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"I'm not sure. Maybe we met years ago," she replied.
"How do you do, Miss Connie? It's good to see you," Gable said.
They did not look directly at each other again; they even stepped
backwards at the same time, like people who have nothing in common.
I stared at the two of them, as though the moment had been caught inside
a cropped photograph whose meaning lay outside the borders of the camera's
lens. Both Gable and Connie had come up through the ranks at NOPD back in the
late 1960s. How could they have no specific memory of each other?
Then Connie Deshotel lit a cigarette, as though she were distracted by
thoughts that would not come together in her mind. But she did not have the
lighter I had seen her use by her swimming pool, the one that was identical to
the thin leather and gold lighter owned by Jim Gable.
His face split with his gap-toothed smile.
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"It's the Davester," he said.
"I was just talking with your chauffeur about your friendship with
Maggie Glick," I said.
"Maggie, my favorite madam," he said.
"You got her out of prison?" I said.
"Right again, Davester. A wrong narc planted crystal on her. It's a new
day in the department. Too bad you're not with us anymore," he replied.
It started to rain, thudding on top of the tents, misting on the neon
and the strings of electric lights over the rides. A barman dropped a tarp on
one side of the drink pavilion, and the air was sweet and cool in the dryness
of the enclosure and I could smell the draft beer and whiskey and mint and
sweet syrup and melted ice in the plastic cups along the bar.
"Remember me, Dave?" Sookie Motrie said, and put out his hand. After my
hand was firmly inside his, he locked down on my fingers and winked and said,
"When I used to write bonds for Wee Willie Bimstine, I went to see you in the
lockup once. I think you were doing extracurricular research. Back in your
days of wine and roses.
I took my hand from his and looked out into the rain, then said to
Bootsie, "I promised Alf we'd be back early. I'll get the car and swing around
behind the pavilion."
I didn't wait for her to answer. I walked into the rain, out beyond the
noise of the revelers in the tents and the rides whose buckets and gondolas
spun and dipped emptily under the electric lights.
You just walk away. It's easy, I thought. You don't provoke, you don't
engage. You keep it simple and your adversaries never have power over you.
I started Bootsie s car and drove through the mud toward the drink
pavilion. Cora Gable had disappeared, but Jim Gable was at the plank bar,
standing just behind Bootsie.
I kept working my twelve-step program inside my head, the way a
long-distance ocean swimmer breathes with a concentrated effort to ensure he
does not swallow water out of a wave and drown. I told myself I did not have
to live as I once did. I did not have to re-create the violent moments that
used to come aborning like a sul-furous match flaring off a thumbnail.
Through the rain and the beating of the windshield wipers I saw Jim
Gable standing so close behind Bootsie that his shadow seemed to envelop her
body. She was dabbing with a napkin at a spot on the plank bar where she had
spilled a drink and was evidently not aware of his closeness, or the way his
loins hovered just behind her buttocks, the glaze that was on his face.
I stopped the car and stepped out into the rain, the car door yawing
behind me.
Gable's nostrils were dilated as he breathed in the smell of Bootsie's
shampoo, the perfume behind her ears, the soap from her bath, the heat off her
skin, the hint of her sex in her underthings. I could see the cloth of his
slacks tightening across his loins.
Then I was running out of the rain toward him. I hit him so hard spittle
and blood flew from his mouth onto a woman's blouse four feet away. I drove my
fist into his kidney, a blow that made his back arch as though his spine had
been broken, then I hooked him with a left below the eye and drove a right
cross into his jaw that knocked him across a folding table.
A man I didn't know grabbed my arm, and a big uniformed policeman
crashed into me from the other side, wrestling with both of his big meaty
hands to get his arms around me and smother me against his girth. But even
while the two men tried to pull me off of Gable, I kicked him in the side of
the head and kicked at him once more and missed his face and shattered his
watch on the cement.
I fell over a chair and stared stupidly at the faces looking down at me,
like a derelict who has collapsed on a sidewalk and must witness from the
cement the pity and revulsion he inspires in his fellowman. Bootsie was
between me and Gable now, her face incredulous. A wet cigarette butt clung to
my cheek like a mashed cockroach. I could smell whiskey and beer in my clothes
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and Gable's blood on my knuckles and I swore I could taste whiskey surging out
of my stomach into my throat, like an old friend who has come back in a time
of need.
Through the sweat and water that dripped out of my hair I saw the
governor and people from the crowd lifting Jim Gable to his feet. He was
smiling at me, his teeth like pink tombstones in his mouth.
26
MY HANDS STILL HURT the next morning. I ran cold water over them in the
kitchen sink, then drank coffee out on the picnic table in the blueness of the
dawn and tried not to think about last night. I walked along the coulee that
traversed the back of our property and looked at the periwinkles along the
bank, the caladiums and elephant ears beaded with moisture, the willows
swelling in the breeze. I wanted to stay in that spot forever and not go into
the department on Monday morning, not look at the early edition of the Daily
Iberian, not deal with the people who would speak politely to me on a sidewalk
or in a courthouse corridor, then whisper to one another after they thought I
was out of earshot.
I walked back up toward the house just as the sun rose behind the
cypress trees and seemed to flatten like fire inside the swamp. The back of
the house was still deep in shadow, but I could see a white envelope taped to
Alafair's screen. I pulled it loose and looked at her name written across the
front in a flowing calligraphy. The flap was glued, with tiny felt-pen marks
that transected both the flap and the body of the envelope so the dried glue
could not be broken without the addressee knowing it.
I opened my pocketknife and slit the envelope all the way across the top [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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