I wiped at my mouth with my napkin, then walked around behind her chair, put my arms on her shoulders, and kissed her hair. It was the color of dark honey and she brushed it in thick swirls on her head, and it always smelled like strawberry shampoo. I kissed her along the cheek and touched her breasts.
"You doin' anything?" I said.
"You have to go back to work."
"The perps will understand."
She reached behind the chair and fitted her hand around the back of my thigh.
The curtains in the bedroom, which were white and gauzy and printed with tiny flowers, puffed and twisted in the wind that blew through the trees in the yard. When Bootsie undressed, her body seemed sculpted, glowing with light against the window. She had the most beautiful complexion of any woman I ever knew; when she
made love it flushed with heat, as though she had a fever, and took on the hue of a new rose petal. I kissed her breasts and took her nipples in my mouth and traced my fingers down the flatness of her stomach, then I felt her reach down and take me in her palm.
When I entered her she hooked her legs in mine and laced the fingers of one hand in my hair and placed t
he other hand hard in the small of my back. I could feel her breath against the side of my face, the perspiration on her stomach and inside her thighs, then her tongue on my neck, the wetness of her mouth near my ear. I wanted to hold it, to give more satisfaction than I received, but that terrible moment of male pleasure and solitary indulgence had its way.
"Boots—" I said hoarsely.
"It's all right, Dave. Go ahead," she whispered.
She ran both palms down my lower back and pushed me deeper inside, then something broke like a dam and melted in my loins and I closed my eyes and saw a sailfish rise from a cresting wave, its mouth torn with a hook, its skin blue and hard, its gills strung with pink foam. Then it disappeared into the wave again, and the groundswells were suddenly flat and empty, dented with rain, sliding across the fire coral down below.
It should have been a perfect afternoon. But on my way out Bootsie asked, almost as an afterthought, "Was there any other reason you didn't want to go to the LaRoses?"
"No, of course not."
I tried to avert my eyes, but it was too late. I saw the recognition in her face, like a sharp and unexpected slap.
"It was a long time ago, Boots. Before we were married."
She nodded, her thoughts concealed. Then she said, her voice flat, "We're all modern people these days. Like you say, Streak, no problem."
She walked down to the pond at the back of our property by herself, with a bag of bread crusts, to feed the ducks.
CHAPTER 3
At sunrise the next day, while I was helping Batist open up the bait shop before I went to work, the old-time gunbull called me long-distance from Angola.
"You remember I told you about them movie people come see me? There's one ain't gonna be around no more," he said.
"What happened, Cap?"
"My nephew's a uniform at NOPD in the First District. They thought it was just a white man interested in the wrong piece of jelly roll. That's till they found the camera," he said.
After I hung up the phone I filled minnow buckets for two fishermen, put a rental outboard in the water, and pulled the tarp on guy wires over the spool tables on the dock in case it rained. Batist was sprinkling hickory chips on the coals in the barbecue pit, which we had fashioned from a split oil drum to cook chickens and links of sausage for our midday customers.
"That was that old man from up at the prison farm?" he asked.
"I'm afraid so."
"I ain't going to say it but once, no. It don't matter what that kind of man bring into your life, it ain't no good."
"I'm a police officer, podna. I can't always be selective about the people I talk to."
He cut his head and walked away.
I left a message for the nephew at NOPD and drove to the office just as it started to mist. He returned my call two hours later, then turned over the telephone to a Homicide detective. This is how I've reconstructed the story that was told to me.