Customers at other tables turned and looked at us.
“What’s your opinion?” I said.
“It doesn’t matter. I should have called 911 when I saw a guy in jailhouse whites bail off the train.”
“We can’t be sure the guy was Tillinger. Why would he jump off in the Mermentau River? Why wouldn’t he keep going until he was in Florida?”
“I checked that out. There were some gandy dancers working on the track. He could see them from the top of the boxcar. Helen is pretty hot about this, isn’t she?”
“You’re a good cop, Clete. She knows that.”
“I’m not a cop. I blew it.”
“Don’t say that. Not now. Not ever.”
He looked at nothing. The whites of his eyes were shiny and tinged with a pink glaze. He glanced up at the air-conditioning vent. “It’s too cold in here. Let’s take a walk. I feel like I walked through cobwebs. Sorry about the way Travis talked to you. He was a bar of soap in the shower at Huntsville.”
As always, I walked to work the next morning. Desmond Cormier was waiting for me in the shady driveway that led past the city library and the grotto devoted to the mother of Jesus. He was sitting in the passenger seat of a Subaru convertible with California plates driven by Antoine Butterworth.
Desmond got out and shook my hand. His friend winked at me. “I have to talk with you, Dave,” Desmond said.
I didn’t answer. Butterworth lifted a gold-tipped cigarette from the car’s ashtray, took one puff, and flipped it into the flower bed surrounding the grotto.
“I feel so foolish,” Desmond said. He was wearing tennis shorts and a yellow T-shirt and a panama straw hat. “About that business with the telescope and the woman on the cross. My right eye is weak and I have a cataract on the left. That’s why I didn’t see her. I should have explained.”
“How about your friend there? He didn’t see her, either.”
“It’s just his way,” Desmond said. “He’s contrary. He’s been in a couple of wars. Somalia and the old Belgian Congo. You’d find him quite a guy if you’d give him a chance. Have lunch with us.”
“Another time.”
“Dave, you were one of the few I looked up to.”
“Few what?”
“The regular ebb and flow.”
“There’s some pretty good people here, Desmond.”
“See you around, I guess.”
“You ever hear of a guy named Hugo Tillinger?” I asked.
“No. Who is he?”
“An escaped convict. He knew the dead woman. He may be in the vicinity.”
“I wish I could be of help,” he said. “This is an awful thing.”
“Before you go — that still shot you have on your wall of Henry Fonda standing on the roadside saying goodbye to Clementine?”
“What about it?”
“That scene is about failed love, about the coming of death, isn’t it?”
“For me it’s about the conflict between light and shadow. Each seeks dominion. Neither is satisfied with its share.”
I looked at him. I didn’t try to follow his line of thought. “I saw the picture at the Evangeline Theater in 1946. My mother took me.”
He nodded.
“I think a scene like that could almost take a guy over the edge,” I said.
“I never heard it put that way.”
“It’s strange what happens when a guy gets too deep into his own mind,” I said.
“Maybe you think too much,” he said.
“Probably.” I reached down and picked up the burning cigarette Butterworth had thrown in the flower bed. I mashed it out on the horn button of the Subaru and stuck it in Butterworth’s shirt pocket. “We’re heck on littering.”
Butterworth grinned. “In Louisiana?”
The pair of them drove away, the sunlight spangling on the windshield.
I couldn’t get the still shot of Wyatt Earp and Clementine out of my mind. I could almost hear the music from the film blowing in the trees.
I had another surprise waiting for me at the rear entrance to city hall. Travis Lebeau was slouched against the brick wall, in the shade, picking his nails. “Hey.”
“What’s the haps?” I said.
“Need to bend your ear.”
“Come upstairs.”
“How about down by the water? I’m not big on visiting cop houses.”
I looked at my watch. When it comes to encouraging confidential informants, there is no greater inducement than a show of indifference. “I’m under the gun.”
“I’ve got a bull’s-eye on my back,” he replied.
I walked down the bayou’s edge and let him follow. “Say it.”
“There’s a couple of AB guys who know where I am. Give me five hundred. I’ll give you Tillinger.”
“The same guy you stood up for?”
“I’m in a spot,” he said, his eyes leaving mine. “He liked to drop names.”
“People Lucinda Arceneaux knew?”
He looked sideways and blew out a breath. “Yeah, people she knew.”
“Which people?”
“How about the money?”
“You haven’t given me anything, Travis.”
He scratched his forearms with both hands, like a man with hives. “I got to score, straighten out the kinks,” he said. “I’ll make good on my word.”
“You’re an addict?”
“No, I’m Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road.”
“Can’t help you, partner.”
I turned to go.
“Maybe I exaggerated a little,” he said.
“About what?”
“Tillinger. He creeped me out.”
“In what way?”
“The way sex between men bothered him. He had a crazy look in his eyes when he’d hear a couple of guys getting it on. You ever know a guy like that who probably wasn’t queer himself? Sometimes he’d burn himself with matches. He talked about casting out our demons and raising the dead.”
“Would he hurt Lucinda Arceneaux?”
He shook his head slowly, as though he couldn’t make a decision. “I don’t know, man. I can’t go in somebody’s head.”
“In reality, you don’t have anything to sell, do you.”
He didn’t know what to say. I started up the slope.
“Two hunnerd,” he said at my back.
I kept walking. He caught up with me and pulled on my shirt. “You don’t understand. They’ll use a blowtorch. I saw them do it in a riot.”
“Sorry.”
“Maybe the chocolate drop led him on. Maybe Tillinger lost it. Come on, man, I got to get out of town.”
“You need to take your hand off my arm.”
“Come on, man. I’m hurting.”
“Life’s a bitch.”
His face made me think of a piece of blank paper crumpling on hot coals. Cruelty comes in all forms. It’s least attractive when you discover it in yourself.
I walked home for lunch. A cherry-red Lamborghini was parked in the driveway. Alafair was eating at the kitchen table with a middle-aged man I had never seen. A plate of deviled eggs and two avocado-and-shrimp sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and a glass of iced tea with mint leaves in it had obviously been set for me. But she had not waited upon my arrival before she and her friend started eating.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hey, Dave,” she said. “This is Lou Wexler. He has to get to the airport, so we started without you.”
Wexler was a tall, thick-bodied man with a tan that went to the bone and blond hair sun-bleached on the tips. He was ruggedly handsome, with intelligent eyes and large hands and the kind of confidence that sometimes signals aggression. He wiped his fingers with a napkin before rising and shaking hands. “It’s an honor.”
“How do you do, sir?” I said, sitting down, glancing out the window at the bayou. My manner was not gracious. But no father, no matter how charitable, trusts another man with his daughter upon first introduction. If he tells you he does, he is either lying or a worthless parent.