“Didn’t mean to get in your face last night,” he replied.
“You didn’t.”
“I been studying on a few things. I don’t know if they’re he’pful or not.”
“You figured out who was in your barn?”
“Probably that little rodent nobody can catch.”
“Wimple?”
“Whatever,” he said.
“Let me set your mind at ease on that,” I said. “If that were Smiley Wimple, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“I’d be dead?”
“Probably.”
“I been thinking about various clues on these murders,” he said.
“Clues?”
“There haven’t been many. Not from the day we seen that poor lady floating on the cross.”
“I’m not following you, Sean.”
“The clue we didn’t give much mind to is that green tennis shoe me and you found on the beach. Size seven.”
“It’s not much of a clue, Sean.”
“Y’all run a DNA on it, though, right?”
“Yeah, it belonged to Lucinda Arceneaux.”
“If she was wearing one, she was wearing two.”
“That’s right,” I said, my attention slipping away.
“One of the people who called in the 911 said there was a scream from a lighted cabin cruiser.”
“You got it.”
“Why not search every cabin cruiser on Cypremort Point?” he said.
“Search warrants aren’t that broad, Sean.”
He picked up a pebble from the curb and flung it at the street. “Well, I was just trying to come up with something. Sorry I ain’t much he’p.”
But Sean had opened a door in my head. A green tennis shoe with blue stripes. It didn’t go with the purple dress Lucinda Arceneaux had died in.
“Why you got that look on your face?” Sean said.
“Because I just realized how stupid I’ve been.”
• • •
I WOULDN’T CALL IT an epistemological breakthrough, but it was a beginning. Monday morning I went to our evidence locker and found Lucinda Arceneaux’s purple dress. I also retrieved the green tennis shoe with blue stripes that Sean and I had found. I signed for both the shoe and the dress, then drove to St. Martinville and got a plainclothes to let me in Bella Delahoussaye’s house. In her closet I found almost the same purple dress on a hanger, except it had been sprayed with sequins. She had been wearing it the first time I saw her at the blues club on the bayou.