“Everything copacetic?”
“I’m not the issue. Rowena is.”
“I’m sorry all this has happened to you, Levon.”
“Actually, I’m surprised you’re here. You must not have seen the local news this evening,” he said. “You were the lead story. I don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news.”
* * *
AT TEN P.M. Alafair and I watched the replay of the interview with T. J. Dartez’s wife. It was hard. Her grief and incomprehension were real. All of her features were round, without corners or angles, her face without makeup, a pie plate full of dough. Her husband was dead, killed, she said, by someone in the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, a man who had harassed both her and her husband. She had no income and was about to be evicted from the Quarters outside Loreauville.
Alafair started to turn off the set.
“Let’s hear her out,” I said.
Mrs. Dartez was crying, her handkerchief twisted between her fingers. The interview had been prefaced with the caption “Justice Denied?” The newsman was obviously moved and had trouble completing the interview. He thanked her for being there, then looked silently at the camera.
“Someone is doing a job on you, Dave,” Alafair said.
“Nobody has that kind of beef against me.”
“Labiche does.”
“He’s not that smart.”
“At this point you should get a lawyer.”
“A lawyer will tell me to shut up and not cooperate with the department. Everything I do will be interpreted as an indicator of guilt.”
She couldn’t argue with that one.
I had been in the midst of Katrina and its aftermath. Oddly, I wanted to return to those days. There is a purity in catastrophe. We see firsthand the nature of both human courage and human frailty, the destructive and arbitrary power of the elements, the breakdown of social restraint and our mechanical inventions and the release of the savage that hides in the collective unconscious. An emergency room lit only by flashlights and filled with the moans of the dying and feet sloshing in water becomes a medieval scene no different than one penned by Victor Hugo. It is under these circumstances that we discover who we are, for good or bad. And when all this passes, we never talk about it, lest we lose the insight it gave us.
Wars have the same attraction. Rhetoric fades away; truth remains. In my hometown, I was trapped by shadows that had neither substance nor face.
Helen called me in the next morning. “I just got back from the prosecutor’s office.”
“He watched the news last night?” I said.
“The wire services and networks are on him. I’ve had three calls myself.”
“I see.”
“Internal Affairs is taking over.”
“Internal Affairs is a joke,” I said.
“Let me put you on the desk. All this will pass.”
“Not for me it won’t. Maybe I killed Dartez. I have dreams I can’t remember. I think he’s in them. I see headlights shining and hear glass breaking. I see blood coming from someone’s mouth.”
It was obvious that she didn’t want to hear it. “We have a witness who puts Kevin Penny at the scene,” she said. “That’s reasonable doubt. The prosecutor knows this isn’t a prosecutable case.”
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“Then why doesn’t he say that?”
“At some point all of us will. Then a shitload of criticism will come down on our heads, and time will go by, and everybody will forget it.”