unconscious like a sleeping bat.
'It's going to be all right,' I said, and placed one hand on her shoulder. I could feel the bone through the cloth of her blouse.
But nothing was going to be all right. She lowered her head and exhaled. Then I realized what she was looking at. On the tip of her tennis shoe was a red curlicue of dried blood.
'Why did it have to be a pathetic and frightened little man like Albert?' she said. She swayed slightly on her feet, and her eyes closed, and I saw the tears squeeze out from under the lashes.
I put my arms around her shoulders and patted her softly on the back. Her forehead was pressed against my chest; I could feel the thickness of her hair against my cheek, the thin and fragile quality of her body inside my arms, the brush of her stomach against my loins. On the neighbor's lawn the iron head of a broken garden sprinkler was rearing erratically with the hose's pressure and dripping water into the grass.
I took the door key from her fingers. It felt stiff and hard in my hand.
'I have to go back-home now, Lucinda,' I said. 'Where can we get hold of Zoot?'
Then I turned and saw the car parked at the curb, a two-door white Toyota. The car of Sister Marie Guilbeaux, whose small hands were as white as porcelain and resting patiently on the steering wheel. In the passenger seat sat Bootsie, her face disbelieving, stunned, hurt in a way that no one can mask, as though all the certainties in her life had proved to be as transitory as a photographic negative from one's youth dissolving on top of a hot coal.
chapter twenty-two
Bootsie looked straight ahead as we followed I-10 past the sand flats and dead cypress on the northern tip of Lake Pontchartrain. My mind was racing. None of the day's events seemed to have any coherence.
'I left Motley's and Lucinda's extensions on the answering machine, I left the address of the motel. I didn't imagine it,' I said.
'It wasn't there, Dave.'
'Was there a power failure?'
'How would I know if I wasn't home? It wouldn't have affected the recording, anyway.'
'There's something wrong here, Boots.'
'You're right. Sometimes you worry about other people more than you do your own family.'
'That's a rotten thing to say.'
'Goddamn it, he called while you were out of town looking after this Bergeron woman.'
'Buchalter?'
'Who else?'
'How could he? We just changed the number.'
'It was Buchalter. Do you think I could forget that voice? He even talked about what he did to me.'
I turned and looked at her. Her eyes were shiny in the green glow from the dashboard. A semi passed, and the inside of the pickup was loud with the roar of the exhaust.
'What else did he say?'
'That he'd always be with us. Wherever we were. His voice sounded like he had wet sand in his throat. It was obscene.'
'I think he's a hype. He calls when he's loaded.'
'Why does this woman have to drag you into her investigation?'
'It's my investigation, too, Bootsie. But you're right, I shouldn't have gone. We were firing in the well.'
'I just don't understand this commitment you have to others while a psychopath tries to destroy us.'
'Look, something's out of sync here. Don't you see it? How did the nun, what's her name, get involved in this?'
'She dropped by, that's all.'
'Then what happened?'
'Nothing. What do you mean?'
'Come on, think about it. What
'She used the phone. To call somebody at the hospital, I think.'
'When did Buchalter call?'
'A little later. I tried to get you at your office. That's when the sheriff told me there'd been a shooting. I couldn't just stay at home and wonder what happened to you and wait for Buchalter to call again. Marie and I took Alafair to Batist's, then drove to New Orleans. What else was I supposed to do?'
'Whose idea was it to go to New Orleans?'
'Mine… Both of us, I guess… She saw my anxiety, she was trying to be a friend.'
'How many nuns do you know who gravitate toward trouble, who are always around when it happens?' I said.
She was looking at me now.
'Did you check the machine when you first came in the house?' I asked.
'No.'
'Our new number is written down by the side of the phone, isn't it?'
'Yes.'
'It's time to check out Sister Guilbeaux, Boots.'
'You think she erased your message and called Buc-That's crazy, Dave. She's a good person.'
'Buchalter's flesh and blood. I think somebody close to us is helping him. How many candidates are there?'
Her eyes became fixed on the tunnel of trees ahead. I could see her chest rising and falling as she touched her fingers to her mouth.
The next morning, in my office, I sorted through all the case notes, crime scene photographs, autopsy reports, computer printouts, voice cassettes, rap sheets, convict prison records, and Xeroxes and faxes from other law- enforcement agencies that had anything to do with the vigilante killings, Tommy Lonighan, the Calucci brothers, and Will Buchalter and his followers.
I also called the office of the Catholic diocese in Lafayette. Both the bishop and his assistant were out. The secretary said one of them would return my call later. She was new to the job and was not sure if she knew a Sister Marie Guilbeaux.
I read every document on my desk twice. The more I read, the more ill-defined and confusing the case became.
Clete Purcel had always been a good cop because he kept the lines simple. I took a yellow legal pad and a felt pen from my desk drawer and tried to do the same. It wasn't easy.
The owner of the car repair shop where Zoot and I had been taken by Buchalter had turned out to be an alcoholic right-wing simpleton who had already fled the state on a bigamy charge. It seemed that anyone who might lead us to Buchalter had a way of disappearing or going off-planet.
Tommy Bobalouba's mother had emigrated from Germany and perhaps-had been a member of the Silver Shirts. Tommy wanted to salvage the Nazi U-boat before Hippo Bimstine got to it, and his rhetoric was often anti- Semitic. But in reality Tommy had never had any ideology except making money. He prided himself on his military record and blue-collar patriotism, and didn't seem to have any physical connection with Buchalter.
Why did Buchalter (if indeed it was Buchalter) attempt to ascribe the murder of his followers, the men called Freddy and Hatch, to the vigilante?
Was he involved with the ritualistic killings of black dope dealers in the projects? If not, how many psychological mutants of his potential did New Orleans contain?
Why had Lonighan crossed an old New Orleans ethnic line and gotten mixed up with the Calucci brothers, and did it have anything to do with the vigilante killings?
If you have ever been in psychoanalysis or analytically oriented therapy, you're aware that the exploration of
