I hung up the phone, missing the cradle and dropping the receiver on the floor, waking my wife.
Jesse Leboeuf had never thought of himself as a prejudiced man. In his mind, he was a realist who looked upon people for what they were and what they were not, and he did not understand why that was considered bad in the eyes of others. People of color did not respect a white man who lowered himself to their level. Nor did they wish to live with whites or be on an equal plane with them. Any white person who had grown up with them knew that and honored the separations inherent in southern culture. Saturday-night nigger-knocking was a rite of passage. If anyone was to blame for it, it was the United States Supreme Court and the decision to integrate the schools. Shooting Negroes with BB guns and slingshots and throwing firecrackers on the galleries and roofs of their homes didn’t cause long-term damage to anyone. They had to pay some dues, like every immigrant group, if they wanted to live in a country like this. How many people in those homes had been born in Charity Hospital and raised on welfare? Answer: all of them. How would they like living in straw villages back in Africa, with lions prowling around the neighborhood?
But when Jesse reviewed his life, he stumbled across an inalterable fact about himself that he didn’t like to brood upon. In one way or another, he had always needed to be around people of color. He not only went to bed with Negro girls and women as a teenager, he found himself coming back for more well into his forties. They feared him and shrank under his weight and cigarette odor and the density of his breath, while their men slunk away into the shadows, the whites of their eyes yellow and shiny with shame. After each excursion into the black district, Jesse felt a sense of power and control that no other experience provided him. Sometimes he made a point of drinking in a mulatto bar near Hopkins just after visiting a crib, drinking out of a bottle of Jax in the corner, looking nakedly into the faces of the patrons. His sun-browned skin was almost as dark as theirs, but he always wore khaki clothes and half-top boots and a fedora and a Lima watch fob, like a foreman or a plantation overseer would wear. The discomfort Jesse caused in others was testimony that the power in his genitals and the manly odor in his clothes were not cosmetic.
It ended with affirmative action and the hiring of black sheriff’s deputies and city police officers. It had taken Jesse thirteen years and three state examinations and four semesters of night classes at a community college to make plainclothes. In one day, a black man was given the same pay grade as he and assigned as his investigative partner. The black man lasted two months with Jesse before he resigned and went to work for the state police.
Jesse became a lone wolf and was nicknamed “Loup” by his colleagues. If an arrest might get messy or require undue paperwork, the Loup was sent in. If the suspect had shot a cop or raped a child or repeatedly terrorized a neighborhood and barricaded himself in a house, there was only one man for the job; the Loup went in carrying a cut-down twelve-gauge pump loaded with pumpkin balls and double-aught bucks. The paramedics would have the body bag already unzipped and spread open on the gurney, ready for business.
Jesse knew a trade-off had been made without his consent. He was a useful tool, a garbage collector in a cheap suit, a lightning bolt that stayed in the sheriff’s quiver until a dirty job came along that no one wanted to touch. In the meantime, black law officers, some of them female, had replaced him as a symbol of authority in the black neighborhoods, and Jesse Leboeuf had become one more uneducated aging white man, one who no longer had sexual access to the women whose availability he had always taken for granted.
At 5:46 A.M. Saturday, he drove his pickup truck down East Main through the historical district. The street was empty, the lawns blue-green in the poor light, the caladiums and hydrangeas beaded with dew, the bayou smoking just beyond the oaks and cypress trees that grew along the bank. Up ahead he could see the Shadows, and across the street from it, the plantation overseer’s house that had been converted into a restaurant. Jesse had never been impressed by historical relics. The rich were the rich, and he wished a pox on every one of them, both the living and the dead.
He peered through his windshield at a modest shotgun home with a small screened gallery and ceiling-high windows and ventilated green storm shutters. No lights were on in the house. A rolled newspaper lay on the front steps. Two compact cars and a pickup truck were parked in the driveway and under the porte cochere, their windows running with moisture. He went around the block and this time pulled to the curb, under the overhang of a giant live oak, two houses up from the home of the homicide detective who Jesse believed had besmirched his reputation and humiliated him in front of his peers.
He cut the engine and lit an unfiltered cigarette and sipped from a pint bottle of orange-flavored vodka. The cigarette smoke went down into his lungs like an old friend, blooming in his chest, reassuring him that his heart problems had nothing to do with nicotine. He’d acquired several drops over the years, but nobody had seen the one he had on him now. It was a five-chamber. 22 revolver he had taken off a New Orleans prostitute. He had burned the serial numbers with acid and reverse-wrapped the wood grips with electrician’s tape and coated the steel surfaces with a viscous layer of oil. The possibilities of lifting a print from it were between remote and nonexistent. The challenge was to arrange the situation. It couldn’t be in the home; it would have to be someplace else, where there would be no adult witness.
He took another drink from the bottle and another deep puff off his cigarette, letting the exhaled smoke drift through his fingers. He saw himself squeezing the trigger of his. 38 snub, the flash leaping from the muzzle and either side of the chamber, the bullet catching the target unaware, pocking a single hole in the middle of the forehead, the facial muscles collapsing as the brain turned to mush. Then he would wrap the drop in his victim’s hand and fire a round into a wall. It was that easy. In his lifetime, he had never seen a cop go down for an execution if there were no witnesses and it was done right.
The street was completely silent, the lawns empty, the Victorian and antebellum homes overhung by trees dripping with Spanish moss. The setting was like a replication of everything that he secretly hated. Was he being silently mocked for the fact and circumstances of his birth? He had picked cotton and broken corn and mucked out cow stalls before ever seeing the inside of a school. He wondered if anyone in those houses had seen the tips of a child’s fingers bleed on a cotton boll.
He looked at the shotgun house again. Wrong time, wrong place, he thought. Down the bayou in Jeanerette, there was another person he might visit, someone who deserved an experience he hadn’t given a woman in a long time. He wet his lips at the prospect. As he pulled away from the curb, he thought he heard the deep-throated rumble of dual exhausts echoing off a row of buildings, the kind of sound he associated with hot rods and Hollywood mufflers. Then the sound thinned and disappeared over on St. Peter Street, and he gave it no more thought.
Jesse took the back road into Jeanerette and crossed the drawbridge by a massive white-pillared home surrounded by live oaks whose leaves trembled simultaneously when the wind gusted. The eastern sky was black with rain clouds, the moon still up, the surface of the bayou coated with fog as white and thick as cotton. Catin Segura’s home was not hard to find. It was the last one on the block, down by the water, in a neighborhood of small wood-frame houses. Her cruiser was parked in the gravel driveway, and she had put new screens on her gallery and planted flowers in all the beds and window boxes and nailed a big birdhouse painted like the American flag in a pecan tree. A tricycle rested on its side in the yard. A plastic-bladed whirligig fastened to a rain gutter was spinning and clicking in the breeze. Other than the whirligig, there was no movement or sound anywhere on the short block where Catin lived with her two children.
Jesse had one more drink and capped his bottle and rolled down his windows. He lit another cigarette and draped one arm over the steering wheel and thought about his alternatives. There were two or three ways to go. He could get rough with her in a major way and teach her a lesson in the bedroom that she would never forget and probably would be afraid to report. Or he could park one in her ear with his. 38 snub and put the drop in her hand and tack a small holster for it under the breakfast table. He could take a flesh wound if he had to. He drew in on his cigarette and heard the paper crisp and burn. He took the cigarette from his mouth, holding it with his thumb and three fingers, exhaling through his nostrils, his thoughts coming together, an image forming before his eyes. He dropped the cigarette out the window and heard it hiss in a puddle of water. He reached into his glove box and removed a pair of handcuffs and the clip-on holster that contained his. 38 snub. Then he got out of the truck and put on his coat and took his old fedora from behind the seat and put it on his head and threaded the handcuffs through the back of his belt. He worked a crick out of his neck and flexed his shoulders and opened and closed his hands. “Tell me how your life is going one hour from now, you black bitch,” he said under his breath.
The screen door on the gallery was latched. He slipped a match cover between the jamb and the door and lifted the latch hook free of the eyelet and stepped inside. As he tapped on the inside door, he heard the same
