Time passed—a loud and angry blur of sound. Pirate found himself reading and rereading the part about the great rain. God, a whirlwind, made the great rain. He suddenly got it. Great rain plus whirlwind: hurricane. The great thing about the Book of Job was—
All at once Susannah gripped his knee. It shocked him. He jerked upright, stared at her. She pointed to the judge. The judge was speaking.
“ . . . and in terms of establishment of reasonable doubt, if this tape had been produced at the original trial, it is the opinion of this court that despite . . .”
A minute or so later, she banged that hammer thing.
“Oh my God,” said Susannah. “You’re a free man.”
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Then came all sorts of turmoil. Pirate’s tongue got thick, making coherent speech impossible. Susannah turned him toward a door.
Pirate saw the tanned, fit woman again, the one who’d ID’d him. He got that weird, squinting feeling in his non-eye, a little painful this time, because of the tiny weapon. The soft skin on the woman’s face dissolved and he saw underneath, glimpsed something all twisted up.
She might not have long to live.
You went to the hearing?” Clay said. “I don’t understand.”
They sat in a coffee shop across the street from the museum. A DK Industries grader went back and forth over the spot where the
Cloud Nine
had stood, its attenuated arches making the stolen sculpture seem much taller than it really was. “Is that what matters—that I went?” Nell said. “What about the result?”
“Anything can happen in court,” Clay said.
“Was it because of that judge? Would the other one, Earl Roman—”
“No telling,” Clay said; but didn’t she hear doubt in his voice? And hadn’t she caught a flash of anger in his eyes, merely at the mention of Earl Roman’s name? “But tell me why you went to the hearing,”
he said.
“What’s wrong with me going?” Nell said.
The coffee came: an espresso for Clay, a latte for Nell. The cup looked tiny in his hand. He had beautiful dark hands, powerful and finely shaped at the same time, two perfect incarnations of him.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “For starters, why would you want to subject yourself to it?” He sipped his espresso, watching her over the rim of his cup. She almost thought there was something professional in his look.
“I just had to see him.”
“Why?”
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“To see what he looked like.”
“Doesn’t matter what he looks like now,” Clay said. “People change in twenty years.”
“I know.” Other than his size, Alvin DuPree had looked nothing like he had back then, either in her memories of him in court or on the Parish Street Pier; so much older, much more than twenty years’
worth, so scarred, so worn; all of him so different, except for one small similarity—that remaining pale blue eye.
“So why, Nell?”
“I told you.”
“Why didn’t you bring it up before?” Clay said.
“You’d gone to work. It was spur-of-the-moment.”
“Spur-of-the-moment.”
“Yes.”
“You hadn’t been thinking about it?”
“No. Not really.”
“Not really.”
“No.”
“So what provoked this spur-of-the-moment decision?”
“Clay? I feel like I’m being questioned.”
A pained look rose in his eyes. “Sorry, baby,” he said. He reached across the table, laid his hand on hers. She felt a little better right away. “There was no call from Lee Ann Bonner, or anything like that?” he said.
“A call from Lee Ann?”
“Before you jumped in the car and rode down to the courthouse.”
Nell withdrew her hand. “There was no call from Lee Ann,” she said. “I can think for myself.”
“Hell, I know that,” Clay said. “You’re the smartest person in my life, always have been, always will be. I just can’t get the reasoning behind—”
She interrupted. “Don’t you see? What if I put the wrong man behind bars? Destroying a whole life, Clay—he’s old now, he lost an eye, God knows what else happ—”
“Stop,” said Clay. “Stop right there. “You didn’t put—”
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The waitress came by. “You folks all set? We’ve got some nice almond cake today, baked fresh. On the house, Chief.”
“We’re fine,” Clay said. “And we’ll be wanting a check when it’s time to settle up, please.” She went away. He leaned forward, lowered his voice. “You didn’t put anyone behind bars. A jury did that. And it wasn’t just your testimony. DuPree was a known thief, with a record—a record that included a very similar nighttime attack where he showed a knife, and that could easily have had a similar ending if a cruiser hadn’t by chance—”
“And that bothers me, too,” Nell said. “That the knife never got found.”
“No case,” Clay said, “not one, ever gets resolved without a loose end or two. It doesn’t mean things don’t add up. Forget your sighting of the knife. We had the knife wound. We had his previous knife history. That adds up.”
“But what happened to the knife?”
Clay raised his hands. “He threw it in the bayou.”
“But divers went in there and they didn’t—”
“Or in the bushes somewhere, or down a drain, or in a trash can.
Doesn’t matter. He did it.”
She gazed at him. To know someone so well, to know exactly what he was thinking, but to disagree, or at least be in doubt: Nell felt the first twinge of a special kind of pain restricted to good marriages alone.
“But what about the tape?” she said.
He gazed back at her. “This is going to be hard for you, Nell, but—we may never know.”
“Never know?”
“The story of the tape, who fabricated it, why, all those other questions someone with a mind like yours—a conscience like yours—needs answers to. I was downstairs, watching on the closed-circuit hookup, and that’s the feeling I got, a real bad feeling—we may never know.”
Never knowing? At the moment, that struck her as intolerable.
Would time change that, bring acceptance? She knew time had the power when it came to some things, but that didn’t make it right, was more a sign of human weakness.
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“I don’t understand about the FEMA guy maybe having some grudge against Bobby Rice,” she said. “And what was all that about tension between you and Darryll?” Darryll Pines was the deputy chief, had been deputy chief back when Clay was still a detective.
“He wants my job, has always wanted it—that’s no secret,” Clay said. “But that can happen in any organization—we work together fine.”
Nell had a sudden thought. “How did Darryll and Bobby get along?”
Clay took another sip of his espresso, again gazed at her over the rim of the cup, again a gaze that reminded her of his profession.
“Where are you going with that?”
“Nowhere,” she said. “I’m just trying to understand.” She reached across the table, now laid her hand on his. Clay had thick veins on the back of his hand; she could feel blood pulsing inside. “Is this about protecting Bobby’s memory?” she said. “Is that what you’re doing?”
“Bobby’s memory doesn’t need my help,” Clay said. His cell phone went off. He answered, listened, clicked off. “Got to go.”
“Is it about this?”
“No,” Clay said, rising. “Bank robbery in progress, out in River-bend.” He laid some money on the table.
“Be careful.”
“Always,” he said, leaning down and kissing her. Then, his face very close, he added softly, “We may never get to the bottom of this.
Don’t let it ruin anything.”
Their eyes met. There was nothing professional in his gaze now, she thought: just him and her. “I would never do that,” she said. “But whatever happens, DuPree is guilty, right?”
His mouth opened, closed, opened again. She could smell his breath, always fresh and sweet, now with an espresso overlay. “I just don’t know, baby.”
Nell felt blood rushing from her head, a flood, almost faint-inducing, as though a plug had been pulled inside her. “You don’t know?”
He put his finger over her lips. “One way or another,” he said, “we have to put this behind us, move on. Okay?”
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She tried to nod like it was okay, maybe shifted her head a little.
He smiled at her, turned, and walked toward the door; then stopped suddenly and came back. “That Norah matter?” he said, glancing around; the waitress was busy behind the counter, the only other customers sat across the room. “It’s all straightened out.”
“Thanks.”
“There’s her to think of, too,” he said. “We’ll get through this. All of it.”
They were a team; yes, intimates in every way. The feeling of his finger on her lips lingered even after he’d left the coffee shop and driven away, siren on. The sound faded. Nell called the house, got no answer. She tried Norah’s cell. Same.
Nell drove out
to Parish Street, parked at the towpath, stood on the edge of the bayou, where the pier had been. The bayou was all cleaned up, as Kirk Bastien had said: garbage, wrecked cars, and all the dead things—trees, birds, fish, the dog—gone. There was even a little current flowing downstream toward the Gulf, and a crab scuttled through weeds on the far bank. Had Kirk really fired those two assistants? Was that somehow part of the cleanup, a ritual sacrifice to nature? If so, what kind of sacrifice would be necessary to make up for all that Bernardine had done?
Nell closed her eyes, tried to imagine darkness, a full moon, Johnny. She remembered Johnny talking about the contours of the sea bottom and a giant funnel; she could picture the big man stepping out from behind the support post, and how the bandanna had fooled her into thinking his face was deformed—as DuPree’s face later became. Was there meaning behind that? Nell wrestled and wrestled with the idea, got nowhere.
She sat down on the edge of the bank, feet dangling, watching the current. Cloud reflections drifted on the water; when viewed from a bit of an angle, they could have been shadowy things far far down.
Johnny had shielded her. The man had spoken behind the bandanna, just the single word—“money”—not enough to have left her with a trace of the sound of his voice even back then. Then had come the
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long blade and the sound of steel on bone, in bone, through bone, a sound still clear in her mind even now, sitting by the cleaned-up bayou.
The knife had slipped out of Johnny; the curve of the blade visible in the moonlight and like the sound of the stabbing, still clear. Then, too late, she’d resisted, kicking out, and caught that one glimpse of his face. Nell closed her eyes again, tried and tried to see that face.
Her mind offered up the paltriest of visions, no more than an oval, blank and white, all except for the pale blue eyes, which she pictured vividly for a moment before they got all mixed up with the eyes of the
Fortune Teller.
She regretted sitting in the last row in court; up front, she might have gotten a better look at DuPree’s eye, those two moments when he’d turned around. Had he recognized her? He hadn’t shown the slightest sign, in fact, had seemed barely there the second time, as though on some sedative. Were his lawyers allowed to—
What was that? Nell thought she caught a flash under the water, a quick gleam down deep, there and gone. She leaned forward, peered into the water, didn’t see the gleam. That didn’t mean she’d imagined it, didn’t mean the knife wasn’t somewhere on the bottom. True, divers had searched without success back then, but why couldn’t they have simply missed the knife, maybe buried in the mud? And now, so long after, comes Bernardine, stirring things up. Why not? The Justice Project was making the exact same claim for the tape.
Nell rose, kicked off her shoes. She glanced around, saw no one.
A minute later, in bra and panties, she slid down the bank and into the bayou.
Nell had played in this very bayou as a kid, farther upstream where it cut across a corner of Magnolia Glade. The water had always been warm, close to bathtub temperature, but now it was cold enough to make her gasp. Had Bernardine uncovered a previously hidden spring, or something like that? Johnny would have known. She took a deep breath, cut through the surface in a quick duck dive, kicked her way down.
The bayou was only ten or twelve feet deep, clarity nothing like the water around Little Parrot Cay, but good enough. Nell glided along the bottom, eyesight distorted by the lack of a mask, but able to pick things out: soft green algae, shells lying on the bottom, yellow and
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pink, a fat brown catfish with long white whiskers swimming by. Had Bernardine brought the catfish back? Nell remembered what should have been second nature—that gators lived in the bayous, too, making it a good idea to check before diving in—got the sudden feeling of something behind her, glanced back. No gators, but she saw a dull gleam in the mud at the base of the far bank. Two or three strokes and it was in her hand. A mirror, not a knife: a small round mirror in a chrome frame, the kind found on car doors.
Nell kicked up to the surface, breathed, examined the mirror. A cracked mirror: she saw her face split down the middle. Nell swam to the towpath-side bank, found a foothold, climbed to the top.
A Belle Ville cruiser sat beside her car, the words DEPUTY CHIEF on the side. Nell had left her clothes on a rock by the towpath. She put down the mirror, slid into the blouse she’d worn to court and was buttoning it up when the driver’s-side door of the cruiser opened and Darryll Pines stepped out. He was in uniform, cap bill pulled low over his eyes, belly sticking out over his belt. Nell reached for her skirt.
“Hold it right there,” said Darryll Pines; his hand was on the butt of his gun.
“Darryll.”
“Huh?”
“It’s me. Nell Jarreau.”
His hand left the gun butt. “Were you in the bayou or somethin’?”
His head moved in a way that suggested he was looking her up and down; impossible to tell, the way he had his hat.