“Yes!” He seems annoyed. “What size do you wear?”
“Forty-two regular,” I tell him.
“Ahhhh,” Diment says. “That’s perfect.” He pulls the beads aside. Pinky and I step through into the front yard, and the beads fall closed behind us with a kind of liquid rustle.
It’s like leaving a matinee. I’m blinded. An image from Diment’s altar seems to float before me in the sun haze: a painted icon showing two boys, each with a golden orb around his head, each holding a feather quill. Twins. I wonder what that means. I’ll have to ask Diment. Pinky’s car emits a little beep, and I hear the mechanical thunk as its door locks pop open.
“Whoa,” Pinky says, once we’re inside. “I’m not sure I’d be keeping any future appointments with Doctor D. there.”
“I don’t know. What was that question about my size?”
“I doubt he’s gonna kill you for your Gap khakis, but who knows?” Pinky says, turning the key and rolling down the windows. We lurch forward. “The guy looks like a death’s head! Don’t that worry you, pardner? And why’s he want to know what size you wear? And that stuff about ‘a puppy is just a chicken with a tail’? What’s he mean by that, huh? I’m thinking he means that anything alive is nothin’ but a life force, something that could be sacrificed. What if he’s feelin’ that way about you?”
“Yeah,” I say. But the truth is, it’s hard for me to work up any fear about Doctor Diment. Or worry about anything that might happen to me. I’m all played out on the fear front.
“You’re not really going there?”
I shrug. “I’m thinking about it.”
All the way back to the Holiday Inn, Pinky tries to talk me out of it. “It’s crazy! You don’t know this guy – or what crazy thing he might do. That lip, man. I can’t believe you, drinkin’ that rum! You see how skinny he was? Who knows what he’s got? His eyeballs looked yellow to me. You’re talking AIDS, hep C, who knows? And voodoo – it’s nothin’ you want to mess with. Not at all. It’s all blood and drugs and bullshit… I say let’s see what Maldonado says. Look, you can always go back to this guy if you have to.”
“Yeah, we’ll see,” I tell Pinky.
Pinky has a service called OnStar, which he calls his “traveling concierge.” He punches it on, secures Maldonado’s number, and then instructs the machine to call the reporter.
“Hey!” Maldonado’s voice booms from the dashboard. “Good news, Pink. I called up the doctor who admitted Claude when the ambulance brought him in. Sam Harami. If not for Sam, Byron would have got away with murder. The death probably would have gone down as ‘natural causes.’”
“You saying what, Max?”
“I’m saying this is the guy really figured out old Claude had been poisoned. He’s a friend of mine and he’s ready to join us for dinner if you’re buying.”
“My pleasure,” Pinky tells him.
While they go back and forth, figuring out where to meet for dinner, I’m thinking about how I’m going to get out to Chez Diment later tonight. Even though Pinky thinks it’s a bad idea to go, maybe he’ll lend me his car or give me a ride. If not, I guess I can take a taxi.
But I’m definitely going. I think of the dimes, the bowls of water, mementos left to me by Boudreaux. Somehow I know that if I’m going to find him, the man with the death’s head face will be the one to point the way.
CHAPTER 36
We’re supposed to meet Max Maldonado at Prideaux’s Eat Place. It’s an upscale restaurant in the countryside outside New Iberia, a pretty town a few miles from Morgan City. We’re escorted to a table by the window, where a small gray-haired man bounces out of his seat at our approach. This is Maldonado, “seventy-five years young,” as he later puts it. The compression of age, familiar to me from the ongoing shrinkage of my father, seems only to have concentrated this man’s energy.
“Pinky!” he says, with an enthusiastic pump of the hand. “It’s been way too long, baby.”
Pinky introduces us.
“Pleased to meetcha, pleased to meetcha. And this quiet fella here” – he indicates a black-haired Asian man to his left – “this is Sam Harami.” Harami raises his glass in acknowledgment.
“Would you like a drink?” the waitress asks.
“Absolutely,” Pinky tells him. He orders a Jack on the rocks. I ask for a draft beer.
“So… Byron Boudreaux,” Maldonado says. “Remember when that son-of-a-bitch got out, Sam?”
Harami nods.
“We all took a deep breath when he got popped loose, I can tell you that. Checking our backs.”
“That guy scared me,” Harami says, his voice a strange combination of Deep South and Far East. A Japanese drawl. “And I don’t scare easy.”
“He did come right back to Morgan City, soon as he got out. That’s had us worried,” Maldonado says. “But he didn’t stay long. Spent a week with that witch doctor, and that was it. Haven’t heard a peep about him since.”
We order dinner – a process that takes at least fifteen minutes because Maldonado has so many inquiries about ingredients and preparations.
“He drive me crazy,” Sam Harami says. “Worse than a woman choose her wedding gown.”
Finally, I get to ask what’s on my mind. “What can you tell me about Boudreaux that might help me track him down?”
Sam Harami shrugs. “Not sure. What kind of thing you have in mind?”
“Just talk,” Pinky says, throwing back his whiskey. “What’d you know about him? Not just the case with his daddy, although that, too. Anything. Everything. You never know what’s going to help.”
“Well, he never came across my watch,” Maldonado says, “until that thing with the puppy. You know what I’m talking about?”
“Yeah,” I say. “We heard from people at the trailer park.”
“Most of what I heard was after Claude died,” Maldonado says, “so you really can’t trust it. I mean, you show someone a baby picture of Jeffrey Dahmer or Adolf Hitler and they’re bound to nod and say, ‘Yeah, there was always something strange about old Jeff.’… But that thing with the puppy – it about turned that boy into a pariah.”
“I believe it,” Pinky says.
“It put him on my map, I’ll tell you that. People looked back at the way his brother drowned and it had to make you wonder. You remember, Sam?”
Harami raises his eyebrows, which are perfect crescents. “I wasn’t here yet, Max. I get here only in eighty-six, right out of Tulane. What I know about Byron only goes back to when he killed his father.”
“Ah, that’s right,” Maldonado says. “Well, the next thing happened – after the dog – was Marie died. Got that ovarian cancer, that’s a killer.”
I nod. “I heard she died.”
“Yeah. Byron was fifteen years old. A fine woman, Marie. Some people thought maybe that’s what sent Byron over the edge – when she passed – because word was she doted on that boy. Anyway, a few months after she died, Claude gets hurt in an oil-rig accident. Messed up his back big-time. He’s gonna be in a wheelchair for months. When he gets out of the hospital, Byron’s the one who’s goin’ to ‘take care’ of him.” The reporter makes quotation marks in the air.
“Joke,” Harami explains.
“Let’s just say he took care of him all right,” Maldonado adds.
The waitress arrives with gumbo and oysters, and the food silences us for a while. Finally, Maldonado picks up the thread of the story. “So where was I?”
“Claude in a wheelchair, Byron taking care of him.”
“Right! So anyway, here’s old Claude, slowly making progress after this operation. Spinal fusion, I think it was.” He looks at Harami.
“That’s right.”
“And then, for no apparent reason, he gets real sick one afternoon. He’s in front of the tube, in his wheelchair, watching NASCAR with his friend Boots.”