Moth

He nodded. “Things so often happen in the wrong order in our lives.”

“How well did you know Verne, Mr. Garces?”

“Richard.”

I pointed inquiringly back toward the doorframe, the name plaque beside it.

“No one outside my family ever calls me Juan. And no one, period, calls me Mr. Garces. But I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“I mean, did the two of you ever talk? About personal things.”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. Once I found out who you were, I naturally assumed … We really should start this whole encounter again from scratch, I think. I assumed you knew LaVerne and I were close. That this was why you came here.”

The phone buzzed. He excused himself, picked it up, listened for a moment, then responded in Spanish that was far too rapid for me to follow. He hung up and penned a note that he added to the board.

“Over the years LaVerne and I became good friends, yes. It happened slowly, very slowly, and without either of us planning or even expecting it. People have always come to me to talk, that’s kind of how I got into all this. But that’s as far as it ever goes. And LaVerne was one to keep her distance; you knew that when you first talked to her. We were both private people. Never mixed much socially with those we work with. Try to keep it professional.”

“But you and Verne…”

“Yeah, and it was funny. I’d always been the one to listen. But after a while-we’d go out for coffee after work, or sometimes later on we’d meet for breakfast in the morning-I found myself babbling on and on about my problems, my previous or current live-in. Or my relationship with my parents, for God’s sake. That had never happened before, and I’ve been doing this work for a long time. Then one morning when the plates have been cleared and we’re sitting there over a final cup of coffee she says to me: I want to tell you about my life, I want someone to know all this.”

“People here didn’t know?”

“What they knew was that this woman had paid her dues at one of the country’s toughest rape centers, and then on her own she had gone back to school and got a degree in psychology and now here she was, twelve or fourteen hours a day sometimes. That’s all they had to know.”

He looked briefly out the window. A jay screamed as it swept across the pane and out of sight.

“I listen, sometimes all day and part of the night, to people’s problems. I know what it’s like out there, and how little I can do. One of my clients, last month her boyfriend fucked their year-old daughter and then slammed her headfirst against the wall ‘so she wouldn’t tell.’ I’ve got pregnant mothers trying to live out of Dumpsters and a shopping cart. And husbands or parents swooping in all the time with their lawyers and threats trying to take my clients’ kids away, always with this same attitude, like if I just’ll listen to them, I’ll know what’s right. I don’t know what’s right, Lew.”

He looked back at me. “I’m sorry. A little off track there. But there are days, and this is one of them, when I have to wonder what my place really is in all this.”

“I understand.”

“Yeah. You pretty much lived it, LaVerne said.”

“Not anymore.”

“Well. Maybe not. Not on the surface, anyway.”

I thought of a review of my third novel, published in a small magazine specializing in mysteries. I’ve had dozens of bad reviews, most of them justified, I’m sure, but that was the only one I ever felt unfair. Cadging personal details from my publisher and a common acquaintance, the reviewer proceeded to ignore my novel and instead to review me, claiming that Black Hornet was nothing more than a record, a document, of my personal failures.

Maybe that reviewer was right. And maybe Richard Garces was right, too. Who knows what evil …? Well, the Shadow do. Or he be sposed to, at any rate.

“Over the next months,” Garces went on, “LaVerne told me what I guess must be her whole life story. Even for me, I have to say, it was something of a revelation. And then, to think that she could come through all that and arrive where she did.”

“She was rather an amazing woman.”

“I don’t think any of us ever quite realized how amazing.”

“We don’t, usually. Not till afterwards. Things happening in the wrong order, like you say.”

“Yeah.” We were both quiet a moment. “She told me one night how she waited for you for over two hours outside, what was it, a bus station? Your friend from Paris-”

“Vicky.”

“-had just gotten on the plane to go back, and I guess this was a little after LaVerne and Guidry split up, when she’d already been working rape-crisis for a while. You hadn’t seen each other, I guess, for a long time by then, and she went down there without any idea what to expect, how you’d react. Or even how she felt about it all herself.”

“ ‘Whatever works. You wait and see.’ ”

“Right. And she told me that that was maybe the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. That she’d never been more afraid than she was that night, and the next few days. I don’t know. But that story has really stayed with me. Whenever I think about making decisions, really hard ones, I still think about that.”

“She ever talk much about when she and Guidry were together?”

He shook his head. “That whole period was kind of walled off. She did once tell me that the whole time she was married to Dr. Guidry she felt she was masked, as for Mardi Gras, and that no one would ever be able to see who she really was, however closely they looked. I remember thinking it was something like the way people remember war experiences: these brief, incredibly concentrated periods of time that become central to their lives and all-consuming, but then that time’s gone and the experiences are essentially meaningless in the everyday practical world around them, and they let them go. Except in a way I guess LaVerne was talking about a period of peace, surrounded by war.”

“You sure of that?”

“Which part?”

“The peace part.”

“You mean, was the period as tranquil as it appeared?”

“Right.”

“Few periods are, really-even after our memory’s got to work on them. But I more or less felt she wanted somehow to preserve that time, keep it apart. Pure, in a manner of speaking.”

“Maybe so. But she and Guidry split, not at all too peacefully from what little I know. So what happened? Did they get along? Were there problems between them, even early on?”

Garces shrugged. “The book’s closed.”

“So maybe we’ll have to go see the movie.”

I stood and thanked him for his time and help. Then in a time-honored tradition stretching back from Columbo at least to Porfiry Petrovich, I thought of one more thing. “So why do you think LaVerne wouldn’t talk about that period with you, when she talked about everything else?”

“I really don’t know any more than I’ve told you.”

“Was there something different about it? Not just that she was chasing the American Dream and it almost caught her. But something-I don’t know-traumatic, maybe?”

He hesitated, but when he glanced at me then, we both knew.

“You mean her daughter.”

I nodded. He exhaled.

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying to mislead you. Hell, of course I was; nothing else I can call it. But LaVerne had told me you didn’t know about Alouette. She didn’t talk about her very much herself. I guess things hadn’t gone well for a long time.”

“And then they didn’t go at all.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

“Did you know LaVerne had tried to get in touch with her daughter? To see her?”