“What did the guy at the DQ look like?” I asked.
“Chubby buttocks. A lisp. The kind of guy who hangs around playgrounds.”
“I think these kids have sexual problems of their own,” I said.
“Before they got into it, they said the guy was smiling at everybody in the DQ, particularly at children.”
“The kind of guy somebody might call Smiley?”
“I think this baby is back in town and ready to rock,” she replied.
Sometimes it is hard to explain to outsiders the culture of southern Louisiana and the quandary of many of its people. The world in which they grew up is now a decaying memory, but many of them have no place in the present. I know Cajuns who have never been farther than two parishes from their birthplace. There are people here who cannot add and subtract, cannot read a newspaper, and do not know what the term “9/11” means. Over forty percent of children are born to an unwed mother. In terms of heart and kidney disease, infant mortality, fatal highway accidents, and contaminated drinking water, we are ranked among the worst in the nation. Our politicians are an embarrassment and give avarice and mendacity a bad name.
So how do you get angry at someone who was born poor, speaks English so badly that she’s unintelligible to outsiders, has the worldview and religious beliefs of a medieval peasant, cleans houses for a living if she’s lucky, and is obese because of the fat-laced bulk food she feels thankful for?
The temperature had hit ninety-eight degrees at four in the afternoon. The humidity was eye-watering and as bright as spun glass, as tangible as lines of insects crawling on your torso and thighs. At sunset, lightning pulsed in the clouds over the Gulf, but no rain fell, and the wind was dry and hot and smelled of road tar and diesel fuel. I walked down to the bayou and watched the sun shrink into an ember between two black clouds and disappear. Then the wind died and the trees stood still, and the surface of the bayou quivered in the sun’s afterglow, as though a molecular change were taking place in the water.
It’s a phenomenon that seems unique to South Louisiana, like a sea change, as if the natural world is reversing itself and correcting an oversight. The barometer will drop unexpectedly, the bayou will swell and remain placid at the same time, and suddenly, rain rings will dimple the surface from one bank to the other. Fish sense the change in barometric pressure and begin feeding on the surface in anticipation of the rain that will wash food from the trees into the stream or swamp.
The wind sprang to life just as a solitary raindrop struck my face. I went back into the house to get Alafair. “Come outside.”
“What’s going on?” she said.
“It’s actually raining. Let’s walk down to Clementine’s for dessert.”
She was writing in longhand at her worktable, a flat-sided oak door I had nailed onto sawhorses. She looked out the window. The light was almost gone, and leaves were scattering across the yard, and Mon Tee Coon was standing stiff-legged on top of Tripod’s hutch, his nose pointed into the wind. “Wonderful,” Alafair said, and capped her pen.
As we stepped out onto the gallery, we saw a short, stocky woman in a dark dress walk at an angle across Main, carrying a hand-lettered sign, undaunted by the whir of the automobile tires whizzing past her. Her shoulders were humped, the muscles in her calves shaped like upside-down bowling pins, her expression as angry as an uprooted rock. The sign read “D. Robicheaux killed my husbon and was let free. How my family going to live?”
“Let me talk to her, Dave,” Alafair said.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
My expression of confidence was vanity. There in the dying light, trapped in her own rage and madness and the heat radiating through the soles of her cheap shoes, her hair tangled wetly on her face, raindrops spinning down from the stars above oak trees planted by slaves, dredged out of a sixteenth-century mob armed with pitchforks and rakes, Mrs. T. J. Dartez had persevered through time and history and the elements and brought her war to my doorstep and, worse, confronted me again with the bête noire I could not exorcize from my life. I tried to place my hand on her arm.
“Don’t touch me, you,” she said. “Liar. Killer. Fite putin.”
“Don’t be talking about my mother, Ms. Dartez,” I said.
“I seen the preacher at our church. He said I got to forgive. ‘Not Detective Robicheaux, I don’t.’ That’s what I tole him, yeah. Ain’t nothing in the Bible say we got to forgive evil. And that’s what you are.”
“I didn’t kill your husband.”
“How you know that if you say you was so drunk you didn’t know what world you was in. My man was sick. He didn’t have no money for his prescriptions. He couldn’t protect hisself.”
“What prescriptions?”
“For his epilepsy. His truck was ruint, and he couldn’t work ’cause of the accident and ’cause the insurance company wouldn’t give him no money.”
“That’s not true, Ms. Dartez,” Alafair said.
“You stay out of it, you.”
“Let us drive you home,” I said.
“I ain’t taking no favors from y’all. God gonna get you, Mr. Robicheaux. I’m gonna stay out here all night. Then I’m gonna stay out here all day tomorrow.”
“No, you will not,” I said.
“You ain’t gonna boss me, no.”
“I wouldn’t try to do that,” I said. “I think you’re a good lady, Ms. Dartez. I think someone used your husband to bring me harm.”
“It was you,” she said. “It’s all been you.”
“No, ma’am, it’s not me,” I said.
A raindrop struck her forehead and ran through one eyebrow and across her nose like silver thread. But she never blinked, and she did not try to wipe the water from her face. “Why you done this to me? I ain’t got nothing except two hungry kids, me.”
I put a hand on each of her shoulders, whether she liked it or not. “My wife Annie was murdered. So was my mother. My father was killed by an oil-well blowout that shouldn’t have happened. I know what it feels like to be treated badly by the world. That is why I would never deliberately hurt you or your husband. Look into my face and tell me I’m lying.”
“I ain’t got to do nothing you say.”
“No, you don’t. But what does your conscience tell you? Forget about the preacher at your church, good man that he might be; forget about me; forget about every other person in the world except you and your children and your own idea of God. What does your conscience tell you?”
She faltered. “I ain’t sho’.”
“No, tell me, Ms. Dartez. Tell me now.” I squeezed her shoulders tighter. Tears were welling in her eyes. She shook her head.
“Say it.”
“You’re telling the troot’.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She dropped the sign on the grass. “What am I gonna do, suh?”
“Whatever it is, Alafair and I will help you with it.”
She buried her face into my chest, her hands at her sides. I could feel the wetness coming through my shirt.
“I’ll be inside,” Alafair said.
“You okay, Ms. Dartez?” I said.
“No, suh, I ain’t. I ain’t never gonna be okay. Never, never, never.” She ground her forehead deeper into my chest, into the bone.
Considering the hand she’d been dealt, who would take her to task?
At noon on Wednesday, Clete was about to go across the street to Victor’s Cafeteria when a midnight-blue Buick with tinted windows pulled to the curb and a chauffeur in gray livery got out and looked across the roof at Clete and said, “Got a minute, Mr. Purcel?”
Peroxide hair, dented-in face, shades, flat stomach, concrete deltoids, scar tissue around the eyes, a half cup of brains. Where had he seen him before?