"I hate watching TV in a motel room by myself," he said, and laid his big arm across my shoulders and walked with me up the slope to the house.
Early the next morning I put all the crime scene photos from the Vachel Carmouche homicide in an envelope and drove out to his deserted house on Bayou Teche. I pushed open the back door and once more entered the heated smell of the house. Purple martins, probably from the chimney, were flying blindly against the walls and windows, splattering their droppings on the floors and counters. I swatted them away from my face with a newspaper and closed off the kitchen to isolate the birds in the rest of the house.
Why was I even there? I asked myself. I had no idea what I was looking for.
I squatted down and touched a brownish flake of blood on the linoleum with my ballpoint pen. It crumbled into tiny particles, and I wiped my pen with a piece of Kleenex, then put my pen away and blotted the perspiration off my forehead with my sleeve.
All I wanted to do was get back outside in the wind, under the shade of a tree, out of the smell that Vachel Carmouche seemed to have bled into the woodwork when he died. Maybe I had to stop thinking of Passion and Letty Labiche as victims. I tried to tell myself that sometimes it took more courage to step away from the grief of another than to participate in it.
I felt a puff of cool air rise from the floor and I looked down through a crack in the linoleum, through a rotted plank, at a pool of water under the house with purple martins fluttering their wings in it. Then I realized the birds inside the house had not come from the chimney. But it wasn't the birds that caught my attention. One of the cinder-block pilings was orange with rust that had leaked from a crossbeam onto the stone.
I went back outside and lay flat on my stomach and crawled under the house. Three feet beyond the rear wall, wedged between the crossbeam and the cinder-block piling, was a one-handed weed sickle. I pried it loose and crawled back into the sunlight. The short wood handle was intact, but the half-moon blade had rusted into lace.
I slipped the sickle handle-first into a Ziploc bag and knocked on Passion's door.
"This is the instrument that slung blood on the ceiling and walls. Letty hit him with the mattock and you used this," I said when Passion came to the door. "It look like a piece of junk to me," she said. "I came out here because I feel an obligation to your sister. But I don't have time for any more of y'all's bullshit. I'm going to bust Little Face Dautrieve as a material witness and make her life miserable. She'll stay in jail until she tells me what happened and in the meantime Social Services will take her baby. Is that how you want it to play out?"
"You seen the paper today?" she asked. "No."
"The Supreme Court won't hear any more of Letty's appeals. Unless Belmont Pugh commute her sentence, she's gonna die. You want to know what happened? I'm gonna tell you. Then you can carry it down to your office and do whatever you want to wit' it."
Her face was wan, her eyes unfocused inside the gloom of the house, as though she didn't recognize the words she had just spoken. But suddenly I felt my victory was about to become ashes in my mouth. She studied my face through the screen, then pushed open the door and waited for me to come inside.
Eight YEARS ago Passion and Letty looked out their side window in dismay at the return of their neighbor, Vachel Carmouche. In their minds he had been assigned to their past, to a world of dreams and aberrant memories that dissipated with time and had no application in their adult lives. Now they watched him blow his gallery clean of birds' nests with a pressure hose while crushing the tiny eggs under his rubber boots; they watched him pry the plywood covering from his windows, hoe out a vegetable patch, and drink lemonade in the shade, a small sip at a time, like a man who was stintful even with his own pleasure, his starched and pressed gray work clothes and gray cloth cap unstained by sweat, as though the rigidity that characterized his life allowed him to control the secretion in his glands.
They left the house and went grocery shopping, hoping somehow he would be gone when they returned and a rental sign would be standing in the yard. Instead, they saw him moving his belongings into the house, ignoring Passion and Letty as though they were not there. They saw him split open a ripe watermelon and ease chunks of it off a knife blade into his mouth, his face suffused with a self-contained sensual glow. In the evening shadows they saw him scythe weeds out of his front yard and fire a barbecue pit and impale a pork roast on its rotisserie; they saw him pack rock salt and ice into a hand-crank ice cream maker, then give a quarter to a twelve-year-old black girl to turn the crank for him. They saw him press the coin into her palm and fold his fingers over her fist and smile down at her, her upraised eyes only inches from his gleaming cowboy belt buckle and the flatness of his stomach and the dry heat that emanated from his clothes.
Letty went into the yard with a paper sack and walked among the trees in front, picking up scraps of paper that had blown off the road. She waited until Car-mouche went into his house, then called the little girl over.
"What are you doing around here?" she asked.
"Visiting my auntie up the road," Little Face replied.
"Go back home. Stay away from that white man."
"My auntie left me here. She rent from Mr. Vachel." Letty squatted down and looked directly into Little Face's eyes.
"Has he touched you? Put his hand somewhere he shouldn't?" she said.
"No, ma'am. He ain't like that."
"You listen to me-" Letty began, squeezing the girl's arm. Then she looked past Little Face's head at the silhouette of Vachel Carmouche, who stood in the drive now, leaves swirling around his shoes, the early moon like a pink wafer in the sky behind him.
He pinched the brim of his cloth cap with two fingers.
"Been a long time. You grown into a handsome woman, Miss Letty," he said.
"Why'd you come back?" she said.
"A lot of building going on. A man with electrical knowledge can make a good deal of money right now."
"You get your goddamn feet off my property," she said.
"You might be righteous now. But you and your sister were always switching your rear ends around when you wanted something."
"I can't tell you how much I hate you," Letty said, rising to her feet.
"What you hate are your own sins. Think back, Letty. Remember how you'd turn somersaults on the lawn, grinning and giggling at me? You were thirteen years old when you did that. Now you reprimand me and blaspheme God's name in front of a child."
Carmouche put his hand in Little Face's and led her back onto his property. The white streaks of cornstarch that had been ironed into his gray clothes recalled an image out of Letty’s memory that made her shut her eyes.
Letty worked in the backyard, raking the winter thatch out of her garden, thrusting a spade deep into the black soil, taking a strange pleasure when the blade crushed a slug or cut through the body of a night crawler. Her flannel shirt became heavy with sweat and she flung the spade on the ground and went inside the house and showered with hot water until her skin was as red and grained as old brick.
"We'll try to do something about him tomorrow," Passion said.
"Do what?" Letty said, tying the belt around her terry-cloth robe.
"Call Social Services. Tell them about the little girl."
"Maybe they'll hep her like they hepped us, huh?"
"What else you want to do, kill him?" Passion said.
"I wish. I really wish." Passion walked over to her sister and put her arms around her. She could smell a fragrance of strawberries in her hair.
"It's gonna be all right. We can make him move away. We're grown now. He cain't hurt us anymore," she said.