I laid my arms lightly across her back, my inner self rising, an empty space in my thoughts, her fingers digging into my skin.
“Hold me,” she repeated. “Hold me, please. Oh, Lordy, what am I gonna do about my li’l boy?”
When I left, I thought I saw a white man in the alley with a camera. His back was turned. He disappeared behind a clump of banana plants. I walked to the alley, but he was gone.
• • •
ON FRIDAY, THE following day, Helen Soileau called me at home. “You’re on social media,” she said.
“I’m not up on that stuff,” I replied. “What are we talking about?”
“You’re with a black woman. I can’t tell if you’re getting it on or not. Thought you ought to know.”
“So now I know. Seen any good movies lately?”
“You’re not bothered?”
“No.”
“Who’s the woman?”
“Ask people in Internal Affairs,” I said.
“This isn’t about me, Pops.”
“Don’t call me Pops anymore.”
“You and Clete put me in a corner. Quit blaming me because you fucked up.”
“I don’t blame you. What you don’t understand is I didn’t have an alternative. Clete cut Hugo Tillinger loose because to do otherwise would have sent Tillinger to the injection table. If I reported Clete, he could be charged with aiding and abetting. If I had it to do over again, I’d make the same choice. That means I’ll take my own fall. That means you don’t have to say anything.”
“I think you’re enjoying this.”
“I’m tired of other people’s bullshit.”
“Who do you think took the pictures?”
“A friend of Axel Devereaux.”
“Like who?”
“Maybe it was Madman Muntz.”
“Who’s Madman Muntz?”
“Google the name next time you’re playing around on the Internet.”
I eased the receiver into the phone cradle. She didn’t call back. I waited until after supper, then put a throw-down in the pocket of my khakis and rolled my cut-down twelve-gauge Remington pump in a raincoat and placed it on the floor of my truck. I drove to the little settlement of Cade, where Lucinda Arceneaux had grown up as the daughter of a Free Will Baptist preacher who probably never could have guessed his daughter would die upon the symbol of his religion.
• • •
I PASSED A TRAILER and a small church with a faux bell tower in a pecan orchard. On a dirt road, behind the remnants of a motel called the Truman, built for colored in the 1940s, was the neat brick house of Frenchie Lautrec, flat-topped and as squat and ugly as a machine-gun bunker. Maybe it was coincidence that Frenchie lived close to the father of Lucinda Arceneaux, a woman who tried to get the innocent off death row. I had no doubt, however, that Frenchie had posted photos of me and Bella Delahoussaye on the Internet and that his agenda was straight out of the pit.
I parked under the pecan trees and watched the sun descend like an orange globe in the dust; a shadow seemed to crawl across the land. Then I saw the electric lights glowing inside Frenchie’s house. As far as I knew, he was a single man who lived with various women at various times. Most of them were drunks or addicts or battered wives or women he busted for soliciting. They didn’t hang around long, nor did they tell others what he did to them.
I got out of my truck with the shotgun wrapped in the raincoat, and walked across a coulee on a wood bridge and up the steps of his gallery. I could hear a television in the front room. I banged on the door with the flat of my left fist, the cut-down still in the raincoat hanging from my right hand.
Frenchie opened the door. He was barefoot and wore a faded long-sleeve flannel shirt; his shoulders were knobbed with muscle, his chest flat like a boxer’s, the veins in his forearms as thick as soda straws. He was smiling. “Just at the right time. I was fixing to call up some pussy. You game?” He pushed the screen wide.