Purple Cane Road (Dave Robicheaux 11)

“Alf, come with me,” I said, and put my hand on her forearm, my fingers closing around the skin, harder than I meant to.

“No, I’m not going anywhere with you. You’re humiliating me.”

I could see the veins in her forearm bunched like blue string under the skin, and I released her and realized my hand was shaking now.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Everybody’s looking at us. Just go,” she said, her voice lowered, as though she could trap her words in the space between the two of us.

“He’s here, isn’t he?”

“I’ll never forgive you for this.”

“Alafair, I’m a police officer. I was almost killed because of this man.”

She squeezed her eyes shut again and I saw the tears well out of her eyelids and shine on her lashes. Then inadvertently she glanced beyond me.

“The rest room?” I said.

But she wouldn’t answer.

I waited until the area around the door of the men’s room was clear, then I slipped my .45 from its clip-on holster under my coat, holding it close against my thigh, and went inside.

No one was at the urinals or lavatories. I pushed open each of the stall doors, standing back as they swung emptily against the partitions. I put the .45 back in my holster and went outside and motioned to the city cop to follow me. I saw Alafair looking at me, hollow-eyed, from across the room.

We went back down to the first floor and I described Johnny Remeta to the librarian at the circulation desk. She removed the glasses from her face and let them hang from a velvet ribbon around her neck and gazed thoughtfully into space.

“Did he have on a straw hat?” she asked.

“Maybe … I don’t know,” I said.

“He walked past me a few minutes ago. I think he’s in the historical collection. That room in the back,” she said, and pointed past the book stacks.

I walked between the stacks, the city cop behind me, to a gray metal door inset with a small rectangle of reinforced glass. I tried to look through the glass at the entirety of the room but I saw only bookshelves and an austere desk lighted by a reading lamp. I pulled my .45 and held it down against my thigh, then shoved open the door and stepped inside.

The side window was open and a straw hat, with a black ribbon around the crown, lay brim-down on the floor. A bound collection of Civil War-era photographs lay open on the narrow desk. The photographs on the two exposed pages showed the bodies of Confederate and Union dead at Dunker Church and the Bloody Angle.

“This place is like a meat locker,” the city cop said.

I looked out the window into the summer night, into the sounds of crickets and frogs on the bayou and the easy creak of wind in the oak trees. But the air inside the room was like the vapor from dry ice.

“You believe in the angel of death, Top?” I said.

“Yeah, I knew her well. My ex-wife. Or maybe she was the Antichrist. I’ve never been sure,” he replied.

I climbed through the window and dropped onto the lawn. I walked out on the street, then through the parking lot and down to the bayou. I heard the horns on a tugboat in the distance, then the drawbridge at Burke Street clanking heavily into the air. There was no sign of Johnny Remeta. The sky had cleared and was as black as velvet and bursting with stars, like thousands of eyes looking down at me from all points on the compass.

Later, when we drove home, Alafair sat on the far side of the truck’s seat, staring out the window, her anger or regret or humiliation or whatever emotion she possessed neutralized by fatigue and set in abeyance for the next day.

“You want to talk with Bootsie?” I said.

“No. You’re just the way you are, Dave. You’re not going to change.”

“Which way is that?” I said, and tried to smile in the darkness.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

After I pulled into the drive and cut the engine, she got out and walked to the front yard and went into the house through the living room so she wouldn’t have to see me again that night.