'I think we need to turn the butane down.'
'They're going to tell me where that BB gun is or stay here till they have to eat the paint on that hydrant. You hear that, you little pukes?'
'Walk over here with me, Helen,' I said.
'You got no business telling me what to do,' she replied.
'I can't argue with that. But we're on city turf. Let them handle it.'
She lifted her face into mine. Her eyes were blazing, her thick arms pumped.
'I'd like to punch you out, Dave. All the skipper needs is an apology and you're back on the clock,' she said.
'So let the city guy do his job and take the kids down.'
'Yeah, I give a shit,' she said, and bent over and unlocked the handcuffs on the boys' wrists, then cuffed them again and walked them to the city cruiser and shoved them inside and slammed the door behind them. Then she walked back to me and said, 'Buy me coffee, Pops.'
I expected ONE of Helen's harangues, but I was wrong. We went to the McDonald's on East Main and sat by the window. The sky had turned green and the wind was blowing the oaks on the street, and leaves were rising out of the crown of the trees high in the air.
'I was in Lafayette this morning. You know that tattoo and fortune-telling place right off the four-lane?' she said.
'An old cypress cabin with beads and colored lights hanging all over the gallery?'
'I saw Passion Labiche go in there. That girl bothers me.'
'How?'
'Vachel Carmouche was a shithead and everybody knew it. That whole trial sucked. I get pissed off every time somebody tells me Carmouche was a lawman… Why the face?'
'I found evidence she didn't do it by herself.'
'You're telling me Passion helped her?'
'Yeah, I am.'
'Big revelation,' Helen said. 'What else is bothering you today?'
'I set up an ambush on Johnny Remeta last night.'
'You did what?'
'I was going to flush his grits. I couldn't pull the trigger.'
She cleaned up our mess from the table and walked to the trash basket and stuffed it inside and came back to the table.
'This is a noisy place full of teenagers and echoes and cooks yelling and I couldn't quite make out what you were saying. See you around, bwana,' she said.
She walked out to her cruiser and drove away.
I SLEPT THAT night with the remote phone under the bed. It rang just after 11 P.M. I picked it up and went into the kitchen before I clicked it on.
'You're in it for the long haul,' I said without waiting for him to speak.
'I figured you wrong last night. I thought honor required I tell you that, Mr. Robicheaux.'
'Honor?'
'I said you didn't have in it you to drop the hammer on me. I know who popped your mother. That's why you let me live.'
'You're not even close, partner.'
I could hear him breathing on the mouth of the receiver. 'We're alike. I've seen it in your eyes,' he said.
'I always thought my mother betrayed me, Johnny. But I learned to forgive her. I did that so I don't have to be a drunk anymore.'
'You saying something about my mother now?'
'You're smart. Read Chaucer's story about the three guys who set out to find Death and slay him once and for all. They found him, all right. But things didn't work out as they expected.'
'Let me tell you what real revenge is. I'm gonna shake down the people who did your mother, then I'm gonna leave the country and have them killed by somebody else. But you'll never know for sure who they were.'
'Pull on your own pud, Johnny. This stuff is a real drag,' I said, and clicked off the phone. Then I walked through the house and pulled the phone connections from all the wall jacks.
The sheriff lived up Bayou Teche in a yellow and gray frame house with a wide gallery, set back under huge cedar and oak trees. When I drove out there Saturday afternoon, he was trimming back the climbing roses in his flower bed while his grandchildren played in the side yard. He wore a tattered straw hat to protect his head from the thorns, and his stomach hung heavily over his belt. In his home setting, cupping flowers and placing them gingerly in a bowl of water, his clothes stained with fungicide and house paint, the sheriff looked much older than he did at the department and nothing like a law officer.
I sat down on the front steps and picked up some pieces of bark from a bag of mulch and flicked them out into the grass.
'I made an ass out of myself when I attacked Jim Gable. I also brought shame on the department. I want to apologize,' I said.
'You got to rein it in, Dave.'
'I believe you.'
'Five-day suspension without pay, effective last Monday. A letter of reprimand in your jacket. Is that fair?'
'There's something else I have to tell you,' I said. 'Passion Labiche told me she helped her sister kill Vachel Carmouche.' I waited for him to speak but he didn't. 'Number two, I had the chance to plant one in Johnny Remeta's cauliflower and didn't do it.'
He paused in his work but his face showed no expression.
'You froze?' he asked.
'I had him set up. I was going to cut all his motors.'
A mosquito buzzed at his face and he rubbed his cheek with the back of his wrist.
'I'm going to retire soon. I'm glad you told me what you did.'
'Sir?'
'I'd like you to be my successor,' he said.
'Come again?'
'What are you going to do with Passion's confession?' he asked, ignoring my incredulity.
'It'll be dismissed as an eleventh-hour attempt to stop Letty's execution,' I said.
'Maybe that's just what it is. You think of that? Where's Remeta now?'
'He inasmuch told me my mother's killers are the same people who tried to have him killed on the Atchafalaya. He says he's going to extort them, then hire a button man to take them out.'
'You actually had that guy locked down in your sights? Then didn't say anything about it till today?'
'That's it, more or less.'
He locked the clasp on his clippers and dropped them in his pants pocket and looked at his grandchildren playing.
'Remeta is going to take you to your mother's killers, isn't he?' he said.
'That wasn't the reason, Sheriff.'
'Yeah, I know,' he said, scratching inside his shirt. 'Yeah-' But he didn't bother to continue, as though he were weary of contending with the self-serving machinations of others.
I ate an early dinner with Bootsie, then drove to New Orleans through Morgan City. The evening light still reached high into the dome of sky overhead when I parked my pickup truck down the block from Maggie Glick's bar across the river in Algiers. The street was busy with the type of people whose Saturday nights were spent in a facsimile of the places their fellow countrymen enjoyed: elderly pensioners who ate in decrepit diners that served
