“What does her death have to do with the car?”
“There was gasoline and detergent on her jeans. The same combination that was used to burn the car. Quite a puzzle, don’t you think? You have gasoline cans at your filling station?”
“Sure. For people who run out.”
“How about in your garage?”
“No, sir.”
“Were you out with Saber Bledsoe early this morning?”
“Yes, sir, he picked me up in the Heights and drove me home.”
“You said you didn’t know if you were in the Heights or not. Rats must have eaten holes in your memory bank.”
He had me again. He put a Pall Mall in his mouth and scratched a match on the desk, the flame flaring on his cigarette. He took a couple of puffs and removed a piece of tobacco from his lip. “We found a gas can in his garage. The can has soap detergent in it. I’d say your friend has shit on his nose.”
WHEN I GOT HOME, I threw up in the toilet. Then I recovered the stiletto from under my mattress and flicked it open. I saw on one side of the blade, barely visible, a trace of rubber, the kind that might be left from slicing off a valve stem. My father came into the room without knocking. “Want to explain that?”
“This frog sticker?”
“I’d call it a weapon a criminal would have. Where did you get it?”
“In a pawn store.”
His eyes rested on the shelf above my desk where I kept my arrowhead collection and antique fishing lures and minié balls and a rusted revolver that had no cylinder and a cigar box full of Indian-head pennies. He didn’t speak for a long time. “Put it on the shelf. It doesn’t leave the room.”
“Yes, sir.”
“As a rule, when members of our church’s clergy talk about sin, what are they referring to?”
“Sex.”
“That’s correct. They don’t mention much about war, nor about violence in general. But that’s the real enemy, that and greed. Don’t let anybody tell you different. A man who carries a knife like that one is a man who’s afraid.”
When my father spoke this way, he was a different man, more regal and just and clearheaded than any man I ever met. He allowed no guns in our home and hunted ducks only one day a year, with the president of his company, in a blind over by Anahuac. After a prowler broke into our garage a couple of times, my father placed a brick in a hatbox and wrapped the hatbox in satin paper and tied a ribbon on it, then he set the box on the front seat of the automobile. He also put a note in it that read:
Dear Burglar,
While you were stealing this brick, a twelve-gauge shotgun was aimed at your back. If you return, you will not be received in a gracious manner. I do not wish to offend you, but you seem very inept. I suggest you join a church or practice your profession somewhere else. Give serious thought to this.
Best regards,
Your victim,
James Eustace Broussard
Our burglar friend never returned.
I closed the stiletto and placed it on the shelf and sat down on my bed. My Gibson was lying facedown on the spread. I picked it up and propped the curve in the sound box across my knee and formed an E chord on the neck. “I feel a mite sick, Daddy,” I said.
“Your stomach acting up again?”
“It’s not acting up. It’s always like that. Like I have a boil on the lining.”
A shadow slid across his face. “Did that police detective touch you?”
“He tore the chair out from under me and threw me on the floor. That’s not the problem, though.”