“How about flexing your brain instead of your stuff for a change?” Clete said.
“What he want wit’ me?” she said.
“Why would you keep all those newspaper clippings about Letty?” I asked.
“They for Zipper,” she replied.
“You know how Zipper got his name? He carved all over a girl’s face with a razor blade,” Clete said to her.
“We still love you, Fat Man. Everybody down here do,” she said.
“I hate this job,” Clete said.
I placed my hands lightly on the tops of Little Face’s arms. For a moment the cocaine glaze went out of her eyes.
“Letty Labiche is probably going to be executed. A lot of people think that shouldn’t happen. Do you know something that can help her?” I said.
Her mouth was small and red, and she puckered her lips uncertainly, her eyes starting to water now. She pulled out of my grasp and turned away.
“I got an allergy. It makes me sneeze all the time,” she said.
The mantel over the small fireplace was decorated with blue and red glass candle containers. I stooped down and picked up a burned newspaper photo of Letty from the hearth. Her image looked like it was trapped inside a charcoal-stained transparency. A puff of wind blew through the door, and the newspaper broke into ash that rose in the chimney like gray moths.
“You been working some juju, Little Face?” I asked.
“ ’Cause I sell out of my pants don’t mean I’m stupid and superstitious.” Then she said to Clete, “You better go, Fat Man. Take your friend wit’ you, too. You ain’t funny no more.”
Sunday morning I went to Mass with my wife, Bootsie, and my adopted daughter, Alafair, then I drove out to the Labiche home on the bayou.
Passion Labiche was raking pecan leaves in the backyard and burning them in a rusty barrel. She wore men’s shoes and work pants and a rumpled cotton shirt tied under her breasts. She heard my footsteps behind her and grinned at me over her shoulder. Her olive skin was freckled, her back muscular from years of field work. In looking at the brightness of her face, you would not think she grieved daily on the plight of her sister. But grieve she did, and I believed few people knew to what degree.
She dropped a rake-load of wet leaves and pecan husks on the fire, and the smoke curled out of the barrel in thick curds like damp sulfur burning. She fanned her face with a magazine.
“I found a twenty-year-old hooker in New Orleans who seems to have a big emotional investment in your sister’s case. Her name’s Little Face Dautrieve. She’s originally from New Iberia,” I said.
“I don’t guess I know her,” she said.
“How about a pimp named Zipper Clum?”
“Oh, yes. You forget Zipper about as easy as face warts,” she said, and made a clicking sound and started raking again.
“Where do you know him from?” I said.
“My parents were in the life. Zipper Clum’s been at it a long time.” Then her eyes seemed to go empty as though she were looking at a thought in the center of her mind. “What’d you find out from this black girl?”
“Nothing.”
She nodded, her eyes still translucent, empty of anyth
ing I could read. Then she said, “The lawyers say we still got a chance with the Supreme Court. I wake up in the morning and think maybe it’s all gonna be okay. We’ll get a new trial, a new jury, the kind you see on television, full of people who turn abused women loose. Then I fix coffee and the day’s full of spiders.”
I stared at her back while she raked. She stopped and turned around.
“Something wrong?” she said.
“I didn’t mention Little Face Dautrieve was black,” I said.
She removed a strand of hair from the corner of her mouth. Her skin looked dry and cool inside the smoke from the fire, her hands resting on the rake, her shoulders erect.