"You READ my MAIL?" Alafair said. It was evening, the sun deep down in the trees now, and she was grooming Tex, her Appaloosa, in the railed lot by his shed. She stared at me across his back.
"The letter was lying on your bed. Bootsie saw Johnny's name on it. It was inadvertent," I replied.
"You didn't have the right to read it." "Maybe not. Maybe you know what you're doing. But I believe he's a dangerous man."
"Not the Johnny O'Roarke I know."
"You always stood up for your friends, Alafair. But this guy is not a friend. The prison psychologist said he's a sick man who will probably die by his own hand and take other people with him."
"Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit."
"How about it on the language?"
"You admit he saved our lives, but you run him down and take his head apart, a person you don't know anything about, then you tell me to watch my language. I just don't expect crap like that from my father."
"Has he tried to see you?"
"I'm not going to tell you. It's none of your business."
"Remeta's a meltdown, Alf."
"Don't call me that stupid name! God!" she said, and threw down the brush she had been using on Tex and stormed inside the house.
That night I DREAMED about a sugar harvest in the late fall and mule-drawn wagons loaded with cane moving through the fog toward the mill. The dirt road was frozen hard and littered with stalks of sugarcane, and the fog rolled out of the unharvested cane on each side of the road like colorless cotton candy and coated the mules' and drivers' backs with moisture. Up ahead the tin outline of the mill loomed against the grayness of the sky, and inside I could hear the sounds of boilers overheating and iron machines that pulverized the cane into pulp. Immediately behind the mill a stubble fire burned in a field, creeping in serpentine red lines through the mist.
The dream filled me with a fear I could not explain. But I knew, with a terrible sense of urgency, I could not allow myself to go farther down the road, into the mill and the grinding sounds of its machinery and the fire and curds of yellow smoke that rose from the field beyond.
The scene changed, and I was on board my cabin cruiser at dawn, on West Cote Blanche Bay, and the fogbank was heavy and cold on the skin, sliding with the tide into the coastline. To the north I could see Avery Island, like two green humps in the mist, as smooth and firm-looking as a woman's breasts. The waves burst in strings of foam against the white sleekness of the bow, and I could smell the salt spray inside my head and bait fish in a bucket and the speckled trout that arched out of the waves and left circles like rain rings in the stillness of the swells.
When I woke I went into the kitchen and sat in the dark, my loins aching and my palms tingling on my thighs. I held a damp hand towel to my eyes and tried to think but couldn't. Even though I was awake now, I did not want to look at the meaning behind the dreams. I went back to bed and felt Bootsie stir, then touch my chest and turn on her hip and mold her body against me. She was already wet when I entered her, and she widened her thighs and hooked her feet loosely inside my legs, slipping one hand down to the small of my back while she moved in a slow, circular fashion under me, as she always did when she wanted to preserve the moment for both of us as long as she could.
But I felt the heat rise in me, like fire climbing upward along a hard, bare surface, then my mouth opened involuntarily and I closed my eyes and pressed my face between her breasts.
I sat on the edge of the bed, depleted, my face in shadow, one hand still covering the tops of Bootsie's fingers, ashamed that I had used my -wife to hide from the violent act I knew my alcoholic mind was planning.
24
EARLY SUNDAY MORNING I heard a car with a blown muffler pull into the drive and continue to the back of the house before the driver cut the engine. I slipped on my khakis and went into the kitchen and looked into the backyard and saw Clete Purcel sitting alone at the redwood picnic table, his Marine Corps utility cap on his head. He had a take-out cup of coffee between his hands, and he kept looking over his shoulder at the dirt road.
I went outside and eased the screen shut so as not to wake Bootsie and Alafair.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
He looked sideways, then pulled on his nose and let his breath out.
"I went after Ritter. Nobody's been by?"
"No."
"The shit went through the fan."
"I don't want to know about it."
"I was trying to help. You got somebody else willing to cover your back on a daily basis?"
He looked miserable. He rubbed his face, then knocked over his paper cup and spilled coffee on his hands.
"Tell me," I said.
"Ritter had dials on this stripper, Janet Gish. She'd been washing stolen money at the Indian casinos for some Jersey wise guys. Ritter nailed the wise guys but he left her out of the bust. The deal was she had to come across for him at least once a month. Guess what? Janet developed the hots for Ritter, can you believe it? So he knew he had a good thing and he played along with her and said he was going to marry her as soon as he could dump his wife. In the meantime he was bopping Janet every Friday afternoon at a motel on Airline.
"Last week she's in the supermarket and who does she see? Ritter and his old lady. Ritter looks right through Janet and studies these cans of beans on the shelf like he's never seen one before. But what's Ritter supposed to do? she asks herself. Introduce her? Except she's in the next aisle now and she hears Ritter's old lady say, 'Did you see that? She's got jugs like gallon milk bottles. With tattoos yet. You didn't notice?'
"Ritter says, 'I was never attracted to Elsie the Cow types.' They both thought that was a real laugh.
"Janet decides it's payback time. She's got a bond on a soliciting charge with Nig and Wee Willie and she calls me up and asks if I can get the DA. to cut her loose on the soliciting beef if she gives up Ritter. I told her that was a possibility but the D.A. would probably make her take the weight on the money laundering deal and maybe there was a better way to spike Ritter's cannon.
"I got her to call up Ritter's old lady at midnight and tell her she was sorry Don didn't introduce the two of them at the supermarket because they probably have a lot in common. Then Janet goes into detail about Ritter's sex habits and says it's too bad Ritter uses the same old tired line with all his broads, namely that his wife is a drag at home and an embarrassment at departmental social functions and he's shit-canning her as soon as he can make sure all the bills and charge accounts are under her name.
"It took about ten minutes for Ritter to come tearing across the bridge to Janet's place on the West Bank. She dead-bolted the back door on him and he got a ball peen hammer out of his convertible and started smashing the glass out of the door and trying to get his hand on the lock. That's when I clocked him with the birdbath."
"You hit him with a cement birdbath?" I said.
"Hear me out, okay? Janet’s brother owns this car wash behind the apartment. Ritter's half out of it, so I put him in the passenger seat of his convertible and hooked him up to the door handle with his cuffs and drove him up to the car wash entrance.
"I go, 'Don, you're a dirty cop. Now's the time to rinse your sins, start over again, try keeping your flopper in your pants for a change. You set up that gig on the Atchafalaya and almost got my podjo, Dave, killed, didn't you?'
"He goes, 'No matter how this comes out, you're still a skell, Purcel.'
"So I drove his convertible onto the conveyor and pushed all the buttons for the super clean and hot wax job. The pressure hoses came on and those big brushes dipped down inside the car and were scouring Ritter into the seats. I shut it down and gave him another chance, but he started yelling and blowing the horn, so I turned everything back on and stalled the conveyor and left him there with the steam blowing out both ends of the building."