A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“Why you’re here.”

“You told me to drop by sometime. Have you ever been a CI?”

“A what?”

“A confidential informant.”

“Maybe my morals are tattered, but I’m not a rat, thank you very much.”

Good for you, I thought. I looked at the television. “I love that film. The screenplay was written by A. B. Guthrie. He wrote The Big Sky. I met him in Montana.”

“Go back to that CI stuff. You thought I’d sell out Adonis?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t mean that at all.”

She stepped closer to me. “Don’t lie.”

“I’ve seen the devotion you have toward your child. You think that’s lost on me?”

She seemed to take my measure. “You’re a funny guy for a homicide roach.”

“Who told you I worked homicide?”

“I asked around.”

“Why would you do that?” I asked.

“I don’t let everybody in my house. Want to watch Shane?”

“Sure,” I said.

We sat on the couch. Her daughter was asleep in her bedroom. The rain was thudding on the roof and the windows. The intensity of Shane is like no other western I have ever seen, including My Darling Clementine. In the last scene, set at dusk, the little boy Joey, played by the child actor Brandon deWilde, runs after Shane, calling his name plaintively. But Shane disappears into the shadows of the Grand Tetons, into an obscurity that makes you want to weep.

“Wow,” Leslie said.

“Yeah, there’s no film like it,” I said. “The story’s only historical equivalent is the biblical account of Eden. The sodbuster family builds a log house and a farm in a place that’s like the first day of creation. Good vanquishes evil, but you know that valley at the base of the Tetons will never be the same again.”

She was looking at me with a strange expression.

“I say something weird?” I asked.

“I don’t get you.”

“What’s to get?”

“You show up in lightning and hail storms, then disappear. I don’t know what you want, but it’s something. You don’t want to get into my bread?”

“Where did you get your vocabulary?”

“At the convent. You got something bothering you?”

“I lost my wife a while back.”

“How far back?”

“One day or one thousand. There’s no difference.”

“I’m sorry. How’d she die?”