Then, as irony would have it, just as I was about to go up to the house and change clothes for work, the phone on the counter rang. It was Sister Helen Bienvenu, the nun who gave art lessons at the public library.
'I did something I think I shouldn't have,' she said.
'What's that, Sister?' I said.
'Rosebud Hulin did a lovely drawing of Amanda Boudreau with her parents. I think the photo was in the
'I don't understand. What did you do that was improper?' I said.
'I gave the drawing to the Boudreau family. I didn't tell them who drew it, but last night Mrs. Boudreau was at the library and saw Rosebud in my drawing class. It was obvious she made the connection. I feel like I've exacerbated an already very bad situation.'
'Did you ask Rosebud why she wanted to draw the Boudreau family?'
'Yes. She ran away from me. What are you going to do, Mr. Robicheaux?' she said.
'Did you tell anybody else about this?'
'No. But there was a black man who saw the drawing. He came to the class one night to drive Rosebud home. She wouldn't go with him. He owns a bar.'
'Jimmy Dean Styles?'
'Yes, I think that's his name.'
'Styles is a bad guy, Sister. Don't have anything to do with him.'
'This upsets me, Mr. Robicheaux,' she said.
'You didn't do anything wrong.'
'Did Rosebud witness a murder? Please don't lie to me,' she said.
I went up to the house and changed clothes and fixed coffee and a pan of hot milk and ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and blueberries at the kitchen table. Bootsie came out of the bedroom in her terry-cloth bathrobe and took the medication that kept her lupus, what we called the red wolf, in abeyance. Then she sat down across from me and wrapped the inflatable tourniquet of her blood pressure monitor around her upper arm. She waited for the digital numerals to stop flashing on the monitor, then pushed the button on the air release valve and puffed out her cheeks, exasperated at not being able to change a condition that seemed both unfair and without origin.
'You've eaten salt and fried food every day of your life and your systolic is ten points above a cadaver's. What's your secret, Streak?' she said.
'Let me take your blood pressure,' she said.
'I'd better get on the road.'
'No, I want to see if my monitor's accurate,' she said.
She wrapped my arm and pumped the rubber ball in her hand. She looked at the numbers on the monitor and punched the air release, her expression neutral.
'Your systolic is 165 over 90,' she said. I turned the page on the newspaper and tried to shine her on.
'That's almost forty points above your normal,' she said.
'Maybe I'm off my feed this morning.'
She put the monitor back in its box and began fixing cereal for herself at the drainboard. When she spoke again, her back was still turned to me.
'All my diet pills are gone. So is the aspirin. So are all the megavitamins I bought in Lafayette. What the hell are you doing, Dave?' she said.
I went to the office and tried to concentrate on a back-load of paperwork in my intake basket, A dozen messages were on my voice mail, a dozen more in my mailbox. A homeless man, who daily walked the length of the city with all his belongings rolled inside a yellow tent that he carried draped over his neck and shoulders like a gigantic cross, wandered in off the street and demanded to see me.
His eyes were filled with madness, his skin grimed almost black, his yellow hair glued together with his own body grease, his odor so offensive that people left the room with handkerchiefs over their mouths.
He said he had known me in Vietnam, that he'd been a medic who had loaded me with blood-expander and shot me up with morphine and pulled me onboard a slick and held me in his arms while the air frame rang with AK-47 rounds from the canopy sweeping by below us.
I looked into his seamed, wretched face and saw no one there I recognized.
'What was your outfit, Doc?' I asked.
'Who gives a shit?' he replied.
'I've got twenty bucks here. Sorry it's not more.'
He balled his hand on the bill I gave him. His nails were as thick as tortoiseshell, gray through the tops with the amounts of dirt impacted under them.
'I had a rosary wrapped around my steel pot. I gave it to you. Don't let them get behind you, motherfucker,' he said.
After he was gone we opened the windows and Wally the dispatcher had the janitor wipe down the chair the deranged man had sat in.
'You knew that guy?' Wally said.
'Maybe.'
'You want me to have him picked up, take him to a shelter?'
'The war's over,' I said, and went back to my office.
At ten o'clock my skin was coming off. I drank water at the cooler, chewed two packs of gum, went to Baron's Health Club and pounded the heavy bag, then returned to the office, sweating inside my clothes, burning with irritability.
I checked but a cruiser and drove out to the home of Amanda Boudreau's parents. I found Mr. Boudreau at the back of his property, under shade trees by the coulee, uncrating and assembling an irrigation pump. It was a large, expensive machine, the most sophisticated one on the market. But he had no well or water lines to attach it to, no network of ditches to carry the water it would draw from the aquifer.
He wore a white, short-sleeved shirt and new strap overalls, dark blue and still stiff from the box. His face was flushed, his knuckles skinned where his hand had slipped on a wrench.
'I ain't gonna get caught by drought again,' he said. 'Last year almost all my cane dried up. Ain't gonna allow it to happen again. No, sir.'
'I think the drought is pretty well busted,' I said, looking at a bank of black clouds in the south.
'I'm gonna be ready, me. That's the way my father always talked. I’m gonna be ready, me,'' he said. I squatted down next to him.
'I know you and Mrs. Boudreau don't think well of me, but I lost both my mother and my wife, Annie, to violent people. I wanted to find those people and kill them. There's nothing wrong in feeling that way. But I don't want to see a good man like yourself take matters into his own hands. You're not going to do that, are you, sir?'
He clapped his broad hand on a mosquito that had landed on the back of his neck and looked at the bloody smear on his palm.
'Lou'sana's been drying up. Gonna dig me a well. Gonna have ditches and lines all through those fields. It can get dry as a brick in a stove, but I'm gonna have all the water I want,' he said. He went back to his work, twisting a wrench on a nut, his meaty, skinned hand shining with sweat.
I stopped at a phone booth and called Clete's apartment.
'You still have flashbacks?' I asked.
'About 'Nam? Not much. Sometimes I dream about it. But not much.'
'A guy came off the street today. He said he was the medic who took care of me when I was hit.'
'Was he?'
'He was deranged. His hair was blond. The kid who got me to battalion aid was Italian, from Staten
