“I’m not sure that’s the case.”
“You kill me, Streak.”
“Where’s Gretchen?”
“I don’t know. But if I catch Pierre Dupree around her, I’m going to turn him into wallpaper.”
“Did you know a woman’s panties are lying on your rug?”
“Really?” he said. His jaw was swollen with meat and eggs and bread and looked as tight as a baseball. “Want to go to the 1940s revue tonight with me and Julie Ardoin? They’re going to blow the joint down.”
27
The performance was scheduled to begin in the Sugar Cane Festival Building inside City Park at eight o’clock Friday evening. In that same building, in 1956, I had listened to Harry James perform with Buddy Rich on drums, Willie Smith on alto sax, and Duke Ellington’s arranger Juan Tizol on valve trombone. The band had worn summer tuxes, and James had worn a bloodred carnation in his lapel. For us down here in our provincial Cajun world on the banks of Bayou Teche, the people playing horns and reed instruments on the stage were magical creatures that had descended from the ether. Their black trousers had razor creases, and their dress shoes gleamed, and their trombones and cornets had the brightness of liquid gold. The female singer sang Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” to a swing arrangement, then the orchestra went right into “One O’Clock Jump.” For two hours we were dancing at the Savoy or the Trianon or the Hollywood Palladium, James’s trumpet rising like a bell into the rafters, Buddy Rich’s drums rumbling in the background, the saxophones creating a second melody that was like an ocean wave starting to crest on a beach, all of it building into a crescendo of sound and rhythm that was almost sexual, that left us dry-mouthed and with a sense of longing we couldn’t explain.
Now we were over a half century down the road, almost to the winter solstice and the re-creation of Saturnalia, probably no wiser than our antecedents, our fears of mortality and the coming of night no less real. The live oaks in the park were wrapped with strings of tiny white lights; the Sugar Cane Festival Building was hung with wreaths and thick red ribbons tied in big bows; and families who were undaunted by cold weather were barbecuing under the picnic shelters, the blue smoke of their meat fires hanging as thick as fog in the damp air. Above the wide sweep of the oaks in the park, the sky was black and bursting with stars. The night could not have been more beautiful.
Alafair and Molly and I parked down by the duck pond and joined the crowd entering the building. “There’s Gretchen Horowitz,” Alafair said.
“Pretend you don’t see her,” I said.
“That’s a cheap way to act,” she replied.
“Leave her alone,” I said, putting my hand on her forearm.
“You’re not going to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do, Dave.”
“Will both of you stop it?” Molly said. She stared through the crowd at Gretchen’s hot-rod pickup, which was parked on a concrete pad at the rear of the building. “What’s she doing, anyway?”
“Unloading her film equipment. She’s making a documentary,” Alafair said. “I was going to help her with it.”
“You think she has any talent?” Molly said.
“I think she’s an artist. She has the love of it. What she doesn’t have are friends who are willing to help her,” Alafair said.
“You’re talking about me?” I said.
“No, I’m talking about myself. I gave her the impression that I might help her with her documentary. But I ended up telling her I was busy with my new novel. She got pretty mad about it.”
“At you?” I said, watching Gretchen pull a boom pole from her truck.
“Of course.”
“I’ll meet y’all inside,” I said.
“Don’t,” Alafair said. This time it was she who grabbed my arm.
“Gretchen needs to think about relocation. I think southern California is a fine place to visit this time of year,” I said.
“If you do this, Dave, I’ll move out of the house,” Alafair said.
“Clete is my best friend,” I said. “But he has to get Gretchen Horowitz out of New Iberia. She also needs to understand that members of our family don’t have the answer to her problems, all of which are connected to killing people.”
“Lower your voice,” Molly said.
“There’s Pierre Dupree,” Alafair said.
He had moved out of the crowd and was walking toward Gretchen’s pickup, wearing a pin-striped suit with a western shirt and buffed needle-nosed cowboy boots. In the background, through the trees, I could see Clete Purcel parking his maroon convertible by a picnic shelter. He and Julie Ardoin got out, and the two of them headed toward the building.
“Does Clete know Pierre is trying to put moves on Gretchen?” Alafair said.
“Yep.”
“What’s he plan to do about it?” she asked.
“Turn Pierre Dupree into wallpaper. Maybe that was just a metaphor,” I replied.
“I’m going over there,” Alafair said.
“For what?” I said.
“Pierre is evil. Gretchen is fighting a war in her head about forgiveness while this lying piece of shit is giving her a line.”
“Stay with Molly, Alf. I’m asking you, not telling you,” I said. “Please trust me on this.”
“You said you weren’t going to call me that again.”
“I’m just not much good at keeping certain kinds of promises.”
Her eyes studied mine, and I knew she wasn’t thinking about pet names. “I’ve got a bad feeling, Dave.”
“About what?”
“All of this,” she said.
At first Gretchen tried to ignore him, to pretend that either his presence or his absence was of no concern to her. But even as she reached back into the cab of her pickup to retrieve her Steadicam, his shadow seemed to loom above her and block out the lights of the building and invade her thoughts and reduce her in size and importance, as though he knew the location of every weakness in her body and soul. “I hoped you’d be here,” he said.
“I said I would be, didn’t I?” she replied.
“You sure did. Is this your equipment?”
“Whose does it look like?”
“You have to remember, film isn’t my medium.” He was smiling, his collar unbuttoned, the black hair on his chest showing.
“You see movies, though?” she said.
“Sometimes.”
“You ever see The Johnson Patrol? It was about an American patrol in Vietnam. But it was done by the French. It’s one of the best documentaries I ever saw. It made me think of Robert Capa’s work.”
“Who?”
“He was one of the greatest combat photographers who ever lived.”
“I was never that keen on motion pictures and photography. I’m a painter.”
“You don’t like movies?”
He grinned and shrugged. “Sit with me.”
“I’m working.”
“How about a drink afterward?”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Pierre.”
