A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“I don’t know,” he said. “But Shondell is a big player. This is how one guy close to the gutter rat put it: Working-class people think liberals look down on them, and they think the black people and Hispanics want to take away everything they’ve worked for. Shondell thinks the gutter rat is headed for the White House.”

“Are you in the slop chute?”

“One other thing. Remember when we saw a boat with black sails out on Lake Pontchartrain, in front of the Balangie compound? I saw one yesterday.”

“Talk to you later, Clete.”

“Don’t hang up on me. This Gideon stuff is tearing me apart. I see that guy in my sleep. I see the fire he was building under my head.”

“You know how I feel when you say that?”

“No.”

“I wish you’d parked one in Shondell’s face.”

* * *

BUT SYMPATHIZING WITH Clete’s irrational behavior brought me no solace. I woke each day with the sense that time was ending. This was a phenomenon I had carried with me since childhood, when an evil man named Mack seduced my mother and made her a whore and destroyed our family. After Mack came into our lives, I had nightmares about the sun turning black in the sky and dipping over the edge of the earth, never to return.

The dream followed me to the Central Highlands of Vietnam and the bars of Saigon and Hong Kong and Manila and the drunk tank in the New Orleans French Quarter. But now the dream was no longer a dream. The feeling of loss didn’t end with the dawn; I carried it throughout the day. The season did not follow its own rules. At the end of the day, the moon was orange and low in the sky, the dust rising like ash from the fields, as though autumn were upon us rather than the end of winter and the advent of spring.

I felt as though I had stepped inside a place that was outside time, a place where reason and the laws of cause and effect held no sway, where the fears we inherit from our simian forebears flare in the unconscious and lead us back to the monsters we thought we had left behind.

Helen Soileau assigned Carroll LeBlanc and me to the assault on Father Julian and what she called the “hit-and-run.” One of the first people we questioned was Leslie Rosenberg. In my case the reason was not entirely professional, either. I had the same inclinations toward her as I did Penelope Balangie. This does not speak well for me. A psychiatrist would probably say the loss of my mother at an early age was responsible for my absorption with women, but I cannot imagine any man not being absorbed with them. If you live long enough, you eventually learn that almost every aspect of the universe is a mystery, no more understandable by the scientist than by the metaphysician. And the greatest mystery in creation is the spiritual and healing transformation of a woman when she gives herself to you. It’s a gift you cannot repay, a memory that never dies. That was the way I felt about Leslie. She had another quality, one possessed by almost every badass biker girl. They may pop chewing gum and have a pout on their face and eyes that say “Wanna fuck,” but I’ve yet to see one who wasn’t a closet flower child.

I say “we” questioned Leslie. That’s not quite right. When Carroll and I went to her cottage, he didn’t get out of the cruiser.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“My stomach,” he said. “You mind going in by yourself?”

“No problem.”

I knocked on the door. Leslie opened the screen and let me in but continued to stare at the cruiser. “Who’s that with you?”

“Carroll LeBlanc.”

“A vice cop?”

“No, he’s Homicide. He was a vice cop at NOPD.”

“I remember him. He tried to grab my ass.”

“He’s a different guy today,” I said.

“I’ll send a few bucks to Franklin Graham. I got to pick up the sitter and get to work. Is this about Father Julian and the guy who got splattered on the two-lane?”

“Yeah, we’ve had a hard time catching up with you.”

“I don’t like to be used,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“I talked with Father Julian. You already know what happened. Nobody is going to believe any of us. Why be a pincushion?”

“Did you see Gideon Richetti?”

“I saw him last night. Outside my window.”