Jesse knew a trade-off had been made without his consent. He was a useful tool, a garbage collector in a cheap suit, a lightning bolt that stayed in the sheriff’s quiver until a dirty job came along that no one wanted to touch. In the meantime, black law officers, some of them female, had replaced him as a symbol of authority in the black neighborhoods, and Jesse Leboeuf had become one more uneducated aging white man, one who no longer had sexual access to the women whose availability he had always taken for granted.
At 5:46 A.M. Saturday, he drove his pickup truck down East Main through the historical district. The street was empty, the lawns blue-green in the poor light, the caladiums and hydrangeas beaded with dew, the bayou smoking just beyond the oaks and cypress trees that grew along the bank. Up ahead he could see the Shadows, and across the street from it, the plantation overseer’s house that had been converted into a restaurant. Jesse had never been impressed by historical relics. The rich were the rich, and he wished a pox on every one of them, both the living and the dead.
He peered through his windshield at a modest shotgun home with a small screened gallery and ceiling-high windows and ventilated green storm shutters. No lights were on in the house. A rolled newspaper lay on the front steps. Two compact cars and a pickup truck were parked in the driveway and under the porte cochere, their windows running with moisture. He went around the block and this time pulled to the curb, under the overhang of a giant live oak, two houses up from the home of the homicide detective who Jesse believed had besmirched his reputation and humiliated him in front of his peers.
He cut the engine and lit an unfiltered cigarette and sipped from a pint bottle of orange-flavored vodka. The cigarette smoke went down into his lungs like an old friend, blooming in his chest, reassuring him that his heart problems had nothing to do with nicotine. He’d acquired several drops over the years, but nobody had seen the one he had on him now. It was a five-chamber .22 revolver he had taken off a New Orleans prostitute. He had burned the serial numbers with acid and reverse-wrapped the wood grips with electrician’s tape and coated the steel surfaces with a viscous layer of oil. The possibilities of lifting a print from it were between remote and nonexistent. The challenge was to arrange the situation. It couldn’t be in the home; it would have to be someplace else, where there would be no adult witness.
He took another drink from the bottle and another deep puff off his cigarette, letting the exhaled smoke drift through his fingers. He saw himself squeezing the trigger of his .38 snub, the flash leaping from the muzzle and either side of the chamber, the bullet catching the target unaware, pocking a single hole in the middle of the forehead, the facial muscles collapsing as the brain turned to mush. Then he would wrap the drop in his victim’s hand and fire a round into a wall. It was that easy. In his lifetime, he had never seen a cop go down for an execution if there were no witnesses and it was done right.
The street was completely silent, the lawns empty, the Victorian and antebellum homes overhung by trees dripping with Spanish moss. The setting was like a replication of everything that he secretly hated. Was he being silently mocked for the fact and circumstances of his birth? He had picked cotton and broken corn and mucked out cow stalls before ever seeing the inside of a school. He wondered if anyone in those houses had seen the tips of a child’s fingers bleed on a cotton boll.
He looked at the shotgun house again. Wrong time, wrong place, he thought. Down the bayou in Jeanerette, there was another person he might visit, someone who deserved an experience he hadn’t given a woman in a long time. He wet his lips at the prospect. As he pulled away from the curb, he thought he heard the deep-throated rumble of dual exhausts echoing off a row of buildings, the kind of sound he associated with hot rods and Hollywood mufflers. Then the sound thinned and disappeared over on St. Peter Street, and he gave it no more thought.
JESSE TOOK THE back road into Jeanerette and crossed the drawbridge by a massive white-pillared home surrounded by live oaks whose leaves trembled simultaneously when the wind gusted. The eastern sky was black with rain clouds, the moon still up, the surface of the bayou coated with fog as white and thick as cotton. Catin Segura’s home was not hard to find. It was the last one on the block, down by the water, in a neighborhood of small wood-frame houses. Her cruiser was parked in the gravel driveway, and she had put new screens on her gallery and planted flowers in all the beds and window boxes and nailed a big birdhouse painted like the American flag in a pecan tree. A tricycle rested on its side in the yard. A plastic-bladed whirligig fastened to a rain gutter was spinning and clicking in the breeze. Other than the whirligig, there was no movement or sound anywhere on the short block where Catin lived with her two children.
Jesse had one more drink and capped his bottle and rolled down his windows. He lit another cigarette and draped one arm over the steering wheel and thought about his alternatives. There were two or three ways to go. He could get rough with her in a major way and teach her a lesson in the bedroom that she would never forget and probably would be afraid to report. Or he could park one in her ear with his .38 snub and put the drop in her hand and tack a small holster for it under the breakfast table. He could take a flesh wound if he had to. He drew in on his cigarette and heard the paper crisp and burn. He took the cigarette from his mouth, holding it with his thumb and three fingers, exhaling through his nostrils, his thoughts coming together, an image forming before his eyes. He dropped the cigarette out the window and heard it hiss in a puddle of water. He reached into his glove box and removed a pair of handcuffs and the clip-on holster that contained his .38 snub. Then he got out of the truck and put on his coat and took his old fedora from behind the seat and put it on his head and threaded the handcuffs through the back of his belt. He worked a crick out of his neck and flexed his shoulders and opened and closed his hands. “Tell me how your life is going one hour from now, you black bitch,” he said under his breath.
The screen door on the gallery was latched. He slipped a match cover between the jamb and the door and lifted the latch hook free of the eyelet and stepped inside. As he tapped on the inside door, he heard the same rumble of twin exhausts that he had heard in New Iberia. He looked down the street and caught a glimpse of a pickup painted with gray primer, its windows no more than one foot high. The vehicle went through the intersection, the driver easing off the accelerator and depressing the clutch to prevent the dual exhausts from waking up the neighborhood.
Catin opened the door on the night chain. Through the crack, he could see her slip showing where she had belted her bathrobe. He could also see the black sheen and the thickness of her hair and the way it curled on her cheeks, like a young girl might wear it. Her skin had the color and tone of melted chocolate; it didn’t have the pink scars that black women often got from shucking oysters or fighting over their men in the juke. “What are you doing on my gallery?” she said.
“I came to apologize,” he replied.
Her eyes went away from his face and focused on the latch hook that he had worked loose with his match cover. “I already forgave you. There’s no reason for you to be h
ere.”
“I want to make it right, maybe do something for your kids.”
“Don’t you talk about my children.”
“I can get them into a private school. My daughter’s church has got a scholarship fund for minority children.”
“I think you’ve been drinking.”
“Getting to the end of the road isn’t much fun. People deal with it in different ways.”
“Go home, Mr. Jesse.”
“I’m talking about death, Miss Catin.”
“It’s Deputy Segura.”
“You know why each morning is a victory for an old person? It’s ’cause most old people die at night. Can I have a cup of coffee? It’s not a lot to ask.”
He noticed the pause in her eyes and knew he’d found the weak spot. He could see into the house’s interior now, a bedroom door that opened on two small beds, the covers tucked tightly in, the pillows fat and unmarked by the weight of anyone’s head. The children were not home. He could feel a tingling in his hands and a stiffening in his loins.
“I can call a cab for you or have a cruiser drive you home,” she said.
“You said you was a Christian woman.”
“I am.”
“But you’ll turn me from your door?”
Her eyes were lidless, her face absolutely still.
“What do you think I’m gonna do? I’m an old man with congestive heart failure,” he said.