Clete opened the top on his grill and let a cloud of white smoke rise into the trees. He pulled a longneck from a tub full of half-melted ice and twisted the cap off and set it on the picnic table. “Sit down. I’m going to fix you a sandwich. Dave Robicheaux told me he went to see you. Why don’t you talk to him?”
“He’s a policeman.”
“Axel Devereaux beat you up?”
“You ain’t hearing me.” She sat at the table and put her hands over her face. “Don’t nobody hear me. Don’t nobody know what it’s like when you’re on your own against the world.”
Clete picked up the longneck and touched her arm with it. “Drink it.”
Her hand was shaking when she lifted the bottle; the beer spilled out of her mouth. He handed her a paper towel. “Who’s this guy getting in your head?”
She wiped her chin. “I only went to the ninth grade.”
“So?”
“I know what I’m t’inking is the troot, except I cain’t find the right words for it. When I’m wit’ him, I got no power. I get weak all over. The way he touches me and talks in my ear and looks in my eyes like no man done before. It’s like he’s putting pictures in my head that ain’t supposed to be there, and it makes me scared. I cain’t sleep, no.”
“Is this a white or a black man?”
“A black man might hit you, but he don’t mess up your head.”
“He’s not a pimp?”
“No, he ain’t nothing like that.”
Clete sliced the roast and layered two pieces of French bread on a paper plate with meat and sauce and tomatoes and lettuce and onions and set it in front of her.
“I ain’t hungry,” she said.
“Eat it anyway.”
“You ain’t gonna he’p, are you.”
“Tell me the guy’s name, and we might get somewhere.”
“He tole me I ain’t supposed to do that. He held my chin wit’ his fingers and looked into my eyes when he said it.”
“This guy sounds like a real piece of shit. Tell me who he is and I’ll dial him up.”
“He said I’m a chalice. I got to be pure ’cause I’m chosen. Chosen for what?”
“Did you ask him that?”
“I was afraid.”
“Listen to me, Miss Hilary. You’re giving me half the story and not trusting me with the other half.”
He waited for her to speak. She took a small bite from her sandwich and chewed as though it were cardboard. Then she took the food out of her mouth and put it on the plate. “I’m gonna be sick.”
“Is he a client?”
“Not in a reg’lar way.”
“You don’t get it on with him?”
“He gives me money and t’ings. Once he axed me to rub his back.”
“Where did you meet this guy?”
“At the Winn-Dixie. His basket crashed into mine. He said, ‘Sorry, pretty lady.’ ”
Clete closed the top of the grill and sat down across from her. “Did you know Lucinda Arceneaux?”
“I don’t know nobody named Lucinda.”
“Her body was found floating on a wood cross in Weeks Bay.”
“I don’t know nothing about that.”
“You don’t read the newspaper or watch the news?”
“It don’t have nothing to do wit’ me.”
Clete shut and opened his eyes. “Describe the pictures that the man without a name puts in your head.”
“Horses galloping, people burning up in their shacks, children screaming. If I don’t do what he say, t’ings like that are gonna be my fault. He says we’re all part of a big plan.”
“Are we talking about a guy named Hugo Tillinger?”
“No.”
“This guy is not only a bad guy, he’s a fake. The only power he has is the power you give him.”
She stared at Clete as though he were an apparition and the man who had poisoned her mind were real. Her skin was like dark chocolate, pitted in one cheek, a scar like a piece of white string at the corner of one eye. There was a smear of lipstick on her teeth. Clete wondered whom she had been with before she had come to his cottage. He wondered how many times she had been used as a child and sworn to secrecy by her molester.
“What was Nine/eleven, Hilary?”
“What was what?”
“Nine/eleven.”
“You mean the convenience store?”
He wrote his cell number on the back of his business card and gave it to her. “When you’re ready to give up your guy, let me know.”
“I remember what he said now. I’m the Queen of Cups. What’s that?”
“Some kind of bullshit he uses to scare people,” Clete said. He pulled another longneck from the cooler and screwed off the cap and drank from the bottle. “Is your baby okay?”
“Yes, suh.”
“You need any money?”
“What you t’ink?”
He removed two twenties from his wallet and put them in her hand. “Stay out of bars and away from the wrong people for a few days. Call me if Axel Devereaux comes around.”
She looked at the money. “You don’t want me to do nothing for you?”
“One look at me in the nude and women run for the convent.”
He thought she might smile, but she didn’t. She walked away without saying thanks or goodbye. He watched her get into her car and drive off, the muffler clanking. He hit the speed dial on his cell phone and got into his Caddy, talking on the phone, then drove down East Main to my house.
We sat on the front steps while he told me everything Hilary Bienville had said. The sun was almost down, and through the trees I could see clouds that were crimson and yellow and half filled with rain in the afterglow.
“You have any idea who this guy could be?” he said.
“The same one who gave her the Maltese cross she tied on her daughter’s ankle.”
“Yeah, but who’s the guy?”
“Anybody can buy tarot cards in the Quarter or on the Internet.”
Clete kept fiddling with his hands, running his fingers over his knuckles. They were the size of quarters. “What’s he after? It’s not sex.”
“Maybe she’ll get hurt again and tell us.”
“So just leave her alone?”
“It’s her choice,” I said.
“What about this guy Butterworth? Your cop friend in West Hollywood says he’s a bucket of vomit.”
“He’s hard to read. He spends a lot of time hanging out his signs.”
Clete stood up. “I got to go.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Not sure. Did Mon Tee Coon come back?”
“No.”
“I’m going to have a chat with Axel Devereaux.”
“Bad idea.”
“The guy beats up on women. He’s about to stop. Same with hurting people’s pets.”
I was sitting in his shadow now, the tree limbs above us clicking with hail, the last of the sunset shrinking inside clouds that were dark and swollen with rain and quivering with thunder. “What I say won’t make any difference, will it.”
“You can’t always wait out the batter, Dave. Sometimes you have to take it to him. Devereaux is overdue.” Clete’s porkpie hat slanted on his forehead, and an unlit cigarette hung from his mouth.
“The key is the tarot,” I said. “Devereaux is an asshole and a distraction.”
“Not if you’re a woman and he’s pounding your face into marmalade.”
After Clete backed into the street and drove away, the hail stopped and the rain began, big drops flattening on the heat trapped in the sidewalk and the street, filling the air with a sweetness like the summers of our youth. I got up and went inside and turned off the air-conditioning units and opened the windows, letting the house swell with wind. Then a strange sensation overtook me, in the same fashion it had on the evening I’d walked without purpose to the home of Bailey Ribbons and could give no explanation for my behavior other than the fact that I seemed to have stepped into a vacuum in which the only sounds I heard were inside my head.