Epilogue
JOHNNY REMETA TOOK the fall for Connie Deshotel's death. It wasn't hard to arrange. In fact, Johnny had made it easy. His cut-down Remington was already loaded with double-ought bucks. I fired one round out into the trees, slipped the shotgun under his chest, and let the coroner and the state police and the sheriff's deputies from St. Martin Parish come to their own conclusions.
It was dishonest, certainly, but I don't think it was dishonorable. In fact, it probably saved Helen Soileau's career. Besides, the print and electronic media loved the story we had created for them, and who could be so unkind as to disabuse them of their romantic fantasies? Connie Deshotel was much more likable as a blue-collar heroine in death than the self-serving political functionary she had been in life.
My own role in her death was not one I cared to think about. I wondered why I didn't unlock Connie's handcuff and allow her to walk outside, away from the crime scene, away from any other confrontations with Helen. There was no evidence to disprove her claim that Remeta had tried to assault her. In fact, I believed at the time, as I do now, that she may have told the truth.
Was it natural to turn my back on my mother's murderer, knowing a pistol lay within ten inches of her grasp? Or was I deliberately incautious? Age has brought me few gifts, but one of them has been a degree of humility, at least a sufficient amount so that I no longer feel compelled to take my own inventory and I can surrender that terrible burden to my Higher Power.
It was late when the paramedics and the coroner and the parish deputies and the state troopers finally wrapped up their work at Connie Deshotel's camp on Lake Fausse Point. The sun was below the horizon in the west, and a green aura from the wooded rim of the swamp rose into the sky. I could hear alligators flopping and nutrias screaming back in the flooded trees, and when the moon came up the bass starting hitting the insects in the center of the lake, chaining the lake's surface with water rings.
I had forgotten all about the call from the St. Martin Parish Sheriff's Department. I used Helen's cell phone and got a night deputy at the jail on the line.
'Somebody called earlier. A problem with Clete Purcel,' I said.
'Sonofabitch is spreading chaos all over the lockdown unit. You either quiet him down or he's gonna have an accident with a baseball bat.'
'Put him on,' I said.
'Are you nuts?'
'How'd you like him to do six months with you guys?' I asked.
There was a brief pause. 'Hang on,' the deputy replied.
A few moments later I heard a cell door open and the tinkle of waist or leg chains.
'Hello?' Clete said hoarsely.
'You going to tell me what it is now?' I said.
'When I took Passion up to Angola last weekend? For the dinner with Letty and their relatives? She was wearing a raincoat and that bandanna around her neck. There were two gunbulls outside and a matron inside, but nobody with a lot of smarts. Letty and Passion were going in and out of the John. You get my drift?'
'What are you telling me, Clete?'
'On the way back home Passion was like somebody I didn't know. Weirded out. Crying. Looking out the side window into the dark. I told her I'd be there when Letty went to the table. She said she wasn't going back up to the Death House. Just like that. No explanation.'
I could hear him breathing against the phone, his chains tinkling.
'I think they've both made their choice. I think it's time to leave it alone,' I said.
'You've got to give me a better answer than that,' he said.
But I didn't have a better answer. I heard Clete drop the receiver and let it swing on its cord against the wall. Then someone gathered it up and replaced it in the cradle.
It started to rain again after I got home. I listened to no radio or television that night, and at ten minutes after midnight I put on my raincoat and hat and walked down to the bait shop and turned on the string of lights over the dock and the flood lamps that shone on the bayou and every light in every corner of the shop. I fixed coffee and mopped down the floors and cut and trimmed bread for sandwiches and said my rosary on my fingers and listened to the rain beating on the roof until it became the only sound in my head. Then I realized I was not listening to rain anymore but to hail that bounced and smoked on the dock and melted into white string on the flood lamps, and I wanted to stay forever inside the lighted, cool brilliance of the dock and bait shop, and to keep Bootsie and Alafair there with me and let the rest of the world continue in its fashion, its cities and commerce and inhumanity trapped between morning and the blackness of the trees.
But it was I who would not let the world alone. The next day I drove out to the Labiche home and was told by a tall, high-yellow mulatto I had never seen before that Passion was at the nightclub, preparing to open up. He wore a mustache and tasseled, two-tone shoes and dark blue zoot pants with a white stitch in them and a black cowboy snap-button shirt with red flowers on it and a planter's straw hat cocked at an angle on his head. 'How's she feeling?' I said.
'Ax her,' he said.
'Excuse me, but who are you?'
'What do you care, Jack?' he said, and closed the door in my face.
Passion's pickup truck was the only vehicle in the nightclub's parking lot. I went in the side door and saw a woman at the antique piano by the back wall. She was totally absorbed in her music and was not aware that anyone else was in the building. Her powerful arms lifted and expanded in silhouette as she rolled her fingers up and down the yellowed keys. I couldn't identify the piece she was playing, but the style was unmistakable. It was Albert Ammons, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Moon Mulligan; it was out of the barrelhouse South of fifty years ago; it was Memphis and Texas R amp;B that could break your heart.
The woman at the piano stool wore jeans and an LSU T-shirt. A streak of gold sunlight fell across her neck like a sword, and on her neck was a tattooed red rose inside a cluster of green leaves.
She finished her song, then seemed to realize someone was standing behind her. She stayed very still, her hair lifting on her neck in the breeze from the fan, then closed the top on the piano keys.
'You want something?' she said, without turning around.
'No. Not really,' I replied.
'You figured it out?'
'Like Clete Purcel says, 'What do I know?''
'You think bad of me?'
'No.'
'My sister was brave. A lot braver than me,' she said.
'The dude at your house looks like he's in the life.'
'It's a life, ain't it?'
'I never heard anybody do 'Pine Top's Boogie' as well as you. Don't sell yourself short, kiddo,' I said, and squeezed her on the shoulder and walked outside into the sunlight.
This story has only a brief postscript, and it's not a very dramatic one. Yesterday a package wrapped in white butcher paper arrived in the mail. In it were an old scrapbook with a water-faded purple binder and an envelope taped across the binder's surface. The letter read as follows:
