“There’s a bad dude by the name of Johnny Remeta running loose. In case you haven’t heard, he’s the same perp who cut Axel Jennings’ kite string. He’s got an iron bolt through his head and thinks he’s my guardian angel. I wouldn’t want Remeta on my case. You get my drift, Connie?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, a strange transformation seemed to take place in her. She rose from her chair, an unlit cigarette dangling between her fingers, a gold lighter in her other hand, and studied the shadows that the banana trees and palm fronds created on her brick wall. Her face was bladed with the glare of the late afternoon sun reflecting off the pool; her eyes were narrow and hard, her lips crimped on the end of her unlit cigarette as she clicked her lighter several times without the flint igniting a flame. Her skin looked coarse and grained, like that of a countrywoman or someone who had stepped into a cold wind.
>
I replaced the photo in the envelope and put it in my pocket and walked across the flagstones toward the gate. I turned around and looked back at her once more before I entered the side yard.
The gold lighter. It was an archaic type, thin and lightweight, with strips of veined, dark leather inset in the casement and a horizonal lever the smoker snapped downward on top and a tiny cap that automatically retracted from the flame.
It was the same type of stylish gold lighter that Jim Gable used to light his cigars.
She got her cigarette lit and blew her smoke at an upward angle, her sandaled feet slightly spread, one hand on her hip, a private thought buried in her eyes.
21
Monday morning Little Face Dautrieve came to see me at my office. She wore a dark dress with green flowers printed on it, and a hibiscus in her hair, and hose and lavender pumps.
“You going somewhere special today?” I said.
“Yeah, you driving me and you to New Orleans,” she replied.
“Is that right?”
“The reason I call you ‘Sad Man’ ain’t ’cause of the way you look. It’s ’cause you let Zipper Clum play you for a fool,” she said.
“Say again?”
“Zipper liked to make other people hate themselves. That’s how he got people like me to work for him. That and the rock he give me.”
“You’re not making a whole lot of sense, Little Face.”
“You never axed me how I got in the life. It was t’rew my auntie in New Orleans. She knowed Zipper. I visited my auntie this weekend. She say Zipper tole you a bunch of lies about your mother.”
• • •
I signed out a cruiser, and Little Face and I took the four-lane through Morgan City to New Orleans. The sugarcane was high and thickly clustered and pale green in the fields, and the cruiser was buffeting in the wind off the Gulf.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
“I seen the story in the paper. People trying to shoot at you and Fat Man. He doin’ all right?”
“Sure.”
“Tell Fat Man I been going to meetings,” she said, her face pointed straight ahead to hide whatever emotion was in it.
“You still don’t trust me enough to tell me how Vachel Carmouche died?”
“A lawman get killed in Lou’sana, somebody gonna pay. It don’t matter who. Give them peckerwoods a chance, they’ll strap another one down wit’ her. Tell me I be wrong, Sad Man.”
The aunt lived on St. Andrew, in a white shotgun house, between the streetcar line and the Mississippi River levee. She had been a prostitute thirty years ago, but her skin was smooth, unwrinkled, like yellow tallow, her gray-streaked hair combed out on her shoulders, her turquoise eyes and red mouth still seductive. At least until she opened her mouth to speak and you saw her bad teeth and the gums that were black and eaten with snuff.
She sat on the stuffed couch in her small living room, her hands clasped just below her knees to prevent the floor fan from puffing up her dress. From outside I could hear the streetcars grinding up and down the tracks on St. Charles.
“You knew Mae Guillory?” I asked.
“I worked in a club in Lafourche Parish. Down on Purple Cane Road, almost to the salt water,” she said.
I repeated my question. The aunt, whose name was Caledonia Patout, looked at Little Face.