sister, don’t you?”
“Maybe.”
“If y’all are still in the backyard later, can I invite Gretchen to join us?”
“I don’t think that’s a real good idea.”
“I don’t believe she’s a killer. I think she has no friends and she’s lived a hard life and she feels betrayed because Clete is seeing Varina Leboeuf. Is that the kind of person our family shuts the door on? Look me in the face and tell me that, Dave. When did we start being afraid of someone who is friendless and alone?”
I felt sorry for the litigators who would have to face Alafair in a courtroom.
In the darkness of the theater, Gretchen Horowitz sat totally still, enraptured by every detail of the film from the opening scene until the fade-out, never taking her eyes off the screen. Alafair had never seen anyone watch a film with such intensity. Even when the credits had finishing rolling, Gretchen waited until the trademark of the studio and the date of production had trailed off the screen before she allowed herself to detach. The film was Pirates of the Caribbean.
“Do you know what John Dillinger’s last words were?” she asked.
“No,” Alafair replied.
“It was in Chicago, at the Biograph Theater. He had just come out of seeing Manhattan Melodrama with the two prostitutes who sold him out to the feds. You’ve heard about the lady in red, right? Actually, she was wearing orange. Anyway, John Dillinger said, ‘Now, that’s what I call a movie.’ Did you see Public Enemies? Johnny Depp played Dillinger. God, he was great. The critics didn’t understand what the film was about, though. That’s because a lot of them are stupid. It’s a really a love story, see. John Dillinger’s girlfriend was an Indian named Billie Frechette. She was beautiful. In the last scene, the fed who shot Dillinger goes to see Billie in jail and tells her that Johnny’s last words were ‘Tell Billie bye-bye blackbird.’ That scene made me cry.”
“Why were you holding your cell phone all during the movie?” Alafair asked. “You expecting a call?”
“A guy I know in Florida is making a nuisance of himself. Did you hear what I said about Dillinger and Billie Frechette?”
“Yeah, sure.”
They were outside the theater now, not far from one of the bridges over the Teche. The air had cooled and smelled of the bayou, and on the horizon giant clouds of smoke were rising from the sugar refinery, which was lit as brightly as a battleship. “You like it here?” Gretchen asked.
“It’s where I grew up,” Alafair said. “I was born in El Salvador. But I don’t remember much of life there, except a massacre I saw in my village.”
Gretchen stopped walking and looked at her. “No shit. You saw something like that?”
“A Maryknoll priest flew my mother and me into the country. We crashed by Southwest Pass. Somebody had put a bomb on board. My mother was killed. Dave dove down without enough air in his tank and pulled me from the wreck.”
“Is that in your book, the one that’s about to come out?”
“Some of it.”
“I wish I could write. I’d like to be a screenwriter. I have an associate’s degree and fifteen hours at Florida Atlantic. You think I could get into film school at the University of Texas?”
“Why would you not be able to?”
“I wasn’t the best student in the world. I think half the time my male professors were grading my jugs. I kind of had a way of choosing almost all male professors for my classes. Oops, there goes my phone. I’ll be just a minute.”
Gretchen walked across the parking lot and began speaking into the phone as she rounded the corner of the theater. Some middle-school kids cutting through from the street to the parking lot passed her, then looked back and started laughing. “What’s so funny, you guys?” Alafair asked.
“That lady over there dropped her phone in the mud puddle. She knows some cuss words, yeah,” one boy said.
Alafair looked at her watch, then walked to the corner of the building. She could hear Gretchen’s voice in the darkness. Perhaps secretly, she hoped to hear a profane tirade at a lover or a family member. Or a confession of need or an attempt at reconciliation or an argument over money. But the voice she heard was not one dependent on profanity to intimidate the listener. Nor was it the voice of the Gretchen Horowitz enamored by the love story of Billie Frechette and John Dillinger.
“Here’s what it is, and you’d better get it right the first time,” Gretchen said. “I’m out. Don’t leave anything in the drop box. The last deal was on the house. No, you don’t talk, Raymond. You listen. You take my number out of your directory, and do not make the mistake of contacting me again.” There was a pause. “That’s the breaks. Go back to Cuba. Open a beans-and-rice stand on the beach. I think you’re worrying about nothing. The people who pay us pay us for one reason: They’re not up to the job themselves. So adios and hasta la cucaracha and have a good life and stay away from me.”
Gretchen closed her phone and turned around and looked into Alafair’s face. “Didn’t see you there,” she said.
“Who was that?” Alafair asked.
“A guy I was in the antique business with in Key West. He’s a gusano and always spotting his drawers about something.”
“A worm?”
“A Batistiano, an antirevolutionary. Miami is full of them. They love democracy as long as it’s run by brownshirts.” She smiled awkwardly and shrugged. “We brought in some antiquities from Guatemala that were a little warm, like freshly dug up next to some Mayan pyramids, the kind of stuff that private collectors pay a lot of money for. I’m out of it now. You said something about going to your house for boiled crabs?”
“It’s kind of late.”
“Not for me.”
“How about a drink at Clementine’s?” Alafair said.
“You were looking at me a little funny. What did you think I was talking about?”
“I wasn’t sure. It’s not my business.”
“You had a real funny look on your face.”
“You have mud in your hair. You must have dropped your phone.”
Gretchen touched her ear and looked at her fingers. “You think I could fit in at a place like the University of Texas? I hear a lot of rich kids go there. I’m not exactly a sorority girl. Tell me the truth. I’m not sensitive.”
Clete Purcel turned the Caddy south on the two-lane and headed down the green tree-lined strip of elevated land that led to Cypremort Point. The surface of the bay was the color of tarnished brass, the waves capping close to the banks, the late sun as red and angry and unrelenting as a stoplight at a railroad crossing. He pulled down the visor but could not keep the brilliance out of his eyes. He had to drive with one hand and shield himself from the glare, as though the sun had conspired with the voices in his head that told him to desist, to cut a U-turn and scour grass and mud out of the swale, to floor the Caddy back to New Iberia and find a bar with a breezy deck by Bayou Teche and quietly sedate his head for the next five hours.
But omens and cautionary tales had never been an influence in the life of Clete Purcel. The sunset was splendid, the oil that lurked in the Gulf quiescent or even biodegrading, as the oil companies and government scientists had claimed. He and his best friend had eluded death on the bayou and left their enemies blown into bloody rags among the camellias and live oaks and pecan trees and elephant ears. How many times in his life had he been spared a DOA tag on his toe? Maybe it was for a reason. Maybe his attendance at the big dance was meant to be much longer than he had thought. Perhaps the world was not only a fine place and well worth the fighting for; perhaps it was also a neon-lit playground, not unlike the old Pontchartrain Beach, where the admission was free and the Ferris wheel and the aerial fireworks on the Fourth of July stayed printed against the evening sky forever.
Varina Leboeuf had called and said she’d found a photo she thought he should see. Should he have ignored her call and not driven out to Cypremort Point? Was there something inherently bad in his level of desire or the fact that he admired the way a woman walked and glanced back over her shoulder at a man? Was it wrong that he was
