“And Bailey Ribbons is joining the cast?” Alafair said.
I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to say it again.
“She’s hanging it up with the department?” Alafair said.
“I don’t know. I don’t care, either.”
She pulled me inside the room and closed the door. “How do you want me to say it? You lost two of your wives to violence and one to lupus. You’ll never get over your loss. But you won’t cure the problem with Bailey.”
“We have four unsolved homicides on our desks,” I said. “That’s not an abstraction or part of a soap opera. I need her. I mean at the job.”
“The homicides are not the issue, so stop fooling yourself and stop acting like a twit.”
“Give it a rest, Alafair.”
Her face was pinched, her hands knotting. “Okay, I’m sorry. I get mad at Bailey.”
“Why?”
“She went to the head of the line. She’s attractive and intelligent and has charm and an innocent way that makes men want to protect her. Helen Soileau earned her job. Bailey didn’t. Now she hangs you out to dry and leaves you at war with yourself.”
“I’ll survive,” I replied, and tried to smile.
“Pardon me while I go to the bathroom and throw up,” she said.
I went to the window and looked at the miles and miles of mountain desert to the north, pink and majestic and desolate in the sunrise. It was a perfect work of art, outside of time and the rules of probability and governance of the seasons, as if it had been scooped out of the clay by the hand of God and left to dry as the seas receded and the dinosaurs and pterodactyls came to frolic on damp earth that, one hundred million years later, became stone. As I stared at the swirls of color in the hardpan, the sage clinging for life in the dry riverbeds, and the solemnity of the buttes, massive and yet miniaturized by the endless undulation of the mounta
in floor, I felt the pull of eternity inside my breast.
I heard Alafair return from the bathroom and felt her standing behind me. “What are you thinking about?” she said.
“Nothing. I bet Desmond casts Bailey as the IWW woman in the book. The one who was at the Ludlow Massacre.” Alafair was looking at me with an expression between pity and anger.
“Can I visit the set?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“I’d like to wish her luck.”
“Better give your well wishes to Desmond. I think he might lose his shirt.”
“I thought he had the Midas touch.”
“He mortgaged his home and vineyard in Napa Valley. He reminds me of Captain Ahab taking on the white whale. He’s always talking about ‘the light.’ He says it’s a Plotinian emanation of the unseen world.”
My attention began to wander. “Clete’s probably still in the dining room. Let’s join him.”
“I have to confess something,” she said. “I think the killings in New Iberia are connected to us.”
“Who’s ‘us’?” I asked.
“Hollywood. The evil we can’t seem to get out of our lives. The legacy of slavery. Whatever.”
“Quit beating up on yourself. We pulled the apple from the tree a long time ago, Alf.”
“Yeah, that bad girl Eve. Save it, Dave.”
Chapter Sixteen