Butterworth grinned. “In Louisiana?”
The pair of them drove away, the sunlight spangling on the windshield.
I couldn’t get the still shot of Wyatt Earp and Clementine out of my mind. I could almost hear the music from the film blowing in the trees.
• • •
I HAD ANOTHER SURPRISE waiting for me at the rear entrance to city hall. Travis Lebeau was slouched against the brick wall, in the shade, picking his nails. “Hey.”
“What’s the haps?” I said.
“Need to bend your ear.”
“Come upstairs.”
“How about down by the water? I’m not big on visiting cop houses.”
I looked at my watch. When it comes to encouraging confidential informants, there is no greater inducement than a show of indifference. “I’m under the gun.”
“I’ve got a bull’s-eye on my back,” he replied.
I walked down the bayou’s edge and let him follow. “Say it.”
“There’s a couple of AB guys who know where I am. Give me five hundred. I’ll give you Tillinger.”
“The same guy you stood up for?”
“I’m in a spot,” he said, his eyes leaving mine. “He liked to drop names.”
“People Lucinda Arceneaux knew?”
He looked sideways and blew out a breath. “Yeah, people she knew.”
“Which people?”
“How about the money?”
“You haven’t given me anything, Travis.”
He scratched his forearms with both hands, like a man with hives. “I got to score, straighten out the kinks,” he said. “I’ll make good on my word.”
“You’re an addict?”
“No, I’m Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road.”
“Can’t help you, partner.”
I turned to go.
“Maybe I exaggerated a little,” he said.
“About what?”
“Tillinger. He creeped me out.”
“In what way?”
“The way sex between men bothered him. He had a crazy look in his eyes when he’d hear a couple of guys getting it on. You ever know a guy like that who probably wasn’t queer himself? Sometimes he’d burn himself with matches. He talked about casting out our demons and raising the dead.”
“Would he hurt Lucinda Arceneaux?”
He shook his head slowly, as though he couldn’t make a decision. “I don’t know, man. I can’t go in somebody’s head.”
“In reality, you don’t have anything to sell, do you.”
He didn’t know what to say. I started up the slope.
“Two hunnerd,” he said at my back.
I kept walking. He caught up with me and pulled on my shirt. “You don’t understand. They’ll use a blowtorch. I saw them do it in a riot.”
“Sorry.”
“Maybe the chocolate drop led him on. Maybe Tillinger lost it. Come on, man, I got to get out of town.”
“You need to take your hand off my arm.”
“Come on, man. I’m hurting.”
“Life’s a bitch.”
His face made me think of a piece of blank paper crumpling on hot coals. Cruelty comes in all forms. It’s least attractive when you discover it in yourself.
• • •
I WALKED HOME FOR lunch. A cherry-red Lamborghini was parked in the driveway. Alafair was eating at the kitchen table with a middle-aged man I had never seen. A plate of deviled eggs and two avocado-and-shrimp sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and a glass of iced tea with mint leaves in it had obviously been set for me. But she had not waited upon my arrival before she and her friend started eating.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hey, Dave,” she said. “This is Lou Wexler. He has to get to the airport, so we started without you.”
Wexler was a tall, thick-bodied man with a tan that went to the bone and blond hair sun-bleached on the tips. He was ruggedly handsome, with intelligent eyes and large hands and the kind of confidence that sometimes signals aggression. He wiped his fingers with a napkin before rising and shaking hands. “It’s an honor.”
“How do you do, sir?” I said, sitting down, glancing out the window at the bayou. My manner was not gracious. But no father, no matter how charitable, trusts another man with his daughter upon first introduction. If he tells you he does, he is either lying or a worthless parent.
“Lou is a screenwriter and producer,” Alafair said. “He works with Desmond.”
“Actually, I don’t work with Desmond,” he said. “I help produce his films. Nobody ‘works’ with Desmond. He’s his own man. In the best way, of course.”
“How about this fellow Butterworth?” I said.
“You’ve met Antoine, have you?”
“Twice.”
Wexler’s eyes were sparkling. “And?”
“An unusual fellow,” I said.
“Don’t take him seriously,” Wexler said. “Nobody does. He’s a bean counter posing as an artist.”
“I heard he was in a couple of wars,” I said.
“He was best at scaring the natives in the bush, rattling around in a Land Rover, and showing up for photo ops. South Africa was full of them.”
“That’s your home?” I asked.
“For a while. I was born in New Orleans. I live in Los Angeles now.”
If he’d grown up in New Orleans, he had acid-rinsed the city from his speech.
“We pulled a body out of the salt just south of Desmond Cormier’s house,” I said. “The body was tied to a cross. I spotted the cross through a telescope. Our man Butterworth took a peep but couldn’t see a thing. Neither could Desmond, although this morning he told me he had bad eyesight. Butterworth didn’t seem bothered one way or another.”
The room was silent. Alafair stared at me.
“Can you run that by me again?” Wexler said.
I repeated my statement.
“Well, that’s something, isn’t it?” Wexler said. “Sorry, I haven’t been watching the time. I have to get a new gym bag. Then I need to pick up some fellows in Lafayette. We’re searching out a couple of locations. Perhaps you can help us.”
His level of self-involvement was hard to take.
“I probably wouldn’t know what you’re looking for,” I said.
He touched at his mouth with his napkin and set it aside. “It’s been grand meeting you, Mr. Robicheaux.”
“Likewise.”
“Don’t get up.”
I didn’t intend to. Alafair walked him to the door. Then she came back into the kitchen, her jaw clenched. “Why do you have to be so irritable?”
“You’re a success on your own. You don’t need these phony bastards.”
“You stigmatize an entire group because of this Butterworth character?”
“They’re nihilists.”
“Desmond’s not. He’s a great director. You know why? Because he paid his goddamn dues.”
“How about it on the language, Alf?”
“Sometimes you really disappoint me,” she said.
I felt my face shrink. I took my plate outside and finished eating at the picnic table with Snuggs and Mon Tee Coon. Then I went back inside. Alafair was brushing her hair in front of the mirror in the bedroom. She was five-ten and dark-skinned, with beautiful hair that fell to her shoulders. She had a black belt in karate and ran five miles every morning. Sometimes I couldn’t believe she was the same little El Salvadoran girl I’d pulled from a submerged airplane near Southwest Pass.