Voodoo River

have a pay phone on the wall by the restroom.

The cook nodded help yourself. Watching me gave him something to do.

I fed a quarter into the phone and dialed Martha Guidry, who answered on the second ring. I said, 'Martha, it's Elvis Cole.'

'What?' The Raid.

I had to yell. 'It's Elvis Cole. Remember?' The old man and the cook were both looking at me. I cupped the receiver. 'Her ears.' The cook nodded, saying it's hard when they get like that.

Martha Guidry yelled, 'Goddamn bugs!' You could hear the flyswatter whistle through the air and snap against the wall, Martha cackling and saying, 'Gotcha, you sonofabitch!'

'Martha?' Trying to get her back to the phone.

Something crashed, and she came back on the line, breathing harder from her exertion. 'You have a bowel movement yet? I know how it is when I travel. I cross the street, I don't go potty for a week.' A living doll, that Martha.

I said, 'The people you were trying to remember, were their names Johnson?'

'Johnson.'

'Pamela and Monroe Johnson.'

There was a sharp slap. 'You should see the size of this goddamned roach.'

'The Johnsons, Martha. Was the family named Johnson?'

She said, 'That sounds like them. White trash lived right over here. Oh, hell, Pam Johnson died years ago.'

I thanked Martha Guidry for her help, then hung up and stared at the address I had copied. 1146 Tecumseh Lane. I fed another quarter into the phone and dialed Information. A pleasant female voice said, 'And how are you today?' She sounded young.

'Do you have a listing for a Pamela or Monroe Johnson on Tecumseh Lane?'

She didn't say anything for a moment, and then she said, 'No, sir. We've got a bunch of other Johnsons, though.'

'Any of them on Tecumseh Lane?'

'I'm sorry, sir. I don't show Pamela or Monroe Johnson, and I don't show a Tecumseh Lane, either.'

I hung up.

The cook said, 'No luck?'

I shook my head.

The old guy at the window table said something in French.

'What'd he say?'

The cook said, 'He wants to know what you want.'

'I'm trying to find Monroe and Pamela Johnson, I think they live on Tecumseh Lane, but I'm not sure where that is.'

The cook said it in French, and the old man said something back at him and they talked back and forth like that for a while. Then the cook said, 'He doesn't know these Johnson people, but he says there's a Tecumseh Lane in Eunice.'

'Eunice?'

'Twenty miles south of here.' Ah.

I smiled at the old man. 'Thank him for me.'

The cook said, 'He understands you okay, he just don't speak English so good.'

I nodded at the old man. 'Merci.'

The old man tipped his hat. Dignified. 'Il y a pas de quoi.' You take your good fortune where you find it.

I went out to my car, looked up Eunice on the Triple-A map, and went there. Like Ville Platte, the landscape was flat and crosscut with bayous and ponds and industrial waterways, mostly sweet potato fields and marshlands striped with oil company pipelines and vent stations. The town itself was bigger than Ville Platte, but not by a lot, and seemed like a neat, self-contained little community with a lot of churches and schools and quaint older buildings.

Tecumseh Lane was a pleasant street in an older residential area with small frame houses and neatly trimmed azalea bushes. 1146 was in the center of the block, with a tiny front lawn and an ancient two-strip cement drive and a big wooden porch. Like every other house in the area, it was set atop high brick pillars and, even though the land was flat, you had to climb three or four steps to enter the house.

I left the car at the curb and went up to the house and rapped at the door. An older black woman in what looked like a white nurse's uniform answered. 'May I help you?'

I gave her one of my nicer smiles. 'Mrs. Johnson?'

'Oh, no.'

'I'm looking for Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. I was told they lived here.' The air behind her smelled of medicine and pine-scented air freshener.

She was shaking her head before I finished. 'You'll need to speak with Mrs. Boudreaux. I work for her.'

'Who's Mrs. Boudreaux?'

'She owns this house.' A wet, flapping sound came from deeper in the house, and a raspy old man's voice yelled something about his pears. The black woman took a half-step out onto the porch, pulling the door so I wouldn't hear. 'She doesn't live here, though. She only comes by in the morning and the evening.'

I let myself look confused. A relatively easy task. 'Did the Johnsons move?'

'Oh, Mr. Johnson's her daddy. She used to rent this place out, but now she lets him live here.' She pulled the door tighter and lowered her voice, letting me in on the know. 'He can't live by himself, and they didn't want to put him in a home. Lord knows he couldn't live with them.' She raised her eyebrows.

'He's very ill.'

I said, 'Ah. So Mr. Johnson does live here.'

She nodded, then sighed. 'He's eighty-seven, poor thing, and he takes spells. He's a devil when he takes a spell.' The voice in the house yelled again, something about the TV, something about Bob Barker and the goddamned pears.

I said, 'How is Mrs. Johnson?'

'Oh, she died years ago.'

Score another for Martha Guidry. 'If I wanted to speak with Mrs. Boudreaux, how could I do that?'

'She'll be here in a little while. She always comes around two. Or you could go by her shop. She has a very nice formal wear shop on Second Street by the square. They call it Edie's. Her first name is Edith, but she goes by Edie.'

'Of course.'

She glanced back toward the house. 'Twice a day she comes, and he don't even know it, most days. Poor thing.'

I thanked her for her time, told her I'd try to stop at the house again around two, then drove back to the square. Edith Boudreaux's boutique occupied a corner location next to a hair salon, across from a little square filled with magnolia trees. I parked on the square, then walked back and went inside. A young woman in her early twenties smiled at me from a rack of Anne Klein pants suits. 'May I help you, sir?'

I smiled back at her. 'Just sort of browsing for my wife.'

The smile deepened. Dimples. 'Well, if you have any questions, just ask.'

I told her I would. She finished racking the Anne Kleins, then went through a curtained doorway into the stockroom. As she went through the curtains, an attractive woman in her late forties came out with an armful of beige knit tops. She saw me and smiled. 'Have you been helped?'

The similarities to Jodi Taylor were amazing. The same broad shoulders, the good bone structure, the facial resemblance. They were, as the saying goes, enough alike to be sisters. We would have to unseal the sealed documents to be sure. We would have to compare the adoption papers from the Johnson family to the Taylor family to be positive, but Edith Boudreaux and Jodi Taylor were clearly related. Maybe Jimmie Ray Rebenack wasn't the world's worst detective, after all. I said, 'Are you Ms. Boudreaux?'