In the silence, he held his eyes on hers, barely breathing, studying every aspect of her face. He could feel his lungs tighten and his heart start to swell, as though no oxygen were reaching his blood, as though a vein might pop in his temple. She moistened her lips and returned his stare. “If we go to breakfast, you won’t run off on me again, will you?”
“No.”
“Good. Because I really wouldn’t like that.”
If there was a second meaning in her words, he couldn’t tell. All the way to Cafe du Monde, he watched the side of her face as though seeing part of himself, not necessarily a good one, that he had never recognized.
They got a table under the pavilion with a fine view of Jackson Square and the cathedral and the Pontalba Apartments. The sky was blue, the myrtle bushes and windmill palms and banana plants in the square covered with sunshine. It was the kind of crisp green-gold late-fall day in Louisiana that seems so perfect in its dimensions that winter and even mortality are set at bay. “So you’re a private investigator?” she said.
“I used to be with the NOPD, but I messed up my career. It’s my fault, not theirs. I started over, know what I mean?”
“Not really.”
“I worked for some mobbed-up guys in Reno and Montana. But I got clear of them. I have a friend named Dave Robicheaux. He says it’s always the first inning. You get up one morning and say fuck it and start over.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“Antiques, collectibles, that kind of stuff. I’ve got a little store in Key West, but most of my sales are on the Internet.”
“You didn’t know my name, but you ran my tag and traced me to the jail and got me back on the street. You even brought me my cigarette lighter. Not many people could pull that off. Maybe you have a gift.”
“My mother said my father was a marine who got killed in the first Iraqi war, so that’s why I brought you your lighter. I was never sure if my mother was telling me the truth. She should have had a turnstile on her bedroom door.”
“What I’m saying is I could use an assistant,” Clete said.
“Are you having hot flashes or something?” she asked, biting into a beignet.
“I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. I have blood pressure issues.”
“You ought to take better care of yourself,” she said. “This junk we’re eating isn’t helping either your blood pressure or your cholesterol count.”
“I’ve got two offices, one here and one in New Iberia. That’s on Bayou Teche, about two hours west. How long are you going to be in town?”
“I’m not big on clocks and calendars.”
“You think you could work for a guy like me?”
“You married?”
“Not now. Why do you ask?”
“You act strange. I don’t think you’re on the make, but I can’t quite figure you.”
“What’s to figure?”
“You never asked my name. It’s Gretchen Horowitz.”
“Glad to meet you, Gretchen. Come work for me.”
“I never saw you at Little Yankee Stadium. It was somewhere else, wasn’t it?”
“Who cares?” he said.
“What did you do in the Crotch?”
“Tried to stay alive.”
“You kill any people while you were staying alive?”
“I did two combat tours in Vietnam. Who told you the Corps was called the Crotch?”
“I get around. I picked up some of my mother’s habits. Mostly the bad ones.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that now,” he said.
She gazed at him without replying. He realized her eyes were violet in the daylight as well as in the evening shadows, and they engendered feelings in him that he could not deal with.
“Thanks for the beignets. You don’t mind walking to your office, do you?” she said. “It’s across the square and about a block down, right? See you around, big boy. Keep it in your pants.”
She left five dollars under her plate for the waitress. After she was gone, he pressed his fingers against his temples and tried to put together what she had just said. How did she know where his office was, and how did she know the exact distance? Had she followed the Greyhound to Baton Rouge and popped Frankie Gee in the stall? Had his seed produced a psychopath? Even though a breeze was blowing off the river, the scent of her perfume seemed to hang on every surface she had touched.
That same night in New Iberia, the southern sky was filled with strange lights, flashes of electricity that would ignite inside a solitary black cloud and in seconds ripple across the entirety of the heavens without making a sound. Then a rain front moved across the marshlands and drenched the town and overflowed the gutters on East Main and covered our front yard with a gray and yellow net of dead leaves. At four in the morning, amid the booming of thunder, I thought I heard the telephone ring in the kitchen. I had been dreaming before I woke, and in the dream, large shells fired from an offshore battery were arching out of their trajectory, whistling just before they exploded inside a sodden rain forest.
I felt light-headed when I picked up the phone, part of me still inside the dream that was so real I could not shake it or think my way out of it. “Hello?” I said into the receiver.
At first I could hear only static. I looked at the caller ID, but the number was blocked. “Who is this?” I said.
“It’s Tee Jolie, Mr. Dave. Can you hear me okay? There’s a bad storm where I’m at.”
Through the window, I could see fog rolling off the bayou into the trees, pushing against the windows and doors. I sat down in a chair. “Where are you?” I said.
“A long ways from home. There’s a beautiful beach here. The sea is green. I wanted to tell you everyt’ing is all right. I scared you at the hospital in New Orleans. I wish I ain’t done that.”
“Nothing is right, Tee Jolie.”
“Did you like the songs I left on your iPod? I dropped it before I gave it to you. It don’t always work right.”
“You said everything is all right. Don’t you know about your sister?”
“What about her? Blue is just Blue. She’s sweet. To tell you the troot’, her voice is better than mine.”
“Blue is dead.”
“What’s that?”
“She was murdered. Her body floated up in St. Mary Parish.”
“You’re breaking up, Mr. Dave. What’s that you said about Blue? The storm is tearing up the boathouse on the beach. Can you still hear me, Mr. Dave?”
“Yes.”
“I cain’t hear you, suh. This storm is terrible. It scares me. I got to go now. Tell Blue and my granddaddy hello. Tell them I couldn’t get t’rew.”
The line went dead, and the words “blocked call” disappeared from the caller identification window. Molly was awake when I got back into bed and lay back on the pillow. “Were you fixing something in the kitchen?” she said.
“No, that was Tee Jolie Melton on the phone.”
Molly raised herself up on one elbow. Each time lightning flashed in the clouds, I could see the freckles on her shoulders and the tops of her breasts. “I didn’t hear the phone ring,” she said.
“It woke me up.”
“No, I was awake, Dave. You were talking in your sleep.”
“She said she was sorry for making me worry about her. She doesn’t know her sister is dead.”
“Oh, Dave,” Molly said, her eyes filming.
