small sip from the water glass and placed the box of candy on the arm of the couch. 'Before I go, could I show you something? It'd mean a lot to me.'
The hair on his forearms looked golden and soft, like down, in the shaft of sunlight that fell through the side window. He removed a silver leather-bound scrapbook from the paper bag and rested it in his lap.
'It'll only take a minute,' he said.
'I'm a little behind in my work today.'
'Please. Then I won't bother y'all any more.'
'Well, for just a minute,' she said.
She sat down next to him, her legs crossed, her hands folded on her knee.
'I know that Mr. Bimstine has talked to Dave, but unfortunately he's sometimes not a truthful man,' he said.
'Bimstine?'
'Yes, Hippo Bimstine. Sometimes he has a way of concealing what he's really up to. I'm afraid it might just be another racial characteristic with him and some of his friends.'
'I'm not making the connection. I'm not sure of what you're doing here, either.'
He patted his palms lightly on the silver leather of the scrapbook.
'I don't want to say something that's offensive to anyone,' he said. 'But Mr. Bimstine lies about the causes he serves. I doubt that he's told your husband he raises money for Israel.'
'You had better come back later and talk to Dave about this.'
'You're misunderstanding me. I didn't come here to criticize Mr. Bimstine. I just wanted to show you how a hoax can be created.' His thumb peeled back several stiff pages of the scrapbook to one that contained two clipped-out newspaper photographs of men in striped prison uniforms and caps, staring out at the camera from behind barbed wire. Their faces were gaunt and unshaved, their eyes luminous with hunger and fear. 'These are supposed to be Jews in a German extermination camp in nineteen forty-four. But look, Mrs. Robicheaux.' He flipped to the next page. 'Here are the same photographs as they appeared in a Polish newspaper in nineteen thirty-one. These were Polish convicts, not German political prisoners. This is all part of a hoax that was perpetrated by British Intelligence… I'm sorry. Have I upset you about something?'
'I mistook you for someone else,' she said rising to her feet. 'I have to go somewhere now.'
'Where?'
'That's not your… Please go now.'
He rose to his feet. His face looked down into hers, only inches away. For the first time she noticed that there were blackheads, like a spray of pepper,- at the corners of his eyes.
'I only wanted to help,' he said. 'To bring you and your husband some information that you didn't have before. You invited me in.'
'I thought you were someone else,' she repeated. 'It's not your fault. But I want you to leave.'
'I'd like to help you, if you'd let me.'
'I'm going out the door now. If you don't leave, I'll call-'
'Who? That black man washing fish? I think you're very tense. You don't need to stay that way, Mrs. Robicheaux. Believe me.'
'Please get out of my way.'
He rested both of his hands on her shoulders and searched in her eyes as a lover might. 'How does this feel?' he asked, then tightened his fingers on her muscles and inched them down her back and sides, widening his knees slightly, flexing his loins.
'You get away from me. You disgusting-' she said, his breath, the astringent reek of his deodorant washing over her.
'I wouldn't hurt you in any way. You're a lovely woman, but your husband is working for Jews. Hush, hush, now, I just want to give you something to remember our little moment by.'
His arms encircled her waist, locking hand-on-wrist in the small of her back, tightening until she thought her rib cage would snap. He bent her backwards, smothering her body with his, then pushed his tongue deep inside her mouth. He held her a long moment, and as he did, he clenched her left kidney with one hand, like a machinist's vise fastening on a green walnut, and squeezed until yellow and red patterns danced behind her eyes and she felt urine running from her shorts.
She sat cross-legged and weeping against the wall, her face buried in her hands as he started his red convertible in the drive, tuned his radio, and backed out into the dirt road, the dappled sunlight spangling on the waxed finish of his car.
chapter seven
There was no record of a Will Buchalter with the New Iberia city police or the sheriffs department or with the state police in Baton Rouge. No parish or city agency in New Orleans had a record of him, either, nor did the National Crime Information Center in Washington, D.C. Nor could Bootsie identify him from any of the mug shots at the Iberia Parish sheriff's office.
Our fingerprint man lifted almost perfect sets of prints from the water glass used by the man who called himself Will Buchalter, from the record jackets he'd touched, and from the box of candy he'd left behind. But without a suspect in custody or corresponding prints on file, they were virtually worthless.
There was another problem, too, one that many victims of a sexual assault discover. Sexual crimes, as they are defined by our legal system, often fall into arbitrary categories that have nothing to do with the actual degree of physical pain, humiliation, and emotional injury perpetrated on the victim. At best we would probably only be able to charge the man who called himself Will Buchalter with misdemeanor battery, committed under circumstances that would probably make a venal defense lawyer lick his teeth.
I called Hippo Bimstine early the next morning, then drove to New Orleans and met him at his house in the Carrollton district by the levee. He sat in a stuffed red velvet chair by the front window, which reached from the floor to the ceiling, and kept fooling with a cellophane-wrapped cigar that was the diameter of a twenty-five-cent piece. His hair was wet and freshly combed, parted as neatly as a ruled line down the center of his head. His lower stomach bulged like a pillow under his slacks. Hanging on the wall above the mantel was a gilt-framed photograph of Hippo and his wife and their nine children, all of whom resembled him.
'How about sitting down, Dave?' he said. 'I don't feel too comfortable with a guy who acts like he was shot out of a cannon five minutes ago.'
'He knew you.'
'So do a lot of people. That doesn't mean I know them.'
'Who is he, Hippo?'
'A guy who obviously doesn't like Jews. What else can I tell you?'
'You'd better stop jerking me around.'
'How about a Dr Pepper or something to eat? Look, you think I rat-fuck my friends? That's what you're telling me, I set you up for some lowlife to come in your house and molest your wife?'
'He said you were raising money for Israel.'
'Then he's full of shit. I'm an American businessman. The big word there is
'How do you know he's a Nazi?'
'I took a wild guess.'
'What's in that sub?'
'Seawater and dead krauts. Jesus Christ, how do I know what's in there? Like I've been down in German submarines?' He looked at me a long moment, started to unwrap his cigar, then dropped it on the coffee table and stared out the window at a solitary moss-strung oak in his front yard. 'I'm sorry what this guy did to your wife. I don't know who he is, though. But maybe there're more of these kinds of guys around than you want to believe, Dave. Come on in back.'
