James Burke - Light of the World

Clete thought about all these things as he parked the Caddy and walked up on the wood porch of the cabin and knocked, his heart beating hard.

She had a hairbrush in her hand when she opened the door. “You found it okay?” she said.

“I fish down here a lot. Dave and I fish here together. It’s always cool in the summer. One time in the fall, I backpacked way up that trail and saw a moose.”

Her eyes went past him, then came back on his. She touched the hair on her neck with the brush. “Your car looks like you just had it waxed.”

He turned around and looked at it as though observing it for the first time, wondering if the disingenuous nature of their conversation was as embarrassing to her as it was to him. “I just got it out of the shop. It got shot up when this guy from Kansas tried to kill my daughter. You want to sit out here?”

“No, come in. What did you say? A man from Kansas?”

“He was driving a truck with a Kansas tag. Maybe he’s Asa Surrette.”

“The psychopath that Mr. Robicheaux’s daughter interviewed in prison?”

“Yeah, he’s a bad guy. You told me you were afraid. What are you afraid of?”

She looked beyond him at an old red boxcar that lay desiccated and half-filled with rotting hay inside a grove of cottonwoods. “I don’t know what I’m afraid of. I feel a sense of loss I can’t get rid of. I think about Angel and how she died and what the killer probably did to her before he put a plastic bag over her head. I can’t get those images out of my mind. I hate my husband. I’d like to kill him.”

“Why?”

“Will you come in, please?”

He stepped inside. She closed the door behind him and turned the key in an old-fashioned lock. Then she went to the windows and pulled the curtains closed.

“Who do you think is out there?” he asked.

“I can’t be sure. Caspian is afraid of someone. More so than I’ve ever seen him. When he’s afraid, he’s cruel.”

“To you?”

“To anyone. I never knew a coward who wasn’t cruel. I had to make him bathe. No, I had to get Love to make him bathe.”

“I’m losing the picture here.”

“He wouldn’t take a bath or get in the shower. I told him I didn’t want him in our bedroom. Maybe he’s depressed. When people get depressed, they behave like that, don’t they?”

“Depressed over your daughter’s death?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think.” She sat down at a wood table, the hairbrush still in her hand. There was a vase of cut flowers on the table and another one on the kitchen windowsill. Her face looked freshly made up, her mouth glossy with lipstick that was too bright for her complexion, the streaks of brown in her hair full of tiny lights. “Nothing makes sense to me. Did this man Surrette kill our daughter?”

“Evidently, nobody saw her leave the Wigwam. Would she leave with somebody she didn’t know?”

“She was seventeen. A girl that age has no judgment.”

He sat down across from her. “Had she ever gone off with guys she didn’t know?”

“I tried to talk her into going to Alateen. She wouldn’t do it. Sometimes she’d come home at ten P.M. Sometimes she’d get dropped off at ten the next morning.”

“Would she go off with strangers, Felicity?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Who were her friends?”

“Druggies, boys on the make, kids who wanted access to her money.”

“Was she promiscuous?”

“Today they all are,” Felicity replied.

Clete looked around the cabin. The walls were pine, the floors constructed from railroad ties, the stone fireplace outfitted with steel hooks for cook pots. “What do y’all use this place for?”

“Hunting during big-game season. When Angel was younger, she had her friends out. We had ice cream parties on the bank of the stream.”

“Were Caspian and your daughter close?”

“I don’t know who Caspian is anymore.”

“Pardon?”

“When I met him, he was a different person. He had a brilliant mind for figures. He wanted to create a high-tech company and compete in the defense industry. He borrowed a half million dollars in start-up money from Love. Then he started gambling in Vegas and Atlantic City and Puerto Rico. Here’s the funny part. At the blackjack tables, he could count cards coming out of a six-deck shoe. He got banned from several casinos. Then they caught on to what he was doing.”

“I don’t understand. You said they caught on to him after he was banned.”

“They realized if they let him stay at the table, he would lose everything he had won and drop ten to thirty thousand on top of it. How sick is that?”

“That’s why they do it,” Clete said.

“Do what?”

“That’s why they gamble. They want to lose. They like to punish themselves. They want to feel there’s a cosmic plot working against them. Go into the bar at the track after the seventh race. It’s full of losers. They’re happy as hogs rolling in slop.”

She stared at him blankly. “I feel like an idiot.”

“Because you never figured out your husband?”

“Because I married him.”

“My ex gave our savings to an alcoholic Buddhist guru in Boulder,” Clete said. “This guru made people take off their clothes at poetry readings. My ex thought he was a holy man and I was a drunk cooze hound. Unfortunately, in my case, she was right.”

Felicity propped her elbow on the table and rested her chin on her hand. For the first time since he had come into the room, she smiled. “You always talk like that to women?”

“Only the ones I trust.”

Had he just said that?

“Why should you trust me?”

“Because we both grew up in the same part of New Orleans. Because everybody from Uptown knows what everybody else there is thinking. It’s probably like an A.A. meeting. There’s only one story in the room. We all come out of the same culture.”

The fear she had described seemed to have lifted momentarily from her soul. There was a warm light in her eyes. Her hair had the tone and variations of color you see in old hand-rubbed mahogany. “When you talk, you make me feel good,” she said.

“I’m an overweight former homicide roach, Miss Felicity. I’m still persona non grata at NOPD. That’s like being a top sergeant in the Crotch, then getting your stripes pulled. Dave Robicheaux sobered up and got his life back. I never could pull it off. Three days without a drink, and my head turns into a concrete mixer.” He could see her attention fading, the fear and concern creeping back into her face. “I got a bad habit,” he said. “I start talking about myself and put everybody to sleep.”

She touched the top of his hand. “No, you’re a nice man. I mentioned something about Caspian that you wouldn’t have a way of understanding. He asked Love if he believed in hell. Caspian has never had any interest in religion. Why would he ask Love a question like that?”

Clete shook his head. “Guilt?”

“If Caspian ever felt guilt about anything, I never saw it. He’s the most selfish human being I’ve ever known.”

The kitchen window was open, and the curtains were blowing in the breeze. They were printed with small pink roses and made Clete think of the flower bed that his mother kept behind their small house in the old Irish Channel. “I think I’d better go,” he said. “I have a way of getting into trouble, Felicity. Lots of it. The kind that doesn’t go away and leaves people messed up for a long time.” The disappointment in her face was not feigned. He was sure of that, or at least as sure as he ever was when it came to matters of the heart. He got up to leave.

“Do what you need to do,” she said.

He nodded and walked to the door and tried to turn the key in the lock.