I walked to my cruiser, which was parked on Abbeville's town square. The sun was already deep in the west, the light thin and brittle on the old brick cathedral in the square and the cemetery behind it, where the bodies of Confederate dead from Shiloh and Port Hudson lay in crypts stained with lichen and split with fissures, as though the earth were determined to absorb them and their contents back into itself. I could hear traffic crossing the steel bridge over the Vermilion River and smell the odors of diesel oil and water and shrimp husks piled behind a restaurant, and as I looked at the bare limbs of the willows along the river I was suddenly filled with the sense the sun was not simply completing part of its cycle across the sky, it was about to descend over the rim of the earth for the last time.
In psychoanalysis it's called a world destruction fantasy.
Were my irrational feelings connected to the fact I had just helped dismantle a woman's life? Or were the rats' nests of rags and bones in those crypts reminders that Shiloh was not a grand moment in history, but a three-day meat-cutter that soaked the hills with the blood of farm boys most of whom never owned a slave or knew anything about the economics of northern textile mills? Or was the sum total of my own life finally being made apparent to me?
The streets were almost empty, swirling with dust and pieces of newspaper, the water oaks bare of leaves, many of the old stores permanently closed. The world in which I had grown up was gone. I wanted to pretend otherwise, to find excuses for the decay, the strip malls, the trash strewn along the roadways, the century-old live oaks that developers lopped into stumps with almost patriotic pride. In my vanity I wanted to believe that I and others could turn it around. But it was not going to happen, not in my lifetime nor in my child's.
It was 4:45 when I got back to the department and rain had begun falling in big fat drops on the sidewalk that led into the courthouse. I pulled my mail out of my pigeon hole and went into my office. A few minutes later Helen came in.
"So what happened today?" she asked.
I told her.
"Will Guillot creeped the psychiatrist's office and stole Theo Flan-nigan's file so he could blackmail Castille Lejeune?" she said.
"It's more serious than that. I think he murdered the psychiatrist on orders from Castille Lejeune. He was probably supposed to deliver the file back to Lejeune, but he either didn't do that or he xeroxed it and is using it to take over the old man's business."
Through the window I saw a hearse pass on its way to the funeral home on St. Peter Street. I got up from my desk and let down the Venetian blinds. My office suddenly seemed hermetically sealed, artificially lit, shut off from the rest of the world.
"You unhappy about something?" Helen said.
"No. Everything is fine."
She looked somberly at my face. "Have dinner with me, Pops," she said.
"Why not?" I said.
CHAPTER 24
That evening I walked into the kitchen while Father Jimmie was on the phone. Unconsciously he turned his back to me, rounding his shoulders, as though somehow creating a shell around his conversation.
"I believe you, but we'll do this on my terms. No, you have my word. I'll be there. Now, good-bye," he said. After he hung up he turned around and grinned sheepishly. "I get calls from a neurotic parishioner once in a while," he said.
"Was that one of them?" I asked.
"Let's don't clutter up the evening, Dave."
"You're meeting Max Coll?"
"He's ready to change his way. I can't deny him reconciliation or communion."
"Coll is planning to kill somebody. But you're supposed to repair his soul so he can sneak into heaven through a side window?"
"That last sentence describes two thirds of my constituency," he said.
He picked up Snuggs and a box of cat food and went out on the back steps to feed him.
"I already fed him," I said.
"He's a warrior. He needs extra rations," Father Jimmie replied.
There was no moon that night. Screech owls were screaming in the trees and the humidity was so thick I could hear moisture ticking in the leaves on the ground. Father Jimmie had gone out, although I had no idea where. I went into the small office I had created in my rented house and sat at the desk and began writing a letter to Alafair.
DearAlf,
We're going to have a swell time at Christmas. Clete's in town and is anxious to see you, as of course am I. How is your novel going? I bet it's going to be a fine one. Hope you're through exams by now. Don't be too worried about grades. You always did well in school and college is not going to be any different. Would you like to take a ride out on the salt if the weather permits? Batist says he's found a new spot for redfish by Southwest Pass.
The images out of the past, created by my own words, made my eyes film. I saw Bootsie, Alafair, and me in the stern of our boat, with Batist at the wheel, the throttle full out, slapping across West Cote Blanche Bay at sunrise, the salt spray like a wet kiss on a spring morning.
I put aside the letter and stared at the guns mounted on the gun-rack I had screwed into the walclass="underline" an AR-15, a sporterized '03 Springfield, and my old Remington twelve-gauge, the barrel sawed off even with the pump, the sportsman's plug long ago removed from the magazine.
I knew what had been on my mind all afternoon and evening. Since I had interviewed Gretchen Peltier at the insurance office in Abbeville I'd had little doubt about Will Guillot's involvement in the burglary of Dr. Bernstine's office and Bernstine's death by gunshot in Lafayette's Girard Park. I also had no doubt he was mixed up in pornography and narcotics and the blackmail of Castille Lejeune. The problem was his crimes had all been committed in other parishes, and there was no way to hang the killing of either Sammy Fig-orelli or the drive-by daiquiri store operator in New Iberia on him.
In order to get at him and subsequently Castille Lejeune, I would have to work with at least three other law-enforcement agencies. Then the legal processes of indictment and prosecution would be turned entirely over to others, perhaps in a parish Castille Lejeune controlled.
I turned off the light and sat in the darkness with the twelve-gauge across my lap. The steel and the wood of the stock felt cool against my palms. I opened the breech and smelled the odor of the machine oil I had used to clean the chamber and the magazine, then set the stock butt-down between my legs, moving my thumb along the edges of the barrel where I had sawed it off and sanded it smooth with emery paper. I thought about my dead wife Bootsie and the systemic corruption of the place I loved and the inhumanity and cruelty that had been visited upon a great blues artist like Junior Crudup.
I removed a box of double-ought buckshot from my closet shelf and began pressing a handful of shells one at a time into the magazine of my Remington. I sat in the darkness a long time, the gun resting on my knees, my mind free of all thought, a strange numbness in my body. Then I ejected the shells and replaced them one by one in their box, set the shotgun back in the rack, and took a walk down by the drawbridge. A lighted tug was waiting for the bridge tender to raise the bridge. I waved at him in the pilot house and he waved back at me, then I walked back home and went to bed, with Snuggs sleeping at the foot.
The next day, Friday, I contacted Joe Dupree in Lafayette, and we went to work on getting a search warrant on Will Guillot's home and place of business. But it was going to be a long haul. The warrant request was based on statements made by Gretchen Peltier, the psychiatrist's former secretary, about a break-in committed in Lafayette by a man who lived in Franklin. Also, Will Guillot was probably many things, but stupid wasn't one of them. It was highly unlikely he would keep the stolen case file, which he was using to blackmail Castille Lejeune, in either his home or office.