I went back to reading my morning mail. When I looked up again, he was gone. A moment later Father Jimmie stuck his head in the door, his disappointment obvious.
"You couldn't help Phil out?" he as
ked.
The next day I called the warden's office at Angola Penitentiary and asked an administrative assistant to do a records search under the name of Clarence "Junior" Crudup.
"When was he here?" the assistant asked.
"In the forties or fifties."
"Our records don't go back that far. You'll have to go through Baton Rouge for that."
"This guy went in but didn't come out."
"Say again?"
"He was never released. No one knows what happened to him."
"Try Point Lookout."
"The cemetery?"
"Nobody gets lost in here. They either go out through the front gate or they get planted in the gum trees."
"How about under the levee?"
He hung up on me.
At noon I walked past the whitewashed and crumbling brick crypts in St. Peter's Cemetery to Main Street and ate lunch at Victor's Cafeteria, then returned to the office just as the sun went behind a bank of thunderheads and the wind came up hard in the south and began blowing the trees along the train tracks. There were two telephone messages from Theodosha Flannigan in my mailbox. I dropped them both in the dispatcher's wastebasket.
At 4:00 P.M." in the middle of a downpour, I saw her black Lexus pull to the curb in front of the courthouse. She popped open an umbrella and raced for the front of the building, water splashing on her calves and the bottom of her pink skirt.
I went out into the corridor to meet her, feigning a confidence that masked my desire to avoid seeing her again.
"Did you get my invitation?" she said, her face and hair bright with rain.
"Yes, thanks for sending it," I replied.
"I called earlier. A couple of times."
Two deputies at the water cooler were looking at us, their eyes traveling the length of her figure.
"Come on in the office, Theo. It's been a little busy today," I said.
I closed the door behind us. "If you can't come Saturday, I understand. I need to talk to you about something else, though," she said.
"Oh?"
"I've got a problem. It comes in bottles. Not just booze. Six months ago I started using again. My psychiatrist gave me the keys to the candy store," she said.
Her voice was wired, the whites of her eyes threaded with tiny veins. She let out a breath in a ragged sigh. Her breath smelled like whiskey and mint leaves, and not from the previous night. "Can I sit down?" she asked.
"Yes, I'm sorry. Please," I said, and looked over my shoulder at Helen Soileau passing in the corridor.
"Dave, I have little men with drills and saws working in my head all day. Sometimes in the middle of the night, too," Theodosha said.
"There's a meeting tonight at Solomon House, across from old New Iberia High," I said.