“I’m not objective about certain individuals.”
“Have you seen Labiche?”
“In the coffee room.”
“Tell him to get his ass in here.”
* * *
THAT EVENING I went to an A.A. meeting in Lafayette. Sometimes A.A. is a hard sell in South Louisiana. Booze is a big part of the culture. When I was a teenager, nobody was ever carded. Uniformed cops worked as bartenders and in gambling houses in St. Martinville, Lafayette, and Opelousas. The law in Louisiana was never intended to be enforced. Its purpose was to provide a vague guideline that made people feel respectable. New Iberia had the most notorious red-light district in the state. There was a semi-cathouse and bar right around the corner from the Lafayette Daily Advertiser in the middle of downtown. Friday was family night, no prostitutes allowed; the boiled crawfish and shrimp were free. What better way to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s?
Drive-through daiquiri windows are open until two A.M. You can get plowed before you go to midnight Mass. Fans get wildly drunk at baseball games. If anyone tells you he’s from New Orleans and doesn’t drink, he’s probably not from New Orleans. Louisiana is not a state; it’s an outdoor mental asylum in which millions of people stay bombed most of their lives. That’s not an exaggeration. Cirrhosis is a family heirloom.
The meetings I attend are made up of the bravest people I’ve ever known. Don’t let anyone tell you that only victims of war suffer post-traumatic problems. The unconscious of a recovering drunk is filled with images no one wants to have as part of his spiritual cache. They hit you at a red light, shopping in a grocery, talking to a friend, kneeling in church. There are people in A.A. who have killed people with their cars or their bare hands. There are people whose negligence killed their children.
As I sat in the meeting in Lafayette, I felt dishonest and unworthy. I had owned up to my slip but not to the possibility that I was involved in a homicide. Nor had I told anyone that the desire to drink was still with me, that pushing a basket down the beer and wine aisle at Winn-Dixie made my throat go dry. A Lutheran minister sat on one side of me, a black hooker on the other. The woman leading the meeting owned a chain of hair salons. Our commonality lay in our addictions and unexplainable chemistry, one that absolutely no one, including us, understands.
Though I don’t believe in capital punishment, I don’t mourn when someone like Penny gets blown out of his socks. However, no one deserves to go out the way he did. When it was my time to speak, I told the group that I was a police officer and had seen an awful instance of inhumanity that morning. I added that, when drunk and in a blackout, I may have been guilty of inhumane acts myself. After the Our Father, the hooker told me to have a nice evening, the minister asked if I could give his car battery a jump, and the woman who owned the beauty salons stopped washing coffee cups long enough to throw me a dish towel.
As sober drunks say, there are no big deals in A.A.
* * *
EARLY TUESDAY MORNING, while I was shaving and Alafair was on her jog, someone twisted the bell on the gallery. I walked into the living room and looked through the window screen. Spade Labiche stood four feet away, staring at a squirrel on the lawn. I resumed shaving. Two minutes later, he was at the back door.
“What do you want, partner?” I said.
“To get something straight.”
“See you in my office.”
“I know we’re not on the best of terms. But I’m going to tell you what I told Helen. You can look at the sign-out sheet. I went to interview Penny. I lost my lighter somewhere. It must have been at his trailer.”
“Could be,” I said.
“I got a call from this broad in Jennings. She ran my prints. She wants to interview me.”
“Sherry Picard?”
“Yeah, that’s her name. She sounds like a real cunt.”
“You delivered your message, Spade.”
“Can’t we be friends, shake hands or something? I shoot off my mouth sometimes.”
“No problem. I’ll see you later.”
“Okay. You got it,” he said.
I watched him walk away, obviously confident that he had righted the universe. I wondered how much time would pass before he tried to give it to me between the shoulder blades.
* * *
THAT AFTERNOON I was just leaving my office when Sherry Picard came up the stairs and walked toward me. Her badge holder and a small holstered revolver were hooked on her belt; a pair of cuffs was pulled through the back. Two deputies at the water cooler couldn’t take their eyes off her.
“Got a minute?” she said to me.
“Sure,” I said.