“You was born for the blues, Dave. Take care of yourself out there.”
The Maltese cross glinted at her throat. She picked up my hand and kissed the back of it and pressed it on her breast, then released it and flattened her hand on my heart. Her eyes seemed to reach inside my mind. If I ever saw death in a woman’s eyes, it was at that moment. But I did not know if I was looking at my reflection or hers or that of someone else I knew. She opened the door and remained standing in it as I walked to my truck. It was Indian summer, the evening sky porcelain blue, the sunlight like a cool burn. When I looked back at her cottage, the door was shut, the curtains closed. Bella Delahoussaye was the personification of Old Louisiana. I felt as though an icicle had pierced my heart.
I drove to Bailey Ribbons’s home on Loreauville Road and parked in front and walked up on the gallery and tapped on the screen door. When she came to the door, she was wearing a bathrobe, a towel wrapped around her head. “What’s going on?”
“I’ve got two tickets to Marcia Ball’s performance at the Evangeline Theater tonight.”
“Do I have time to dress?”
“It doesn’t start until eight.”
“Come in.”
She left me in the living room and went into the back of the house. I didn’t take a seat. I stared at nothing, the blood beating in my wrists. I could hear her opening and closing drawers. She came back in the hallway, still in her robe, her hair wet on her shoulders. “What’s the real reason you’re here, Dave?”
“I’ve never been good at self-inventory.”
“Let me give you mine. I went into law enforcement because I got fired from my teaching job.”
“For what?”
“I changed a black girl’s grade.”
“Why did you change her grade?”
“So she wouldn’t be expelled.”
“That sounds terrible,” I said.
She stared at me, her eyes round and unblinking, a flush on her throat. “Are we going to the concert?”
“Anyone who turns down tickets to a Marcia Ball performance has a serious spiritual disorder.”
“I’ll be just a minute,” she said.
The concert was wonderful. The buffet, the formal dress, the smell of the mixed drinks, the gaiety of small-town people who are overjoyed when a famous artist visits them, the location of the concert in the old Evangeline Theater, where I saw My Darling Clementine with my mother in 1946, seemed proof that the past is always with us, in the best way, if one will only reach out and dip his hand into it.
Afterward, I drove Bailey home in my truck. She seemed to sit closer to me than she usually did, but I couldn’t be sure. The light was burning on the gallery, the shadows of the camellias and hibiscus waving on the grass. I parked on the edge of the light and cut the engine. The magnolia tree on the far end of the gallery was in late bloom, the fragrance overwhelming. Bailey sat very still, looking straight ahead. I could hear the engine’s heat ticking under the hood.
“Dave?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Do you have regrets? Or rather, do you take them on easily?”
“There are several people I regret not killing.”
“You have a sensitive conscience and a tender heart. Those are not always virtues.”
“I’ll try to be as mean-spirited as I can.”
I saw a grin at the side of her mouth. “I’m weak.”
“About what?”
“Need. You’re a widower. You’re vulnerable.”
“Wrong.”
She turned toward me. The tips of her dark brown hair were aglow in the moonlight. Her mouth looked like a flower about to open.
“Oh, Dave,” she said.
“Oh, Dave what?”
“Just oh, Dave.”
I got out of the truck and walked around the front of it. I opened her door. When she stepped out, I pulled her against me and kissed her shoulder and neck and hair and eyes. Then we walked up the steps inside, closing the door behind us, going straight down the hallway into the bedroom, leaving the light off. It felt strange being in an intimate situation with a woman other than my wife. I turned my back while she undressed.
“Dave?” she said.
The back of my neck was burning. “You have to excuse me. I’m awkward about a lot of things.”
“Turn around,” she said.
The moonlight fell on her through the side window. Her body had the smoothness and radiance of a Renaissance painting. “Are you going to make me feel really dumb?”
“No,” I said. I took off my shirt, trousers, and socks, and we got into bed, each on a side and reaching for the other. Then I pressed her back on the pillow and kissed her on the mouth and on her eyes and on the tops of her breasts. I kissed her thighs and stomach and put her nipples into my mouth and felt her nails in my hair and her breath on my forehead and her legs widening to receive me, then I was deep inside her, the welcoming grace of her thighs embracing mine, her moans and the wet cadence of her body like the iambic beat of a rhyming couplet.
Behind the redness in my eyelids I saw a pink cave filled with gossamer fans, a wave rotating through it, sliding over heart-shaped coral covered with underwater moss that was as soft as felt, deeper and deeper, as though I were dropping through the center of the earth, then I felt my loins dissolve and the light go out of my eyes and my heart twist with such violence that I thought it would burst.
Then I was standing in a place I had seen at a distance but never stood upon. I was at the entrance of a canyon that had turned pink and then magenta, streaked with shadows as the evening sun moved across it. It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, as though I were standing on the lip of Creation or its terminus. A woman was standing next to me. She stepped closer and enveloped me in her cloak and lay back on a bare rug atop a pine bough, and I laid my head on her breast and the two of us rose into the sun, and I closed my eyes and felt my seed go deep inside her, and I put my face between her breasts and kissed the salt on her skin and heard her heart pumping as though it were about to break.
I rose sweaty and hot from Bailey, already longing to enter her again, and for the first time in my life saw what it all meant and realized that I would never allow death to hold claim on me again, and that Bailey Ribbons had perhaps saved me from myself.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I went home that night and left at sunrise and drove down to Cypremort Point, where Desmond Cormier maintained his beautiful home on the tip of the peninsula, where all of this started with the body of Lucinda Arceneaux floating on a wood cross, the chop sliding across her sightless blue eyes.
Why dwell upon the image? Answer: Any homicide cop can deal with sadism or bestiality or wholesale murder when the victims are part of the culture that took their lives. But when the victims are female teenage hitchhikers on their way to New Orleans to see a concert, a young couple forced into the trunk of their own car that was set on fire by two Oklahoma psychopaths, a little boy who was anally raped before he was killed, a mother with her two daughters who trusted a boatman on vacation and were raped and tied to cinder blocks and dropped one at a time into the ocean with their mouths taped, each having to watch the fate of the other, when you see these things up close and personal, you never free yourself from them, and that’s why cops pop pills and spend a lot of time at the watercooler in the morning.
These things are not generic in nature or manufactured incidents found in lurid crime novels. They all happened, and they were all the work of evil men. You can drink, smoke weed, melt your brains with downers or whites on the half-shell, or transfer to vice and become a sex addict and flush your self-respect down the drain. None of it helps. You’re stuck unto the grave, in your sleep and during the waking day. And that’s when you start having thoughts about summary justice — more specifically, thoughts about loading up with pumpkin balls and double-aught bucks and painting the walls.