Chapter Seventeen

I flew home in the morning on a commercial flight, although I could sorely afford the cost. The next day I called Helen and the head of Internal Affairs and left messages saying I was at their disposal. Then I sat in the silence of the kitchen and stared at the leaves dropping from the oaks in the backyard. It felt strange to be home alone in the middle of the workday, separated from my profession and all the symbols of my identity: my badge, the cruiser that was always available for me, the deference and respect that came from years of earning the trust of others. I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered whom I was about to become.

That afternoon I walked downtown and across the drawbridge and into the park and sat by myself at a picnic table next to the softball diamond. The park was empty, the grass blown with tiny pieces of leaves chopped up by the mower, a plastic tarp stretched across the swimming pool. At dusk I walked back home and passed people on the bridge whom I did not know and who did not respond to my greeting. Clete would not return from Arizona until the next day, and Alafair was staying on with Desmond until the weekend. I fed Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon, then showered and shaved and dressed in a pair of pressed slacks and a Hawaiian shirt I let hang over my belt. Rain was falling out of the sky, which seemed turned upside down, like a barrel of dark water with stars inside it. I put on a rain hat and drove to the club on the bayou where the blues weren’t just music but a way of life.


Bella Delahoussaye was singing a song by a Lafayette musician named Lazy Lester. Inside the din, the only line I could make out was Don’t ever write your name on the jailhouse wall. I sat at the end of the bar in the shadows and ordered a chicken barbecue sandwich and a 7Up with a lime slice. Ten minutes later, a heavyset man spun the stool next to me as though announcing his presence, then sat on it, a cloud of nicotine and dried sweat whooshing out of his clothes. “I think they fucked you, Robicheaux.”

His head had the dimensions of a football, swollen in the center and tapered at the top and the chin. His small mouth was circled with salt-and-pepper whiskers he clipped daily. When he spoke, his mouth looked both bovine and feral. His name was Frenchie Lautrec. He ordered a shot and a water back. Before joining the department, he was a brig chaser in the Crotch and a bondsman. He was also a longtime friend of Axel Devereaux.

“Did you hear what I said?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “So who fucked me?”

“The Queen Bitch, Helen Soileau. Who else?”

“Don’t talk about her like that.”

“No problem. I still think she stuck it to you. What are you drinking?”

My glass was half empty. “Nothing.”

“You staying off the hooch?”

“What are you after, Frenchie?”

“I hear IA has got you by the short hairs. You been over the line too many times. I heard the prick running your case say it.”

“Who’s the prick running my case?”

“I’m trying to cut you a break, Robicheaux. You need some help, maybe a job, a little income, I’m here. That’s what old school is about. We take care of each other.”

“I’ll get by.”

“I admire that. But if you need a gig, let me know.”

“Doing what?”

“Greasing the wheels.”

“What kind of wheels?”

“This is the Cajun Riviera, right? Use your imagination.”

“Maybe I’ll get back to you.”

“That’s the spirit.” He hit me on the back and got up from the stool. “If you want a little action, it’s on the house. Know what I’m saying?”

I watched him walk away, his shoulders humped, his hands knotting and unknotting. I finished my sandwich and ordered another 7Up. After her set, Bella Delahoussaye sat down next to me. “That guy who was here, you hang around wit’ him?” she said.

“I worked with him.”

Her gaze went away from me, then came back. “What do you mean, you did?”

“I’m suspended without pay. That means canned.”

“What for?”

“Screwing up,” I said. “You want a drink?”

“You shouldn’t be here, baby.”

“How am I going to listen to you sing?”

“You know what I mean. You ain’t supposed to be around the wrong kind of liquids.”

“What do you know about Frenchie Lautrec?”

She twisted a strand of hair around her finger. She touched the scar that circumscribed half her neck and looked down the row of faces at the bar. “Walls got ears.”

“What time you get off?” I said.

“Like you don’t know. I ain’t giving you an excuse to sit at a bar. Go home. Don’t get yourself in no trouble.”

I smiled at her. She squeezed my thigh and went back on the stage. She hung her guitar on her neck and gazed into the shadows. “Mean and lean, down and dirty, y’all. I’m talking about the blues.”


I knocked on her door in St. Martinville at ten the next morning. She opened the door, a bandana on her head. “My favorite boogie-woogie man from la Louisiane.

“Thought I’d take you to breakfast,” I said.

She looked out at the street. “Ain’t nobody followed you?”

“Why would anybody follow me?”

She pulled me inside and closed the door. “Frenchie Lautrec and Axel Devereaux was running the working girls. Now Devereaux is dead, and Frenchie got it all.”

“Prostitution?”

“Boy, you right on it.”

“It can’t be that big.”

“They got girls get five hundred a night, some up to a thousand. Most of the johns are in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Frenchie’s got a plane.”

Her living room was tiny, the doorways hung with beads, an ancient Victrola against a wall, the couch and stuffed chairs maroon and purple and tasseled, incense burning in a cup on the coffee table. Bella wore sandals and jeans and an oversize Ragin’ Cajuns T-shirt and a gold chain around one ankle, a charm balanced on the top of her foot. I could smell ham and eggs cooking in the kitchen.

“Sit down. I got something to ax you,” she said.

“Sure.”

“I got a son in Angola. He’s just a li’l-bitty boy. One of the wolves put him on the stroll.”

“What’s he down for?”

“Murder. During a robbery, him and another guy. The other guy pulled the trigger, but it didn’t matter. I went to see Harold two days ago. He cain’t hardly walk. That what the wolves are doing to him. They don’t use no grease, nothing.”

“I can make a call.”

She nodded and put a Kleenex to her nose as though she had a cold. She went into the kitchen. I followed her and sat at a table by the window.

“I got enough for two here,” she said.

There was a live oak in the backyard, a broken swing hanging from a limb, an alleyway strewn with trash and spiked with banana plants. “I already ate,” I said.

“I thought you wanted to go to breakfast.”

“Not really.”

“You just wanted to pump me about Frenchie Lautrec.”

“No. You’re nice to talk to.”

There was a beat. She worked the spatula in the frying pan, her back to me. “How long your wife been dead?”

“Three years.”

“Ain’t been nobody else?”

“No.”

She put a piece of browned toast and a cup of coffee in front of me. She filled her own plate and sat down across from me. “I got to say this: I was raised up to believe a redbird don’t sit on a blackbird’s nest.”

“That’s what white people taught your ancestors, then forgot their own admonition. I saw the chain on your ankle. What kind of charm is that?”

“A cross.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“From Hilary Bienville.”

“Where’d she get it?”

“Don’t know, didn’t ax. No matter what you say, you ain’t here about me, are you?”

“I like you and admire you, Miss Bella. Believe what you want.”

She got up and raked her food into a trash can, then washed the plate in the sink and set it in a drying rack. She leaned on the counter, her face covered with shadow. I stood up and spread my hand on her back. I could feel her breath rising and falling, her heat through the T-shirt, her blood humming.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“No, I ain’t ever gonna be all right. They gonna kill him in there. That li’l boy that never had no daddy and no real mama.” She turned around and took my hand and placed it on the scar on her neck. It felt as firm and thick as a night crawler. “A policeman in New Orleans done that. A black one. I was seventeen. I killed him. I done it with a razor blade. Ain’t nobody ever knowed about it.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“ ’Cause I ain’t never tole nobody. ’Cause my li’l boy is paying for my sin, if it was a sin. I didn’t think it was one at the time.”

“You’re not a sinful person.”

She stepped close to me, then buried her face in my shirt and put her arms around me and pressed herself against me. “Hold me.”

I laid my arms lightly across her back, my inner self rising, an empty space in my thoughts, her fingers digging into my skin.

“Hold me,” she repeated. “Hold me, please. Oh, Lordy, what am I gonna do about my li’l boy?”

When I left, I thought I saw a white man in the alley with a camera. His back was turned. He disappeared behind a clump of banana plants. I walked to the alley, but he was gone.


On Friday, the following day, Helen Soileau called me at home. “You’re on social media,” she said.

“I’m not up on that stuff,” I replied. “What are we talking about?”

“You’re with a black woman. I can’t tell if you’re getting it on or not. Thought you ought to know.”

“So now I know. Seen any good movies lately?”

“You’re not bothered?”

“No.”

“Who’s the woman?”

“Ask people in Internal Affairs,” I said.

“This isn’t about me, Pops.”

“Don’t call me Pops anymore.”

“You and Clete put me in a corner. Quit blaming me because you fucked up.”

“I don’t blame you. What you don’t understand is I didn’t have an alternative. Clete cut Hugo Tillinger loose because to do otherwise would have sent Tillinger to the injection table. If I reported Clete, he could be charged with aiding and abetting. If I had it to do over again, I’d make the same choice. That means I’ll take my own fall. That means you don’t have to say anything.”

“I think you’re enjoying this.”

“I’m tired of other people’s bullshit.”

“Who do you think took the pictures?”

“A friend of Axel Devereaux.”

“Like who?”

“Maybe it was Madman Muntz.”

“Who’s Madman Muntz?”

“Google the name next time you’re playing around on the Internet.”

I eased the receiver into the phone cradle. She didn’t call back. I waited until after supper, then put a throw-down in the pocket of my khakis and rolled my cut-down twelve-gauge Remington pump in a raincoat and placed it on the floor of my truck. I drove to the little settlement of Cade, where Lucinda Arceneaux had grown up as the daughter of a Free Will Baptist preacher who probably never could have guessed his daughter would die upon the symbol of his religion.


I passed a trailer and a small church with a faux bell tower in a pecan orchard. On a dirt road, behind the remnants of a motel called the Truman, built for colored in the 1940s, was the neat brick house of Frenchie Lautrec, flat-topped and as squat and ugly as a machine-gun bunker. Maybe it was coincidence that Frenchie lived close to the father of Lucinda Arceneaux, a woman who tried to get the innocent off death row. I had no doubt, however, that Frenchie had posted photos of me and Bella Delahoussaye on the Internet and that his agenda was straight out of the pit.

I parked under the pecan trees and watched the sun descend like an orange globe in the dust; a shadow seemed to crawl across the land. Then I saw the electric lights glowing inside Frenchie’s house. As far as I knew, he was a single man who lived with various women at various times. Most of them were drunks or addicts or battered wives or women he busted for soliciting. They didn’t hang around long, nor did they tell others what he did to them.

I got out of my truck with the shotgun wrapped in the raincoat, and walked across a coulee on a wood bridge and up the steps of his gallery. I could hear a television in the front room. I banged on the door with the flat of my left fist, the cut-down still in the raincoat hanging from my right hand.

Frenchie opened the door. He was barefoot and wore a faded long-sleeve flannel shirt; his shoulders were knobbed with muscle, his chest flat like a boxer’s, the veins in his forearms as thick as soda straws. He was smiling. “Just at the right time. I was fixing to call up some pussy. You game?” He pushed the screen wide.

I stepped inside. “Thanks.”

I shook the raincoat from the cut-down and slammed the stock across his mouth. I heard his teeth clack against the wood. He crashed against the wall, his lips gushing blood. When he tried to get up, I brought the butt down on his forehead and split the skin at the hairline. He rolled into a ball, his forearms clamped around his ears. I tossed the cut-down on the couch and peeled one arm from his head and mashed his head under my foot.

The inside of his house looked like a collection of synthetic junk someone had bought at the dollar store. There was even a plastic birdcage with a cloth canary in it.

“Who else is in the house?” I said. “If you lie, I’m going to crack your skull.”

“Ain’t nobody here.”

“Where’s the camera?”

“I don’t have one.”

I lifted him to his feet and shoved him across the coffee table, breaking it in half.

“Eat shit,” he said.

I lifted him again and threw him through a bedroom door. There was a desk against one wall with a computer and a camera on top. I picked up the camera. “Is this the one you used?”

Fuck you.”

“I want to explain something to you. I couldn’t care less if you put photos of me on the Internet. But you did it to an innocent woman and made her an object of scandal and ridicule.”

“I’m getting up now,” he said, one hand raised in front of him. “I cock-blocked you. You’ll have to find a new knothole. I win, you lose. Now get out of here.”

“Better stay where you are, Frenchie.”

“My dick in your ear.”

I felt my old enemy kick into gear, not unlike a half-formed simian creature breaking the chains from its body. The transformation always began with a sound like a Popsicle stick snapping inside my head; then the world disappeared inside a wave of color that resembled the different shades of a fire raging in a forest. I was now in a place bereft of mercy and charity, drunk on my own adrenaline, the power in my arms and fists of a kind that, in certain people, age does not diminish.

When I finished hitting him and throwing him against the wall, I dropped his camera on the floor and smashed it into junk. Then I picked up a handful of parts and pushed them into his mouth and stepped on them.

He began crawling away from me on his hands and knees. Both my hands were bleeding. The wallpaper was splattered with blood.

“Get up!” I said.

He didn’t answer. I thought I heard him weeping. Then I realized he was probably choking to death. I dragged him into the bathroom and hung him over the rim of the bathtub and hit him between the shoulder blades. I could hear the pieces of the camera tinkling in the bottom of the tub. I wet a towel and wiped his face and eased him down on the floor, his back against the wall. His whiskers were bright red, his shirt plastered with blood against his chest.

I squatted down in front of him. “You want an ambulance?”

He shook his head.

“If I was you, I’d call for one,” I said.

“They’re gonna clean your clock.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“People wit’ big money. More than you can dream about. Axel was gonna tap into it.”

“Axel Devereaux was into something besides pimping?”

“Something to do with Arabs and uranium,” he said. He spat a piece of metal off his tongue.

“This is southern Louisiana. We don’t have Arabs or sand dunes or centrifuges.”

“I told you what I know. Axel thought he was gonna be in the movies. He got to eat his baton instead. Maybe they’ll do that for you.”

“The movie people are going to hurt me?”

“Maybe it’s those guys out of Jersey. The ones backing the casinos. Guys who knew Nicky Scarfo. You think the Indians run their show? The wiseguys wouldn’t wipe their ass on them.”

“The foster father of Lucinda Arceneaux lives a few hundred yards from here. Did you know her?”

“Saw her around. She thought her shit didn’t stink.”

I got to my feet. My knees were weak, my eyes stinging with sweat.

“Tell me something,” he said.

“What?”

“Did you get into her bread?”

“Whose bread?”

“Bella Delahoussaye’s. She fucked my brains out. You ought to give it a try, if you haven’t already.” He was grinning. Two of his teeth were broken off. He spat a clot of blood onto the floor and laughed to himself.

“I’ve got to give it to you,” I said.

“For what?” he replied.

“I never met a worse cop. You give shit a bad name.”

I filled a water glass that was on the wash basin and placed it in his hand. I stared at him a long time, until he had to look away.

“What?” he said.

“I killed Asian men I had nothing against,” I said. “Speak disrespectfully of Miss Bella again, and what happened here tonight will be just a tune-up.”

I took the glass from his hand and threw the water in his face.

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