“You with us, Dave?” Helen said.
“Sure.”
“What do you think?”
“About what?”
She froze the screen. “About what you just watched, for Christ’s sake.”
“O’Banion’s ticket got punched. So did the woman and the guy who has a face like a speedbag. Who are they?”
“We don’t know yet,” she said. “Boy, you’re a ball of sunshine.”
“The issue is the guy in the mask,” I said.
“Duh,” she said.
“He’s an amateur,” I said.
“Amateur how?” Bailey said.
“He messed up with the spray can,” I said. “Rather than admit he messed up, he tried to hide the can and let the others be identified. Eventually, they would have given him up.”
“Maybe they weren’t going to be alive much longer,” Bailey said.
“Maybe,” I said.
“What’s with the sign language?” she asked.
“That and lip reading are invaluable in prison,” I said.
“So the guy in the mask doesn’t care about loyalties?” Bailey said. “Somebody with no feelings? A hard case, a real piece of shit?”
“You don’t have to use that language,” I said.
Helen was looking at both of us now. “What is this?”
“Just making an observation,” Bailey said.
“Whatever is going on with you two, leave it at the door,” Helen said.
The room was quiet.
Bailey coughed under her breath. “Everyone is sure that’s Wimple who climbed out of the laundry cart?”
“He left his brass,” Helen said. “The prints on them are his.”
“I thought he was a pro,” Bailey said. “Why wouldn’t he pick up his casings?”
“He was wounded,” I said.
They both looked at me. “Where’d you get this information?” Helen said.
“A friend of Clete’s,” I said. “A waitress.”
“Why didn’t she tell the investigator at the scene?” Helen said.
“Because the investigator is a troglodyte,” I replied.
“How bad is Wimple hurt?” Helen said.
“From what the waitress said, he was bleeding from his side.”
“I don’t get any of this,” Helen said. “Wimple is a psychopath, but he’s protecting Clete? And Jaime O’Banion was taking orders from an amateur who cost him his life?”
“That about sums it up,” I said.
“And?” she said.
“The guy in the mask is not a noun,” I said.
“I’m not in the mood, Dave,” she said.
“Read it like you want,” I said. “Nothing we do is going to change what’s happening.”
Helen looked at Bailey. “Do you have any idea what he’s saying?”
Bailey shook her head. But I saw it in her eyes. She knew exactly what I was saying, and I knew at that moment that neither of us would ever be able to separate entirely from the other, no matter how great our differences.
“Let me know if I can help you with anything else, Helen,” I said.
I got up and walked down the corridor to my office. I knew it was probably a self-indulgent act and stupid on top, but I didn’t care. I stood at my window and gazed at the Teche. It was high and yellow and running fast, a cluster of red swamp-maple leaves spinning in the current and disappearing around a corner as though dropping into infinity. I wondered if I wasn’t watching a message, one requiring us to acknowledge not only the lunar influences on the tide but the place to which we all must go.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Five minutes later, Bailey came through my door without knocking. “You just walk out? On the case? On you and me? On everything?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” I said.
“Oh, really?”
“I’m not right for you, Bailey. I was deceiving you and myself.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”
I looked at the bayou again. The light was gold in the trees along the bank, the grass a pale green, the camellia bushes swelling in the wind. The surface of the water seemed to shrivel like old skin. When I turned around, she was six inches from my face. “I want to pound you with my fists,” she said.
“I don’t blame you.”
“Are you having a psychotic break?”
“You knew what I was talking about with Helen.”
“About the guy in the mask not being a noun?”
“Yes.”
“You’re saying he’s a symbol? Something we turned loose on ourselves? So what?”
“I know who he is. I just can’t prove it. I can almost see him in my mind.”
“I think you’re slipping your mooring,” she said.
“I’m a detail or two away.”
“If you knew who our guy was, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” I didn’t answer. She looked into my eyes. “Don’t you dare, Dave.”
“Clete feels the same way.”
“I don’t care what you feel. Neither one of you is an executioner.”
I left her standing there and walked out of my own office.
“You hear me?” she called down the hallway.
I kept walking, down the stairs, through the foyer, and out the rear exit and into the brightness and the cold of the day and the tannic odor of late autumn on the wind.
That night, Alafair came in late. I was reading under a lamp in the living room. Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon were curled up with each other on the rug.
“I called you a couple of times,” I said. “Where were you?”
“With Desmond and some of the crew,” she replied. “We have to go back to Arizona and reshoot a couple of scenes.”
“Now is not a good time to be around Desmond.”
“I work for him.”
“Smiley Wimple is in the vicinity. He’s badly wounded. I think he’s going to paint the walls before he goes out.”
“What does that have to do with Desmond?”
“Everything.”
“You’re fixated, Dave. You don’t see it.”
“Fixated on what?”
“The destruction of the world you grew up in.”
“I’m supposed to ignore it?”
“You’re also fixated on Bailey Ribbons,” she said.
“She has nothing to do with this.”
“You got yourself into a relationship that you feel is wrong. You see her as a symbol rather than as a woman. You feel guilty about loving all the things you love. How fucked up is that?”
“Don’t use that language in our house.”
“Sorry, I’ll go across the street and send you semaphores through the window.”
I put down the book I was reading and went into the kitchen. Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon followed me, probably thinking they would get a snack.
“I didn’t mean it, Dave,” Alafair said from the doorway.
“What was that about semaphores?”
“Nothing. I was just grabbing a word out of nowhere.”
“Do you work with anyone who knows sign language?”
“I’ve never seen anyone on the set use it.”
“The guy who almost killed Clete knows sign language. He was using it to communicate with Jaime O’Banion at the motel.”
“Why are you coming down on Desmond?”
“Because he’s dirty. Because he lies. Just like all the people who prey on us.”
“You’ll never change,” she said.
I spread newspaper on the floor and opened a can of sardines and put it down for Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon.
“Answer my question, Dave. In what way is Desmond dirty?”
She was leaning against the doorframe, her black hair auraed with lights from the streetlamps on Main, her weight slouched on one foot, her jeans hanging low on her lips. It was hard to believe that this tall beautiful woman was the little Salvadoran girl I’d pulled from an air bubble trapped inside a sunken airplane off Southwest Pass.