“Want me to take him home?” I said.
“Screw him,” she said. She walked in a circle, her hands on her hips. “Think he slipped the punch?”
“You took his skin off.”
“And?”
“Bledsoe’s a psychopath. He’s incapable of accepting injury done to him by others, either real or imagined. He hates our guts and he’ll get even in whatever way he can.”
I think Helen had drawn on her own childhood experience when she turned the screws on Bledsoe. I also suspected some of the images she had used in her interrogation were of a kind she herself did not like to remember.
“Some fun, huh, bwana?” she said.
LATER THAT DAY Bertrand Melancon was sitting on the steps of his grandmother’s gallery, wondering what he should do next, when a blue Mercury turned in to the Quarters and splashed through a puddle, fanning a muddy spray back across its immaculate surface. The driver sighted Bertrand and turned in to his grandmother’s yard.
Another storm front had moved in and the sky overhead was blue-black and blooming with electricity. The driver of the Mercury got out and walked toward the gallery, avoiding the pools of rainwater, lifting his trouser cuffs above his two-tone shoes.
“Hi,” he said.
“What’s happenin’?” Bertrand replied.
“My name is Ronald. What’s yours?”
“Same as it was this morning, when a guy wit’ a face just like yours was following me down by the drawbridge in Jeanerette.”
“You’re smart. I bet you been to college.”
“What you want, man?”
“Can I sit down?”
“No.”
The man with the indented face opened a badge holder with a photo ID and an ornate gold and blue shield inside. “I’m an investigator for an insurance carrier. I’d like to pay you a recovery fee.”
Was this one of the guys who had taken Eddy out of our Lady of the Lake and stolen his mind? Bertrand wondered. Or lured Andre into a car outside the FEMA camp? No, those guys wouldn’t drive up to his grandmother’s house in daylight, in full view of the neighbors.
“Recovery of what?”
The man who had introduced himself as Ronald removed a big envelope from his side pocket. It was thick and crimped tightly in the center with two double-wrapped rubber bands.
“Here, see what’s inside,” he said, holding it in front of Bertrand’s face.
Bertrand folded his hands and pretended to look into the distance.
“Open it up,” Ronald said. “A smart man always gets the information up front before he does his decision making. A smart man sees what’s on the table, then makes an informed choice. You’re a student of people, I can tell that. You a cautious, smart man. I know that, ’Cause I’m a student of people, too.”
The man named Ronald touched the edge of the envelope against the back of Bertrand’s hand. “What you got to lose?” he said. “Think those rich people in those big houses down the road are worried about you and your grandmother?”
Bertrand looked down the street that was lined with shotgun houses and dirt yards in which the people parked their vehicles. Across the state road he could see a field full of green sugarcane and a thoroughbred horse farm bordered by white-painted railed iron fences and dotted with breeding barns that cost more than his grandmother’s entire neighborhood, all of it backdropped by a sky that leaked thunder.
Bertrand reached out and took the envelope. It was heavy and solid and felt good in his hand, the way a stack of money packed into an envelope can feel solid and good.
“How much in here?” he said, his voice suddenly dry and speaking of its own accord, before he could even organize the words in an intelligible fashion.
“Forty thousand. But that’s just for now. You get another forty thousand after we do the recovery. Go ahead. Stick your finger in there. Close your eyes and tell me what it feels like. Make you think of anything else?”
Bertrand cracked the glue on the seal with his thumb and looked at the sheaves of one-hundred-dollar bills inside. “How I know it ain’t counterfeit?”
“Tomorrow morning I’ll drive you to the bank. Or tonight we can go to the casino. We’ll buy some chips with it and see what happens. The people at the casino know counterfeit when they see it. You’re a smart man, all right.”
A camera lens opened in Bertrand’s mind and he saw himself driving a convertible down an ocean highway, waves sliding up on the sand, big coral rocks hissing with foam. He saw girls in bikinis slapping a volleyball back and forth across a net. He heard music pounding from his stereo speakers and felt the salt spray in his face.
“Time to start a new life,” Bledsoe said.
Next door a woman began shouting at her children. Bertrand heard her hit one of them, a bone-deep slap, the kind that sent a child to the floor.
“You right,” he said.
“That’s what I thought.”
“That why I ain’t interested. Besides, you got the wrong guy,” Bertrand said.
He handed the envelope back to Bledsoe and knitted his fingers between his legs. Spots swam before his eyes. He could not believe the amount of money he had just held in his hand and returned to the man who had offered it to him. He spit between his knees and let his mind go empty.
“What you just said is not only illogical, it’s untrue,” Ronald said, mustering his most tolerant voice.
“What’s that suppose to mean?”
“If you’re the wrong guy, you wouldn’t know enough to say you’re not interested. Besides, you look just like your brother.”
Bertrand could hear an electric rip in a cloud, a tearing sound at the bottom of the sky. “How you know what my brother looks like?” he asked.
Ronald’s eyes retained their mirthful brightness, but a pause took place in them, a beat or a blink that was not a blink, a split-second inner recognition that he had made a slip.
“I got both y’all’s mug shots. I got them from a friend at NOPD.”
“Yeah, New Orleans cops that been wading in water up to their chins love to do that for guys who get their badges out of Cracker Jack boxes.”
“I’m trying to be your friend, Bertrand. I want to make you rich. You’re inches away from having the most beautiful women in the world.”
“Hey, man, no hard feelings, but I don’t think you know nothing about beautiful women.”
Bertrand got up from the step and went back in the house. He wondered if he had managed to conceal the fact he had made Ronald as one of the men who had kidnapped Eddy. When he looked back through the screen, Ronald was turning his car around in the yard, one tire mashing over a tomato plant in his grandmother’s garden. The shape of his head reminded Bertrand of a question mark. Then Ronald’s eyes locked on Bertrand’s. The expression on Ronald’s face made Bertrand step back from the screen.
A FEW MINUTES LATER Bertrand drove down to the grocery store in Loreauville and bought a chocolate drink from the soda machine. He drank it in the car, in the parking lot, across from a Catholic church, and tried to think. This dude with a head and face that reminded him of the curved head of a long-reach toothbrush was lying. He was one of the dudes who had grabbed and tortured Eddy. Which meant he was one of the dudes working for Sidney Kovick. But why didn’t they just grab Bertrand, too? They knew where he lived. They knew his movements. They knew who his grandmother was. Bertrand should have been dog food by now.
Because the guy was working his own deal? Because the guy was going to stiff Sidney Kovick?
That was it. Kovick’s hired geek had got off his leash and was going to make his own score, at Kovick’s expense.
