When she looked back at me, there were tears in her eyes. “You’re better than all these people, Dave. They don’t deserve you.”
“I’m better than no one.”
“This Poche woman is in St. Martinville?”
“Bad idea,” I said.
“Where does she live?”
“Stay away from her,” I said. “Are you listening, Alf? Come back here.”
IT WAS DARK and rain had started to fall before Alafair found the cypress house on the bayou where Emma Poche lived. Only one light burned in the house, perhaps in a back bedroom. The light fell out into the backyard, where a barbecue pit with an open top smoldered under a live oak, the smoke rising into the leaves in an acrid flume.
The tide was in, and Bayou Teche was high and swollen with mud, the surface chained with rain rings. A speedboat was moored among the flooded elephant ears, a tarp thrown carelessly over the console and the front seat. Alafair could hear music playing inside the cypress house. She could also hear wind chimes tinkling on the gallery and the sound of someone’s voice rising and falling above the music. She stepped up on the gallery and started to tap on the door. Then she realized what she was hearing, a soliloquy of need and debasement, a confession of personal inadequacy made by someone who was either drunk or morally insane or without any vestige of self-respect.
“I’ve done everything you wanted,” the voice said. “But you treat me like fingernail parings. I’m supposed to fuck you on demand and never expect a kind word, and act like that’s normal. I bought a roast and a cake and fixed your potatoes just the way you like them. I thought we’d eat and go out in public or go to New Orleans and stay at the Monteleone. I don’t have a career or a life anymore. All I have is you. Come back to bed. Let me hold you.”
Alafair stepped back, unsure what she should do next. Then she took a breath and knocked hard on the door. The inside of the house went silent. “Ms. Poche, it’s Alafair Robicheaux. I need to speak to you,” she said.
She heard the sound of feet moving across the floor and a door opening in back. She knocked again, this time harder. “Ms. Poche, one way or another, you’re going to talk to me,” she said.
She walked around to the side of the house. Someone wearing a flop hat and a raincoat was walking rapidly through the trees and down the slope to the bayou. The electricity leaping between the clouds lit the moored speedboat and the banks of flooded elephant ears and the small waves capping among the cypress knees. The person picked up the weighted painter and stepped up on the speedboat’s bow in a single motion, then pushed the electric starter on the engine and backed into the current. In seconds, the boat was splitting a trough down the middle of the bayou.
Alafair went back to the gallery. Emma Poche was standing behind the screen door, backlit by a lamp she had turned on in the living room. She wore jeans and a blouse that exposed a bra strap. “What do you want?” she said, her hair in disarray, her breath rife with the odor of cigarettes and alcohol.
“You called my father this afternoon.”
“What about it?”
“You said someone was going to kill him and anybody he was with.”
“I have no memory of a conversation like that.”
In the glow of the lamp, Alafair could see the streaked makeup on Emma Poche’s face, the swollen eyes, the smear of lipstick on her teeth. “I answered the phone,” Alafair said. “I handed the receiver to my father. I listened while he talked to you. Don’t lie to me.”
“What did you say?”
“May I come in?”
“No, you can’t,” Emma replied, reaching for the latch on the screen.
But Alafair jerked open the door and went inside. “If you want to call 911 and report an intruder, you can use my cell.” When Emma didn’t reply, Alafair said, “Who was the person who just left?”
“I don’t have to tell you anything. Who do you think you are? Your father has hallucinations. Everybody knows it. He’s one of those dry alcoholics who would be better off drunk.”
“My father is the kindest, most decent human being you’ll ever meet. I feel sorry for you, Ms. Poche-”
“It’s Deputy Poche.”
“I advise you to shut your mouth and listen, Deputy Poche. I found out where you live from Clete Purcel. I also found out you were the woman who tried to set him up for the murder of Herman Stanga. That’s about as low as it gets. I had a hard time imagining what kind of woman could do that to a man like Clete. I tried to see you in my mind’s eye, but I couldn’t. Then I stood on your gallery and heard you begging affection from somebody to whom you’re obviously a throwaway fuck. If you weren’t so pathetic, I’d slap you all over your own house.”
“You little bitch, you can’t talk to me like that.”
“Who are the men who tried to kill Dave?”
“I don’t know.”
Involuntarily, Alafair raised her hand.
“You listen to me, girl,” Emma said. “We can die and become humps out in a field, and two days after we’re gone, nobody but our families will remember who we were. Look around you. You see the trailer slums on the bayou and the crack dealers on the street? You think Dave or you or me can change the way things work here? We’re little people. You think I’m the only person around here who’s a disposable fuck? You like the way you got treated by Kermit Abelard?”
“What do you know about Kermit?”
“Better question, what
Alafair used the full flat of her hand to slap Emma Poche across the face. She hit her so hard, spittle rocketed from Emma’s mouth.
Emma sat down on the couch, her left cheek glowing from the blow, her eyes out of focus. “You feel sorry for me? I have a high school degree. You’re a Stanford law student. Which one of us got used the worst? Which one of us shared her lover with a sleazy con man who date-rapes teenage girls? I could have you locked up and charged, but I’m gonna let you slide. Now get out of my house.”
Alafair’s gaze dropped to the coffee table. “What are you doing with this book?” she asked.
“Reading it?”
“Who just left here?”
“No one. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve imagined everything that’s happened here tonight.”
“You’re reading Kermit’s novel about the Battle of Shiloh?”
“You keep your hands off my book.”
“Did Kermit give you this, Ms. Poche?”
“Why would you think that? Why wouldn’t you assume I bought it at a store?”
“Because everything else on your bookshelf is trash.”
“You give me that,” Emma said, getting to her feet.
Alafair peeled back the book’s pages to the frontispiece. The inscription read:
To Carolyn,
With affection and gratitude to a champion on the courts and a champion of the heart. Thanks for your support of my work over the years.
Kermit Abelard
Carolyn?
I DID NOT see Alafair until the next morning, when I was fixing breakfast and she came into the kitchen in her bathrobe. I poured her a glass of orange juice and fixed her a cup of coffee and hot milk and set the glass and the coffee cup and saucer in front of her at the table. I didn’t ask her where she had gone the previous night or what she had done. I went outside and fed Snuggs and Tripod and came back in. Then she told me everything that had happened at Emma Poche’s house in St. Martinville.
“You hit her?” I said.
