“No, so far I haven’t been able to.”
“I’ve been in your shoes and I know the kind of thoughts you’re having.”
“I was never that good on going into other people’s heads, Mr. Baylor, so in turn I ask that they not tell me what my own thoughts are.”
“My family has a violent history. My father and his brother did things I’m ashamed of. Some of their violent tendencies have lived on in me. That means I can recognize it when I see it in others. I think you and I are cut out of the same burlap. If you go after Bledsoe on your own, you’ll be playing his game.”
“Oh?”
“In the insurance business all policies are written in terms of risk and percentages. It’s not guesswork, either. The only other industry as good at calculating profit and loss is the gambling industry. That’s why it’s not a ‘gambling’ industry. The player loses, the house wins. There’s no exception to the rule. You following me?”
“No.”
“Bledsoe didn’t file charges against Alafair, did he?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Because he put his hand on her person. Because he made offensive sexual remarks to her.”
“That’s right. And in a local court his potential for a successful prosecution would be at about thirty percent. But what happens if Alafair’s father decides to take the law in his own hands? My guess is Bledsoe’s chances for prevailing in court go up to about eighty percent. His chances of winning a civil suit would probably be over ninety.”
I was sitting across the coffee table from him. The windows were open and through the screen I could hear the rain clicking on the plants in the flower bed.
“Who shot the looters, Mr. Baylor?”
“Put it this way. The DNA evidence from my daughter’s rape kit was lost in the storm, so I’ll never know for sure those guys were the ones who attacked her. But if they were, they got what was coming to them and I’m glad they’re not around to hurt anyone else. I hope the one on the loose gets his comeuppance, too.”
“That might be poor consolation for an innocent man hoeing soybeans in the shadow of a mounted gunbull,” I said.
“Don’t let me regret I came here, Mr. Robicheaux.”
And don’t argue with people who are uneducable, I thought to myself. “Not for the world, sir. Thanks for coming by,” I said.
Most people who stack time make a series of decisions that ensure their eventual confinement, just like dry drunks finding ways to get back inside saloons. I wondered what tragedy or violent event or reservoir of anger was compelling a good-hearted rotary club man to wend his way into the belly of the beast.
As I watched his car drive away, his back tires spinning on a layer of blackened leaves in the gutter, I said a brief prayer for Otis Baylor. I had a feeling he would need all the help he could get.
BERTRAND MELANCON could not remember a time when he was not afraid. He feared his mother for the men she brought home and he feared even more her unpredictable mood changes. She would strike him in the face as easily as she would place a bowl of breakfast cereal in front of him, or perhaps do both within a ten-second time frame. Conversely, most of the men were not mean or violent and in fact would sometimes take him to ball games or give him money to pick up cigarettes or beer for them at the corner package store. But often his mother and the man with her would tell him and Eddy to stay out in the yard until they were called in for dinner. As Bertrand watched them drop the blinds, he knew his house did not belong to him and neither did his mother, and the realization of that fact was worse than his mother’s hand across his face.
Bertrand woke each morning with a nameless fear that was like a hungry animal eating a hole through his stomach. The images from his dreams followed him into the day, ill defined, without origin, like the reflection at night of faces in a streetcar window that told him he was of no value.
Eddy said he worried too much. But Eddy started getting drunk on short-dogs in the fourth grade, sometimes on the school bus at 7:30 a.m. Eddy got wiped out on glue in the boys’ bathroom and set fire to a girl’s locker. When he was twelve he was carrying a shank and claimed he had used it on a kid who had tried to take his tennis shoes at the park.
Bertrand and Eddy pulled their first armed robbery when they were in middle school. An old Vietnamese man was closing up his register in the tiny grocery store he operated when Eddy shot him in the face with a paintball gun. Not only did they clean out the register, Eddy threw canned goods through the glass windows in the wall coolers. Later Bertrand asked his brother why he had taken time to start throwing cans at the coolers when the old man was about to punch in numbers on the telephone. Eddy frowned and said, “Don’t know. Just felt like it.”
They never planned their scores or their strong-arm takedowns. The events seemed to present themselves of their own accord and were not of anyone’s manufacture, in the same way a storm can blow through a house or a match can turn a pool of gasoline into a whoosh of flame under a parked car. Stuff happened, that’s all. The hands trembling on the money drawer, the averted eyes, the broken mouth, the gashed scalp, these were images that receded into memory, like tiny bits of paper drifting to the bottom of a well, unplanned, undirected, ultimately inconsequential.
Eddy was never bothered by what they did. In the St. John the Baptist Parish jail it was Eddy who paid a cook four decks of smokes to put roach paste in the food of a wolf who bragged he was going to turn out both Eddy and his brother. It was Eddy who got Andre to pull the van up to the curb and talk to the young girl who was walking home from a street fair with a stuffed animal clutched to her breast. It was Eddy who tied her up in back. It was always Eddy who started it but who somehow got Bertrand to finish it or clean it up. Eddy thrived. Bertrand’s stomach stayed on fire. The two of them were joined at the hip, one incomplete without the other, each serving compulsions and insatiable desires neither could explain to himself.
Now, in the wake of Katrina, Bertrand’s nameless fear had a face on it. In a shelter in Des Allemands, someone had left a copy of the Times-Picayune scattered on the floor of a toilet stall. On the society page was a photograph of Mr. And Mrs. Sidney Kovick repairing the damage done to their historical home by both looters and the hurricane. The cutline contained no mention of the bullet that plowed through Eddy’s throat and Kevin’s skull.
Bertrand could not take his eyes off Sidney Kovick’s face. It made something shrivel inside him. Silently it told him of his insignificance, his failure, the disdain in his mother’s eyes, the loathing and disgust in the face of the white girl he had raped and tormented.
When he left the toilet stall, he was convinced there was only one way to end the fear and self-hatred that roiled his stomach and poisoned his blood: He had to destroy the face that hid like a reflection in a darkened window glass wherever he went. He had to kill Sidney Kovick.
SIDNEY LOVED GOING to work at his flower store. The interior of the shop was snug and full of color and fragrance, and the people who came into the shop respected him for his knowledge of flowers and his ability to select or create the right bouquet for the occasion. He alw