What does an intelligent investigator do? He doesn’t listen to any of it. The detail that stuck with me from my conversation with Cormac was the Maltese cross on Lautrec’s calf. I used the word “collective” regarding the response to killings. For me, the word is always a pejorative. My father spoke a form of English that was hardly a language, but in Cajun French he could speak insightfully. My favorite of his sayings was “Did you ever see a mob rush across town to do a good deed?”
My feelings were stronger than his. Hobnailed boots in unison never bode well for anyone, and the further down the food chain you get, the more heinous the agenda. The Maltese cross meant Lautrec was on board. But with what? He was neither a leader nor a follower; he was an opportunist, a walking gland, a genetic throwback trying to lure a primitive woman in animal skins away from the fire and into the darkness of the cave. What would frighten him so much that he would bail off a chair and swing back and forth on an electrical cord and not pull his wrists loose from the tape that barely restrained them?
Of course, there was another possibility. Maybe he was guilty. I believed then and I believe now that he was one of those made different in the womb. He enjoyed cruelty and visiting it upon women he couldn’t control. I suspected he was capable of inflicting the kind of damage that had been done to Hilary Bienville before she died. Or he could have been a secondary participant in the attack. He had worked in the parish prison during the previous administration, when inmates were badly abused. Once again, I had no answers. I heard the cops who nailed the Hillside Stranglers never had answers either. Or the ones who nailed BTK in Kansas or the Night Stalker in Los Angeles.
I went down to Bailey’s office, but she had left for the day. I drove to her house. The sun had gone out of the sky, and the rainbow arcing into City Park had evaporated, replaced by smoke from the sugar mill that drifted onto the trees and grass like black lint.
Bailey was in the backyard, playing with her calico cat, who had the male name of Maxwell Gato. She picked up Maxwell and bounced Maxwell’s rump in her palm and handed her to me. Maxwell was a longhair and must have had twenty pounds of fat on her. I bounced her up and down also. The cat closed her eyes. I could feel her purring.
“What’s going on, sailor?” Bailey said.
“Sailor?”
“You don’t like that?”
“That’s what my wife Bootsie used to call me. Did you eat?”
“No. How about I fix us something? Then we might mess around. How’s that?”
“That’s pretty nice.”
But I was hiding my feelings. I didn’t feel right about Bailey. She was an aging man’s wet dream. Beautiful, intelligent, loving, and full of laughter in bed. Pardon me if my remarks are too personal or if they violate good taste. She smelled like flowers and the ocean when she made love, and she moaned like one of Homer’s Sirens. In the last heart-twisting moment, I felt an electric current inside her that seemed to take control of both of us. Her body and mouth and hands and ragged breath and even her nails hooked in my back became a gift, a prayer rather than an erotic act, a moment so intense I wanted to die inside it and never leave. When I rose from her, I felt unworthy of what had just happened in my life.
I watched her at the stove. Her thick brown hair was piled on her head, spiked with two long wooden pins, the kind that women wore during the Victorian era. I had not noticed earlier that her stove was refashioned from one manufactured to burn wood. It had claw feet, and the porcelain was painted with green tendrils, as it would have been in an earlier time.
“Will you quit staring at me?” she said.
“Sorry.”
“Do I remind you of someone else? The wife you lost?”
“You remind me of everything that’s good.”
“No, I can see it in your eyes when you think I’m not looking. I’m someone else to you.”
“I don’t believe that time is sequential,” I said. “I believe the world belongs to the dead as well as the unborn. I’ve seen Confederate soldiers in the mist at Spanish Lake. I’ve wanted to join them.”
“Did you just say what I think you did?”
“I think I stole you from another time. I’m sure that’s what Desmond thinks. I fear someone may take revenge on me by hurting you or Clete or Alafair.”
“You’re talking about Desmond? He’s in jail.”
“For breaking and entering. It won’t stick.”
“I can take care of myself. You get these crazy ideas out of your head. You also need to forget about Confederates in the mist.”
“They’re there. I’ve talked with them. I put my hand through a drummer boy’s shoulder. He was killed at Shiloh.”
Her eyes were empty; I wondered if she was deciding whether to ignore me or to disengage from our relationship. She let in Maxwell Gato, then lifted her up and kissed the top of her head and put her in my arms. “The world belongs to the living, Dave. These things you’re telling me have nothing to do with reality. What’s really on your mind is our relationship. You think you’re too old for me, and you think you’re doing something morally wrong.”
“That’s not true,” I lied.
“You’re in better shape than men who are thirty-five. You’re honest and kind and brave. You think I care about your age?”
“A few years down the road you will.”
“Let me worry about that. What did you mean when you said you stole me out of another time?”
“I think there’re doors in the dimensions.” Maxwell Gato began pushing her back feet into my arm so I would play with her. I gently tugged her tail and bounced her up and down. “I’ve always thought normalcy was overrated.”
Bailey was wearing moccasins. She took Maxwell Gato from me and set her on the floor, then stood on tiptoe and kissed me on the mouth and folded her arms behind my neck. “Do you love me, Dave?”
“Of course.”
“Like a daughter? Because that’s the way you’re talking to me.”
“I love you because you’re one of the best people I’ve ever known, and one of the most beautiful.”
She stood on my shoes and buried her head in my neck, her body shaking.
“Are you all right?” I said.
“I’m always all right. Just hold me.”
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Hold me. Tighter. Please.”
An hour later, she got up from the bed and showered and came back into the bedroom, a towel wrapped around her, her body damp and warm and glowing. She lay down next to me, then cupped her body into mine and held my hand with both of hers and told me what she said she had never told anyone, at least not in detail.
At age seventeen, one year into her widowhood, she had a summer job as a ticket taker for a carnival and rodeo and Wild West show that was headquartered in Louisiana and traveled through the Great American Desert. In the fairgrounds of a small city in Utah rimmed with red cliffs and a green river flanged by cottonwoods, she was tearing tickets at the entrance when she saw three young men sitting on the back of a flatbed truck. They were sweaty and sunbrowned, with physiques as lean as lizards. They wore beat-up black cowboy hats and tight Wranglers and cowboy boots stippled with hay and manure. They grinned as though they knew her; they were drinking soda pop and eating handfuls of pork rinds from a bag. The tallest one pulled a bottle from a cooler and dropped off the flatbed and approached her.