Conversely, the truth teller is laconic and seems bored with the discussion, not caring whether you get it right or not.
Nightingale showed none of the traditional characteristics of the liar, and I began to believe him. Then something very strange occurred. For just a second I saw a glimmer in the corner of his eye, like a wet spot. His throat became ruddy; his lips parted slightly, as though he wanted to confide a secret to a trusted friend.
“Did you want to tell me something, Jimmy?”
The moment passed. His eyes were bright, his smile in place. “I don’t know what I could add.”
“Want to come in and make a formal statement with your attorney present?”
“What good would that do?”
“Do it by the book. Show everybody you have nothing to hide,” I replied.
“Said the spider to the fly. Where is this going, Dave?”
“That’s up to the prosecutor’s office.”
“Rowena really said all those things?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I was a fool to take her to the boat. What’s Levon got to say about all this?”
“What do you think?”
“I was hoping to put a movie deal together with him. I’ve got the connections to do it. I guess that’s in the toilet, huh?”
“You’re being accused of rape and sodomy, and you’re worried about a movie deal?”
“I thought Levon and I could make a grand film. He’s a bit negative on Hollywood. I thought a down-home touch might be the key.”
“A down-home touch?”
“Outsiders don’t understand us. Why do we have to depend on Hollywood to make movies about us?”
His presumption and naïveté would probably get him laughed out of Los Angeles or New York, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. “Thanks for your time, Jimmy. You’re not planning to take a trip anywhere, are you?”
“No, I’m at your disposal. I can’t believe this is happening.”
I thought about the beating death of T. J. Dartez. “I know the feeling.”
Alafair pulled in to the driveway late that afternoon. As I looked at her, I had to wonder again at the arbitrary nature of fate and how the most influential events in our lives are usually unexpected and unplanned. On a clear day out at Southwest Pass, I had heard a sputtering sound just before the twin-engine plane came in low on the water, a long black column of smoke stringing behind it. The pilot was gunning the engines, probably trying to reach Pecan Island, where he could pancake in the salt grass. But he’d hit the water and flipped, and the waves had washed over the fuselage, and the plane had gone down in the murk like a deflating yellow balloon.
I still have nightmares in which I swim down to the wreck, my air tank almost empty, while clouds of sand rise from the plane’s wings and the bat wings of stingrays flutter by me and a little girl struggles to find an air bubble inside the cabin. My second wife, Annie, and I took her to a hospital and named her Alafair for my mother and began raising her in the Cajun culture in which I had grown up. She forgot her own language and the death squad that attacked her village and became an honor student and went to Reed College. The next stop was number one in her class at Stanford Law.
But as with all parents, when I looked at Alafair, I saw the child and not the adult, as though she were incapable of growing older. I had a footlocker in the attic where I kept her Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, her Orca the Whale T-shirt, her Donald Duck hat with the quacking bill that we bought at Disneyland, and her pink tennis shoes embossed with “Left” and “Right” on the appropriate toes.
The leaves were floating from the trees and blowing on the street when I went to greet her. She was tall and lithe and had long Indian-black hair and brown eyes and an IQ that wasn’t measurable. Only two people in one million have it.
I carried her things into her bedroom, which I dusted and cleaned every week and kept closed and never let anyone use, not even Clete. After she put her things away, we went to the cemetery and placed flowers in a vase on Molly’s grave. I never talked about Molly’s death unless I had to, not even at the grave. I don’t believe that acceptance of mortality is a situation you resolve by talking with others. The same with personal grief and mourning or loss of any kind. I remember the words of a black ex-junkie musician friend of mine who got clean in a lockdown unit where he beat his head to pulp against a steel walclass="underline" “You deal wit’ your own snakes or you don’t, man. Sometimes you’re the only cat in the cathedral. Ain’t nobody else can do it for you.”
When we got home, I knew Alafair had read my thoughts.
“You bottle up your feelings, Dave,” she said. “I think that’s why you got drunk again.”
“Give it a rest, Alf.”
“You kept feeding your anger toward T. J. Dartez. What do they say at meetings? You get drunk at somebody?”
“Something like that.”
I started taking food out of the icebox. She had just gone to the heart of the matter. Every time I tried to remember what had happened after I’d seen the headlights in my rearview mirror, I reached the same conclusion, and it is the same conclusion every alcoholic reaches after he comes off a bender, sick and trembling and terrified: I had done something my conscious mind refused to accept.
“I haven’t quite told you everything,” I said. “I went after a guy by the name of Kevin Penny. He’s a violent man and a three-time loser who was going to hurt his kid.”
“What’d you do?”
“It involved a swimming lesson in the toilet bowl.”
Her eyes roved over my face. “What if he takes it out on his kid?”
“I called social services. They’re going to make home calls, and so is Clete.”
“Why do you have it in for this guy in particular?”
“I don’t know. He bothers me. I came within a few seconds of drowning him. I wanted to do it.”
I poured a glass of milk and drank it. She watched me silently. “He isn’t filing charges?” she asked.
“I had a bandana on my face.”
“Did somebody set you up on the Dartez deal?”
“Evidently, I called his house the night he was killed. I asked him to meet me out by Bayou Benoit.”
“That’s where he was killed?”
“Yes,” I said. I showed her my hands. They were scabbed over, the knuckles still swollen.
“Could you have punched a wall?”
“That’s what I’d like to believe.”
“Clete believes Fat Tony Nemo and Jimmy Nightingale and Levon Broussard may be mixed up in this,” she said.
“Clete and I are always trying to find excuses for each other.”
“He says you had dinner with Nightingale and Levon.”
“Nightingale got ahold of a sword carried by Levon’s great-grandfather in the Civil War and gave it to him. Nightingale wants to make a movie from one of Levon’s novels. Except Levon’s wife and Nightingale hit it off a little too well.”
“Nightingale thinks he’s going to produce a film with Levon? Where’s he been?”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone knows Levon hates Hollywood. He thinks they screwed up a couple of his adaptations. On CNN he said Hollywood is a potential gold mine for anthropologists because it’s the only culture in the world where educated and rich and powerful people have the mind-set and manners of Southern white trash.”
“That’s not a bad line.”
I fixed avocado-and-tomato sandwiches for both of us and we sat down at the breakfast table by the window. I glanced through the screen. “Look yonder.”