“You’re making this up. You don’t know me,” Bledsoe said.
“You made a mistake coming to this parish. You’re a sick man and you’ll be treated as such. Detective Robicheaux, go get him another cup of coffee. I want to talk to Mr. Bledsoe a little more privately.”
“I don’t want any. I want to return to my cottage now.”
“You know why you keep looking at that camera, Mr. Bledsoe?” she said. “It’s because your identity is self-manufactured and you’re nothing like the person you want the world to see. We know everything about you. You’re genetically and psychologically defective. People like you and Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy should have been flushed down the toilet with the afterbirth five minutes after y’all were born. Unfortunately your mommies didn’t do that and instead raised up big titty babies that everyone else has to take care of.”
I picked up his coffee cup from the table. “You want cream or sugar?”
His bottom lip trembled. Helen had delivered a cut that went to the bone.
“Answer him,” she said.
He sat up in the chair, his eyes blinking and refocusing, like a man who had just undergone a violent decompression inside a bathysphere. Then he huffed air out his nostrils and straightened his shoulders. I suspected that behind that jutting forehead he was rebuilding his mental fortifications a block at a time, a process he had learned in an environment most of us can only guess at. He bit into a doughnut and pushed the custard inside his mouth with his fingers.
“It’s been real nice y’all having me here,” he said. “I won’t hold your words against you. That’s not my way. My mother was a lovely, kind woman and you don’t have any idea of what you’re talking about.”
“You need to talk to us, Mr. Bledsoe,” I said.
“No, sir, I surely don’t. Very harsh things have been said here today.” He got up from the chair and took his pair of dark glasses from his pocket, the ones with the round white frames, and fitted them on his face. “Looks is only skin deep, Ms. Soileau. If you’re a Christian, maybe you should give more thought to the feelings of other people.”
With that, he walked out of the room, down the hall, and out of the courthouse.
“Do you believe that?” Helen said.
“Want me to take him home?” I said.
“Screw him,” she said. She walked in a circle, her hands on her hips. “Think he slipped the punch?”
“You took his skin off.”
“And?”
“Bledsoe’s a psychopath. He’s incapable of accepting injury done to him by others, either real or imagined. He hates our guts and he’ll get even in whatever way he can.”
I think Helen had drawn on her own childhood experience when she turned the screws on Bledsoe. I also suspected some of the images she had used in her interrogation were of a kind she herself did not like to remember.
“Some fun, huh, bwana?” she said.
LATER THAT DAY Bertrand Melancon was sitting on the steps of his grandmother’s gallery, wondering what he should do next, when a blue Mercury turned in to the Quarters and splashed through a puddle, fanning a muddy spray back across its immaculate surface. The driver sighted Bertrand and turned in to his grandmother’s yard.
Another storm front had moved in and the sky overhead was blue-black and blooming with electricity. The driver of the Mercury got out and walked toward the gallery, avoiding the pools of rainwater, lifting his trouser cuffs above his two-tone shoes.
“Hi,” he said.
“What’s happenin’?” Bertrand replied.
“My name is Ronald. What’s yours?”
“Same as it was this morning, when a guy wit’ a face just like yours was following me down by the drawbridge in Jeanerette.”
“You’re smart. I bet you been to college.”
“What you want, man?”
“Can I sit down?”
“No.”