“I talked to a retired fire department superintendent,” I said. “He believed they cut you some slack because of the problems in your home.”
“You’re saying I’m a firebug?”
“No,” I said. But the word stuck in my throat.
“So what am I?”
“Someone who had a hard young life. Like a lot of us.”
“What do we do now? Make love? Eat dinner? Pretend nothing has happened?”
“I’m not sure.”
She went to the dining room table and pinched out the candles one at a time. “There. Good night, sweet prince. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
I stared at her dumbly. She avoided my eyes. I think she was on the edge of crying. I went outside and got into my truck and drove home in the last of the sunset. I don’t think I ever felt more alone.
• • •
THAT SAME EVENING, Alafair and Clete went to Red Lerille’s Health and Racquet Club in Lafayette. Alafair played tennis with a friend under the lights in the outdoor courts, then joined Clete inside, where he was slowly curling and lowering a hundred-pound barbell, his upper arms swelling into muskmelons. Then she realized Lou Wexler was in the free-weight room also, forty feet away, dead-lifting three hundred pounds, his back and thighs knotted as tight as iron. He released the bar, bouncing the plates on the platform.
“Hey, you,” he said.
“Hey,” she replied. “I thought you had to go back to Los Angeles to work out something with the union.”
“Got it done on the phone,” he said. “Des wants to keep me close by. He seems to go from one mess to the next.”
“I’d rather not talk about Des.”
“Right-o. I saw the big fellow over there, what’s-his-name, Purcel. You’re here with him?”
“Y’all haven’t met formally?” she said.
“No, just a nod or two. I saw him at Monument Valley, I think. When he visited the set. No need to bother him.”
“You two would hit it off.”
“You know me, Alafair, I’m a bit private.”
She gestured for Clete to come over anyway. “This is Lou Wexler, Clete. He’s a producer and writer on our film.”
“Glad to know you,” Clete said, extend
ing his hand.
“Likewise,” Wexler said. He didn’t take Clete’s hand. His attention had shifted to a man in a black-and-white jumpsuit wearing yellow workout gloves who had just walked in and begun pumping twenty-pound dumbbells. The man in the jumpsuit stiff-armed the dumbbells straight out in front of him, twisting them rapidly back and forth, the veins in his neck cording. His head was shaped like a lightbulb, with several strands of hair combed across the crown.
Alafair followed Wexler’s line of sight to the man in the jumpsuit. “Who’s that?”
“One of the happy little fellows who was indicted in the Iberia Parish prison scandal.”
“That’s Tee Boy Ladrine,” Clete said. “He was a guard at the jail. He was found not guilty.”
“How could anybody work there and not know what was going on?” Wexler said.
“I know what you mean,” Clete said. “He was tight with Frenchie Lautrec, the guy who hanged himself. But Tee Boy rents his brain by the week. On a good day he can tie his shoes without a diagram.”
“What does intelligence have to do with pretending he didn’t know a man was suffocated in there?” Wexler said.