crackling with a sound like crushed cellophane.
When the phone did ring, it was Bootsie, asking me to bring a quart of milk from the cooler up to the house.
Johnny Remeta may have been temporarily out of the way, but Connie Deshotels possible involvement with Axel Jennings was not.
In Vietnam I knew a self-declared Buddhist and quasi-psychotic warrant officer who would fly a Huey into places the devil wouldn't go. He used to say, 'The way to keep your house safe from tigers is to return the tiger to its owner's house.'
I got Connie Deshotel's address from our local state representative, then drove to Baton Rouge late Sunday afternoon. She lived off Dalrymple, in the lake district north of the LSU campus, in a gabled two-story white house with azaleas and willows and blooming crepe myrtle in the yard. Her Sunday paper still lay on the front porch, wrapped tightly in a plastic rain bag.
I didn't try to call before I arrived. Even if she wasn't home, I felt my business card in her mailbox would indicate, if indeed she was the money behind Axel Jennings, that her intentions were known, and another visit from one of her emissaries would lead right back to her door.
I lifted the brass door knocker and heard chimes deep inside the house. But no one came to the door. I dropped my card through the mail slot and was headed back down the walk when I heard the spring of a diving board and a loud splash from the rear of the house.
I walked through a side yard under a long trellis that was wrapped with trumpet vine. I opened the gate into the backyard and saw Connie Deshotel in a purple two-piece bathing suit, mounting the tile steps at the shallow end of her swimming pool.
She picked a towel off a sun chair and shook out her hair, then dried her face and neck and blotted the towel on her thighs and the backs of her legs. She placed her feet inside her sandals and poured a Bloody Mary from a pitcher into a red-streaked glass with a stick of celery blossoming out of the ice.
I started to speak, then realized she had seen me out of the corner of her eye.
'Did you bring Bootsie with you this time?' she asked.
'No, it's still all business,' I replied.
'Well,' she said, touching the towel to her 'forehead, her chin raised, as though taking pause with an unacceptable intrusion rather than allowing herself to be undone by it. 'What is it that's of such great concern to us this Sunday afternoon?'
'Can I sit down?'
'Please do. Yes, indeed,' she said.
She sat across from me at a glass-topped table under an umbrella that was made from wide, multicolored strips of tin.
'Friday the sheriff and I were talking about an interesting attribute everyone of our generation seems to share,' I said.
'Oh?' she said, her interest wandering out into the yard.
'What were you doing when you heard John Kennedy had been shot?'
'I was coming out of gym class. Some girls were crying in the hallway.'
'See?' I said, smiling. 'Everybody remembers that exact moment in his or her life. They never hesitate when they're asked.'
'What's the point?'
'It's that photo taken of you with the parents of the Labiche girls. It troubles the heck out of me. Here, I brought it along,' I said, and removed a manila envelope from the pocket of my coat.
But before I could pull the photo out, she leaned forward and took both of my hands in hers, pressing down hard with her thumbs, her eyes fastened on mine.
'Dave, give this up. You're a good man. But you've developed a fixation about something that means absolutely nothing,' she said.
I took my hands from hers and slipped the photo out of the envelope and lay it flat on the table.
'You remember being with the Labiches?' I asked.
'No, I don't.'
'See, up here in the corner, someone wrote, 'Christmas, 1967.' So here you are in a nightclub, back in the civil rights era, in an evening dress, with a corsage on, at Christmastime, with a notorious mulatto couple who pimped for a living, and you have no memory of it. Does that seem strange to you?'
She picked up a big leather bag with drawstrings on it from the flagstones and dug a package of cigarettes and a gold lighter out of it and set them on the tabletop.
'I really don't have anything more to say on the matter. Would you like a Diet Coke or lemonade or decaffeinated coffee or ice water or whatever it is you drink?'
'In '67 you hadn't been out of the police academy too long. Does it make sense that a young cop could be around the Labiches, perhaps on Christmas Eve, and not remember it? Look me in the face and tell me that.'
'Do me a great favor, Dave. Go home to your wife. Sell worms to your friends. Play mind games with your sheriff. Just… go.'
'There's a bad dude by the name of Johnny Remeta running loose. In case you haven't heard, he's the same perp who cut Axel Jennings' kite string. He's got an iron bolt through his head and thinks he's my guardian angel. I wouldn't want Remeta on my case. You get my drift, Connie?'
She didn't answer. Instead, a strange transformation seemed to take place in her. She rose from her chair, an unlit cigarette dangling between her fingers, a gold lighter in her other hand, and studied the shadows that the banana trees and palm fronds created on her brick wall. Her face was bladed with the glare of the late afternoon sun reflecting off the pool; her eyes were narrow and hard, her lips crimped on the end of her unlit cigarette as she clicked her lighter several times without the flint igniting a flame. Her skin looked coarse and grained, like that of a countrywoman or someone who had stepped into a cold wind.
I replaced the photo in the envelope and put it in my pocket and walked across the flagstones toward the gate. I turned around and looked back at her once more before I entered the side yard.
The gold lighter. It was an archaic type, thin and lightweight, with strips of veined, dark leather inset in the casement and a horizontal lever the smoker snapped downward on top and a tiny cap that automatically retracted from the flame.
It was the same type of stylish gold lighter that Jim Gable used to light his cigars.
She got her cigarette lit and blew her smoke at an upward angle, her sandaled feet slightly spread, one hand on her hip, a private thought buried in her eyes.
21
MONDAY MORNING LITTLE FACE Dautrieve came to see me at my office. She wore a dark dress with green flowers printed on it, and a hibiscus in her hair, and hose and lavender pumps.
'You going somewhere special today?' I said.
'Yeah, you driving me and you to New Orleans,' she replied.
'Is that right?'
'The reason I call you 'Sad Man' ain't 'cause of the way you look. It's 'cause you let Zipper Clum play you for a fool,' she said.
'Say again?'
'Zipper liked to make other people hate themselves. That's how he got people like me to work for him. That and the rock he give me.'
'You're not making a whole lot of sense, Little Face.'
'You never axed me how I got in the life. It was t'rew my auntie in New Orleans. She knowed Zipper. I visited my auntie this weekend. She say Zipper tole you a bunch of lies about your mother.'
