I heard him swallowing, the saliva clicking in his windpipe.
"Years ago, you knew a girl who was a whore," he said. "They snatched her up. My uncle was a cop in Galveston. He was one of the guys who snatched h
er. I saw where they took her. I saw the room she was in."
I looked down at him. His eyes were wide-set, round, his youthful haircut and porcine face like a grotesque caricature of the decade he never allowed himself to grow out of. "What was the name of the girl?" I said.
He wet his lips, his hand knotting my shirt. "I don't know. She burned some people for a lot of money. You and your brother took her out of a cathouse. So they snatched her up."
I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. "Your uncle and who?" I asked.
He shook his head. "Cops and a pimp. She had a mandolin. They busted it up."
"Did they kill her?"
"I don't know. I saw blood on a chair. I was just a kid. Just like you and Jimmie. What's a kid s'pposed to do? I took off. My uncle's dead now. Nobody probably even remembers that girl now 'cept me."
He was the saddest-looking human being I think I had ever seen. His eyes were liquid, receded in his face. His body was encased in beer fat that seemed to be squeezing the breath out of his lungs. He let go of my shirt and waited for me to speak, as though my words could exorcise the succubus that had probably fed at his heart all his life.
"That's right, we were all just kids back then, Troy," I said, and winked at him.
He tried to smile, his skin puckering around his mouth. Without his consent, the nurse fitted the oxygen mask back on his face. Through the window I saw a TV news van in the parking lot, with the call letters and logo of an aggressive Shreveport television station painted on the side. But if the news crew was there to cover some element in the passing of Troy Bordelon, it was of little import to Troy. He looked out the window at the sun's last red ember on the horizon. A flock of crows rose from the limbs of cypress trees in a lake, lifting into the sky like ashes off a dead fire. The look in his eyes made me think of a drowning man whose voice cannot reach a would-be rescuer.
Outside, I walked toward my truck, my head filled with nightmarish images about what may have been Ida Durbin's last moments. How had Troy put it? He had seen "blood on a chair."
"Hold on there, Robo," a voice called out behind me.
Robo?
There were two of them, angular in build, squared away, military in bearing, their uniforms starched and creased, wearing shades, even though it was almost dark, their gold badges and name tags buffed, their shoes spit-shined into mirrors. I had seen them at various times at law enforcement gatherings in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I didn't remember their names, but I remembered their manner. It was of a kind every career lawman or military officer recognizes. These were men you never place in situations where they have unsupervised authority over others.
I nodded hello but didn't speak.
"On the job?" one of them said. His name tag read Shockly, J. W. He tilted his head slightly with his question.
"Not me. I hung it up," I replied.
"I saw you go into Troy Bordelon's room. You guys were buds?" he said.
"I went to school with him," I said.
The second deputy was grinning from behind his shades, as though the three of us were in a private club and the inappropriateness of his expression was acceptable. The name engraved on his tag was Pitts, B. J. "Poor bastard was a real pistol, wasn't he? Half the blacks in the parish are probably drunk right now," he said.
"I wouldn't know," I said.
"Ole Troy didn't want to unburden his sins?" the second deputy, the one named Pitts, said.
Shockly pulled on his nose to hide his irritation at his friend's revelation of their shared agenda.
"Nice seeing you guys," I said.
Neither one of them said good-bye as I walked away. When I glanced in my rearview mirror, they were still standing in the parking lot, wondering, I suspect, if they had said too much or too little.
I decided I needed to talk to Troy again, when the two sheriff's deputies were not around. I checked into a motel in the next town, then returned to the hospital at sunrise, but Troy had died during the night.
I was a widower and lived by myself in New Iberia, a city of twenty-five thousand people on Bayou Teche in the southwestern part of the state. For years I had been a detective with the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department and also the owner of a bait shop and boat rental business outside of town. But after Alafair, my adopted daughter, went away to college and the home my father built in 1935 burned to the ground, I sold the baitshop and dock to an elderly black man named Batist and moved into a shotgun house on East Main, on the banks of the Teche, in a neighborhood where the oak and pecan trees, the azaleas, Confederate roses, and philodendron managed to both hide and accentuate the decayed elegance of a bygone era.
After I returned from my visit to Troy's bedside, I could not get Ida Durbin out of my head. I tried to convince myself that the past was the past, that Ida had involved herself with violent and predatory people and that her fate was neither my doing nor Jimmie's.