"No, that's not true. Not at all," I said, focusing my eyes on the bayou.
"That night we had the little fling? We'd both been drinking our heads off. Neither one of us was married at the time. I admit I thought you might come back around, but you didn't. So I wrote it off. It's no big deal."
"You're right, it's no big deal. I didn't say it was a big deal," I replied.
"Then why are you so "
"It's not a problem. That's really important to understand here," I said.
"I'm afraid I've intruded upon you."
"No, you haven't. Everything is fine. Give Merchie my best."
"Will you come out to dinner?"
I pinched my temples and looked down the bayou at the Evange-line Oak looming over the water and at the spire of the old French church, a sliver of moon rising behind the steeple.
"Maybe we can talk about it later," I said.
"Sure. I'm sorry for being here like this. Since my psychiatrist died.. No, that's the wrong word. Since he shot himself I feel this terrible sense of guilt. I've got two days' sobriety now. That's pitiful, isn't it? I mean, taking pride in staying off the hooch for two days, like I invented the wheel?"
"I'll see you, Theo."
She exhaled her breath and I felt it touch my skin. She raised her eyebrows, staring inquisitively into my face, as though I needed to supply the endings to all her unfinished thoughts. Then she seemed to give it up and kissed the tips of two fingers, pressed them against my cheek, and walked out of the cemetery, a solitary firefly lighting in a tree above her head.
In the morning I called a homicide detective at the Lafayette City Police Department by the name of Joe Dupree. He had been in the 173 Airborne Brigade in Vietnam, but never spoke of the war and ate aspirin constantly for the pain he'd carried in his knees for thirty-five years. He was also one of the most thorough investigators I had ever known.
"What do you have on this psychiatrist who shot himself in Girard Park?" I said.
"Dr. Bernstine? It's going down as a suicide. Why do you ask?"
"A woman named Theodosha Flannigan has brought it up a couple of times."
"Merchie Flannigan's wife?"
"Yeah, how'd you know?"
"Her name was in Bernstine's appointment book," he replied.
"You don't buy the suicide?"
"He took two.25 caliber rounds in the right side of the head. The muzzle burns were an inch apart, just above the ear. If the second round was discharged as a spastic reaction, why were the entry wounds almost identical?"
"Any witnesses?" I asked.
"None who could give a visual. But a kid said he heard two pops. At first he said they were a few seconds apart. Then he said they were together. Finally he said he couldn't be sure what he heard. Anyway,
Bernstine had powder residue on his right hand. I'd like to say he was left-handed so my suspicions would have more basis. But he was ambidextrous."
"What's bothering you, besides the kid originally saying there was a time lag between the shots?"
"Bernstine died on a Saturday. The Flannigan woman was scheduled to see him the following Tuesday. But there was no case record on her in his files."
"Maybe he had just started seeing her."
"No, I called Ms. Flannigan. She said she'd been going to Bernstine for six months. Anyway, Bernstine's wife calls me every day and tells me no way in hell he shot himself. Maybe not. But he'd lost his butt in the stock market and rumor has it he was messing around on his wife. So it's going down as a suicide."
"Thanks for your time, Joe."
"You haven't told me what Ms. Flannigan said to you."
"For some reason she feels guilty about Bernstine's death," I said.
"Think she was in the sack with him?"
"If she had been, she would have told you about it. She's a little neurotic," I said.
"I'm shocked you'd know anybody like that, Dave."
The following Monday Father Jimmie Dolan had just returned to the rectory after saying a 7:00 A.M. Mass when the phone rang in his office.
"Hello?" he said.
There was no reply. He heard a streetcar bell clanging in the background.
"Hello?" he repeated.
"Oh hello, Father. Sorry. I couldn't get the bloody door closed on the booth," a voice said.
"It's you again, is it?"
"Father, you've put me seriously in the shitter."
"I think you need counseling, my friend."
"Sir, you're a prelate and hence I believe a man of honor. Can you give me your word you won't continue to interfere in certain enterprises that are fully legitimate and doing little if any harm to anyone?"
Father Jimmie shuffled some papers around on his desk, then picked up a page torn off a note pad. "Your name is Max Coll?" he said.
"The coppers must have paid you a visit.".
"Are you on Canal or St. Charles?"
There was a pause, then Max Coll said, "Now, how would you be knowing where I am?"
"There's only one streetcar line in operation today. It runs only on those two streets. So that means you're not too far away from me."
"You're a mighty intelligent man. But I need to "
"You stay out of my church."
"Sir?"
"You heard me. If you ever bring a weapon into my confessional again, I'll tear you apart."
"Excuse me for saying this, Father, but that is a fucking mean-spirited statement for a Christian minister to make."
"Be thankful I don't have my hands on you," Father Jimmie said, and hung up.
Then he stood motionlessly by his desk, his heart hammering against his chest.
CHAPTER 6
That same evening, Leon Hebert, the daiquiri-store operator who had fired Josh Comeaux, had to handle the window by himself because Josh's replacement had called in sick. Hebert didn't like to work alone, at least not at night. He was a cautious man, both with money and people, and had made his living over the years on the soiled edges of society wherever he had gone. If there was any group of people he understood in this world, it was his clientele.
After he was discharged from the United States Navy, he had owned a liquor store on South Central Avenue in Los Angeles. The profits were huge and, except for the insurance, the overhead minimal. He accepted food stamps, welfare grocery orders, and even Bureau of Public Assistance bus tokens in place of money. After 2:00 A.M. he and a hired man would drive a panel truck down to East Fifth Street and sell eighty-nine-cent bottles of fortified wine, called short dogs, for two dollars apiece to the desperate souls who could not wait for the bars to open at 6:00 A.M.
But Leon Hebert learned there was a downside to running a business in a ghetto. On a warm summer night a white L.A. patrolman tried to hook up a drunk driver and force him into the back of a cruiser. In five minutes bricks, bottles, and chunks of curb stone were being flung into the traffic on Century Boulevard. This was in the era before the Crips and Bloods, but their predecessors the Gladiators, Choppers, Eastside Purple Hearts, Clanton 14, and the Aranas rose to the occasion and strung fires all over the south and east sides of Los Angeles.
A Molotov cocktail crashed through the window bars and front glass of Leon Hebert's store. The inventory went up like gasoline.
In the riot only two groups of white-owned businesses were spared: funeral homes and the offices of bail bondsmen. The lesson was not lost on Leon. When he got back to New Iberia, his birthplace, he sold burial insurance to people of color, collecting their half-dollar and seventy-five-cent premiums weekly, wending his way without fear through every back-of-town slum in south Louisiana.
Then he discovered the fast lane to prosperity was still available. He didn't have to go into the ghetto to sell his wares, either. The ghetto dwellers came to him, inside a shady grove on the four-lane, their gas-guzzlers smoking at his drive-by window, his ice-packed daiquiris, sweet and cold, ready to go at five bucks a pop.