I stood by the screen window and gazed out at the lake while Andropolis described my mother's last hours and the hooker and pimp scam that brought about her death.
I wanted to shut out the words, live inside the wind in the trees and the light ruffling the lake's surface, listen to the hollow thunking of a pirogue rocking against a wood piling, or just watch Clete's broad back and thick arms and boyish expression as he flipped a lure with his spinning rod out into the dusk and retrieved it back toward the bank.
But even though he had been a parasite, an adverb and never a noun, Andropolis had proved in death his evil was sufficient to wound from beyond the grave.
"The guys who whacked her weren't cops. They were off-duty security guards or something. She had this dude named Mack with her. He told everybody he was a bouree dealer but he was her pimp. Him and Robicheaux's mother, if that's what she was, just worked the wrong two guys," Andropolis' voice said.
As through a sepia-tinted lens I saw wind gusting on a dirt road that lay like a trench inside a sea of sugarcane. Black clouds roiled in the sky; a red and white neon Jax sign swung on a metal pole in front of a dance hall. Behind the dance hall was a row of cabins that resembled ancient slave quarters, and each tiny gallery was lit with a blue bulb. In slow motion I saw my mother, her body obese with beer fat, lead a drunk man from the back of the dance hall to a cabin door. He wore a polished brass badge on his shirt pocket, and she kissed him under the light, once, twice, working her hand down to his loins when he momentarily wavered.
Then they were inside the cabin, the security guard naked now, mounted between her legs, rearing on his stiffened arms, buckling her body into the stained mattress, bouncing the iron bed frame against the planked wall. A freight train loaded with refined sugar from the mill roared past the window.
Just as the security guard reached orgasm, his lips twisting back on his teeth like a monkey's, the door to the cabin drifted back on its hinges and Mack stepped inside and clicked on the light switch, his narrow, mustached face bright with purpose. He wore pointed boots and striped pants and a two-tone sports coat and cocked fedora like a horse trainer might. He slipped a small, nickel-plated revolver out of his belt and pointed it to the side, away from the startled couple in the center of the bed.
"You just waiting tables, you?" he said to my mother.
"Look, bud. This is cash and carry. Nothing personal," the security guard said, rolling to one side now, pulling the sheet over his genitalia, removing himself from the line of fire.
"You ain't seen that band on her finger? You didn't know you was milking t'rew another man's fence?" Mack said.
"Hey, don't point that at me. Hey, there ain't no problem here. I just got paid. It's in my wallet. Take it."
"I'll t'ink about it, me. Get down on your knees."
"Don't do this, man."
"I was in the bat'room. I splashed on my boots. Right there on the toe. I want that spot to shine… No, you use your tongue, you."
Then Mack leaned over and pressed the barrel of the revolver into the sweat-soaked hair of the naked man while the man cleaned Mack's boot and his bladder broke in a shower on the floor.
Connie Deshotel pushed the off button on the tape player.
"It looks like a variation of the Murphy scam gone bad," she said. "The security guard came back with his friend and got even."
"It's bullshit," I said.
"Why?" She set two bowls of her ice cream and brandy dessert on the table.
"Andropolis originally told me the killers were cops, not security guards. Andropolis worked for the Giacanos. Anything he knew had to come from them. We're talking about dirty cops."
"This is from another tape. The security guard was a Giacano, a distant cousin, but a Giacano. He was killed in a car accident about ten years ago. He worked for a security service in Algiers about the time your mother supposedly died."
Far across the lake, the sun was just a red ember among the trees. "I tell you what, Ms. Deshotel," I said, turning from the screen.
"Connie," she said, smiling with her eyes.
Then her mouth parted and her face drained when she heard my words.
I walked down the incline through the shadows and stepped into the outboard and cranked the engine. Clete climbed in, rocking the boat from side to side as I turned us around without waiting for him to sit down.
"What happened in there?" he asked.
I reached into the ice chest and lifted out a can of Budweiser and tossed it to him, then opened up the throttle.
It was almost dark when we entered the canal that led to the boat landing. The air was heated, the sky crisscrossed with birds, dense with the distant smell that rain makes in a dry sugarcane field. I ran the boat up onto the ramp and cut the engine and tilted the propeller out of the water and flung our life vests up onto the bank and lifted the ice chest up by the handles and waded through the shallows.
"You gonna tell me?" Clete said.
"What?"
"How it went in there." His face was round and softly focused, an alcoholic shine in his eyes.
"I told her if Don Ritter ever repeats those lies about my mother, I'm going to jam that tape up his ass with a chain saw."
"Gee, I wonder if she got your meaning," he said, then clasped his huge hand around the back of my neck, his breath welling into my face like a layer of malt. "We're going to find out who hurt your mother, Streak. But you're no executioner. When those guys go down, it's not going to be on your conscience. My old podjo had better not try to go against me on this one," he said, his fingers tightening into my neck.
The next morning I woke before dawn to the sounds of rain and a boat engine on the bayou. I fixed a cup of coffee and a bowl of Grape-Nuts and ate breakfast at the kitchen table, then put on my raincoat and hat and walked down to the bait shop in the grayness of the morning to help Batist open up.
"Dave, I seen a man wit' a boat trailer by the ramp when I drove up," Batist said. "I got out of my truck and he started to walk toward me, then he turned around and drove off. Later a boat gone on by the shop. I t'ink it was him."
"Who was he?" I asked.
"I ain't seen him befo'. It was like he t'ought I was somebody else. Maybe he was looking for you, huh?"
"Why's this guy so important, Batist?"
"My eyes ain't that good no more. But there was somet'ing shiny on his dashboard. Like chrome. Like a pistol, maybe."
I turned on the string of lights over the dock and looked out the screen window at the rain denting the bayou and the mist blowing out of the cypress and willow trees in the swamp. Then I saw one of my rental boats that had broken loose from its chain floating sideways past the window.
"I'll go for it," Batist said behind me.
"I'm already wet," I said.
I unlocked an outboard by the concrete ramp and headed downstream. When I went around the bend, I saw the loose boat tangled in an island of hyacinths close-in to a stand of flooded cypress. But I wasn't alone.
An outboard roared to life behind me, and the green-painted aluminum bow came out of a cut in the swamp and turned into my wake.
The man in the stern was tall, dark-haired, his skin pale, his jeans and T-shirt soaked. He wore a straw hat, with a black ribbon tied around the crown, and his face was beaded with water. He cut his engine and floated up onto the pad of hyacinths, his bow inches from the side of my boat.
He placed both of his palms on his thighs and looked at me and waited, his features flat, as though expecting a response to a question.
"That's an interesting shotgun you have on the seat," I said.
"A Remington twelve. It's modified a little bit," he replied.
"When you saw them off at the pump, they're illegal," I said, and grinned at him. I caught the painter on the boat that had broken loose and began tying it to the stern of my outboard.