A moment later Connie emerged into the bedroom, flattening her hair back wetly on her head with a hairbrush. She wore no makeup, but her face was calm, dispassionate, ruddy from her warm shower.
"I don't know if I can prove this, Dave, but I think you sent this man after me," she said.
"You talked Remeta into the sack, then wasted him," I said.
"He tried to rape me, you idiot. I got my gun out of my bag and shot him through the door. Otherwise I'd be dead." Then she said "God!" between her teeth, and started to walk past us, as though we were only incidental elements in her day. Her slippers tracked Remeta's blood across the floor.
Helen pushed her in the chest with her fingers. "You're tainting a crime scene. You don't do anything until we tell you," she said.
"Touch my person again and you'll be charged with battery," Connie said.
"What?"
"I'm the chief law officer of Louisiana. Does that register with you at all? A psychopath tried to rape and sodomize me. Do you think I'm going to let you come in here and treat me like a perpetrator? Now, get out of my way."
Helen's face was bright with anger, a lump of cartilage flexing against her jaw. But no words came out of her mouth.
"Are you deaf as well as stupid? I told you to get out of my way," Connie said.
Helen held the shotgun at port arms and shoved Connie through the side door onto the deck. "Sit in that chair, you prissy bitch," she said, and snipped a cuff on Connie's left wrist and hooked the other end to the handle on a huge earthen pot that was planted with bougainvillea.
"Are you placing me under arrest? I hope you are, because I'm going to ensure you live in penury the rest of your life," Connie said.
"No, I'm restricting you from a crime scene. You want my job, you can have it," Helen said.
I could hear lightning popping in the swamp and raindrops striking the tin roof. Helen began punching in numbers on her cell phone, then she hit the phone against the wall.
"I can't get through. I'm going out front," she said.
I followed her into the living room.
"Take it easy," I said.
"She's gonna walk."
"There's no statute of limitations on homicide. We'll get her sooner or later."
"That's not enough. When they blow somebody apart and take a shower and then get in your face, it's not enough. It's not nearly enough," she said.
I put my hand on her arm, but she stepped away from me. "Just let me do my job. Not everybody in this world is a member of the walking wounded," she said, and flipped the shotgun's barrel up on her shoulder and pushed open the screen door and went out on the front porch, punching in numbers on her cell phone with her thumb.
I went back through the bedroom onto the deck. Connie Deshotel was gazing into the distance, at a heron, perhaps, or at her plans for her future or perhaps at nothing.
"When you and Jim Gable killed my mother, she took back her married name," I said.
"Excuse me?" Connie said.
"Right before she died she told you her name was Mae Robicheaux. Y'all took her life, Connie, but she took back her soul. She had the kind of courage you and Jim Gable couldn't dream about."
"If you want to charge me with a crime, that's your prerogative. Otherwise, please shut up."
"You ever think about what lies beyond the grave?"
"Yes. Worms. Will you unlock this handcuff and keep that ridiculous woman away from me?"
I looked at her eyes, the sun-bleached tips of her wet hair, the healthy glow of her skin. There was no dark aura surrounding the head, no tuberous growth wrapping its tentacles around the spirit, no guilty attempt to avoid the indictment in my stare. She was one of those who could rise early and rested in the morning, fix tea and buttered toast, and light the ovens in Dachau.
I gave it up. I couldn't look at her face any more. Connie Deshotel's eyes had once contained the reflected image of my mother dying on a strip of frozen ground between fields of sugarcane that creaked with ice, whose clattering in the wind was probably the last sound my mother ever heard. Whatever Connie had done or seen that winter day long ago meant nothing to her, and when I looked into the moral vacuity of her eyes I wanted to kill her.
I turned my back to her and leaned on the deck railing and looked out at the rain falling on the lake. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her shake a cigarette out of her pack and place it in her mouth. Then she picked up her cigarette lighter, the one probably given her by Jim Gable, and snapped it dryly several times. She replaced it on the table and leaned forward, her redwood chair creaking under her, and reached for the box of kitchen matches on which rested the Glock automatic she had used to murder Johnny Remeta.
Simultaneously I heard Helen Soileau say, "Hey, Dave, the St. Martin sheriff's office is trying to patch into you. Clete's going era-"
That was as far as she got. When she reached the door she saw Connie Deshotel's hand lift the Glock to get to the box of kitchen matches.
Connie's unlit filter-tipped cigarette was still hanging from her mouth when Helen blew most of her head off.
Epilogue
JOHNNY REMETA TOOK the fall for Connie Deshotel's death. It wasn't hard to arrange. In fact, Johnny had made it easy. His cut-down Remington was already loaded with double-ought bucks. I fired one round out into the trees, slipped the shotgun under his chest, and let the coroner and the state police and the sheriff's deputies from St. Martin Parish come to their own conclusions.
It was dishonest, certainly, but I don't think it was dishonorable. In fact, it probably saved Helen Soileau's career. Besides, the print and electronic media loved the story we had created for them, and who could be so unkind as to disabuse them of their romantic fantasies? Connie Deshotel was much more likable as a blue-collar heroine in death than the self-serving political functionary she had been in life.
My own role in her death was not one I cared to think about. I wondered why I didn't unlock Connie's handcuff and allow her to walk outside, away from the crime scene, away from any other confrontations with Helen. There was no evidence to disprove her claim that Remeta had tried to assault her. In fact, I believed at the time, as I do now, that she may have told the truth.
Was it natural to turn my back on my mother's murderer, knowing a pistol lay within ten inches of her grasp? Or was I deliberately incautious? Age has brought me few gifts, but one of them has been a degree of humility, at least a sufficient amount so that I no longer feel compelled to take my own inventory and I can surrender that terrible burden to my Higher Power.
It was late when the paramedics and the coroner and the parish deputies and the state troopers finally wrapped up their work at Connie Deshotel's camp on Lake Fausse Point. The sun was below the horizon in the west, and a green aura from the wooded rim of the swamp rose into the sky. I could hear alligators flopping and nutrias screaming back in the flooded trees, and when the moon came up the bass starting hitting the insects in the center of the lake, chaining the lake's surface with water rings.
I had forgotten all about the call from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff's Department. I used Helen's cell phone and got a night deputy at the jail on the line.
"Somebody called earlier. A problem with Clete Purcel," I said.
"Sonofabitch is spreading chaos all over the lockdown unit. You either quiet him down or he's gonna have an accident with a baseball bat."
"Put him on," I said.
"Are you nuts?"
"How'd you like him to do six months with you guys?" I asked.
There was a brief pause. "Hang on," the deputy replied.
A few moments later I heard a cell door open and the tinkle of waist or leg chains.
"Hello?" Clete said hoarsely.
"You going to tell me what it is now?" I said.
"When I took Passion up to Angola last weekend? For the dinner with Letty and their relatives? She was wearing a raincoat and that bandanna around her neck. There were two gunbulls outside and a matron inside, but nobody with a lot of smarts. Letty and Passion were going in and out of the John. You get my drift?"