wired a huge amount of money to Canada. You think the book business is that good?”
“How would I know?”
“Because maybe you have a history with him.”
“I saw him giving a snow job to a young girl who didn’t have enough sense to stay out of his car. So I had a heart-to-heart with him. I don’t know where you get all this other stuff. Have you been talking to the bartender?”
“You told Weingart he’d gotten a free pass about something. You were talking as though you’d had a chance to put a stop to something but you didn’t. You were talking as though you wanted to make up for what a theologian would call a sin of omission.”
“Run that church-basement psychobabble on somebody else, Dave.”
“Why is it that every person I know who uses that term has something he or she fears discussing?”
“Because most of the people you know are professional victims?”
“Were you talking about the death of Bernadette Latiolais or Fern Michot?”
Emma picked up a thick sheaf of paper from her desktop, work that seemed to be completed, and set it in the in-basket. Her cheeks were flaming. “Why do you do this to me, Dave? I was always your friend.”
“I think you planted Clete’s gold ballpoint in Herman Stanga’s swimming pool. You’re not only a dirty cop, Emma, I think you set up a man you slept with, a man who had great affection for you and who still defends you.”
There was a cup of cold coffee on her desk. She picked it up and threw it in my face. Other deputies, both plainclothes and in uniform, were getting up from their desks, staring through the front of the cubicle. I took two pieces of Kleenex from the box on Emma’s desk and wiped my face with them. “You’re a Judas goat. You lead your own kind down the slaughter chute,” I said. “Tell me if there is anything lower.”
The sheriff placed his hand on my shoulder. “That’s enough, Dave,” he said.
“Not even close,” I replied.
CHAPTER 19
EARLY MORNING IS a bad time for recovering drunks. The wall between the unconscious and the world of sleep is soft and porous, and the gargoyles have a way of slipping into the sunlight and fastening a talon or two into the back of your neck. Perhaps that is why I have always been an early riser, escaping into the blueness of the dawn and its healing properties before the power of memory and the dark energies of my previous life lay claim on my waking day.
But the funk and depression I brought back to town after my encounter with Emma Poche could not be blamed on the unconscious or my history of alcoholism and violence. A time comes in your life when the loudest sound in a room, any room, is the ticking of a clock. And the problem is not the amplified nature of the sound; the problem is that the sound is slowing, each tick a little further away than the one that preceded it. The first time this happened to me, I was in City Park on an autumn day, the smell of chrysanthemums and gas hanging in the trees. The breath went out of my chest and a sweat broke on my forehead. I sat down on a bench, the camellias and the bayou and the ball diamond slipping out of focus. I waited for the moment to pass, my mouth filling with a taste like pennies or blood from a fresh cut. I took off my wristwatch and shook it to make it stop ticking. Then I realized that people were staring at me, their faces disjointed with pity and concern.
“I’ve got malaria,” I said, my hands knotted between my knees, a weak smile on my mouth.
It’s not enough to call this a vision of mortality. In that moment, when watches and clocks misbehave and you feel a cold vapor wrap itself around your heart, you unconsciously draw a line at the bottom of a long column of numbers and come up with a sum. Perhaps it’s one that fills you with contentment and endows you with a level of courage and an acceptance that you didn’t know you possessed.
Or maybe not.
Maybe you wonder if you blew it, if you flipped away your yesterdays like cigarette butts that left a bad aftertaste. Or worst of all, you realize you have to leave the lives of others behind, the one you didn’t live and the ones you did not get to know adequately.
Helen Soileau probably had several women living inside her skin, but I had come to know only one or two of them. My daughter had grown from a terrified five-year-old refugee I had pulled from a submerged plane into an aspiring novelist and law student. My wife, Molly, had been a Catholic nun, a missionary in Central America, a labor organizer in southern Louisiana, and the wife of a police officer who had shed the blood of many men. I suspected that neither woman’s story was over. I also suspected I would not see the rest of their stories written.
Thoughts of this kind rob you of both faith and resolve. And my situation was further complicated by a phone call that Alafair picked up in the kitchen that afternoon. “Just a moment, please,” she said, pressing the mute button on the console. “It’s somebody named Emma. She sounds like she’s had a few drinks.”
I waited, thinking.
“I’ll tell her to call back.”
“That’s all right,” I said, taking the receiver from her. I placed it against my ear. I could hear people talking loudly and a jukebox playing in the background. “What’s shaking, Emma?”
“Screw you, Dave. One day I’ll pay you back for what you did today.”
“Is that the entirety of your message?”
“No. No matter what you think of me, I still have a conscience.”
“I’m listening.”
There was a long silence.
“Emma?”
“They’re gonna cap you and anybody who’s with you.”
“Who is?”
“God, you’re dumb,” she said, and broke the connection.
My ear felt cold when I set the receiver down in the cradle.
“What is it, Dave?” Alafair asked.
“That was Emma Poche. She’s a deputy sheriff in St. Martin Parish. Her boat must have left the dock a little early today.”
But I kept staring at Alafair, my words banal and silly, poorly disguising the portent of Emma’s call.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.
“She said I was in danger, as well as anyone who might be with me.”
“Danger from whom?”
“She hung up without saying.”
“Let’s have a talk with her.”
“I did that this morning. Maybe this is her way of getting even or appeasing her conscience. She’s a drunk, and nothing she says is reliable.”
Alafair sat down at the breakfast table and gazed out the back window. Molly was feeding Tripod on top of his hutch, and Snuggs was watching both of them from a fork in the tree overhead. “I have to tell you something, Dave,” Alafair said.
“What is it?”
“I heard two deputies in uniform talking in the booth next to me in McDonald’s. They were talking about the guys who tried to kill you and Clete in Jeff Davis Parish. One of them said, ‘I wonder if Robicheaux is starting to see black helicopters.’”
“Who cares what he said?”
“I care,” she said.
“Did you say something to this guy?”
“I told him he’d better keep his mouth off you or he’d be wearing his Big Mac on his head.”
I sat down next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. Her back was as stiff and hard as a stump. “Even when you were a little bitty girl, you were heck on wheels, Alf.”
