The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux 22)

“Give it a try,” Bailey said.

“I’ve thought about it,” he said. He stared at the concrete floor, his eyes empty, his emotions, whatever they were, as dead as wet ash. “What’s done is done. There ain’t no changing it. He was a good little boy. I always miss that little boy. Cain’t get him out of my head sometimes.”

• • •

AFTER LUNCH I talked to Helen in her office.

“So Hugo Tillinger is running around naked without his truck, and Smiley could be anywhere, and y’all’s interview with Desmond Cormier’s father was a dead end?”

“I don’t see it that way,” I said. “Tillinger is a smart guy. If he’s digging around in Desmond’s family, it’s for a reason.”

Helen was standing by the window. “Come here.”

I walked behind her desk and stood next to her.

“Look across the bayou,” she said. “Those people picnicking under the shelters and children flying kites on the baseball diamond have no idea what the world is really like. Can you imagine showing any of them a pho

tograph of Axel Devereaux with the baton shoved down his throat? Or Hilary Bienville torn apart? Or what some of Smiley’s victims looked like?”

“You’re preaching to the choir,” I said.

“You’re not hearing me. I’m saying a black flag has its purpose.”

“It’s not a good one, either,” I said.

“This from you? Stop it.”

“It’s a mistake to create a mystique about these murders,” I said.

“They’re just regular meat and potatoes?”

“I’m saying they’re about money.”

“That’s what you want to believe. You know better.”

I looked at my watch. “I’d better get on it. Anything else?”

“You and Bailey getting along?”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

“You deserve a good life, bwana.”

“Could you translate that for me?”

Her gaze dropped to my chest and arms. I was wearing a white dress shirt and a tie.

“You have too much starch in your shirts,” she said. “You ought to switch your laundry service. Loosen up. Go with the flow.”

“Adios,” I said.

• • •

HELEN WAS BEING invasive about my sex life in part because hers was so outrageous, but I was glad she had changed the subject from a discussion that no cop likes. Here’s the truth about the profession I have served most of my adult life: There are uncomfortable moments for almost all cops. The struggles are similar to those of the mystic with doubt about God’s existence; the lover who looks into the eyes of a companion after orgasm and sees only disinterest and an uncoupling of the spirit; or the humanist who watches a neighbor whip a child savagely in the yard. If a cop is on the job long enough, he will see things he never discusses with anyone, not unless he is afflicted with the same psychological disorders that define the sociopaths he locks up. The moment I’m describing, the one that happens in the middle of the night, when the booze and weed and pills aren’t working anymore, is the realization that real evil is not simply a product of environmental factors. It may be a disembodied presence floating from place to place, seeking to drop its tentacles into whatever host it can find.

What are its origins? I don’t know. Charles Manson and his kind are harlequins and poseurs. Anyone who wants to check out the collective nature of evil can take a photo tour of Hitler’s extermination camps and decide whether William Blake’s tiger is out there or not.

• • •