Some might consider him profligate, he thought. But so what? Long ago he had learned that most people admired the pagan virtues rather than the Christian ones, particularly in their leaders, no matter what they said. Libido and power and success and creativity were interchangeable characteristics of the human personality. Ask any woman whether she preferred a lover who radiated a quiet sense of power and confidence or one who was self-effacing and pliant. If he was lucky, Cora would drink herself unconscious and he could make a call and meet a woman at a motel in Grand Isle. Why not? He could be back in three hours.
But the quickening of his heart already told him why not.
In his mind’s eye he saw himself on an empty stretch of highway, in the dark, the walls of sugarcane twelve feet high on each side of him. Then a tire went flat or a fan belt broke, and while he was jacking up the car or staring down at a steaming radiator a car pulled in behind him, the high beams on, but the driver remained behind the wheel, faceless, letting him burn with apprehension in the headlights’ glare.
A film of perspiration had formed on his forehead and he drank from his whiskey. But the ice had melted and the whiskey tasted as though it had been aged inside oily wood. Why was his heart beating so rapidly? Was he a coward, afraid to go down the road because of this kid Remeta?
No. He was just using his judgment. Remeta was a cop killer. The odds were good that if cornered Remeta would never make the jail. All Jim Gable had to do was wait.
He was hungry. He washed his face and hands and combed his hair in the bathroom mirror and went into the kitchen and opened the icebox. It was virtually empty. He pulled back the sliding door on the terrace and went outside. She lay supine on a reclining chair, her face rosy with vodka, her teeth yellow in the waning light.
“Hungry, dear?” she said.
“Yes.”
“You’ve always been a hungry little boy, haven’t you?”
“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t talk to me like that, Cora.”
“Well, your dinner will be here shortly. You’ll see.”
“Thank you,” he said, and went back inside and slid the glass door shut.
How long had her mother lived? Ninety-six years? Good God! Maybe not even a quart of booze a day could kill genes like that. What a horrible thought. No, he was not going to have thoughts like that.
To hell with Johnny Remeta, he told himself. He called the beeper number of a woman in New Orleans, and a half hour later she called him back. Her nickname was Safety Pin Sue, a mindless, totally dependent addict who took a narcissistic pleasure in her own self-destruction.
“Meet me in Grand Isle tonight,” he said.
“For you, Jim, anywhere, anytime,” she said, her voice warm with crack.
That was more like it, he thought.
He tonged fresh ice into his drink and gazed out the high window at the darkening greenness of the land, the gold light trapped on the bay’s horizon, the sailboat that had turned around and was tacking for home. He raised his drink in salute to the evening.
That’s when he heard a vehicle under the porte cochere. He opened the middle drawer of his desk and removed a blue-black .38 revolver and let it hang loosely from his hand.
The house puffed with wind when Cora opened the side door onto the drive.
“That smells delicious. Bring it into the kitchen, would you? My purse is on the table,” Cora’s voice said.
Jim Gable replaced the revolver in the drawer and closed it and finished his drink. The wind was picking up, and a red leaf tore loose from a maple and plastered itself against the window. For some reason the leaf, its symmetrical perfection arbitrarily terminated by a gust of cold air, made Jim Gable brood upon an old prospect that he had tried to bury on the edges of his consciousness for many years. Was it just mortality? No, it was the darkness that lay beyond it and the possibilities the darkness contained.
Don’t have those thoughts. They’re the products of wives’ tales, he told himself, and turned to the mirror above the mantel and started to comb his hair, then realized he had just combed it.
He heard Cora’s stoppered cane scudding softly on the floor behind him.
“This is my husband,” she said. “Jim, this is the young man who delivered our dinner. I can’t find my checkbook. Do you have some cash?”
Gable looked into the mirror and saw his own startled expression and the floating head of the Vietnamese soldier and the reflected face of Johnny Remeta, like three friends gathered together for a photograph. The teeth of the dead Vietnamese were exposed at the corner of his mouth, as though he were trying to smile.
33
On the following Tuesday the early edition of the Daily Iberian said Letty Labiche had been moved from St. Gabriel Prison to the Death House at Angola. Belmont Pugh held what he said was his “last TV news conference on the matter” on the steps of the capitol building. He used the passive voice and told reporters “the death warrant has been signed and will be carried out tomorrow at midnight. It’s out of my hands. But I’ll be waiting by the telephone up to the last second.” He turned his face into the sunrise and presented a solemn profile to the camera.
Helen and I went to lunch together and were walking back from the parking lot to the department when a deputy in uniform passed us.
“The old man’s looking for you,” he said.