“Tell me I’m mistaken,” he said.
I went back into the bedroom.
“What was that about?” Bailey said.
“Nothing,” I said. “Did you find anything else?”
She shook her head.
“Bag up the scrapbook and the stuff in the hatbox,” I said to Sean. “I’ll put Butterworth in the cruiser.”
“This bust bothers me,” Bailey said. “We might have some legal problems. Like a liability suit.”
“Not if Lucinda
Arceneaux’s DNA is on that needle,” I said.
“But you know it’s not, don’t you?” she said. “Why do you have it in for this guy?”
I didn’t answer. I collected Butterworth from the deck and hooked him to a D-ring in the back of the cruiser. Bailey and I got in the front and drove up the long narrow two-lane toward New Iberia, the palm fronds on the roadside rattling dryly in the wind, the waves chopping against the boats in their slips. She glanced sideways at me.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” she said, and winked. “I think you’re a nice guy. That’s all.”
That was when I knew that the folly of age is a contagion that spares no man, not unless he is fortunate enough to die young.
Chapter Fourteen
WE BOOKED BUTTERWORTH and transferred him to the parish prison. That evening Desmond turned in to my driveway in a new Cherokee. He seemed to wear his contradictions as you would a suit of clothes. I had a bell, but he tapped lightly on the door. I had a sidewalk, but he walked on the lawn, even though it was damp from the sprinkler. The lightness of his touch on the door was not in sync with the intensity in his face and the corded veins in his forearms.
I looked at him through the screen. “If this is about Butterworth, I’ll talk to you at the department during office hours.”
“Antoine is my friend,” he said. “So are you. I’d like to speak with you in that spirit.”
I stepped out on the gallery. The light had pooled high in the sky, like an inverted golden bowl; the oaks in the yard were deep in shadow, the trunks surrounded by red and yellow four-o’clocks that bloomed only in the shade.
Desmond’s wide-set pale blue eyes were unblinking and yet simultaneously veiled; they had the vacuity you see in the eyes of sociopaths.
“Let Butterworth take his own fall,” I said.
“He hasn’t done anything.”
“Have you seen the photos in his scrapbook?”
“Maybe he does a different kind of penance than the rest of us. Hollywood is a place of second chances. More important, it’s a place where there are no victims. Everyone there knows the rules and the odds. Why beat up on Antoine?”
“On the phone you said we’d strip-mine the Garden of Eden if the price was right. You grew up in Eden?”
“What are you saying, Dave?”
“You lived on a piece of reservation hardpan that was given to the Indians only because the whites didn’t want it.”
“Better put, they wouldn’t spit on it,” he said. “What’s your point?”
“The casino made life a little better for some of your people. You think that was a bad idea? Why don’t you cut the rest of us some slack? Most of us do the best we can.”
“I thought I could reason with you,” he said. “That was a mistake. I’d better go before I say something I’ll regret.”