I drove back to New Iberia, unable to think straight. Helen had left a Post-it on my door. SEE ME, it said.
"Where have you been?" she asked, looking up from her desk.
"I took some personal time in Lafayette. I called Wally before eight," I replied.
"What kind of 'personal time'?"
"I saw Ida Durbin."
"I have to meet this woman."
"What is it, Helen?"
"Raphael Chalons wants to see you."
"Why?"
"You got me. Unless he thinks you're a priest." She looked at her watch. "It sounded to me like he was already on the bus."
I have heard both hospice personnel and psychologists maintain that human beings lose body weight at the moment of death,, that the dimensions of the skeleton and the tissue visibly shrink before the eye, as though the escape of the soul leaves behind a cavity swirling with atoms. Raphael Chalons was not dead when I reached Iberia General, but his stricken face and hollow eyes and the sag of his flesh on his bones made me wonder if the Angel of Death was not deliberately casting a slow shadow on the haunted man who stared back at me from the hospital bed.
"I tried to bring you flowers earlier, Mr. Raphael. But the nurse felt my visit wasn't an appropriate one," I said.
My words and their banality were obviously of no interest to him. His eyes were as black as a raven's wing, his facial skin oily, spiked with whiskers, furrowed around the mouth. One hand lay palm-up on top of the sheet. He crooked his fingers at me.
I did not want to approach him. I did not want to inhale his breath. I did not want his words to put talons in my breast. I did not want to be held captive by another dying man.
But I leaned over him just the same. His fingers rose up and tapped my chest, as though he could convey meaning through my skin to compensate for the failure of his vocal cords. His lips moved, but his words were only pinpricks of spittle on my face.
"I can't understand you, sir," I said.
A flame burned in his cheeks and his eyes rolled up at mine, as a dependent lover's might. A clot broke in his throat. "Not his fault," he said.
"Sir?" I said.
His lingers tore a button on my shirt. His breath was dank, earth-smelling, like dirt spaded from a tree-covered grave. "The fault is mine. All my fault. Everything," he whispered. "Please stop my son."
"From doing what, Mr. Raphael?"
But his hand released my shirt and his gaze receded from mine, as though he were sinking into a black well and I was now only a marginal figure on its perimeter.
The nurse came in and closed the blinds. It was only then I noticed that my flowers were on the windowsill. "Don't worry, he's only sleeping," she said. "He has bursts of energy, then he falls asleep. He liked your flowers."
"Has he talked about his son?" I asked.
"No, not at all," she replied. She nodded toward the door, indicating she wanted to finish the conversation in the corridor. "May I be frank? I was very disturbed by something I saw take place here. It was very distressing."
"Go ahead," I said.
"Mr. Val came into the room with two lawyers. They tried to get Mr. Raphael to dictate a will. But he wouldn't do it. Mr. Val was quite upset. No, the better term is irate."
"Thank you for telling me this," I said.
"You and Mr. Raphael must be very close."
"Why do you think that?"
"He only asked to see one other person. Someone named Ida. Fortunately, she showed up here about an hour ago. I saw her stroking his hair on the pillow. She seemed a very elegant person. Do you know her, Detective Robicheaux?"
At three that afternoon a nurse's aide found Raphael Chalons half out of his bed, his sightless eyes staring out of his head as though he had looked into a camera's flash. The blanket and sheet had cascaded over his shoulders, like the mantle a medieval lord might wear as he walked toward a blade of light on the earth's rim.
chapter TWENTY-SEVEN
Wednesday evening Molly and I towed my boat to Henderson Swamp and fished at sunset inside a grove of flooded cypress trees. In the distance we could see car headlights flowing across the elevated highway that traverses a chain of bays and canals inside the center of the Atchafalaya Basin. The air was breathless, the moon rising above the cypress into a magenta sky, the water so still you could hear the hyacinths popping open back in the trees.
We kept two largemouth bass that we caught on plugs and headed across a long bay toward the boat landing. In the dusk I could see cows standing on a green levee and lights inside the baitshop and restaurant at the landing. We winched the boat onto our trailer, then drove up the concrete ramp and went inside the baitshop for a cold drink. Through the window I saw a man on the gallery pouring a bag of crushed ice into his cooler, rearranging the fish inside. He put the plastic wrapper in a trash can and drank from a bottle of beer while he admired the sunset.
"Wait here a minute," I said to Molly.
"Somebody you know?" she said.
"I hope not," I said.
I approached the man on the gallery. The wind had come up, and I could see the leaves of the cypress trees lifting like green lace out on the water. The man felt my weight on the plank he was standing on. He lowered the bottle from his mouth without drinking from it and turned toward me. "Yeah, I remember you used to talk about fishing over here," he said.
"Always a pleasure to see you, Johnny," I said.
He nodded, as though a personal greeting did not require any other response.
"How's your mother?" I asked.
"When you're that old and you smell the grave, you're thankful for little things. She don't complain."
He slid another bottle of beer out of his cooler and twisted off the cap. The fish in the cooler were stiff and cold-looking and speckled with blood and ice under the overhead light. Jericho Johnny's shirt puffed open in a gust of wind across the water. He turned his face toward the horizon, as though a fresh scent had invaded his environment. As he stood framed against a washed-out sky, his eyes devoid of any humanity that I could detect, his nose wrinkling slightly, I wondered if he wasn't in fact the liege lord of Charon, his destroyed voice box whispering in the blue-collar dialect of the Irish Channel while he eased his victims quietly across the Styx.
I leaned on the railing, my arm only inches from his. "You can't do business in Iberia Parish, Johnny," I said.
He raised his beer bottle to his mouth and took a small sip off it. He glanced over his shoulder at Molly, who sat at a table in the baitshop, reading a magazine. "That your lady?" he said.
"Look at me," I said. "Val Chalons is off limits. I don't care what kind of deal you cut with Clete Purcel."
He closed the lid on his cooler and latched it. "Purcel don't have anything to do with me, Robicheaux. You were nice to my mother. I was nice to you. In fact, twice I was nice to you. That means I go where I want. I do what I want," he said.
He placed his unfinished beer on the railing and walked toward his car, his cooler balanced on his shoulder, ice water draining down his shirtback as though his skin possessed no sensation.
I went to Clete Purcells office on Main Street during lunchtime the next day. His office had been a sports parlor during the 1940s,, then had been gutted by a fire and turned into a drugstore that went bankrupt after the Wal-Mart store was built south of town. In the last week an interior decorator had hung the ancient brick walls with historical photographs of New Iberia and antique firearms encrusted with rust that had been found in a pickle barrel under a nineteenth-century warehouse on the bayou. The new ambiance was stunning. So was the clientele going in and out of the office. Clete was now starting up his own bail bond service,, and the utilitarian furniture in the front of the office was draped with people whose idea of a good day was the freedom to watch trash television without interruption.