extension. “I got an FBI gal out here in shades and a suit and wit’ top-heavy knockers. What you want me to do wit’ her?” he said.
“Wally, what in God’s name-” I began.
“She’s in the can. She cain’t hear me.”
“That’s not the point. This is supposed to be a professional-”
“She backed her car into a cruiser in the parking lot. Helen’s outside looking at it now. I’ll send her up to your office.”
I walked to the window and looked down on Helen Soileau and a group of uniformed deputies staring at the crushed front end of a cruiser. A stream of green radiator fluid was draining into a pool on the asphalt. Behind me, someone tapped on my door. I looked through the glass at a tall woman in a powder-blue suit with hair the bright color of straw. She had propped one hand against the wall and was pulling off her shoe. When I opened the door, she looked up at me awkwardly, her left shoe gripped in her hand, the sole splayed with a flattened piece of pink bubble gum. “Yuck, I hate it when that happens,” she said.
“Can I help you?” I said.
“I’m Special Agent Betsy Mossbacher. Phew, what a day,” she replied, straightening up, then walking past me to the window, one shoe on, one shoe off. She looked down at the parking lot. “Oh, jeez.”
“You’re here about the bills from the Mobile savings and loan job?”
“Yeah, I’m getting off to kind of a bad start here. I just interviewed the Klein woman. You knew her father was killed in an armored car robbery? Can I sit down?”
“Yes,” I said, uncertain as to which question I had just answered.
She sat in a chair by the side of my desk and began prying gum off her shoe with a pencil and wiping it onto a piece of paper over my wastebasket. “The Klein woman talked with you about her father?”
“She didn’t have to. He was a friend of mine. I saw him killed.”
Her face became thoughtful, her eyes looking into space, even though she kept digging gum off her shoe with her pencil. “You were the off-duty cop in front of the bar, right?”
I felt myself swallow. “You obviously ran my sheet, so why do you ask?”
“You were pinned down while these guys were shooting at you?”
“I was drunk.”
She dropped her pencil in the wastebasket and fitted on her shoe. “I have to wash my hands,” she said.
I was having a hard time assimilating Special Agent Betsy Mossbacher. She seemed to combine ineptitude with abrasiveness and a way of speaking that required a cryptologist to understand what she was saying. Maybe Homeland Security had drained the FBI of its first team, I told myself. Or perhaps a case coordinator was sending her into the hinterland as a training exercise. Or maybe the investigation into two dye-marked bills was not only a waste of time but a way of getting Betsy Mossbacher out of somebody’s hair. When she returned from the restroom, she blew out her breath, as though she had just completed a herculean task. “Quite a coincidence this gal ends up in your backyard, huh?” she said.
“The rim of the Gulf Coast is all one culture.”
She seemed to chew the inside of her cheek. “Did you know Trish Klein roams around half of this country as well as Latin America?”
“No.”
“She inherited a boxcar load of money from her grandmother. She owns beautiful horses. She’s educated and has taste. But she says she got the hot bills at a low-rent hotel-and-casino in Mississippi, the kind of dump a roofers’ union uses for its conventions. Does that make sense to you?”
“Check out her friends. They’re like people who met at a bus depot and decided to live together,” I said.
“You knew the savings and loan was a laundry for the Mob?”
I could feel my irritability growing. “So what?” I said.
“Maybe somebody squeezed Trish Klein’s father and made him give up the armored car schedule.”
“ Dallas owed a lot of money to some bad dudes. I told this to the Feds many years ago.”
“Was one of them a bookie by the name of Whitey Bruxal?”
“Since you came in here you’ve been asking me questions you already know the answer to. You saying maybe I don’t tell the truth?”
She walked to the window again and gazed down on the cruiser she had struck. “You ever mess with cows?” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“In calving season you spend about six weeks learning about natural and unnatural law.”
“You lost me,” I said.
“The cows have got sunburned bags and you’ve got shit, piss, and blood up to your right armpit. You hardly sleep, you’re cold most of the time, and you hear animals bawling day and night. When the mommies reject their calves, you graft the orphans to another mommy. You throw everybody a lot of cottonseed cake and pull it off and feel you’ve done a real good deed. Then one day you ship the whole bunch to the slaughterhouse. Some irony, huh?”
“I’ve always been poor at allegory,” I said.
“The point is our best efforts are seldom good enough. You told Miami-Dade P.D. your buddy Dallas Klein was probably working with the men who boosted his armored car. Consciously or unconsciously, I think you blamed yourself for his death. Are you still carrying guilt, Detective Robicheaux? Is that why you seem to have a remarkable lack of curiosity about his daughter’s behavior?”
She put a bright piece of red candy in her mouth and sucked on it. I looked her evenly in the eyes but did not answer her question, a bubble of anger rising in my chest like an old friend.
“Well,” she said finally, then turned to go, somehow saddened, even aged, by our exchange.
“Where are you from?” I said.
“ Chugwater, Wyoming.”
“They must be frank as hell in Chugwater, Wyoming.”
“That’s what happens when you mess with cows,” she replied.
I didn’t need this.
Chapter 4
THAT EVENING I TOOK Yvonne Darbonne’s diary home with me, and after supper walked down to the bayou with a folding chair and began to reread the thirty pages of entries that offered a small glimpse into the soul of an eighteen-year-old Cajun girl who had fallen in love with the world.
The last four pages contained the following entries:
We ate ice cream on the square in St. Martinville and walked out on the dock behind the old church. The moon was high above the oaks, and the moss looked like silver thread against the moon. He kissed me and wrapped me inside his coat. I could feel him against me, down there…
Today we took a boat out to his father’s camp in the swamp. I know he wants to do it, but he’s afraid to ask. He touched my breast, then said he was sorry. I told him it’s not wrong if people love each other. His eyes are dark brown, the way water is when starlight is trapped inside it. He hasn’t asked me if I’m a virgin. I wonder if he’ll think less of me. His goodness is in everything he does…
Last night he introduced me to his friends. They’re nice boys, I think, except for one. He has a hawk’s eyes and a mouth that always looks hungry. I saw him watching me in the mirror when he thought no one was looking.
But Yvonne Darbonne’s concern with an imperfection in her new-found world was brief. Her last entry returned to the boyfriend:
I told him I wanted him to do it and for him not to be afraid. When we were finished, he kissed my nipples and the tops of my fingers. It was hot in the cabin and his hair was wet and fell in curls on his forehead. I know now I love him in a way that’s different from anyone else I’ve loved. I can’t believe we’ll be going to college together this summer. He wants to meet my father. He told me never to be ashamed of the place I lived.
