“You got woman trouble?” he said.
“A mess of it.”
“You love her?”
“Yes, sir, I sure do.”
He stared at me with his good eye and his white eye at the same time, which was like looking at two different heads that had been sawed down the middle and glued together. “Then get your butt over to her house and tell her that.”
“You belong back there with King Arthur’s knights, Cotton.”
“I hear that a lot,” he replied.
I went back to my table and finished my sandwich and Kool-Aid, then went outside into the wind and the sunshine and started the day all over. Minutes later, I looked up from twisting the handles of a posthole digger in ground that was as hard as concrete, and I saw Wade Benbow’s unmarked car coming up the road in a cloud of dust.
* * *
HE PUSHED OPEN the passenger door for me to get in.
“I’m working,” I said.
“No, you’re not. Get your butt in here.”
“You’re the second man in fifteen minutes to say something like that to me.”
“It’s about your girlfriend.”
My viscera turned to jelly. I sat down on the passenger seat. The car stank of nicotine. An unfiltered cigarette was burning in the ashtray. “What happened?”
“She’s okay. I mean physically. Y’all had a fight or something?”
“Yeah, something. Where is she?”
“At home.” He reached for a notepad on the dashboard. “This is what I have so far. You were supposed to go out to dinner with her. The art professor was fixing her windows. The school-bus zoo was parked in the field. You got into it with this guy Jimmy Doyle. Then you left by yourself.”
“That’s right. Can you get rid of that cigarette?”
He removed it from the ashtray and threw it out his window. “Who would have reason to do Jo Anne McDuffy harm?”
“You said she was all right. How about telling me what’s going on?”
“I didn’t say her house was all right. Back to my question—who would want to hurt her?”
“I’d start with Darrel Vickers.”
He scratched his forehead. “Yeah, that kid should have been lobotomized years ago. After you left, your girl decided to get in some extra hours at her job. When she came home, the windows in back were broken again, the interior was ransacked and smeared with feces, and all her paintings were stolen.”
“The paintings she did about the Ludlow Massacre?”
“Yeah, it seems like a pretty hard blow for her.”
I doubted if he had any idea how hard. It’s the worst fear of every painter, every photographer, every sculptor, and every writer. I couldn’t imagine what I would feel or do if someone stole or destroyed the only manuscript of my novel. “No witnesses, no clues?” I said.
“Nope. One other thing, though: I talked to the art professor. He said he left an envelope with four hundred dollars in it on the counter. Some kind of payback for a loan. I found the envelope on the floor.” Benbow looked at his notepad again. “This is what he wrote: ‘Here’s the rest of the money I owe you and a little for interest. I will always remain your student rather than the other way around. Love, Henri.’ The envelope was torn open and the cash taken. Got any thoughts?”
“Yeah, Henri Devos is the stink on shit. Where is Jo Anne now?”
“I’d try her house. It’s going to need quite a cleaning.”