“No, I’m still old. But I owe you a debt.”
“What debt?”
“You shared your life with me, kiddo.”
“Call me that again and I’ll slap your face.”
I put my hand on her shoulder. “I’ll always love you. I’ll be there for you any time you need me.”
“God, you’re nuts.”
“Probably.”
“Dave, there’s something in your eyes that’s really troubling.”
“What?”
“You’re going to do something that’s not you.”
“I’ve never found out who I am,” I said. “I don’t think anyone does. That’s the biggest joke of all.”
We were standing in front of her cottage. The wind was blowing her dress against her legs. Her mouth was the color of a bruised plum. I wanted to kiss her, but I knew if I did, I wouldn’t leave. So I told her again I loved the name Bailey Ribbons, and I drove away.
• • •
I MADE A STOP at St. Edward’s Church and, before I left, stuck a thick fold of bills into the poor box. Then I headed for City Park, a clock ticking in my head. I knew how the day would end. Or maybe “day” was the wrong term. I was no longer registering the passage of time in minutes or hours or days or weeks or months. I knew I had entered a new season in my life, one that had nothing to do with rotations of the earth. It’s the season when you accept your fate and give up fear and worry and end your lover’s quarrel with the world and follow the foot tracks of hominids into a place that is perhaps already at the tips of your fingers. When that happens to you, you’ll know it, and if you’re wise, you will not try to explain it to others, any more than you would try to explain light to a man born without sight.
As chance would have it, my moment of peace after leaving the church would be intruded upon by the ebb and flow that reduce tragedy to melodrama and a grander vision of the human story to procedural squalor. This came in the form of my cell phone vibrating on the truck seat.
I picked it up, my eyes on the road. “Robicheaux.”
“Where are you, Pops?” Helen said.
“Just coming out of St. Edward’s.”
“Get over to the park. I’ve already sent the bus. I’m not sure what’s going on. Sean McClain is already there. From what he says, Wimple may have done a curtain call.”
“He killed somebody?”
“It sounds too weird for belief. We ROA at the park.”
“Copy that.”
I drove down East Main, past my house and the Shadows, and rumbled across
the steel grid of the drawbridge over the Teche, then entered the urban forest we call City Park. If anything was amiss, I couldn’t see it. The celebrants were going at it, the band playing, long lines at the beer kegs and the hard-liquor tables. I drove along the asphalt path toward the far end of the park, then saw an ambulance backed into the trees, its flashers blinking. A cruiser was next to it, its door open, and Sean McClain was standing in the shadows, talking into his mic. I pulled in behind him. A black Subaru convertible with California tags was parked in a dry swale piled with dead leaves and strewn with air vines. The medics were jerking a gurney out of the ambulance.
“What do you have, Sean?” I asked.
“Looks like that old boy run out of luck. I mean if that’s him.”
I walked through the leaves to the lip of the swale. Both front doors of the Subaru were open, the passenger seat shoved hard against the dashboard. Smiley Wimple, wearing a white suit, was curled in a ball on the ground. His eyes were open and sightless. There was a bloody hole in his suit, just above his heart. He seemed strangely at peace. A small blue-black semi-auto rested in his right palm.
Other emergency vehicles were turning off Parkview Drive, winding their way past the old National Guard Armory.
“What happened?” I said.
“A black woman, name unknown, called in the 911,” Sean said. He took a notebook out of his shirt pocket. “This is what I got from the dispatcher.”