"Oh, there you are," I heard Molly Boyle say behind me. She and the Chalons family handyman, Andre Bergeron, walked down a leafy knoll on the edge of the lake. "We were watching the alligators in the shallows. How about something to eat?" she said.
She drove with me in the truck back toward New Iberia. Her friend, the black man, followed. At Jeanerette, I saw his car turn off the highway. I had hardly spoken since leaving the fish camp deep in the Atchafalaya Basin. Each time we passed a bar I felt as though a life preserver were being pulled from my grasp. "How'd you know where I was?" I asked.
"The lady who was watching you called me. Her husband owns the bar," she replied.
"Why was the Chalonses' handyman with you?" I said.
"Andre helps me in any way he can. He's always been protective of us," she replied. "Don't be angry, Dave."
"I'm not. I just got jammed up," I said irrationally, my hands tightening on the steering wheel, my breath a noxious fog.
Molly was silent. When I looked over at her, she was staring out the side window. "I'll go to a meeting with you," she said.
"I'd better drop you by your house," I said.
"That's not going to happen, trooper. If you try to pick up a drink today, I'm going to break your arm."
I looked at her again, in a more cautious way.
We drove down East Main toward my house, the nineteenth-century homes and manicured lawns and wet trees rushing past me, all of it curiously unchanged, a study in Sunday-afternoon normalcy and permanence to which I had returned like an impaired outsider. I pulled the truck deep into the driveway, past the porte cochere, so that it was almost hidden from the street by the trees and bamboo. I cut the engine and opened the driver's door. When I did, a shiny compact disk fell to the ground. Just next to the edge was a tiny reddish-brown smear that looked like blood.
"What's that?" Molly said.
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know what it is." Vainly, I tried to explain to myself where the CD had come from or who could have placed it in my truck. I touched the crusted smear on the surface and was sure I was touching blood. I slipped the CD in my pants pocket and unlocked the back door, my hands shaking.
Even if Molly had not been with me, my home offered no succor for the drunk teetering on the edge of delirium tremens. I had returned all the booze I'd purchased at Winn-Dixie. There was not even a bottle of vanilla extract in a cabinet. But at least my brother was not home and did not have to see me in the condition I was in.
The only other consolation I had was the fact my bender had not hurt my animals. When I bought my house I had created a small swinging door in the back entrance so Tripod and Snuggs, in case of emergencies, could get to a bag of dry food on the floor. But I couldn't take credit for having thought about them. A drunk on a drunk thinks about nothing except staying drunk.
I got in the shower, turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, and stayed there until the tank was almost empty. Then I dressed in fresh clothes and shaved while my hand trembled on the razor. I could hear Molly clanking pans in the kitchen.
I went into the living room and loaded the CD into my stereo. There was no seal or logo on it, and I suspected it contained nothing more than an Internet download of music someone had not bothered to pay for. But who had left it in my truck? The poachers the Creole woman had mentioned?
I pushed the "play" button on the stereo and the long-dead voice of Harry Choates, singing his signature song, "Jolie Blon," filled the room. That's why I had heard those words over and over in my head when I had woken up that morning, I told myself. Perhaps someone with a cut on his hand had given me Choates's song and I had probably played it repeatedly in my truck's stereo. A blackout didn't necessarily mean I had committed monstrous acts. I had to control my imagination. Yes, that was it. It was all a matter of personal control.
Then a second song began to play, one titled "Two Bottles of Wine," which had been written by Delbert McClinton for Emmylou Harris in the late 1970s. But the singer was not Emmylou. The band was raucous, the recording probably done in a bar or at a party, and the voice on it was the same voice as on the old 45-rpm recording Jimmie believed to have been cut by Ida Durbin.
"Everything in there okay, Dave?" Molly called from the kitchen.
chapter SIXTEEN
Monday morning the Garden of Gethsemane was the 7:35 traffic backup at the railroad crossing. It also included a horn blowing like a shard of glass in the ear, the hot smell of tar and diesel fumes, undigested food that lay greasy and cold in the stomach, waiting to fountain out of my throat. Then, to demonstrate I was in control of things and not bothered by the metabolic disaster inside my body, I blew my horn at a passing streak of freight cars.
I had attended an AA meeting the previous night, determined to leave my weekend bender behind, and this morning I had dressed in pressed slacks, shined shoes, a striped tie, and a white shirt that crinkled with light. But as I walked into the office I knew my affectation of freshness and confidence was the cheap ruse of a willful man who had thrown away years of sobriety, betrayed his friends in AA, and perhaps mortgaged a long series of tomorrows.
By midmorning I could feel a tension band begin to tighten on the right side of my head. I constantly touched at my scalp, as though I were wearing a hat that had begun to shrink. I chewed gum, washed my face with cold water in the lavatory, and tried not to think about where I might go when the clock finally struck noon. But that problem was about to be taken away from me.
The chief of police in Jeanerette was Doogie Dugas. He was not a bad fellow, simply a showboat and political sycophant. But like most sycophants he was inept and lived in fear of people who had power. I was walking past Helen's open door when I saw her talking on the telephone, snapping her fingers at me. "Hang on, Chief, Dave Robicheaux just walked in," she said. "I'm going to put you on the speakerphone. Dave's the lead detective in our own investigation."
"- get the impression Mr. Val isn't a big fan of Dave Robicheaux," Doogie's voice said.
"Uh, you're on the speakerphone now, Chief," Helen said.
There was a pause. "You got any evidence this guy is local?" Doogie said.
"Which guy?" I said.
"The Baton Rouge serial killer," he said.
"No, we don't have any evidence to that effect. What's going on?" I said.
"What's going on is it looks like a butcher shop in there. The sheriff and me got road stops set up on the parish line, but I'm gonna need some lab hep here," he replied.
"Sir, I have no idea what you're talking about," I said.
"Honoria Chalons, somebody cut all over her. I never seen anyt'ing like this. Y'all coming over here or not?" he said.
Helen and I and our forensic chemist, Mack Bertrand, drove to the Chalons home on the far side of Jeanerette. The homicide had taken place in the guesthouse sometime during the weekend, when Val and his father were in New Orleans on business. Val claimed he had returned shortly after nine on Monday morning and had found the body.
Crime scene tape had already been strung through the trees, sealing off the immediate area around the guesthouse, which was located by a swimming pool that had long ago been abandoned to mold and the scales of dead vines. Crime scene technicians from three parishes were already inside the guesthouse, photographing the body, the walls, the furniture, the tile floors., the glass in the windows, even the ceiling.
Honoria was nude, her body reclining on a white sofa, the incision in her throat so deep she was almost decapitated. But the wounds in the rest of her body had bled so profusely it was obvious that the mortal blow was not the first one the killer had struck.