"Can I sit down?"
"Please do. Yes, indeed," she said.
She sat across from me at a glass-topped table under an umbrella that was made from wide, multicolored strips of tin.
"Friday the sheriff and I were talking about an interesting attribute everyone of our generation seems to share," I said.
"Oh?" she said, her interest wandering out into the yard.
"What were you doing when you heard John Kennedy had been shot?"
"I was coming out of gym class. Some girls were crying in the hallway."
"See?" I said, smiling. "Everybody remembers that exact moment in his or her life. They never hesitate when they're asked."
"What's the point?"
"It's that photo taken of you with the parents of the Labiche girls. It troubles the heck out of me. Here, I brought it along," I said, and removed a manila envelope from the pocket of my coat.
But before I could pull the photo out, she leaned forward and took both of my hands in hers, pressing down hard with her thumbs, her eyes fastened on mine.
"Dave, give this up. You're a good man. But you've developed a fixation about something that means absolutely nothing," she said.
I took my hands from hers and slipped the photo out of the envelope and lay it flat on the table.
"You remember being with the Labiches?" I asked.
"No, I don't."
"See, up here in the corner, someone wrote, 'Christmas, 1967.' So here you are in a nightclub, back in the civil rights era, in an evening dress, with a corsage on, at Christmastime, with a notorious mulatto couple who pimped for a living, and you have no memory of it. Does that seem strange to you?"
She picked up a big leather bag with drawstrings on it from the flagstones and dug a package of cigarettes and a gold lighter out of it and set them on the tabletop.
"I really don't have anything more to say on the matter. Would you like a Diet Coke or lemonade or decaffeinated coffee or ice water or whatever it is you drink?"
"In '67 you hadn't been out of the police academy too long. Does it make sense that a young cop could be around the Labiches, perhaps on Christmas Eve, and not remember it? Look me in the face and tell me that."
"Do me a great favor, Dave. Go home to your wife. Sell worms to your friends. Play mind games with your sheriff. Just… go."
"There's a bad dude by the name of Johnny Remeta running loose. In case you haven't heard, he's the same perp who cut Axel Jennings' kite string. He's got an iron bolt through his head and thinks he's my guardian angel. I wouldn't want Remeta on my case. You get my drift, Connie?"
She didn't answer. Instead, a strange transformation seemed to take place in her. She rose from her chair, an unlit cigarette dangling between her fingers, a gold lighter in her other hand, and studied the shadows that the banana trees and palm fronds created on her brick wall. Her face was bladed with the glare of the late afternoon sun reflecting off the pool; her eyes were narrow and hard, her lips crimped on the end of her unlit cigarette as she clicked her lighter several times without the flint igniting a flame. Her skin looked coarse and grained, like that of a countrywoman or someone who had stepped into a cold wind.
I replaced the photo in the envelope and put it in my pocket and walked across the flagstones toward the gate. I turned around and looked back at her once more before I entered the side yard.
The gold lighter. It was an archaic type, thin and lightweight, with strips of veined, dark leather inset in the casement and a horizontal lever the smoker snapped downward on top and a tiny cap that automatically retracted from the flame.
It was the same type of stylish gold lighter that Jim Gable used to light his cigars.
She got her cigarette lit and blew her smoke at an upward angle, her sandaled feet slightly spread, one hand on her hip, a private thought buried in her eyes.
21
MONDAY MORNING LITTLE FACE Dautrieve came to see me at my office. She wore a dark dress with green flowers printed on it, and a hibiscus in her hair, and hose and lavender pumps.
"You going somewhere special today?" I said.
"Yeah, you driving me and you to New Orleans," she replied.
"Is that right?"
"The reason I call you 'Sad Man' ain't 'cause of the way you look. It's 'cause you let Zipper Clum play you for a fool," she said.
"Say again?"
"Zipper liked to make other people hate themselves. That's how he got people like me to work for him. That and the rock he give me."
"You're not making a whole lot of sense, Little Face."
"You never axed me how I got in the life. It was t'rew my auntie in New Orleans. She knowed Zipper. I visited my auntie this weekend. She say Zipper tole you a bunch of lies about your mother."
I SIGNED out A cruiser, and Little Face and I took the four-lane through Morgan City to New Orleans. The sugarcane was high and thickly clustered and pale green in the fields, and the cruiser was buffeting in the wind off the Gulf.
"Why are you doing this?" I asked.
"I seen the story in the paper. People trying to shoot at you and Fat Man. He doin' all right?"
"Sure."
"Tell Fat Man I been going to meetings," she said, her face pointed straight ahead to hide whatever emotion was in it.
"You still don't trust me enough to tell me how Vachel Carmouche died?"
"A lawman get killed in Lou'sana, somebody gonna pay. It don't matter who. Give them peckerwoods a chance, they'll strap another one down wit' her. Tell me I be wrong, Sad Man. "
The aunt lived on St. Andrew, in a white shotgun house, between the streetcar line and the Mississippi River levee. She had been a prostitute thirty years ago, but her skin was smooth, unwrinkled, like yellow tallow, her gray-streaked hair combed out on her shoulders, her turquoise eyes and red mouth still seductive. At least until she opened her mouth to speak and you saw her bad teeth and the gums that were black and eaten with snuff.
She sat on the stuffed couch in her small living room, her hands clasped just below her knees to prevent the floor fan from puffing up her dress. From outside I could hear the streetcars grinding up and down the tracks on St. Charles.
"You knew Mae Guillory?" I asked.
"I worked in a club in Lafourche Parish. Down on Purple Cane Road, almost to the salt water," she said.
I repeated my question. The aunt, whose name was Caledonia Patout, looked at Little Face.
"Robicheaux been good to me, Callie," Little Face said, her eyes avoiding mine, as though she had broken a self-imposed rule.
"The club was still for white people then. I worked out of the cribs in back. That's how I knew Mae Guillory," Caledonia said.
"My mother worked out of the cribs?" I said, and coughed slightly in my palm, as though I had a mild cold or allergy.
"No, your mother wasn't no working girl. Zipper just putting some glass inside you. You seen that burn like a big ringworm on his cheek? Cops done that. Mae Guillory waited tables and hepped at the bar and cooked sometimes. She tole me she'd come there twenty years before with a man deal bouree. The bouree man got TB and died. So she just work there on and off. The rest of the time she work places around Morgan City and Thibodaux."
"What happened to her, Caledonia?"
This is what she told me.
It was 1967, way down in the fall, hurricane weather. The sky turned green at evening and the air was palpable with the heavy, wet smell of seaweed laden with fish eggs and Portuguese men-of-war whose air sacs had popped and dried in a crusty web on the beach; it was weather that smelled of a storm-swollen tide surging over the barrier islands, bursting in geysers against jetties and sandspits.
The old owner of the nightclub had died and left his property to his half brother, a reckless, irreverent slaughterhouse butcher by the name of Ladrine Theriot. Ladrine had always wanted to be a professional cook, and he remodeled the kitchen of the club and began to serve gumbos and chicken and dirty rice dinners. He loved to cook; he loved women, and, like my father, he loved to fight with anyone foolish enough to accept his challenge.