“Rosebud Hulin did a lovely drawing of Amanda Boudreau with her parents. I think the photo was in the Daily Iberian about a week ago. When she finished it, she pressed it into my hands, as though she wanted me to give it to someone. There was a kind of sadness in her I can’t adequately describe.”
“I don’t understand. What did you do that was improper?” I said.
“I gave the drawing to the Boudreau family. I didn’t tell them who drew it, but last night Mrs. Boudreau was at the library and saw Rosebud in my drawing class. It was obvious she made the connection. I feel like I’ve exacerbated an already very bad situation.”
“Did you ask Rosebud why she wanted to draw the Boudreau family?”
“Yes. She ran away from me. What are you going to do, Mr. Robicheaux?” she said.
“Did you tell anybody else about this?”
“No. But there was a black man who saw the drawing. He came to the class one night to drive Rosebud home. She wouldn’t go with him. He owns a bar.”
“Jimmy Dean Styles?”
“Yes, I t
hink that’s his name.”
“Styles is a bad guy, Sister. Don’t have anything to do with him.”
“This upsets me, Mr. Robicheaux,” she said.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Did Rosebud witness a murder? Please don’t lie to me,” she said.
I went up to the house and changed clothes and fixed coffee and a pan of hot milk and ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts and blueberries at the kitchen table. Bootsie came out of the bedroom in her terry-cloth bathrobe and took the medication that kept her lupus, what we called the red wolf, in abeyance. Then she sat down across from me and wrapped the inflatable tourniquet of her blood pressure monitor around her upper arm. She waited for the digital numerals to stop flashing on the monitor, then pushed the button on the air release valve and puffed out her cheeks, exasperated at not being able to change a condition that seemed both unfair and without origin. “You’ve eaten salt and fried food every day of your life and your systolic is ten points above a cadaver’s. What’s your secret, Streak?” she said.
“Picture of Dorian Gray syndrome.”
“Let me take your blood pressure,” she said.
“I’d better get on the road.”
“No, I want to see if my monitor’s accurate,” she said.
She wrapped my arm and pumped the rubber ball in her hand. She looked at the numbers on the monitor and punched the air release, her expression neutral.
“Your systolic is 165 over 90,” she said.
I turned the page on the newspaper and tried to shine her on.
“That’s almost forty points above your normal,” she said.
“Maybe I’m off my feed this morning.”
She put the monitor back in its box and began fixing cereal for herself at the drainboard. When she spoke again, her back was still turned to me.
“All my diet pills are gone. So is the aspirin. So are all the megavitamins I bought in Lafayette. What the hell are you doing, Dave?” she said.
I went to the office and tried to concentrate on a backload of paperwork in my intake basket. A dozen messages were on my voice mail, a dozen more in my mailbox. A homeless man, who daily walked the length of the city with all his belongings rolled inside a yellow tent that he carried draped over his neck and shoulders like a gigantic cross, wandered in off the street and demanded to see me. His eyes were filled with madness, his skin grimed almost black, his yellow hair glued together with his own body grease, his odor so offensive that people left the room with handkerchiefs over their mouths.
He said he had known me in Vietnam, that he’d been a medic who had loaded me with blood-expander and shot me up with morphine and pulled me onboard a slick and held me in his arms while the air frame rang with AK-47 rounds from the canopy sweeping by below us.
I looked into his seamed, wretched face and saw no one there I recognized.
“What was your outfit, Doc?” I asked.