“I’ll come with a warrant if I have to.” I could hear her breathing against the receiver. “Is your husband there, Mrs. Lujan?”
“My husband is in jail. You should know that.”
“No, he’s not.”
She was silent again. Then she said, “What time did he get out?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Find out and call me back,” she said, and hung up.
I rang the jail, then redialed Mrs. Lujan’s number.
“He was out at nine-seventeen a.m.” It was now a quarter to noon.
“Have you seen him since his release?”
“No, ma’am.”
“If you wanted to find him, would you know where to look?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I could give you two or three addresses. Guess which part of town they’re in. Guess who lives at those addresses.”
“I wouldn’t know, Mrs. Lujan.”
“You wouldn’t know? Do you smoke cigarettes?”
“I don’t.”
“Do you know where to buy some?”
This time I didn’t answer.
“My husband is an inflexible man and doesn’t allow smoking in our home. Please buy me a package of Camels and bring them to the house. Can you do that for me, Mr. Robicheaux?”
“My pleasure,” I said.
“Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Yes?”
“Also bring the video. The one you said shows the Darbonne girl at our garden party. Bring that with the cigarettes.”
Thirty minutes later, the maid let me in the front door. Outside, the sun was white in the sky, the windows running with humidity, but the interior of the house was frigid. There was no sign of Bello or his car. Mrs. Lujan gestured at me from the sunporch, her fingers curling back toward her palm.
“Sit,” she said. Then she waited, her eyes on my face.
“You want the cigarettes?” I said.
“Take one out and give it to me.”
I removed the cellophane from the package and slipped a cigarette loose for her. She held it between two fingers and waited. I took a folder of matches from my shirt pocket and lit her cigarette and blew out the match. There was no ashtray on the glass tabletop that separated me from her wheelchair, and I set the match on the edge of a coffee saucer and placed the package of cigarettes next to it. She turned her face to one side when she exhaled the smoke, then looked at me quizzically. “You think I’m strange?” she said.
“It’s not my job to make those kinds of judgments.”
“Put the video in the machine,” she said.
I shoved the cassette into the VCR and watched the first images come up on the screen. She continued to smoke as I fast-forwarded the tape, her eyes rheumy, sunken like green marbles into bread dough. She seemed to radiate sickness in the same way that an unchanged bandage or an infected wound does. I even wondered if the diminution of her bone structure had less to do with an automobile accident than a cancerous anger that lived inside her.
I stopped the tape on the garden party, backed it up, and recommenced it. Once again, Yvonne Darbonne was dancing to the signature composition of John Lee Hooker, her shoulders powdered with freckles, her pug nose turned up at the sky.
“That’s the girl who shot herself?” Mrs. Lujan said.
“Do you remember her?”
“She was pretty. Tony brought her here. Then he left, and she was dancing by herself. She was wearing that tank top. She spilled sangria on it.”
“Go on.”
“I was watching the dancers from the upstairs window. She looked up at me and smiled and pointed at the stain on her top. It was wet and dark on the material. Her breasts were molded against the cloth and I remember thinking she didn’t belong out there, at least not with the likes of Slim Bruxal. I waved at her to come inside. I wanted to give her a clean blouse to wear.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I saw her talk to Slim, then to Bello. She walked under the orange tree, below my line of vision, then I couldn’t see her anymore. I heard the door slam. The side door is right under my bedroom, and when it slams I can always feel the vibration through the floor. So I know she went into the house. Then I heard the door slam a second time.”
Mrs. Lujan drew in on the cigarette and blew out the smoke and watched it flatten against the window. Her makeup was caked, her mouth stitched with wrinkles that were as thin as cat’s whiskers, her eyes looking at an image, imagined or real, trapped inside her head.
“Who followed Yvonne Darbonne into the house?” I asked.
“There’s a game room behind the den. Bello keeps the curtains drawn so the western sun doesn’t get in. It’s the place where he goes to be alone. I heard something thump against the wall down there. I kept waiting to hear another thump, the way you do when a sound wakes you up in the middle of the night. But I didn’t. All I heard were voices.”
“Voices?”
“I heard a girl’s. I heard it come up through the pipe in the lavatory. It was loud, then it stopped, and I couldn’t hear anything except the sound of water running. I think somebody turned on the shower down there. I can always tell when it’s the shower in the game room. The stall is made of tin. The water makes a drumming sound on the sides. I wanted to think she was just taking a shower. But that’s not why somebody turned on the water, is it?”
I waited before I spoke again. “What do you think happened down there, Mrs. Lujan?”
“I used the intercom to call Sidney, the colored man in the kitchen. It took over fifteen minutes to get him up here. I told him to go down to the game room and see who was in there. But he refused.”
“Pardon?”
“He said he had left a tray of drinks on the landing and had to take them out on the lawn before somebody tripped on them. But I knew he was lying.”
“I’m not with you.”
“ Sidney couldn’t look at me. His eyeballs kept rolling around in his head. I told him to stop acting like Stepin Fetchit and get down there. Ten minutes later I called him on the intercom again. He still hadn’t gone into the game room.”
“Why wouldn’t he do as you told him, Mrs. Lujan?”
She wore dentures, and they looked hard and stiff inside her mouth, her flesh by contrast soft and trembling against them. “Because he was afraid of what he would have to tell me. Because he was afraid of my goddamn husband,” she said.
Her eyes were moist now, the flat of her fist pressed against her mouth.
“There’s something else I have to ask you, Mrs. Lujan,” I said.
When she looked up at me, the whites of her eyes were threaded with tiny red lines.
“I think Colin Alridge has knowledge about your son’s death. I think he may know why Tony was murdered. I believe you gave Alridge information you won’t give us,” I said. “Monarch Little didn’t kill your boy, did he?”
She stared into space, as though reviewing all the words she had said and listened to and all the images her own words had caused her to see inside her head and the confession of personal failure and inadequacy she had just made to a stranger. Her face grew still and composed and she looked up at me again, this time her eyes free of pain, her thoughts clear.
