“He’s laundering money?”
“Probably.”
“Where’s Wexler in all this?”
“We’re just friends.”
“No man is just a woman’s friend.”
She jiggled her fingers at me. “Bye, Dave.”
I went into the kitchen and fixed a sandwich and ate it, drinking simultaneously from the milk carton. I could not remember ever drinking from a milk carton or any container I shared with someone else. There was something loose in my head. Or, better said, like wet paper tearing or wires shorting out or images moving behind a curtain you know you’re not supposed to touch.
I opened the back door to let in Mon Tee Coon, muddy feet included, then walked out in the yard and gazed across the Teche at the celebrants in the park. I had a feeling in my chest that is hard to describe. It was similar to the recurrent nightmare I had as a child when my mother ran off with the man named Mack and my father stayed drunk and bloodied his fists on any man foolish enough to come within an arm’s reach. In the dream, the sky turned to a sheet of carbon paper, then the sun descended over the earth’s rim and time stopped forever, with no transition into a heavenly kingdom or purpose or meaning of any kind. Without knowing it, I had found the quintessence of death, with no ability to explain it to others.
I heard Alafair open the screen door behind me. “I forgot to tell you, the deputy at the evidence locker called,” she said.
“What about?” I asked.
“He just said call him.”
The deputy who oversaw our evidence storage was a kindly old man named Ben Theriot. No one was sure of his age, and his eyes were very bad and his memory not much better, but no one had the heart to force him into retirement.
“How you doin’, Mr. Ben?” I said when I got him on the line.
“Maybe not too good, Dave. ’Member that gym bag you brought in?”
“The one from Desmond Cormier’s place?”
“Yes, suh, that one. I was cleaning the top shelves and I knocked it off. A li’l mint-like t’ing fell out. It must have been wedged in the lining. I ain’t seen it at first and I stepped on it.”
“What is it, exactly?”
“A Nicorette.”
I remembered interviewing Antoine Butterworth in City Park and Butterworth putting a Nicorette on his tongue. “Put it in a Ziploc and we’ll see what the lab can do for us Monday.”
“Dave, I hate to tell you this, but I wasn’t t’inking too good. I just put some lotion on my hands ’cause I got dry skin, and I picked up the mint and dropped it back in the bag.”
I pinched my eyes with my fingers and tried not to react. “Don’t worry about it. The information you’ve given me is helpful on its own.”
“You ain’t just saying that?”
“Use some tweezers to put the mint in a Ziploc and we’ll be fine.”
“T’ank you,” he said.
Maybe we had just blown the first solid evidence we had in the murder of Lucinda Arceneaux, but what do you say to people who are doing their best when their best is not enough? Besides, I didn’t need any more evidence. I had come to believe that if you threw a rock at Desmond or Butterworth or anyone in their vicinity, you would probably hit a guilty man.
There was nothing lighthearted about my sentiment. I could feel a weight the size of a brick in my chest.
“Where you going, Dave?” Alafair said.
“Are Butterworth and Desmond in the park?”
“Everyone is.”
I nodded. “Nice day for it, huh?”
“For what?”
I smiled and shrugged, then went into the backyard and threw pecans at a tree trunk. When I heard her clicking on the keyboard again, I walked down the driveway, got into my truck, and headed up Loreauville Road for Bailey Ribbons’s cottage.
I didn’t try to tell her why I was there, because I wasn’t sure myself. I don’t mean to be too personal, but long ago I made my troth with the Man Upstairs and asked that my sacrifice be acceptable in His sight. I never looked back, even when I fucked my life with a garden rake. I knew the score: You were in the club or you weren’t. For a drunk, loss of sobriety quickly becomes loss of everything you value and love and respect, including your soul and then your life. When you’re sober, you roll the dice with the sunrise. That’s a victory in itself and not one to be taken lightly. It’s glorious to just be part of the action. But control remains an illusion.
Bailey didn’t know what to make of me. It’s funny how she reminded me of a prim girl who had walked out of a frontier schoolhouse. “You came to your senses?” she said. “You gave up the old-man routine?”
“No, I’m still old. But I owe you a debt.”
“What debt?”
“You shared your life with me, kiddo.”
“Call me that again and I’ll slap your face.”
I put my hand on her shoulder. “I’ll always love you. I’ll be there for you any time you need me.”
“God, you’re nuts.”
“Probably.”
“Dave, there’s something in your eyes that’s really troubling.”
“What?”
“You’re going to do something that’s not you.”
“I’ve never found out who I am,” I said. “I don’t think anyone does. That’s the biggest joke of all.”
We were standing in front of her cottage. The wind was blowing her dress against her legs. Her mouth was the color of a bruised plum. I wanted to kiss her, but I knew if I did, I wouldn’t leave. So I told her again I loved the name Bailey Ribbons, and I drove away.
I made a stop at St. Edward’s Church and, before I left, stuck a thick fold of bills into the poor box. Then I headed for City Park, a clock ticking in my head. I knew how the day would end. Or maybe “day” was the wrong term. I was no longer registering the passage of time in minutes or hours or days or weeks or months. I knew I had entered a new season in my life, one that had nothing to do with rotations of the earth. It’s the season when you accept your fate and give up fear and worry and end your lover’s quarrel with the world and follow the foot tracks of hominids into a place that is perhaps already at the tips of your fingers. When that happens to you, you’ll know it, and if you’re wise, you will not try to explain it to others, any more than you would try to explain light to a man born without sight.
As chance would have it, my moment of peace after leaving the church would be intruded upon by the ebb and flow that reduce tragedy to melodrama and a grander vision of the human story to procedural squalor. This came in the form of my cell phone vibrating on the truck seat.
I picked it up, my eyes on the road. “Robicheaux.”
“Where are you, Pops?” Helen said.
“Just coming out of St. Edward’s.”
“Get over to the park. I’ve already sent the bus. I’m not sure what’s going on. Sean McClain is already there. From what he says, Wimple may have done a curtain call.”
“He killed somebody?”
“It sounds too weird for belief. We ROA at the park.”
“Copy that.”
I drove down East Main, past my house and the Shadows, and rumbled across the steel grid of the drawbridge over the Teche, then entered the urban forest we call City Park. If anything was amiss, I couldn’t see it. The celebrants were going at it, the band playing, long lines at the beer kegs and the hard-liquor tables. I drove along the asphalt path toward the far end of the park, then saw an ambulance backed into the trees, its flashers blinking. A cruiser was next to it, its door open, and Sean McClain was standing in the shadows, talking into his mic. I pulled in behind him. A black Subaru convertible with California tags was parked in a dry swale piled with dead leaves and strewn with air vines. The medics were jerking a gurney out of the ambulance.