The New Iberia Blues (Dave Robicheaux 22)

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

I picked her up in Lafayette. We had slipped into Indian summer without being aware of it. The sky was as hard and blue as porcelain, the oak leaves red and gold and clicking like crickets when they rolled across the lawn in the wind. I knew somehow that better days lay ahead.

I fixed dinner for us when we got home, and later, we fed Snuggs on the kitchen floor and Mon Tee Coon and his girlfriend on top of Tripod’s hutch. That night we slept with the windows open, and I could smell the camellias and the dense lemony fragrance of our late-blooming magnolia in the side yard. As I drifted off to sleep, I resolved to capture and protect each spoonful of sunshine allotted me for the rest of my life, and not go with the season or lend myself to doomed causes.

I woke at six-fifteen to the sounds of rain and the phone ringing. I picked up the phone and went into the kitchen so as not to awake Alafair. It was Sean McClain. “I’m in front of Axel Devereaux’s place by the drawbridge on Loreauville Road. I need a witness here.”

“What for?”

“There’s something wrong in that house. People know I don’t get along with Devereaux or his buddies. I don’t want to be busting in on my own.”

“What happened?”

“I was passing his house a half hour ago. All the lights were on and the shades down. A black SUV was in the yard. I saw a woman come running out the back door and thought I heard glass breaking.”

“Go on.”

“I slowed down but didn’t stop.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t want to mix in his personal business.”

He had already made two mistakes: He had ignored a battery situation in progress, and he hadn’t called it in. I didn’t want to think about what was coming next.

“What made you change your mind?” I said.

“I go off at oh-seven-hundred. I thought I’d make one more pass. The SUV was bagging down the road. I didn’t get a tag. The lights were off in the house, and a front window was broken and the shade and screen hanging outside. Devereaux’s truck was in the shed. This time I knocked on the door. No answer.”

“Where are you now?”

“In the front yard.”

“Try again.”

“I pert’ near shook it off the blocks already.”

“You tried the back?”

“Yes, sir. I hit on the bedroom wall.”

“Give me a few minutes.”

I brushed my teeth and washed my face and took a small bottle of orange juice and a cinnamon roll out of the icebox and headed up Loreauville Road. The rain had quit and the sky was an ink wash, as though the sun had refused to rise. A blanket of white fog was rolling off the bayou when I turned onto Axel Devereaux’s property. Sean was waiting on the gallery. An empty whiskey bottle wet with dew glittered in the yard. I walked up the steps.

“You know Axel’s a juicer, don’t you?” I said.

“If that’s the problem, he must have tied on a whammeroo.”

I pounded with the flat of my fist on the door. “It’s Dave Robicheaux and Sean McClain! Open up, Devereaux!”

I took out a handkerchief and twisted the knob. It was locked tight. I stepped back and balanced myself with the screen and kicked the wood door with the bottom of my shoe. The second time it splintered off the jamb. A

xel seemed to have cleaned up the damage done to his living room by Hugo Tillinger. Through the hallway I could barely make out a figure sitting motionlessly at the breakfast table, his back to us. Then I realized he was wearing a peaked hat, dripping with bells like ornaments on a small Christmas tree.

I walked through the hallway with Sean behind me. He looked over my shoulder. “Oh, man.”

“Don’t touch anything,” I said. “Get Bailey and Helen on the horn. Don’t let a photographer get near this.”