“I need you to go with me to see Varina Leboeuf.”
“You want to do this because of Clete?”
“Varina Leboeuf tapes the men she goes to bed with. Clete doesn’t have any judgment about women. I need to have a talk with her, but in the way you would do it, not in the way I usually do things. I need you there as a witness, too. I don’t want her making up lies about me later.”
Alafair was eating a deep-fried soft-shell crab. She put it down and gazed at the seagulls cawing above the cane field. The sky was completely dark now, the clouds rippling with flashes of yellow light. “Clete can take care of himself. Maybe you should leave things alone.”
“You’re smarter than me about almost everything, Alafair, but you’re wrong about this. Most people think society is run by lawyers and politicians. We believe this because those are the people we see on the news. But the only reason we see these people on the news is because they own the media, not people like us. When things have to be taken care of—I’m talking about the kind of things nobody wants to know about—there’s a small bunch that does the dirty work. Maybe you don’t believe this.”
“That’s the way cynics think. And they think that way because it’s uncomplicated and easy,” Alafair said.
“Did you see Mississippi Burning, the story of the boys who were murdered by the Klan and buried in an earthen dam?” Gretchen said. “In the movie, the FBI outsmarts the Klan and turns them against each other and gets them to start copping pleas. But that’s not what happened. Hoover sent a Mafia hit man down there, and he beat the crap out of three guys who were only too glad to turn over the names of the killers.”
“What are you going to say to Varina?”
“Not much. You don’t have to go. I’ve asked a lot of you already.”
“Maybe it’s better I not.”
“I can’t blame you. I try to stay out of other people’s lives. But I don’t think Clete has much chance against Varina Leboeuf. I don’t think he sees everything that’s involved, either.”
“What’s that last part mean?” Alafair asked.
“I’ve known a lot of bad people in Florida. They all had connections in Louisiana. Some of them may have been involved with the murder of John Kennedy. How do you think the crack got in the projects here? It just showed up one day? The money from the crack paid for AK-47s that went to Nicaragua. But who gives a shit, right?”
“This is becoming an expensive dinner.”
“That’s why I said you don’t have to go with me.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Alafair said.
GRETCHEN HOROWITZ HAD never understood what people called “shades of gray.” In her opinion, there were two kinds of people in the world, doers and takers. The doers did a number on the takers. Maybe there were some people in between, but not many. She liked to think she was among the not many. The not many set their own boundaries, fought under their own flag, gave no quarter and asked for none in return. Until recently, she had never met a man who had not tried to use her. Even the best of them, a high school counselor and a professor at the community college, had turned out to be unhappily marr
ied and, in a weak moment, filled with greater need than charity in their attitude toward her, one of them groping her in his office, the other begging her to go with him to a motel in Key Largo, then weeping with remorse on her breast.
That was when she tried women. In each instance she felt mildly curious before the experience and empty and vaguely embarrassed after, as though she had been a spectator rather than a participant in her own tryst. She saw a psychiatrist in Coral Cables who treated her with pharmaceuticals. He also told her that she had never been loved and, as a consequence, was incapable of intimacy. “What can I do about that?” she asked.
“It’s not all bad. Eighty percent of my patients are trying to escape emotional entanglements,” he replied. “You’re already there. What I think you need is an older and wiser man, namely a paternal figure in your life.”
“I have feelings I didn’t tell you about, Doc,” she said. “On a bright, clear day out on the ocean, without a problem in the world, I have this urge to do some payback. On a couple of occasions I acted on my urge, one time with a guy who owned a skin joint and asked me out on his boat. Things got pretty entangled. At least for him. Want to hear about it?”
Later that day the receptionist called Gretchen and told her that the psychiatrist was overloaded and would be referring her to a colleague.
Alafair left her car in town and rode with Gretchen down to Cypremort Point. On the western horizon a thin band of blue light was sealed under clouds as black as a skillet’s lid, and waves were sliding across the darkness of the bay, smacking against the shoals. Gretchen could smell the salt in the air and the rain in the trees and the leaves that had been blown onto the asphalt and run over by other vehicles. But inside the coldness of the smell and the freshness of the evening, she could not take her eyes off the rain rings on the surface of the swells. They reminded her of a dream she’d been having since she was a child. In it, giant hard-bodied fish with the grayish-blue skin of dolphins rose from the depths and burst through the surface, then arched down into the rings they had created with their own bodies, slipping into darkness again, their steel-like skin glistening. The dream had always filled her with dread.
“You have dreams?” she asked.
“What kind?” Alafair said.
“I don’t mean dreams with monsters in them. Maybe just fish jumping around. But you wake up feeling like you had a nightmare, except the images weren’t the kinds of things you see in nightmares.”
“They’re just dreams. Maybe they represent something that hurt you in the past. But it’s in the past, Gretchen. I have dreams about things I probably saw in El Salvador.”
“You ever have violent feelings about people?”
“I was kidnapped when I was little. I bit the guy who did it, and a female FBI agent put a bullet in him. In my opinion, he got what he deserved. I don’t think about it anymore. If I dream about it, I wake up and tell myself it was just a dream. Maybe that’s all any of this is.”
“What do you mean?”