“What?”
“There’s a coon on top of Tripod’s hutch.”
She leaned forward and peered through the screen. “I don’t see him.”
“He’s right there,” I said, pointing. “His tail is hanging down the side of the hutch.”
“I guess I need glasses.”
Since when? I wondered.
In the morning, I finally caught Levon Broussard’s physician in his office. His name was Melvin LeBlanc. He had been a navy corpsman during the first Iraqi war, and when he came home, he became a Quaker and enrolled in medical school at Tulane. He had the face of an ascetic, thinning, sandy hair, and a stare that gave you the sense that he saw presences others did not. We were sitting in his office with the door closed.
“I’m not keen on this kind of stuff, Dave,” he said.
“It’s too personal?”
“I don’t like to be used. That’s what the defense does. That’s what you guys do.”
“Rowena and Levon gave you carte blanche to tell us everything, didn’t they?” I said.
“I can tell you what I found or didn’t find. But don’t try to put words in my mouth.”
“Was there evidence of forced penetration?” I said.
“Around the vagina, no. There was a bruise inside one thigh.”
“A recent one?”
“Yes, sir.”
“No abrasions?”
“Abrasions where?”
“Wherever they might be significant, Melvin.”
“On the hip.”
“Scratches?”
“Correct.”
“Perhaps consistent with someone tearing an undergarment from a victim’s person?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t use the word ‘victim,’ either,” he said.
“Did you do any swabs?”
“Ms. Broussard showered after she returned home. I recommended she go to the hospital and have a rape kit done. She refused.”
“No trauma around the vagina?”
“None other than the bruise on the thigh.”
“How about inside?”
“She didn’t indicate any discomfort.”
“This isn’t coming together for me, Doc.”
“That’s your problem.”
“Ms. Broussard says the assailant sodomized her.”
“That’s a relative word,” he said.
“Not in this case.”
“If you’re asking about bite marks, there were none in the usual places.”
“How about elsewhere?”
“On the shoulder.”
“A bite mark?”
“What some call a hickey. It could have been put there before she went on the boat.”
“Is that why you didn’t mention it when I asked about abrasions?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any other reason?” I asked.
“There were only two people on that boat. One is lying, the other is not. That’s about all I can tell you.”
“You think Rowena Broussard would deliberately put herself through this kind of embarrassment? Would any woman, at least one who’s sane?”
“Hell hath no fury,” he said.
“Not a good metaphor.”
“On the frontier, it was called cabin fever. Levon has a helium balloon for a head. His art comes first. He even tells people that at book signings. Some people want to save the world but don’t have time for their own family.”
“What are you saying, Doc?”
“The human spirit is frail. People believe whatever they need to believe. I feel sorry for all of them.”
That afternoon, Alafair was raking leaves in the backyard when she heard a vehicle come up the driveway and park under the porte cochere, as though the driver lived in the house. She walked around the side and saw a trim blond man get out of a red Honda that looked brand-new. He wore loafers and gray slacks and a long-sleeve purple shirt and a shiny black tie with a gold pin. His stomach was flat, his hair stiff with dressing of some kind, his hands big, the knuckles pronounced. He was holding a clipboard. “Hi. I’m Detective Spade Labiche. I work with Dave.”
“He’s not here right now,” she said.
“Yeah, he caught the Broussard rape case, didn’t he? Did he see the doc yet?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“I hope you don’t mind me parking under your porte cochere. I had my car waxed.”
“My car is parked on the street, so we don’t need the space right now,” she said.
The implication seemed to elude him. “This is a nice spot,” he said. “He put you to work? The old man.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“I’ve read a couple of your books. I thought you’d be typing instead of piling leaves.”
“Is there something I can help you with?”
“I’m excluding Dave in the situation that took place out by Bayou Benoit.” His accent was bottom-of-the-bucket New Orleans.
“Why would Dave be here during work hours?” she said.
“He eats lunch at home some days, doesn’t he?”
“It’s after two.”
“I’ve never met a famous author. Where do you get your ideas?”
“I’ve never given it much thought. Do you want to leave a message?”
“Yeah, I could do it that way. You were an ADA in Portland, right? You know the ropes.”
“The ropes?”
“Whatever you want to call it. We’re all on the same side.” He looked away at the bayou, a little dreamy. He scratched at a mosquito bite on his neck and glanced at his fingertips. The day was warm. When the wind changed, his odor touched her face, a mixture of detergent and perspiration.
“We couldn’t get any prints off the Dartez door handle,” he said. “Maybe somebody wiped them off, or maybe his body was dragged over the handle. I tweezered up some broken glass from the ground and inside the truck. The lab found Dave’s prints on a couple of them. I know there’s an explanation. I just need to get the explanation into my paperwork.” He looked down as he pulled his tie taut on his shirtfront and, at the same time, took her measure from her breasts to her thighs.
“What’s your name again?” she asked.
“Call me Spade.”
“You’re giving me information civilians aren’t supposed to have.”
“I’m trying to be subtle here. I didn’t want this investigation, or at least not one that would cause a colleague problems. Tell Dave I think he was probably out at the Dartez place to talk about the accident, and he had occasion to put his hands on the driver’s window of the pickup.”
“How long have you been doing homicide investigations?”
“It’s not my area. I worked vice and narcotics at Miami-Dade. I was undercover in Liberty City.”
“Liberty City is all black.”
“I figured that out when they started throwing spears at me from the fire escapes.” There was a beat. “Oops. My bad.”
“Come back later, okay?” she said.
“If you work the inner city, you have to develop a sense of humor. Ask Purcel. I heard he had a way of dipping into the culture. What a character.” He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter, the smoke rising out of his cupped hand.
“Could you not do that, please?”
“You don’t let people smoke on your property?” he said.
She tried to crinkle her eyes but couldn’t. There was a bilious taste in her mouth that made her want to spit. He flipped his cigarette sparking into a camellia bush and rotated his head as though he had a stiff neck.
“It’s good you’re raking up all the leaves,” he said. “When they get into the bayou, the biodegradation uses up the oxygen and kills the fish.”
“Yep, that’s what it does,” she said. She propped the rake on the ground, her left hand on the shaft. She saw him use the opportunity to glance at her ring finger.
“There’s a lot of this area I still haven’t seen,” he said. “One day I’d like somebody to show me around. I could do the same for them in New Orleans, show them all the things nobody knows about, including where all the skeletons are hid. In the old days, the Mob dumped jackrollers in Lake Pontchartrain because they were bad for tourism. Cops would throw them out of a car at high speed by the Huey Long Bridge. They got things done back then. That was before your time.”