Cajun Waltz (24 page)

“Man won't get a dime.”

“You have a plan?”

“Don't ask.”

“My clever Sergeant Dupree.”

“At your service.”

“Oh, I know.”

“We should go now.”

“Maybe not yet.”

She withdrew her hand after a moment and he looked down at his tented trousers. “Lordy.”

Bonnie stood with aplomb that to Alvin signified genetic refinement and supreme femininity. She was bright but provincial, hence clumsy in her quest to catch up with the fast life she'd missed. He indulged her quaint notions whatever they were, so gamely rose and followed her out of the diner. Patrons and waitresses regarded him with a range of reactions. He kept his eyes ahead, a sentry at his post.

*   *   *

C
ORINNE
M
EERS'S SCHEME
to get her cousin to drop the charges against R.J. was a long shot to say the least. Beyond the legal release, she wanted Delly's blessing on her and R.J.'s affair. Seth Hooker was the key. Corinne thought if she could fix up him and Delly together it would soften the sting to her cousin of watching Corinne become happy and rich on the arm of her nemesis.

It was her son's last day at the hospital. Seth had kept his distance since being snubbed by Delly outside Georgia Hill, but Corinne pressured him to come say good-bye. She and Delly were packing Joey's things, the boy lying sullen on the bed as they worked, when they heard Seth's cane clacking in the hall. Entering, he put on a front of ignoring Delly and handed Joey a leather-bound Bible. “The Jesus words are in red. Easier to follow that way.”

Joey, though much improved, was anxious about returning to home and school. “Did you mark the dirty parts at least?”

“Don't be pissy,” Delly said. “It's a nice gift.” Protecting Seth's feelings was a sisterly reflex that he, still hoping for more, didn't appreciate.

“This place gets comfortable,” he said to her. “It can be scary to leave.”

“You know from experience?”

“As someone who stayed, yes.”

“You'll go someday.”

“I just need a reason.”

“Christ!” Joey said. “Get married you two and be done with it.”

“He's too good for me,” Delly said, being nice if accidentally candid.

Corinne made her move. “Well, I think he's perfect.” Like a matchmaking aunt, she insisted that Delly and Seth immediately come have coffee with her in the hospital's basement cafeteria. “Now tell me why,” she said once the three of them were situated around a table, “you two lovebirds can't get together like everyone wants?”

“Like who wants?” Delly said.

“Like anyone with half an eye for love and fate and shit.”

Seth was humiliated—also heartened. “Suits me.”

Delly shook her head. “I can't look at you and not see your brother.”

“He's dead. Not even a ghost anymore.”

Delly wondered if he could really not know the truth. “Might prefer if he wasn't. So I can kill him myself.”

“Maybe just cuss him a little,” Corinne said. “Clear the air once and for all.”

“He's a monster, you stupid ass.”

“Just tryin' to be helpful.”

“It'll take a miracle to help me.”

“And dammit I got one in mind.” Corinne whapped the table. “I'm in love with R. J. Bainard and we're gonna get married.”

“You know him?” Seth said. He remembered R.J.'s burial at Orange Grove. “Wait, what?”

Delly's hand was already reaching for Corinne's throat. “You will never—”

“We're in love.”

“He's evil!”

“He'd dead,” Seth said. “Isn't he?”

“No, he ain't dead!” Delly snapped. “It's all been a big goddamn trick.”

Seth accepted this. It confirmed his belief that he was always the last to know anything. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“'Cause I'm a fucking saint who only knows to bear the whole load. I felt crappy enough about you as it was.”

“You felt crappy?” A positive sign.

Corinne jumped in. “Please oh please, Del. R.J. hates what happened, really he does.”

“Hates what?” Seth said, embarrassed by his ignorance.

“She accused him of rapin' her.”

“She did?” He turned to Delly. “You did?”

Delly's glare hadn't left Corinne. “Please oh please what?”

“Please let him please say he's sorry, okay?”

“Say sorry. To me?”

“To us,” Seth said.

“Us?”

“He owes me as much as you.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I see better than you on this one.” His brother was alive and Delly the one he'd assaulted. That she'd hid all this from Seth made him angry; it also made him adore her, for surely she'd done it for his sake. He wanted to shake her by the shoulders and tell her he'd got the picture at last—and how could they run from the coincidence that had blasted their lives if that same coincidence brought them together? “R.J. is why my mother died,” he told her. “My father thought they were having an affair.”

“Not true!” Corinne wasn't sure, but when you're in love …

“It's what he thought.” Seth's voice was firm. “And it wasn't completely off base.”

Delly sneered. “I thought you liked R.J.”

“I did. I do. Doesn't mean he can't be an idiot.”

Indignant at how the conversation had gone off track, Corinne launched her last best bid. “R.J. wants to meet you face-to-face.”

Delly didn't look shocked. “It'll cost.”

“Money?”

“Something he'll miss, Corinne.
You
. End it.”

“We're in love, honey.”

“Not if he wants to meet me.”

Corinne exploded. “Who're you to give demands? You're a woman with nothing.”

“You're a woman with a wife and kids.”

“You don't even like Donald.”

“I like Joey. I don't want him hurt.”

“Coulda fooled me.”

Seth assured Delly, “Joey will be fine whatever his mother does. He's pretty clear on that score.” Translation: Joey knew his mom was shallow as paper and counted on her for nothing that mattered.

“Listen to him, Del,” Corinne urged. “He's a doctor.”

“He's no such thing. He's one notch from the man with the mop.”

Seth's spirits had risen at the prospect that this mess might shake out in his favor. “I think,” he told Delly in a measured tone, “that you ought to sit down with my brother.”

“Half,”
Corrine corrected.

“I also think,” Seth went on, “you should postpone any demand about him and Mrs. Meers breaking up. If your meeting with R.J. doesn't satisfy, I'll help you call the police.”

“Maybe I'll call them ahead of time, set me an ambush.”

“R.J.'d come anyways,” Corinne said, “goofy way he talks about you.”

“Goofy how?”

“Halfway nice, I suppose.”

The tidbit hit Delly with unlikely impact. It introduced a new angle into this three-way debate whose meaning Corinne could never have fathomed and whose repercussions, as indicated by Delly's imperceptible shudder, Seth could not have imagined.

*   *   *

O
N
J
UNE
24, 1957, a mass of cool air in the western Gulf undercut a pocket depression of humid, warmer air and set the outer winds whipping in a classic cyclone style. It was in the Bay of Campeche off the Yucatán Peninsula—where the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit 65 million years ago, its crater now a vast undersea teacup whose crosscurrents of water and wind have spawned storms for countless millennia.

The first sign of trouble was a radio message from a Mexican shrimp boat that described heavy swells and wind gusts topping fifty miles per hour. After half a day fighting the elements, the men on shipboard bid exhausted good riddance to the storm plowing north to the gringos. People in southwest Louisiana were relieved when the Weather Bureau advised that it was four hundred miles away and veering toward the Texas coast. Somewhere else, that is.

On that same Monday, Donald Meers bought a Smith & Wesson revolver at Block's Home Supply. Donald was the son of the Lake Charles construction magnate, Burt Meers. Neither bright or accomplished in his own right, his ego rested entirely on faith in his virility—faith shattered, needless to say, by his wife's affair with a Mexican vagrant. His purchase of a handgun was equivalent to buying a Porsche or a hairpiece in response to some similar setback.

The next day, Tuesday, June 25, he returned to the store to buy a box of ammunition. It was about the same time that a government reconnaissance aircraft reported that winds of the Gulf storm were approaching a hundred miles per hour. The newly named Hurricane Audrey was projected to make landfall late Thursday near Corpus Christi. The Weather Bureau advised area residents to secure their homes and businesses and to think about moseying inland.

*   *   *

A
LVIN
D
UPREE AND
Abe Percy headed for Hancock Bayou early Wednesday morning with a plan to be back before the weather turned. Breezes were freshening ahead of the hurricane that the radio said would hit Texas about a hundred miles west of Cameron Parish tomorrow evening. Warm rain fell in a drizzle. Roads were decent. Alvin drove, Abe the passenger in more ways than he knew. They bore southward toward graying skies like storm-chasers after a funnel cloud.

Conversation was spare but useful in sharpening Alvin's dislike of the lawyer. “So desolate,” Abe said of R.J.'s choice of Cameron Parish as his hideout. Thinking Alvin wouldn't know the word, he added, “Nothing to do for entertainment, I mean.”

“Lieutenant Bainard ain't about entertainment,” Alvin said.

“Everyone needs a little.”

“Entertainment done him with that girl. Entertainment done him with Angel.”

Abe cackled. “His father's wife. Classic.”

“All in his mind.”

“I doubt that. And I told his father as much when I telephoned him after Frank Billodeau came forward.”

“So you the one set Richie off that day?”

“He needed no help.”

“But you gave it anyway.”

Abe smartly stopped talking for a while. Then he got stupid again: “Where are you from originally, Alvin?”

“New Orleans.”

“No kidding? I was born in the Garden District. I used to practice—”

“In the Ninth Ward.”

“How did you know?”

“When I was a boy you put me up after my father got convicted, before they moved me to the foster home.”

“Where was your mother?”

“Was a murder conviction.”

“Oh.” Abe hesitated. “I don't recall prosecuting such a case.”

“He confessed, got life. You came around only after.”

“After.”

Alvin shifted in the driver's seat. Abe thought the conversation was making him uncomfortable; along with the .45 automatic under Alvin's coat at the small of his back, it was. “Gave me a bed for a time,” Alvin said. “Tide me over. Guess you did that a lot.”

“I wouldn't say a lot.”

“I recognized you first time we met.”

Abe wondered why Alvin hadn't mentioned this before. He was afraid to ask why he was mentioning it now. A question had to be asked: “Was I nice to you?”

“One word for it.”

Alvin switched on the radio and turned up the volume to play over the raindrops drumming the Cadillac roof. It was WJBW out of New Orleans. The song was “St. James Infirmary Blues.” Alvin hummed to the middle verse:

Seventeen coal black horses, hitched to a rubber-tired hack,

Seven girls goin' to the graveyard, only six of them are comin' back …

Abe did not like the song.

*   *   *

W
INDS WERE PICKING
up. Tarzy Hooker was tying down gear outside the tool shed when the Cadillac pulled up at his aunt Sallie's place. She'd taken the ferry to fetch his mom from her shift at the sugar refinery across the Calcasieu ship channel. Tarzy recognized Abe right away, the lawyer, his dropped pants et cetera having made a strong impression. Because the other man was big, white, and wearing a jacket and tie, the boy guessed he was with the law. The man asked to see the cold locker. “Empty now,” Tarzy said.

“What you called, boy?” Alvin asked.

“Tarzy.”

“Short for Tazwell, am I right?”

“Yessir.”

“
Dog,
I'm good.” His cheerful tone notwithstanding, Alvin had begun to feel agitated. The three of them standing in awkward silence under a pouring rain was getting well past absurd. He closed his eyes and gave a robotic nod, as if to instructions only he heard. He opened his eyes on a world unseen since Okinawa. “Now best you show me that cold box.”

Tarzy was smart enough to be scared. The men's demeanors matched the slate sky, and the way they stood apart from each other, like rival politicians working the same crowd, suggested that they were here on disagreeable business. He unlatched the door as they watched. Stale air spilled out. The cold locker's refrigeration was off. The table on which Freddy Baez had been laid out was backed against the far wall. There was no window, and a small floor grate at the base of one wall was clogged with feathers and grime.

Rain dappled and reddened Abe's face like an ad for ripe tomatoes. His thoughts reeled from what Alvin had said in the car. He'd touched the children sometimes, boys and girls alike. Never hurt them, never made them touch him, and made up for it always with money and kindness. The balance remained mixed in his mind. He had a feeling it would be clearer after today.

Alvin began quizzing Tarzy about the dead body from months ago, who was it and why hadn't he told the truth right away, all while calling him nigger this and nigger that in behavior pisspoor not least because this was a child with no one to defend him. Abe tried, but Alvin hammered a fist into the crook of his neck that dropped him to the soggy turf with a cracked collarbone at minimum. Abe tried to stand but fell back in the slop with a groan.