“Are you all right?” I said.
“No, I ain’t ever gonna be all right. They gonna kill him in there. That li’l boy that never had no daddy and no real mama.” She turned around and took my hand and placed it on the scar on her neck. It felt as firm and thick as a night crawler. “A policeman in New Orleans done that. A black one. I was seventeen. I killed him. I done it with a razor blade. Ain’t nobody ever knowed about it.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“ ’Cause I ain’t never tole nobody. ’Cause my li’l boy is paying for my sin, if it was a sin. I didn’t think it was one at the time.”
“You’re not a sinful person.”
She stepped close to me, then buried her face in my shirt and put her arms around me and pressed herself against me. “Hold me.”
I laid my arms lightly across her back, my inner self rising, an empty space in my thoughts, her fingers digging into my skin.
“Hold me,” she repeated. “Hold me, please. Oh, Lordy, what am I gonna do about my li’l boy?”
When I left, I thought I saw a white man in the alley with a camera. His back was turned. He disappeared behind a clump of banana plants. I walked to the alley, but he was gone.
On Friday, the following day, Helen Soileau called me at home. “You’re on social media,” she said.
“I’m not up on that stuff,” I replied. “What are we talking about?”
“You’re with a black woman. I can’t tell if you’re getting it on or not. Thought you ought to know.”
“So now I know. Seen any good movies lately?”
“You’re not bothered?”
“No.”
“Who’s the woman?”
“Ask people in Internal Affairs,” I said.
“This isn’t about me, Pops.”
“Don’t call me Pops anymore.”
“You and Clete put me in a corner. Quit blaming me because you fucked up.”
“I don’t blame you. What you don’t understand is I didn’t have an alternative. Clete cut Hugo Tillinger loose because to do otherwise would have sent Tillinger to the injection table. If I reported Clete, he could be charged with aiding and abetting. If I had it to do over again, I’d make the same choice. That means I’ll take my own fall. That means you don’t have to say anything.”
“I think you’re enjoying this.”
“I’m tired of other people’s bullshit.”
“Who do you think took the pictures?”
“A friend of Axel Devereaux.”
“Like who?”
“Maybe it was Madman Muntz.”
“Who’s Madman Muntz?”
“Google the name next time you’re playing around on the Internet.”
I eased the receiver into the phone cradle. She didn’t call back. I waited until after supper, then put a throw-down in the pocket of my khakis and rolled my cut-down twelve-gauge Remington pump in a raincoat and placed it on the floor of my truck. I drove to the little settlement of Cade, where Lucinda Arceneaux had grown up as the daughter of a Free Will Baptist preacher who probably never could have guessed his daughter would die upon the symbol of his religion.
I passed a trailer and a small church with a faux bell tower in a pecan orchard. On a dirt road, behind the remnants of a motel called the Truman, built for colored in the 1940s, was the neat brick house of Frenchie Lautrec, flat-topped and as squat and ugly as a machine-gun bunker. Maybe it was coincidence that Frenchie lived close to the father of Lucinda Arceneaux, a woman who tried to get the innocent off death row. I had no doubt, however, that Frenchie had posted photos of me and Bella Delahoussaye on the Internet and that his agenda was straight out of the pit.
I parked under the pecan trees and watched the sun descend like an orange globe in the dust; a shadow seemed to crawl across the land. Then I saw the electric lights glowing inside Frenchie’s house. As far as I knew, he was a single man who lived with various women at various times. Most of them were drunks or addicts or battered wives or women he busted for soliciting. They didn’t hang around long, nor did they tell others what he did to them.
I got out of my truck with the shotgun wrapped in the raincoat, and walked across a coulee on a wood bridge and up the steps of his gallery. I could hear a television in the front room. I banged on the door with the flat of my left fist, the cut-down still in the raincoat hanging from my right hand.
Frenchie opened the door. He was barefoot and wore a faded long-sleeve flannel shirt; his shoulders were knobbed with muscle, his chest flat like a boxer’s, the veins in his forearms as thick as soda straws. He was smiling. “Just at the right time. I was fixing to call up some pussy. You game?” He pushed the screen wide.
I stepped inside. “Thanks.”
I shook the raincoat from the cut-down and slammed the stock across his mouth. I heard his teeth clack against the wood. He crashed against the wall, his lips gushing blood. When he tried to get up, I brought the butt down on his forehead and split the skin at the hairline. He rolled into a ball, his forearms clamped around his ears. I tossed the cut-down on the couch and peeled one arm from his head and mashed his head under my foot.
The inside of his house looked like a collection of synthetic junk someone had bought at the dollar store. There was even a plastic birdcage with a cloth canary in it.
“Who else is in the house?” I said. “If you lie, I’m going to crack your skull.”
“Ain’t nobody here.”
“Where’s the camera?”
“I don’t have one.”
I lifted him to his feet and shoved him across the coffee table, breaking it in half.
“Eat shit,” he said.
I lifted him again and threw him through a bedroom door. There was a desk against one wall with a computer and a camera on top. I picked up the camera. “Is this the one you used?”
“Fuck you.”
“I want to explain something to you. I couldn’t care less if you put photos of me on the Internet. But you did it to an innocent woman and made her an object of scandal and ridicule.”
“I’m getting up now,” he said, one hand raised in front of him. “I cock-blocked you. You’ll have to find a new knothole. I win, you lose. Now get out of here.”
“Better stay where you are, Frenchie.”
“My dick in your ear.”
I felt my old enemy kick into gear, not unlike a half-formed simian creature breaking the chains from its body. The transformation always began with a sound like a Popsicle stick snapping inside my head; then the world disappeared inside a wave of color that resembled the different shades of a fire raging in a forest. I was now in a place bereft of mercy and charity, drunk on my own adrenaline, the power in my arms and fists of a kind that, in certain people, age does not diminish.
When I finished hitting him and throwing him against the wall, I dropped his camera on the floor and smashed it into junk. Then I picked up a handful of parts and pushed them into his mouth and stepped on them.
He began crawling away from me on his hands and knees. Both my hands were bleeding. The wallpaper was splattered with blood.
“Get up!” I said.
He didn’t answer. I thought I heard him weeping. Then I realized he was probably choking to death. I dragged him into the bathroom and hung him over the rim of the bathtub and hit him between the shoulder blades. I could hear the pieces of the camera tinkling in the bottom of the tub. I wet a towel and wiped his face and eased him down on the floor, his back against the wall. His whiskers were bright red, his shirt plastered with blood against his chest.
I squatted down in front of him. “You want an ambulance?”
He shook his head.