Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The next day I stop at the delicatessen inside Harvest Foods, Lolo’s only grocery store. Working people are eating an early lunch at the tables; the day is bright and last night’s snow is melting on the roof, and spring and a cheery note are in the air when Jeremiah McNally grabs my arm roughly from behind. “I got to talk to you,” he says. “Now.”

I pull his hand loose. “Don’t bend my threads, Fred,” I say, and try to smile.

He smells of nicotine and alcohol; there’s a razor nick inside the dimple on his chin. He’s obviously wired. “Don’t let me down, Aaron.”

I push my cart to an empty table in the corner and sit down. “What’s going on, partner?”

He sits down across from me, his eyes sweeping the other tables and the deli counter. “I’m going down for that situation in the Flathead River.”

“The murder of the waitress?”

“Yeah, Betty Wolcott. Guess who’s making the case on me? Joe Latour, the guy who wouldn’t let your injured daughter in his cruiser.”

“Lower your voice.”

“I’m going down for the whole bounce, Aaron. I could ride the needle.”

“Stop it. What’s their evidence?”

“My DNA is all over her apartment and her car and on her body or in her body and I don’t know where else.” His gaze slides off my face.

“Is there something you’re leaving out?”

“No.”

“How about the waitress who was found under the bridge at St. Ignatius? They got you for that, too?”

“Yeah, they might try. You think that’s funny?”

“I’m trying to help you, partner.”

“Well, you’re not,” he says. He gets up and goes to the beer cooler and returns with a six-pack, one can torn loose and already open in his hand. He chugs from it and sets it down on the table.

“You’re testing the envelope, Jeremiah.”

He pulls out his badge holder and opens it on the table. “They can live with it.”

“What can I do for you?”

“You can be my friend. Tell those assholes what’s going on.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Tell them about the spirits locked up in Ruby Spotted Horse’s cellar. The Indians you saw that guy Baker kill behind your house.”

“You’ve become a believer in the preternatural, and you want me to proselytize Latour for you?”

“I can’t follow what you’re saying.”

There’s no point in speaking to him. He’s obviously gone over a line and won’t be coming back for a while. He burps under his breath and takes another hit from the beer. The manager is headed for our table. I ease the beer can out of Jeremiah’s hand and place it on the floor.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” he says.

“DNA on the body of the victim doesn’t add up to a homicide charge.”

“It’s all political. BLM are running cops through the wringer. So cops hang one of their own out to dry. That’s me, a jockstrap on the wash line.”

“I’m sorry this is happening to you, Jeremiah.”

Many years ago I learned that we discover the best and worst in people when they’re under duress. I think that principle has certainly borne out with my pitiful friend. I wish I had not been witness to it. I take his car keys and drive him to my home and keep him there until he’s sober. He weeps in shame before he drives himself home.

At four p.m. the same day I park by the courthouse and walk through the front entrance of the sheriff’s department and go straight to Joe Latour’s office. His door is half open; he’s at his desk and looks at me over his horn-rims when I tap on the jamb. A framed photograph on the wall shows him in police uniform, shaking hands with George W. Bush.

“What’s up, Mr. Broussard?” he says.

“Need to talk to you about Jeremiah McNally.”

“In regard to what?”

There are a dozen possible answers to his question, almost all of them intrusive and self-destructive. “I have information that may help in the investigation of the Wolcott murder.”

He closes a folder on his desk blotter. “Pull up a chair.”

“Thank you.”

Then Fannie Mae walks through the wall and sits on a file cabinet behind him. She’s wearing snow boots with her jeans tucked inside them, a dark blue Union Army kepi, a Bugs Bunny T-shirt, and a navy peacoat. She gives me a double thumbs-up.

Latour studies my face, then looks behind him. “Something wrong?”

“No, not at all.”

“So what’s the information?” he says.

“Jeremiah says he’s going down for the Betty Wolcott homicide. I think y’all are going in the wrong direction.”

“How did you come to this profound conclusion?”

“I believe supernatural forces are involved. Not with just the Wolcott woman but in the deaths of Clayton Wetzel and the waitress up at Ronan, Irene Barr. I think the man who did these things was Major Eugene Baker. The same man responsible for the Baker Massacre on the Marias River.”

“Glad you brought that info in. I’ll let everyone know. Anything else?”

“Do you really believe someone like Jeremiah McNally would cut the entrails out of a woman’s body, a woman he dated?”

“That applies to anyone. But someone did it.” He looks at a clock on the wall. “Thanks for coming in.”

“You’re making the case on the basis of his DNA?”

“Know what?” he replies. “I don’t think you’re here about McNally. I think you’ve still got resentment about the way you think your daughter was treated.”

“It’s the opposite, Detective. I’m here in spite of the way you treated her and your failure to check the security cameras outside the nightclub. Then you all didn’t go after the assailants for nine weeks. Aside from her physical pain, do you have any idea how much she suffered emotionally? Does any of this register with you at all, sir?”

“It’s not a perfect system,” he says.

“I’ll give you directions to Fannie Mae’s grave. Maybe you can tell her that.”

“All right, so fuck me.”

I look at Fannie Mae. Her expression is serene, almost beatific, as she goes into a sequence of Italian sign language, beginning with the gripped-biceps, curled-up forearm, and clenched-fist symbol for shove it up your ass, followed by double bones that simply mean fuck you twice, asshole, followed by double horns that can mean eat shit or you’re a cuckold, followed by the flip-off on the chin that translates into blow me, beat it, or here’s the sweat off my genitalia.

Latour follows my line of sight. “What are you grinning about, Mr. Broussard? Because whatever it is, I don’t think it’s funny.”

“Please accept my apology.”

“I’ll share some information with you. The media doesn’t have it yet, but everyone else does. Betty Wolcott died of blunt trauma, not, thank God, of the evisceration. The tire jack in the trunk of McNally’s car was covered with her blood and hair, and so were the bottoms of his shoes that he threw into a Dumpster. He fooled me like he fooled you. He had porn and sex toys in his apartment. He’s a sad, sick man who ruined his career.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“That’s your choice. I have work to do.”

I get up to go. I’ve accomplished nothing. He has already gone back to his paperwork. I start out the door. Then he flips his ballpoint end over end into the wastebasket with a clang. “Hold on,” he says. “If I were you, I’d see a counselor. I’m not being sarcastic. I think you have some serious psychological issues.”

“I love the word ‘issues.’ It covers everything. Illiterate people can’t get enough of it.”

I start to go a second time. But I should have known that Fannie Mae wouldn’t leave the fray without charging full blast into enemy lines. She pulls the framed photo of Latour and the president off the wall and sails it through the glass in his office door, scattering shards that look like broken ice on the hallway floor.

I can see Fannie Mae; obviously Latour cannot. He sits wide-eyed and openmouthed in his chair, his arms crossed over his head, as though the building is crashing down upon him.

“That’s my little girl at work, Mr. Latour,” I say. “Does that kid rock or not?”

It’s Wednesday night. Ruby and I decide to attend an outdoor showing of Shane behind the Roxy Theater on Higgins. The viewing area is lined with folding chairs between the back wall of the theater and the rear of the Episcopalian church. There are lighted apartments on the second story of the theater and more apartments in the alley that runs along the side of the church. I mention such detail for a reason. Humping your pack up Golgotha can leave you wondering. But as I look at my surroundings now, I’m reminded of the ivy-covered brick bungalow on the cul-de-sac street in Houston where I was born, and the centuries-old live oaks at the end of the block, and the flowers that bloomed in pots and gardens at every brick house on the street.

I think also of the years we lived in New Iberia and New Orleans, and the way the morning smelled of ponded water and stone stained with lichen and jasmine and four-o’clocks and the fecund odor of fish roe in the bayou and bruised mint in the courtyards and the open-air markets in the French Quarter, the crates of fruit and shrimp and fish and crabs stacked on the sidewalks. And the most poignant image of all, the one that defined the existential and ephemeral and heartbreaking imprint on our souls, one we could neither quarrel with nor of our own volition choose to reject: an orange moon in late autumn above an ocean of sugarcane swirling in the wind, the stalks hammered with streaks of purple and gold, clacking like broomsticks, the smoke from the sugar refineries electrified with floodlights, all of it as transient as an ancient fish working its way out of the sea and onto the sand.

Just before the movie starts, Ruby takes my hand. “I bet you’re thinking of your childhood.”

“How did you know?”

“Because you treat a movie theater like you’re in a church in 1945.”

“That’s what a good theater is,” I reply.

George Stevens’s 1953 movie is one I learn from no matter how many times I see it. The primeval backdrop of the Grand Tetons represents the first day of Creation, and on it we see a wandering light-bearer played by Alan Ladd and a gunman named Jack Wilson played by Jack Palance, but at the center of the story is eight-year-old Joey Starrett, the one whose eyes we see through, the one who learns courage and humanity and honor not just from his struggling sodbuster parents but from Shane, a man with no past and no last name and who, in the last scene, is absorbed by the mountains he came from. It’s the most religious film I have ever seen, although the film contains no reference to religion.

About halfway through the story, Jack Wilson, evil incarnate, appears in the tiny godforsaken settlement on which the sodbusters are all dependent. I have to use the restroom. I work my way between the chairs and the back of the theater, then see a man and a woman and a boy emerging from the alley next to the church. They pull chairs off a stack and snap them into a sitting position and clang them on the asphalt while talking to one another. The man lights a cigarette. The flame illuminates his face. It’s Jimmie Kale.

I go into the theater, then try to return to my seat without drawing the attention of Kale and his companions. I sit back down and pick up Ruby’s hand and hold it in mine. Why hold her hand? I don’t know. Is there a tuning fork inside us that warns about the presence of evil or at least its product? I think there is. Someone’s fingers slide over my shoulder and squeeze. I turn around and see the face of the one person I truly hoped I would never see in the company of Kale or Ginny Stokes. His face seems older, his head sharper in its angularity, an avaricious intensity in his eyes. “How you doin’, Mr. B.?” he says.

“How are you, Jack?” I reply.

“Long time, no see.”

“Yes,” I say, my eyes straight ahead.

“I’m working for Mr. Jimmie.”

“Yeah,” I say, nodding.

“You doin’ okay?”

Those around us are beginning to get irritable.

“I’ll talk to you later, Jack.”

“Yeah, sure. I just wanted to say hello. I had to get out of town for a while.”

I lean forward so I can no longer see him on the perimeter of my vision. I hear him knock into a chair as he rejoins Kale and Sister Ginny. In the last scene of the film, Shane tells Joey there’s no living with a killing and no going back on one and that Joey must return home and grow up to be strong and straight. As Joey runs toward the mountains calling for Shane to come back, there is a plaintive echo in his voice that’s like the guttering flame of a votive candle, so delicate in its flickering that the audience is afraid to breathe upon it. I glance over my shoulder. The chairs occupied by Kale, Ginny Stokes, and Jack are empty, a bag of popcorn left on one, popcorn and butter trickling on the asphalt.