I looked over my shoulder at the doorway. “That has no bearing on what occurred. You roger that, Cat?”
She nodded.
“You called the shooter a person, not a man,” I said. “Was the shooter a woman?”
She looked at the water spots in the wallpaper and on the ceiling. “I’m tired.”
“Who took the cuffs off you?”
“The person did.”
“And you called 911 immediately?”
“Jesse Leboeuf was left on the street when he should have been in a cage. The department didn’t save my life,” she said. “The shooter did. I hope Jesse Leboeuf is in hell. It’s a sin for me to think that way, and it bothers me real bad.”
I pressed her hand in mine. “It’s the way you’re supposed to feel,” I said.
I waved to the paramedics to come back in the bedroom, then I picked up Jesse Leboeuf’s coat and shirt and underwear and hat and half-top boots and holstered. 38 snub-nose and stuffed them in a plastic garbage bag. I didn’t hand them over to the crime-scene investigator. I went into the kitchen, where I could be alone, and removed his wallet from his trousers and thumbed through all the compartments. In it was a color photograph of Leboeuf with a little girl on a beach, the waves slate-green and capping behind them. The little girl had curly brown hair and was holding an ice-cream cone and smiling at the camera. Deeper in the wallet, I found a folded receipt for airplane fuel. The name of the vendor was the same as the boat dock whose phone number we had pulled from Jesse Leboeuf’s telephone records. Written in pencil on the back were two navigational coordinates and the words “Watch downdrafts and pilings at west end of cove.”
I put the gas receipt in my shirt pocket and replaced the rest of Leboeuf’s belongings in the bag. The female deputy from the Iberia department was watching me. “What are you doing, Streak?” she asked.
“My job.”
Her name was Julie Ardoin. She was a small brunette woman with dark eyes who always looked too small for her uniform. Her husband had committed suicide and left her on her own, and when she was angered, her stare could make you blink. “Good. You gonna handle the notification?” she said.
I called Molly and told her I wouldn’t be home until noon, then drove down to the Leboeuf home on Cypremort Point. Theologians and philosophers try to understand and explain the nature of God with varying degrees of success and failure. I admire their efforts. But I’ve never come to an understanding of man’s nature, much less God’s. Does it make sense that the same species that created Athenian democracy and the Golden Age of Pericles and the city of Florence also gifted us with the Inquisition and Dresden and the Nanking Massacre? My insight into my fellow man is probably less informed than it was half a century ago. At my age, that’s not a reassuring thought.
When I pulled in to Varina Leboeuf’s gravel driveway, the tide was coming in and the sky was lidded with lead-colored clouds and waves were breaking against the great chunks of broken concrete that Jesse Leboeuf had dumped on the back of his property to prevent erosion. Varina opened the inside door onto the screened veranda and walked down the stairs toward my cruiser. I got out and closed the car door behind me and stared into her face. I could hear wind chimes and leaves rustling and the fronds of a palm tree clattering, and smell the salt in the bay, all the indicators of life that were ongoing and unchanged among the quick but that were gone forever for Varina’s father.
I wanted to state what had happened and get back to town. I wished I had violated protocol and telephoned. I wanted badly to be somewhere else.
I had lost the respect I once had for Varina; I had come to think of her as treacherous and dishonest. I bore her even greater resentment for her seduction and manipulation of a good man like Clete Purcel. But I resented her most because she reminded me in some ways of Tee Jolie Melton. Both women came out of an earlier time. They were alluring and outrageous and irreverent, almost childlike in their profligacy, more victim than libertine. That was the irony of falling in love with my home state, the Great Whore of Babylon. You did not rise easily from the caress of her thighs, and when you did, you had to accept the fact that others had used her, too, and poisoned her womb and left a fibrous black tuber growing inside her.
Varina wasn’t over ten feet from me now, her hair blowing over her brow, her mouth vulnerable, like that of a child about to be scolded. I looked at the waves cresting and breaking into foam on the chunks of concrete, the petals on the Japanese tulip tree shredding in the wind.
“My father isn’t here. He went fishing,” she said. “He made a ham-and-egg sandwich and was eating it when he drove out at daybreak. I saw him.”
“No, that’s not where he went.”
“He put his poles and tackle box and a shiner bucket in the back of the truck. He wasn’t drinking. He went to bed early last night. Don’t tell me he’s drunk, Dave. I know better. He’s going to be fine.”
“Your father is dead.”
She started to speak, but her eyes filmed and went out of focus.
“Maybe we should go inside,” I said.
“He was in an accident? He’s dead in an accident?” she said, turning her head away as though avoiding her own words.
“He was shot to death in Jeanerette.”
She placed one hand on the rope of a swing suspended from an oak limb. The blood had drained from her face. She was wearing a yellow cowboy shirt with the top snap undone. She began pushing on it with her thumb, knotting the fabric, unable to snap the brad into place, her eyes fastened on mine. “He went to a bar?”
“He was in the home of an Iberia Parish deputy sheriff. I think you know who I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t. He was going fishing. He’d been looking forward to it all week.”
“He raped and sodomized Catin Segura. He also beat her severely. A third party came into the house and shot and killed him.”
“My father isn’t a rapist. Why are you saying all this?” Her breath was coming too fast, she was like someone verging on hyperventilation, the color in her face changing.
“Do you have any idea who the shooter was?” I asked.
“I have to sit down. This is a trap of some kind. I know you, Dave. You were out to get my father.”
“You don’t know me at all. I always believed in you. I thought you were stand-up and honorable. I believed you beat the male-chauvinist oil bums around here at their own game. I was always on your side, but you never saw that.”
She was crying now, unashamedly, without anger or heat. There was a red dot on her chest where she had almost cut herself trying to snap her shirt. “Where is he?” she said.
“At Iberia General. Catin is at Iberia General, too. She has two children. I promised to take them to see her. It will probably be years before Catin overcomes the damage that’s been done to her. Would it hurt if you talked to her?”
“Me?”
“Sometimes the Man Upstairs gives us a chance to turn things around in a way we never see coming. Do Catin and yourself a favor, Varina.”
“You want me to go in there and talk to the woman who claims she was sodomized by my father?”
“I saw her at the crime scene under an hour ago. What happened to that woman is not a claim.”
I was not sure she was hearing me anymore. She looked as though she were drowning, her eye shadow running, her cheeks wet. She started walking toward the kitchen entrance of her house, trying to hold her back straight, almost twisting her ankle when she stepped in a depression. I caught up with her and put my arm around her shoulders. I thought she might resist, but she didn’t.
“Listen to me. Cut loose from that fraudulent preacher, the Duprees, Lamont Woolsey, the rackets they’re involved in, the whole nefarious business. There’s still time to turn it around. Say ‘full throttle and fuck it’ and get this stuff out of your life forever.”
Then she did one of the most bizarre things I had ever seen a bereaved person do. She went up the steps into her kitchen and took a half-gallon container of French-vanilla ice cream out of the freezer and sat at the same table where she had gotten Clete Purcel loaded and began eating the ice cream with a spoon, scraping its frozen hardness into curlicues, as though she were the only person in the room.
