“You know all that stuff you hear about getting it on with a young woman so you can feel young again?”
“What about it?”
“It works fine. Until you come out of the shower the next morning and look in the mirror and see a mummy looking back at you.”
Clete hung up his desk phone and gazed out the back window at the bayou. A black man seated on an inverted bucket was fishing with a cane pole in the shade of the drawbridge. Water hyacinths grew thickly along the banks, and on the far side was the old gray hospital and convent that had been converted into business offices, all of it shadowed by giant live oaks. The wind was up and the moss was straightening in the trees and the oak leaves were tumbling on the manicured lawn. Clete rubbed the heel of his hand into his eye and felt a great weariness that seemed to have no origin. He lit his Zippo lighter and placed it in the center of an ashtray and, with a pair of tweezers, held the memory cards he had retrieved from Varina Leboeuf’s property over the flame.
He had left his office door open. He failed to notice that Gretchen Horowitz had returned from the errands he had sent her on. She tapped on the doorjamb before entering his office. “I wasn’t deliberately listening, but I heard your conversation,” she said.
He watched the second memory card curl and blacken in the flame of his Zippo. He dropped it into the ashtray. “What about it?” he asked.
“I wish you would trust me more.”
“About what?”
“Everything. If you trusted me, maybe I could help.”
“You’re a kid and you don’t know what you’re talking about, no matter how much you’ve been around.”
“I told you not to call me that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a kid. That’s what we all want to be. That’s why we screw up our lives, always trying to be something we’re not.”
“I don’t like to hear you talk like that. I don’t like what this woman is doing to you.”
“Did you get the mail?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go to FedEx in Lafayette?”
“Yes.”
“Then you did your job. We’re done on this subject.”
“Can I have the rest of the afternoon off?”
“To do what?”
She leaned down on his desk. Her shoulders were too big for her shirt, her upper arms taut with muscle. The violet tint of her eyes seemed to deepen as she looked into his face. “Personal business.”
“I think you should hang around.”
“I want to buy a vehicle for myself. Maybe a secondhand pickup.”
“Stay away from Varina Leboeuf,” he said.
“How about taking your own advice? You’re unbelievable.”
He watched her walk out the front door into the brightness of the day, a cute olive-drab cap tilted on her head, her wide-ass jeans stretched tight on her bottom, her tote bag swinging from her shoulder.
Three hours later, Alafair’s cell phone rang. “Are you working on your novel right now?” Gretchen asked.
“I’ve finished the galleys on the first one. I’ve started a new one,” Alafair replied.
“What’s it about?”
“I’m not sure. I never am. I make it up each day. I never see more than two scenes ahead.”
“You don’t make an outline?”
“No, I think the story is written in the unconscious. You discover it a day at a time. At least that’s the way it seems to work for me.”
“I’ll buy you dinner if you drive me to a couple of car lots,” Gretchen said. “I took a cab to three but didn’t find anything interesting. I don’t want to waste the rest of the day waiting on more cabs.”
“Dave says you tore up Pierre Dupree and two other guys with a blackjack.”
“Shit like that happens sometimes.”
“Where are you?”
Alafair picked up Gretchen at a car lot out by the four-lane. She was standing on the corner, wearing dull red cowboy boots, her jeans stuffed into the tops, cars whizzing by her. She pulled open the passenger door and got inside. “Do the drivers around here drop acid before they get in their automobiles?” she said.
“What kind of car are you looking for?” Alafair asked.
“Something that’s cheap with a hot engine.” Gretchen gave directions to a car lot on the edge of town.
“You know a lot about cars?” Alafair said.
“A little. But forget about that. Clete told me you were number one in your class at Stanford Law.”
“There’s no official rating of graduates at Stanford, but I had a four-point GPA. My adviser said if I was ranked, I’d probably be first in my class.”
“You were born in a grass hut? You make me feel like a basket case. I’m sending in my application forms to the University of Texas. I think you have to be interviewed to get into the film program. I’m a little nervous about that.”
“Why should you be nervous?”
“Because I’ve always had a tendency of sending certain kinds of signals to men when I wanted something from them. Like maybe they could get into my pants if things went right for me. I pretended to myself that wasn’t what I was doing, but it was. I’d find a middle-aged guy who couldn’t control where his eyes went and home in on him.”
“Stop talking about yourself like that. If you have to go to Austin for an interview, I’ll go with you.”
“You’d do that?”
“Gretchen, talent doesn’t have anything to do with a person’s background or education. Did you ever see Amadeus? It’s the story of Mozart and his rivalry with Antonio Salieri. Salieri hated Mozart because he thought God had given this great talent to an undeserving idiot. Talent isn’t earned, it’s given. It’s like getting hit by lightning in the middle of a wet pasture. People don’t sign up for it.”
“If I could talk like you.”
“I told you to quit demeaning yourself. You’re the kind of person writers steal lines from. What kind of people do you think make movies? Most of them belong in detox or electroshock. The rest are narcissists and nonpathological schizophrenics. That’s why Los Angeles has more twelve-step meetings than any other county in the United States. Can you see your local Kiwanis Club making Pulp Fiction?”
“I’ve got to write that down.”
“No, you don’t. You have better lines in your own head.”
“I’m one of the people you just mentioned?”
“Anybody can be normal. Count your blessings,” Alafair said.
She turned in to a used-car lot that, only two weeks earlier, had been a cow pasture. The car seller was a notorious local character by the name of T. Coon Bassireau. His business enterprises had ranged from burial insurance to car-title loans to storefront counseling centers that billed Medicaid to treat street people who had to be taught the names of their illnesses. He also patented a vitamin tonic that contained 20 percent alcohol and was guaranteed to make the consumer feel better. He swindled pensioners out of their savings in a Mexican biotech scam and once dumped a bargeload of construction debris in a pristine swamp. But the big score for T. Coon came in the form of deteriorating train tracks across southern Louisiana. Whenever there was a freight derailment, particularly one involving tanker cars, he and his brother, a liability lawyer, distributed T-shirts to people in the neighborhoods along the tracks.
The message printed on the back read: HAVE TOXIC SMELLS IN YOUR HOUSE FROM THE TRAIN WRECK? YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR A LARGE CASH SETTLEMENT. CALL T. COON BASSIREAU. T. COON IS YOUR FRIEND. The 800 number was emblazoned in red on the front and back.
He stood proudly under the vinyl banner that stretched across his new car lot. Half a dozen American flags, their staffs speared into the ground, popped in the breeze. A battery-lit portable sign that read WE SUPPORT THE
