“Lucinda was your half sister, you lying son of a bitch. I followed you to her grave. Less than an hour ago.”
His face drained. “You have no right.”
“I thought you were stand-up, but you’re a bum,” I said. “Somebody you know killed her, and one way or another, you’ve been covering for him. I think it’s because you didn’t want to interrupt the flow of money into your picture.”
“That’s not true.”
“Go sit in your truck until the meat wagon gets here. I don’t want to be around you.”
I don’t think I ever saw greater shame in a man’s face. I knew I would later regret the harshness of my words, but at the moment I did not, I suspect because I still wanted to believe George Orwell’s admonition that people are always better than we think they are.
• • •
AFTER THE PARAMEDICS and three cruisers and a fire truck and Bailey and Cormac Watts had arrived, I told Desmond to get out of his pickup and lean against the fender.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“You’re under arrest.”
“What for?”
“I’ll let you know.” I ran my hands under his armpits and down his sides and inside his legs and over his ankles. Then I hooked him up and led him to the back of a cruiser.
“This is bogus,” he said. “Quit acting like a jerk. I can sue you for this.”
“You’ve been gone from Louisiana too long,” I replied.
I put him in the cruiser and shut the door. I looked back at Lautrec’s house. All the lights were on. Through a side window I could see Cormac walking around Lautrec’s body, studying it.
I followed the cruiser to the parish prison and locked Desmond in a part of the jail that was particularly spartan and depressing—in fact, it was little more than a narrow corridor between two rows of barred cells that resembled zoo cages, all of them empty.
“Why are you taking out your anger on me?” he said.
When you place someone in custody, you don’t answer questions, nor do you negotiate. If you do it right, the routine is a bit like the army: You speak in terms of rank and principle and always in the third person, never the second. I scratched at my face as though I had not heard the question. “A bondsman will be available in the morning. Any inmate at the jail is entitled to at least one phone call.”
“Come on, Dave,” he said. “What’s going on?”
I threw the protocol away. “You knelt at your sister’s crypt.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Your posture made me think of a Crusader knight.”
“My posture?” he said. “You talk like you’re out of your mind.”
“You’ve got a Maltese cross tattooed on your ankle.”
“From my biker days.”
“My ass.”
He leaned his forehead between two bars, his eyes downcast. I could hear a toilet flushing in another part of the building. “Those things you said back there?”
“What about them?” I said.
“You meant them? I’m a bum?”
“I think you don’t let your right hand know what your left is doing.”