"Hungry, dear?" she said.
"Yes."
"You've always been a hungry little boy, haven't you?"
"I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't talk to me like that, Cora."
"Well, your dinner will be here shortly. You'll see."
"Thank you," he said, and went back inside and slid the glass door shut.
How long had her mother lived? Ninety-six years? Good God! Maybe not even a quart of booze a day could kill genes like that. What a horrible thought. No, he was not going to have thoughts like that.
To hell with Johnny Remeta, he told himself. He called the beeper number of a woman in New Orleans, and a half hour later she called him back. Her nickname was Safety Pin Sue, a mindless, totally dependent addict who took a narcissistic pleasure in her own self-destruction.
"Meet me in Grand Isle tonight," he said.
"For you, Jim, anywhere, anytime," she said, her voice warm with crack.
That was more like it, he thought.
He tonged fresh ice into his drink and gazed out the high window at the darkening greenness of the land, the gold light trapped on the bay's horizon, the sailboat that had turned around and was tacking for home. He raised his drink in salute to the evening.
That's when he heard a vehicle under the porte cochere. He opened the middle drawer of his desk and removed a blue-black.38 revolver and let it hang loosely from his hand.
The house puffed with wind when Cora opened the side door onto the drive.
"That smells delicious. Bring it into the kitchen, would you? My purse is on the table," Cora's voice said.
Jim Gable replaced the revolver in the drawer and closed it and finished his drink. The wind was picking up, and a red leaf tore loose from a maple and plastered itself against the window. For some reason the leaf, its symmetrical perfection arbitrarily terminated by a gust of cold air, made Jim Gable brood upon an old prospect that he had tried to bury on the edges of his consciousness for many years. Was it just mortality? No, it was the darkness that lay beyond it and the possibilities the darkness contained.
Don't have those thoughts. They're the products of wives' tales, he told himself, and turned to the mirror above the mantel and started to comb his hair, then realized he had just combed it.
He heard Cora's stoppered cane scudding softly on the floor behind him.
"This is my husband," she said. "Jim, this is the young man who delivered our dinner. I can't find my checkbook. Do you have some cash?"
Gable looked into the mirror and saw his own startled expression and the floating head of the Vietnamese soldier and the reflected face of Johnny Remeta, like three friends gathered together for a photograph. The teeth of the dead Vietnamese were exposed at the corner of his mouth, as though he were trying to smile.
33
ON THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY the early edition of the Daily Iberian said Letty Labiche had been moved from St. Gabriel Prison to the Death House at Angola. Belmont Pugh held what he said was his "last TV news conference on the matter" on the steps of the capitol building. He used the passive voice and told reporters "the death warrant has been signed and will be carried out tomorrow at midnight. It's out of my hands. But I'll be waiting by the telephone up to the last second." He turned his face into the sunrise and presented a solemn profile to the camera.
Helen and I went to lunch together and were walking back from the parking lot to the department when a deputy in uniform passed us.
"The old man's looking for you," he said.
"What's up?"
"Nothing much. Your man Purcel is trying to destroy St. Martinville. They use animal darts on people?" he replied.
Inside, I stopped by my mailbox. It was filled with pink message slips. Three of them were from the St.
Martin Parish Sheriff's Department. Two others were from Dana Magelli. Another simply stated, in capital letters, "SEE ME!" The sheriff's initials were at the bottom. I walked down to his office and opened the door.
"What's going on?" I asked.
"I don't quite know where to start. Where's your beeper?"
"Wally sat on it. That's not a joke."
"Dana Magelli called. Remeta got into Jim Gable's house, locked the wife in the garage, and kidnapped Gable."
"Too bad. What's the deal with Purcel?"
"I knew you'd be torn up over Gable."
"Come on, skipper. What's Clete done?"
"He's in a bar in St. Martinville. Three bikers are already in the hospital." I started to speak, but he held his hand up. "He broke a pool cue across a city cop's face. It's not the barroom follies anymore, Dave. He might get his light blown out. Everybody around here, including me, is sick of this guy."
Helen Soileau and I drove the nine miles to St. Martinville in under ten minutes. The square by the old French church and the Evangeline Oak was rilled with emergency vehicles, and the feeder streets were blocked to keep out traffic. We parked the cruiser a hundred feet from the bar where Clete was barricaded and walked up to a black police lieutenant with a thin mustache who stood with a bullhorn behind the open door of his vehicle. The windows of the bar were shattered, and the wall above one of them was scorched black and dripping with fire retardant.
I fanned the reek of tear gas out of my face.
"The shell hit the windowsill and started a fire. You're friends with this character?" the lieutenant said.
"Yeah. He's generally harmless," I said.
"Oh, I can see that," the lieutenant said. His name was Picard and he was a Vietnam veteran who had gone away to school on the GI Bill and earned a degree in criminal justice. "I've got an officer in the hospital. The inside of that bar is totally destroyed. He beat those bikers till they cried and got down on their knees. You either get your friend out of there, and I mean in cuffs, or we cool him out."
"I think we're overreacting to the situation, Loot," I said.
"Are you hearing anything I say? He has the bartender's shotgun," Picard replied.
"Bullshit," Helen said, and pulled the bullhorn from Picard's hand. "Hey, Clete. It's Helen Soileau. Dave and I are coming in," she said into the horn, its echo resonating under the bar's colonnade. Then she threw the horn back into Picard's hands.
We pushed open the front door and went inside. Chairs and tables were broken; glass Uttered the floor; the liquor bottles on the counter behind the bar had been smashed into jagged shells. In one corner, by the pool table, was the unconscious form of a head-shaved and tattooed man dressed in jeans and a leather vest with no shirt underneath.
Clete sat at the end of the bar, grinning, his scalp bleeding on his face, his slacks and tropical shirt stained with tobacco juice and talc, a can of Budweiser by his fingers. A twenty-gauge, single-load shotgun rested against the inside of his thigh, the barrel pointed toward his chest.
"Is there a safety on that thing?" I asked.
"I haven't checked," he replied.
"What the hell's the matter with you?" Helen said, glass snapping under her shoes.
"It's just been that kind of morning," he said.
"We need to hook you up," I said.
"Bad idea, Streak."
"Beats being dead. That's the itinerary outside," Helen said.
He touched the corner of his mouth with the ball of one finger and looked at the wet spot on his skin. His eyes were lighted, his cheeks filled with color.
"The cop I took down with the cue? He tried to rip my head off with a baton," he said.
Helen removed her handcuffs from the leather case on her belt, her eyes never leaving Clete's, and threw them on the bar.
"Hook yourself up, handsome," she said.
"Nope," he said, and smiled at her with his eyes and lifted his beer can to his mouth.
I stepped beyond Clete's angle of vision and made a motion with my head toward the front of the building. Helen walked with me across the broken glass until we were at the door. Clete salted his beer can, the shotgun still resting between his legs, as though the events taking place around him had no application in his life.