don't let any man talk down to me because I'm a Jew, Dave. I don't want you in my store.'
'I'll try my best to stay out of your life.' He went back behind the counter and began knocking open rolls of change and shaking them into the cash drawer. Then he stopped and slammed the drawer shut with the flat of his pudgy hand. I walked outside, my face burning, the eyes of a half dozen people fastened upon me.
Lucinda Bergeron was sanding the wood steps on the back of her house. The air was sunny and warm, and her hair looked damp and full with the heat from her body and her work. She wore flip-flops and a denim shirt that hung over her pink shorts, and blades of grass stuck to the tops of her feet. She kept glancing up at me while she sanded. The tiny gold chain and cross around her neck were haloed with perspiration against her black skin.
'You go back on duty tomorrow?' I said.
'That's right. All sins forgiven.'
'How do you feel?'
'You know, one foot in front of the other, a day at a time, all that jazz.'
I brushed off a step where she had already sanded and sat down. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and wrapped a fresh piece of sandpaper around a block of wood. She made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and smoothed the paper against the grain.
'I want you to be careful, Lucinda.'
'Worry about yourself, hotshot.'
'It's a mistake to be cavalier about Buchalter, or Schwert, or whatever his name is. There's nothing predictable about this guy or the woman working with him.'
She raised her eyes to mine while her arm and hand kept a steady motion against the step, 'I can't tell you how much I'd love the opportunity,' she said.
'When you're forced to… to pop a cap in the line of duty, something happens to you, at least if you're not a sociopath yourself. The next time it goes down, you get sweaty, you hesitate, you doubt your motivations. It's a dangerous moment.'
'You think I'll freeze up?'
'You tell me.'
'I don't have doubts about the man who hurt my child, believe me.'
'When are you going to quit calling Zoot a child?'
'When I feel like it, Mr. Smart-ass.' She smiled, then worked the nozzle loose from the hose, turned on the faucet, and drank, with her body bent over, the backs of her thighs tight against her shorts, the water arching bright across her mouth. She wet a paper towel and wiped her face and neck and dropped it into a paper sack filled with garden cuttings.
'I have some tea made. Come inside,' she said.
The porcelain and yellow plastic surfaces of her kitchen gleamed in the sunlight through the windows, and the sills rang with red and blue dime-store vases. I sat at the breakfast table and watched her twist a handful of ice cubes in a towel and batter them on a chopping board with a rolling pin, then fill two tall glasses with the crushed ice and mint leaves and tea. The straps of her bra made a hard line across the wash-faded thinness of her denim shirt.
She turned toward me with the drink glasses in each hand. Her eyes looked at mine, and her expression sombered. She sat down across from me and folded her hands.
'I think you're a good person, Dave. That means some things aren't your style,' she said.
'I look like I have a clandestine agenda?'
'I've lived single for a long time. You recognize certain things in people. Even without being told.'
'I don't know if that's too complimentary.'
'Purcel was here yesterday.'
'There's a warrant on him.'
'I'm still suspended. I should worry about a warrant on Clete Purcel?'
'Why was he here?'
'He says one of the Caluccis' greasers will testify Nate Baxter's on a pad. He told me about your trouble at home.'
'Maybe some people should stay out of my private life.'
'Oh, that's perfect. Your closest friends shouldn't worry about you or try to help you?'
I felt my lips crimp together. I looked away from her unrelenting stare.
I stood up and took my seersucker coat off the back of the chair.
'Give me a call if Buchalter shows up,' I said, and walked toward the front door.
She followed me. The sun made slats of light on her face, causing her to squint as she looked up at me.
'Don't leave like this,' she said.
I took a breath. Her hair was scintillated with silver threads and curved thickly on her cheeks.
'What am I supposed to say, Lucinda?'
'Nothing. You're a good man. Good men don't need to say anything.'
The door was wide open so that nothing she did was hidden from view. She put her arms around my neck and bent my face to hers, raising herself on the balls of her feet, her knees pinching together, her thighs flexing and pressing against me unavoidably; then she kissed me on the cheeks, the bridge of the nose, the eyes, and finally once, a light adieu, on the mouth, as her hands came loose from my neck and my face felt as though it were covered with hot red dimes.
chapter twenty-seven
The chorus that condemns violence is multitudinous and unrelenting. Who can disagree with the sentiment? I think we're after the wrong enemy, though. It's cruelty, particularly when it's mindless and visited upon the defenseless, that has always bothered me most about human failure. But my viewpoint isn't exceptional. Anyone in law enforcement, social work, or psychiatric rehab of any kind carries with him or her a mental notebook whose pages never dim with the years.
Sometimes in the middle of the night I remember cases, or simply incidents, of twenty years ago that come aborning again like sins which elude remission, except either the guilt is collective in nature or the deed such a pitiful and naked admission of our tribal ignorance and inhumanity that the mere recognition of it leads to self- loathing.
Stephen Crane once suggested that few people are nouns; instead, most of us are adverbs, modifying a long and weary sequence of events in which the clearly defined culprit, with black heart and demonic intent, seldom makes himself available for the headsman.
I remember: a cop in the Lafayette police station laughing about how a friend rubbed his penis all over a black woman's body; a black street gang who videotaped their beating of a retarded Pakistani so they could show their friends their handiwork; an infant burned all over his body, even between his toes, with lighted cigarettes; a prosperous middle-class couple who forced the husband's parents to eat dog food; high school kids who held a drunk against a barroom picture window, then punched him through the glass; women and children sodomized, a coed shot through the face in Audubon Park (after she had surrendered her money), animals set on fire, a wounded cop flipped over on his back by his assailant, who then put a pillow under his head and slit his throat with a string knife.
I sincerely believe that we're attracted to films about the Mafia because the violence and evil portrayed in them seems to have an explanation and a beginning and an end. It's confined to one group of people, who in their fictional portrayal even have tragic proportions, and we're made to believe the problem is not endemic to the species.
But I think the reality is otherwise.
A random act of cruelty opened a door in the case I probably would not have gone through by myself.
It had started to sprinkle when I stopped at Igor's on St. Charles for a po'-boy sandwich and to call Bootsie and tell her I was headed home.
