyhound bus depot.

When I got home I found a note from Bootsie on the kitchen table, saying that she had taken Alafair with her to the grocery store in town. The evening was warm, the western sky maroon with low-hanging strips of cloud, and I put on my gym shorts and running shoes and did three miles along the dirt road by the bayou's edge. Gradually I could feel the fatigue and concerns of the day leave me, and at the drawbridge I turned around and hit it hard all the way home, the blood pounding in my neck, the sweat glazing on my chest. The house was in shadow now, the notched and pegged cypress planks as dark and hard-looking as iron, and I went into the backyard, where I could still see the late sun above the duck pond and the roofless barn at the foot of my property, and began alternating six sets of push-ups, leg lifts, and stomach crunches.

I propped my feet on the bench of the redwood picnic table that we kept under the mimosa tree and did each push-up as slowly as I could, my back straight, touching my forehead lightly against the clipped grass, my muscles tightening across my ribs and through my shoulders and biceps.

I was old enough to know that most of it was a narcissistic vanity, but at a certain age you're given the luxury of no longer having to be an apologist for yourself. Sometimes it feels good to be over a half-century old and to still be a player, a bit scarred perhaps, but still out there on the mound, messing them up with sliders and spitters when your fastball won't hum anymore. I had a round scar the diameter of a cigar on both sides of my left shoulder, where a psychopath had cored a hole right below my collarbone with a.38 round; a pungi-stick scar on my stomach that looked like a flattened gray worm; and a spray of raised welts across my thigh, like Indian arrowheads wedged under the tissue, a lover's kiss from a bouncing Betty that lighted me on a night trail in Vietnam with such a heated brilliance that I believed my soul left my breast and I could look down and count my bones inside my skin.

But I was all right, I thought. I no longer had dreams about the murder of my wife Annie, and the nocturnal film strips from Vietnam had become less and less distinct, as though the flattening elephant grass under the whirling helicopter blades, the grunts piling out of the Hueys and racing for the cover of the banyan trees, their pots clamped on their heads with one hand, the thump of mortars in a ville across the rice paddy, were all now part of someone else's experience, not really mine anymore or maybe I had finally come to realize that I was only a small part of an army made up of blacks and slum kids and poor-whites from cotton-gin and lumber towns who had a collective cross dropped on them that no one should have to bear. But at least I knew now that it wasn't mine to bear alone anymore, and so maybe I didn't have to bear it at all.

As always in my moments of self-indulgent reverie I had failed to notice an aluminum pot that was sitting in the middle of the redwood table. It was filled with shelled shrimp and an okra and tomato roux, and a red line of ants went from a crack in the table, up one side of the pot and down inside. I picked it up, took a spade from the tool shed, cleaned out the spoiled food in the vegetable garden by the coulee, and buried it.

The doctors at Baylor in Houston and the specialist we used in Lafayette had tried to explain in their best way (and, like most physicians, they were inept with language, even though the compassion was obviously there in their voices) that there was no one answer for lupus. The steroids and medicines that we used to control it, to alleviate its symptoms, to knock it into remission, to protect the connective tissue and the kidneys, were hard to put into perfect balance, and sometimes an imbalance caused moments of hallucination, even temporary periods of psychosis.

I had seen her sway once to music that was not there and had dismissed it; then on a second occasion she told me that perhaps in fact dead people had called me up on the phone when I was having delirium tremens years ago, because just minutes earlier the phone had rung and she had picked up the receiver and had heard the voice of her dead sister.

An hour later she was fine and laughing at her own imagination.

Tomorrow I would call the specialist in Lafayette and make another appointment. it was dusk now, and the purple air was thick with birds. I walked down to the dock to help Batist close up. He wore cutoff Levi's, a tank top, and canvas boat shoes with no socks. His black body looked so hard and muscular you could break barrel slats across it. He was in the back of the bait shop, flinging cases of Jax and Dixie beer into a stack against the wall, an unlit cigar shoved back in his jaw like a stick.

I seined some dead shiners out of the bait tank, then began restocking one of the coolers with long-necked bottles of beer.

"Somet'ing wrong, Dave?" he asked.

"No, not really."

I could feel his eyes on me.

"Too much work at the office, I suppose," I said.

"That's funny. It don't usually bother you."

"It's just one of those days, Batist."

"When I got some trouble at home, sometimes trouble with my wife, my kids, I don't like to tell nobody about it. So I just study on it. It ain't smart, no."

"I worry about Bootsie, But there's nothing for it."

"Don't pretend you be knowing that. You don't know that at all."

I didn't say anything more. I pushed the bottles of beer deep into the crushed ice. The bare electric bulb overhead glinted dully off the smooth metal caps and filled the inside of the bottles with a trembling gold-brown light. My hands were numb up to my wrists.

"We don't need to ice down no more. We got enough for tomorrow," Batist said.

"I'll finish closing up. Why don't you go on home?"

"I got to sweep out."

"I'll do it."

"I ain't in no hurry, me."

I took another case of Jax off the wall and laid the bottles flat on the ice, between the necks of the bottles I had already loaded horizontally into the cooler. I slid the aluminum top shut with the heel of my hand.

Batist was still watching me. Then he lit his cigar, flipped the match out the window into the dark, and began sweeping the plank floor. He was a good and kind man, and even though it might be a cliche for a southern white man to talk about the loyalty of a black person, I was convinced that if need be he would open his veins for me.

I said goodnight to him and walked back up to the house.

In the kitchen Bootsie and Alafair were taking pieces of pizza out of a box and putting them on plates.