"¡ªShe'd tell me everything that had happened in the week since I'd been there. I'd dance with her in the street. Sing to her. Oh, what a beautiful voice she had from the beginning. I don't have a good voice. My mother had a good voice, and so did Terry. And this child got the voice. And the mind she had. We'd ride the ferry together over the river and back, and sing, as we stood by the rail. I took her shopping at D. H. Holmes and bought her beautiful clothes. Her mother never minded that, the beautiful clothes, and of course I was smart enough to pick up something for Terry, you know, a brassiere dripping with lace or a kit of cosmetics from Paris or some perfume selling for one hundred dollars an ounce. Anything but Blue Waltz! But Dora and I had so much fun. Sometimes I thought, I can stand anything if I can just see Dora within a few days. "
"She was verbal and imaginative, the way you were. "
"Absolutely, full of dreams and visions. Dora is no naif, now, you have to understand. Dora's a theologian. That's the amazing part. The desire for something spectacular? That I engendered in her, but the faith in God, the faith in theology? I don't know where that came from. "
Theology. The word gave me pause.
"Meantime, Terry and I began to hate each other. When school-time came, so did the fights. The fights were hell. I wanted Sacred Heart Academy for Dora, dancing lessons, music lessons, two weeks away with me in Europe. Terry hated me. I wasn't going to make her little girl into a snot. Terry had already moved out of the St. Charles Avenue house, calling it old and creepy, and settled for a shack of a ranch-style tract home on some naked street in the soggy suburbs! So my kid was already snatched from the Garden District and all those colors, and settled in a place where the nearest architectural curiosity was the local y-Eleven.
"I was getting desperate and Dora was getting older, old enough perhaps to be stolen effectively from her mother, whom she did love in a very protective and kind way. There was something silent between those two, you know, talking had nothing to do with it. And Terry was proud of Dora. "
"And then this boyfriend came into the picture. "
"Right. If I had come to town a day later, my daughter and my wife would have been gone. She was skipping out on me! To hell with my lavish checks. She was going with this bankrupt electrician boyfriend of hers to Florida!
"Dora knew from nothing and was outside playing down the block. They were all packed! I shot Terry and the boyfriend, right in that stupid little tract house in Metairie where Terry had chosen to bring up my daughter rather than on St. Charles Avenue. Shot them both. Got blood all over her polyester wall-to-wall carpet, and her Formica-top kitchen breakfast bar. "
"I can imagine it. "
"I dumped both of them in the swamps. It had been a long time since I'd handled something like this directly, but no matter, it was easy enough. The electrician's truck was in the garage anyway, and I bagged them up, and I took them out that way, into the back of the truck. I took them way out somewhere, out Jefferson Highway, I don't even know where I dumped them. No, maybe it was out Chef Menteur. Yeah, it was Chef Menteur. Somewhere around one of the old forts on die Rigules River. They just disappeared in the muck. "
"I can see it. I've been dumped in the swamps myself. "
He was too excited to hear my mumblings. He continued.
"Then I went back for Dora, who was by then sitting on the steps with her elbows on her knees wondering why nobody was home, and the door was locked so she couldn't get in, and she started screaming, "Daddy! I knew you'd come. I knew you would!" the minute she saw me. I didn't risk going inside to get her clothes. I didn't want her to see the blood. I put her with me in the boyfriend's pickup truck and out of New Orleans we drove, and we left the truck in Seattle, Washington. That was my cross-country odyssey with Dora.
"All those miles, insanity, just the two of us together talking and talking. I think I was trying to tell Dora everything that I had learned. Nothing evil and self-destructive, nothing that would ever bring the darkness near her, only the good things, what I had learned about virtue and honesty and what corrupts people, and what was worthwhile.
" 'You can't just simply do nothing in this life, Dora,' I kept saying, 'you can't just leave this world the way you found it. ' I even told her how when I was young I was going to be a religious leader, and what I did now was collect beautiful things, church art from all over Europe and the Orient. I dealt in it, to keep the few pieces I wanted. I led her to believe, of course, that is what had made me rich, and by then, oddly enough, it was partly true. "
"And she knew you'd killed Terry. "
"No. You got the wrong idea on that one. All those images were tumbling in my mind. I felt it when you were taking my blood. That wasn't it. She knew I'd gotten rid of Terry, or I'd freed her from Terry, and now she could be with Daddy forever, and fly away with Daddy when Daddy flew away. That's a different thing from knowing Daddy murdered Terry. That she does not know. Once when she was twelve, she called, sobbing, and said, 'Daddy, will you please tell me where Mother is, where did she and that guy go when they went to Florida. ' I played it off, that I hadn't wanted to tell her that Terry was dead. Thank God for the phone. I do very well on the phone. I like it. It's like being on the radio.
"But back to Dora of six years old. Daddy took Dora to New York and got a suite at the Plaza. After that, Dora had everything Daddy could buy. "
"She cry for Terry even then?"
"Yes. And she was probably the only one who ever did. Before the wedding, Terry's mother had told me Terry was a slut. They hated each other. Terry's father had been a policeman. He was an okay guy. But he didn't like his daughter either. Terry wasn't a nice person. Terry was mean by nature; Terry wasn't even a good person to bump into in the street, let alone to know or to need or to hold.
'-'Her family back there thought she'd run off to Florida and abandoned Dora to me. That's all they ever knew till the day the old man and woman died, Terry's parents. There's some cousins. They still believe that. But they don't know who I am, really, it's all rather difficult to explain. Of course by now maybe they've seen the articles in the papers and magazines. I don't know, that's not important. Dora cried for her mother, yes. But after that big lie I told her when she was twelve, she never asked about anything again.
"But Terry's devotion to Dora had been as perfect as that of any mammalian mother! Instinctive; nurselike; antiseptic. She'd feed Dora from the four food groups. She'd dress Dora up in beautiful clothes, take her to dancing school, and sit there and gossip with the other mothers. She was proud of Dora. But she rarely ever spoke to Dora. I think they could go for days without t
heir eyes meeting. It was mammalian. And for Terry, probably everything was like that. "
"This is rather funny, that you should get mixed up with a person like this, you know. "
"No, not funny. Fate. We made Dora. She gave the voice to Dora, and the beauty. And there is something in Dora from Terry which is like hardness, but that's too unkind a word. Dora is a mixture of us, really, an optimum mixture. "
"Well, you gave her your own beauty top. "
"Yes, but something far more interesting and marketable happened when the genes collided. You've seen my daughter. My daughter is photogenic, and beneath the flash and dash I gave her, there is the steadiness of Terry. She converts people over the airwaves. 'And what is the true message of Christ!' she declares, staring right into the camera. 'That Christ is in every stranger you meet, the poor, the hungry, the sick, the people next door!' And the audience believes it. "
"I've watched. I've seen her. She could just rise to the top. "
He sighed.