I went out the back door and walked around the side of the house to the limousine. It was white, with charcoal-tinted windows, and the chauffeur wore a black suit and cap and tie and white shirt. Oddly, his face was turned away, as though he did not want me to see it. Through the limousine's open back window I saw Jim Gable's wife, in a white dress and gloves, drinking sparkling burgundy from a crystal glass with a long stem. The late sun's glow through the trees gave her skin a rosy tone it did not naturally possess, and her mouth was soft, full of wrinkles, when she smiled at me. What was her name? Corrine? Colinda?
"Micah, open the door so Mr. Robicheaux can get in," she said to the chauffeur.
He stepped out of the driver's seat and opened the back, his face still averted. When I was inside, on the rolled leather seat, he walked down toward the dock just as a flight of snow egrets flew across the water, their wings pink in the sunset.
"How you do, Miss Cora?" I said.
"I couldn't stand staying another day alone while Jim's in the city. So I got Micah to drive me on a little tour of your lovely area. Join me in a glass of burgundy, Mr. Robicheaux," she said.
I realized, listening to her voice, that her Deep South accent came and went arbitrarily, even though her eyes, which were violet, never seemed to vary in their level of warmth and sincerity.
"No, thanks. Would you like to come in and have a bite to eat?" I replied.
"I'm afraid I've intruded. I do that sometimes. Lack of an audience, that sort of thing." She watched my face to see if I had inferred a second meaning. Obviously I had not.
"Audience?" I said, confused.
"It's a vanity of mine. I assume everyone on the planet spends time thinking about old movies." She opened a scrapbook and turned several pages that were thick and stiff with glued news articles and black-and-white photographs. She turned another page, and I looked down at a stunning color photograph of a woman with long blond hair in a black nightgown, reclining seductively on a divan with one arm behind her head. Her eyes were violet, her lipsticked mouth waiting to be kissed.
"You're Cora Perez. You were a movie star. I saw you in a film with Paul Muni," I said.
"That was at the end of Paul's career. He was such a wonderful man to work with. He knew how nervous and unsure I was, and he used to bring a flower to me each morning at the set," she said.
"It's an honor to know you, Miss Cora," I said, still unsure of the reason for her visit. My eyes drifted to the kitchen window, where Alafair's and Bootsie's silhouettes were visible at the table.
"I mustn't keep you," she said, and touched me lightly on the back of the hand. "Sometimes I just need someone to reassure me I'm not indeed of diminished capacity."
"Pardon?"
"I'm being declared as such by the court. It's not flattering, of course. But perhaps they're right. How does one accused of being mentally impaired prove she is not mentally impaired? It's like trying to prove a negative."
"I don't think you're impaired at all, Miss Cora. You strike me as a remarkable person."
"Why, you're obviously a man of great wisdom, Mr. Robicheaux."
I thought she would say more and explain her presence or whatever need it was that hovered around the edges of her sentences, but she didn't. I shook hands with her and got back out of the car, which the chauffeur took as his signal to walk back up from the dock. He fixed his cap down on his forehead and pretended he was studying the details of the dirt road and trees and canebrakes on either side of him as he approached the limousine.
"Try not to stare at Micah. He has a deformity of the face. Jim calls him 'Cyclops,' even though I don't allow him to do it in my presence," Miss Cora said.
Just as she finished speaking Micah tilted his chin into the light and I saw the nodulous skin growth that covered the right side of his face, like a strawberry-colored skein that had hardened and pinched the eye shut, tightening the cheek so that the teeth on the right side of the lip were exposed.
I pulled my eyes away and looked deliberately through the back window into Miss Cora's face.
"Good-bye, Miss Cora," I said.
"Come see me. Please do. You impress me greatly, sir," she replied.
I WENT back inside the house and sat down at the table with Alafair and Bootsie.
"Who was that?" Bootsie asked.
"Her stage name was Cora Perez. She was pretty big stuff in Hollywood back in the late forties and early fifties," I said.
"I remember her. Where'd you meet her?" Bootsie said.
"Clete and I had to run down some character by the name of Jim Gable. Clete says Gable married her for her money when he knew she had cancer."
Bootsie looked down at her plate and picked up her fork. Her hair was the color of honey and it moved in the breeze through the window.
"Did I say something wrong?" I asked.
"No, not at all," she replied. She put a very small piece of food in her mouth with the tip of her fork and kept her eyes on her plate.
That night, in bed, Bootsie rested her arm across her forehead and looked up at the ceiling. The moon was rising in the east and the revolving blades of the window fan marbled her body with shadows. I put my hand on her shoulder and she rolled toward me and rested her head under my chin. I raised her slip on her thigh and felt the tapered smoothness of her skin. But her hands were folded together and she didn't respond as she normally did.
"What's the problem, Boots?" I asked.
"This Jim Gable you were talking about? Was he a policeman in New Orleans at one time?" she said.
"He still is. A liaison wheel with the mayor's office."
"I used to know him," she said.
"Oh?"
"After my second husband was killed."
She didn't continue. She seldom spoke of her earlier marriages. Her first husband had been an oil field helicopter pilot who crashed offshore, but the second one had been Ralph Giacano, nephew of Didi Gee, a gangster who held his enemies' hands down in an aquarium filled with piranha and who some people believe was mixed up in the assassination of President Kennedy. The nephew, Ralph, was not only a degenerate gambler who bankrupted Bootsie, but he also tried to take the Colombians over the hurdles and was shotgunned to death, along with his mistress, in the parking lot of Hialeah racetrack.
"What about Jim Gable?" I asked.
"He came to the house a lot after Ralph was killed. He was part of a special unit that was assigned to watch the Mob. We started seeing each other… No, that's not an honest way to put it. We had an affair."
Her knees were drawn up against me, her body motionless. I could feel her breath on my chest.
"I see," I said.
"I don't like hiding things from you."
"It was all a long time ago," I replied. I tried to keep my voice neutral and ignore the tight feeling in my face and the needles in my throat.
"Does Jim Gable bother you because Clete says he's an opportunist?" she asked.
"He keeps the head of a Vietnamese soldier in ajar of chemicals. He said he'd like to see Letty Labiche electrocuted in stages. I think he lied about his knowledge of my mother's death," I said.
Bootsie lay very quiet in the dark, then rolled away from me and stared up at the ceiling. She sat on the side of the bed with her back to me for a long time. I started to touch her with my hand, but she reached behind her and picked up her pillow and went into the living room.
7
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, just before quitting time, Clete came into my office.
"The jigger's name is Steve Andropolis. He worked for the Giacanos and did freelance stuff in Miami when it was an open city. You remember him?" he said.
"Vaguely."
"I had the wrong address last night. He agreed to show up again tonight. The guy's a shitbag, Streak, but he's a gold mine of information."