would pause in midsentence and stare directly into my eyes in a way that made her features sharpen, her cheeks pool with shadow, as though she were having thoughts that the Helen Soileau who came to work that morning would not allow herself to have. All of us believe we have boundaries we won’t cross. I believed Helen had boundaries, too. But I wasn’t sure that either of us knew what they were. I cleared my throat and focused my attention on the raindrops running down the windows.
“You’re supposed to be on the desk and off duty at noon,” she said. “You’re supposed to go home and take naps and throw pinecones in the bayou. Obviously, that’s not what you have in mind. You prefer stirring up the wrong people in New Orleans and going to Lafayette and eating a load of buckshot.”
“I didn’t plan any of this. What do you want me to say?”
“I advise you to say nothing.”
I sighed and raised my hands and dropped them in my lap.
“I think it’s time to put you back on full-time status, bwana,” she said. She narrowed one eye. “It’s the only way I can keep your umbilical cord stapled to the corner of my desk.”
How do you reply to a statement like that? “Thank you,” I said.
“Lafayette PD thinks the shooter was some guy with a personal hard-on,” she said. “They’re looking at a parolee who just got off Camp J, a guy you put away years go. He was staying at the motel where the freezer truck got boosted. You remember a guy by the name of Ronnie Earl Patin?”
“Child molestation, strong-arm robbery, he hurt an elderly man with a hammer about ten years back?” I said.
“That’s the baby.”
“Ronnie Earl was a fat slob. I’m almost certain I’ve never seen either one of the guys in the freezer truck.”
“People can change a lot in ten years, particularly if they’re hoeing out a bean field.”
“The shooter had features like the edge of an ax. The driver was short. Ronnie Earl wasn’t.”
“Could Pierre Dupree be behind this?”
“Maybe, but it doesn’t seem his style. I wouldn’t rule out Jesse Leboeuf.”
“You don’t think that’s a stretch?” she said.
“When I was a pin boy at the bowling alley out on East Main, Jesse was one of the older boys who bullied the rest of us in the pits. He’d made a slingshot with a hand-carved wood frame and elastic medical tubing and a leather pouch to fit a marble in. On Saturday nights he and his buds would go nigger-knocking down on Hopkins.”
“That was bad stuff, but it was a long time ago,” she said.
“I knew a number of kids like him. Some of them are still around. Know what’s interesting about them? They’re as mean as they were when they were kids. They just know how to hide it better.”
“How long did it take you to get from Jesse Leboeuf’s place to Varina’s apartment?”
“Maybe an hour.”
“Bring Leboeuf in,” she said.
Clete Purcel had poured three jiggers of sherry into a glass of milk and gone to sleep before eleven P.M. In his dream, he was standing on a dock under a velvet-black sky on the southernmost tip of Key West, music from a marimba band drifting on the wind behind him, the smoky-green glow of nameless organisms lighting under waves that slid through the pilings without capping. The dream was one he’d had many times and was a safe place to be, but even in his sleep, he knew he had to keep it inviolate and not let it be invaded and destroyed by a milkman who departed for work at four A.M. and often returned home by ten A.M., drunk and unpredictable, sometimes pulling his belt out of his pant loops as soon as he entered the house.
In the dream, the wind was balmy and smelled of salt spray and seaweed and shellfish that had been stranded on the beach by the receding waves. It also smelled of a Eurasian girl who spoke French and English and lived on a sampan in a cove on the edge of the South China Sea, her skin like alabaster traced with the shadows of palm fronds, her nipples as red and inviting as small roses. He could see her walking nude into the water, her hair floating off her shoulders, her teeth white when she smiled at him and extended her hand.
But Clete’s dead father had long ago devised ways of breaking into his inner sanctum, throwing back the bedroom door, his scowl as scalding as an openhanded slap. Sometimes the father poured a sack full of dry rice on the floor and made Clete kneel on the kernels until sunrise; sometimes he sat on the side of the bed and gently touched Clete’s face with a hand that was as callused as a carpenter’s; sometimes he lay down beside Clete and wept as a child would.
Clete could feel himself losing the dream, the marimba music and the salt wind disappearing out an open window, the palm fronds collapsing against their trunks, the Eurasian girl turning her attentions elsewhere. He realized he was hearing the sounds of the street, which he never heard above the hum of his air conditioner. He sat up in bed and reached for the nine-millimeter Beretta he kept between his mattress and box spring. It was gone.
A figure was sitting in a chair by his television set. “Who are you?” he asked.
The figure made no reply.
“You’re about to get the shit kicked out of you,” Clete said. He pulled open the drawer of his nightstand, where he kept a blackjack. The drawer was empty. He put his feet on the floor and adjusted himself inside his skivvies. “I don’t know why you’re here, but you’ve creeped the wrong house.”
In the glow from a streetlamp on the corner, he could see the hands of the figure pick up his Beretta and release the magazine from the frame and pull back the slide and eject the round in the chamber. The figure leaned forward and one by one tossed the Beretta and the magazine and the ejected round on his bed. “I can see why you need some help,” a female voice said. “Your security service has been out of date since Alexander Graham Bell died.”
“Gretchen?”
“That offer you made me, that was on the level?” she said.
“Sure, if you don’t mind working cheap. I work on commission most of the time for Nig Rosewater and Wee Willie Bimstine.”
“You’re not trying to get in my bread?”
“I would have told you.”
“I get it. You tell girls up front when you’re planning to get it on with them? I bet you get a lot of action that way.”
“You need to stop talking like that.”
“Why were you asking about the scars on my arms?”
“Because you’ve got scars, that’s all. I’ve got lots of them. They mean a person has been around. No, they mean a person has probably paid some dues.”
“You want to know how I got them? It happened before I was supposed to be able to remember anything. But I still have dreams about a man who comes into my room with fingertips that glow with light. You know what the light is?”
“You don’t need to talk about this, Gretchen.”
“You figured it out?”
“Maybe.”
“What kind of man would do that to a baby?”
“A sadist and a coward. A guy who doesn’t deserve to live. Maybe a guy who already got what he deserved.”
“What was that last part?”
“They all go down. It’s just a matter of time. That’s all I was saying. It takes a while, but they go down.”
“I can’t figure you out.”
“You want to work for me or not?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I like you. I need the help, too.”
“I know where I saw you before.”
