Cajun Waltz (11 page)

“How old are
you
?”

“Twenty-four. I feel older.”

“How come?”

“Sitting here alone on a Friday night watching a high school basketball game? I'd say it's about over for me.”

“I seen you before.”

“I'm Richie Bainard's son.”

“Then my mom—”

“Works for my father. Poor woman.”

These asides were too slippery for her. Part of their meaning seemed a fair warning to run. “I'm Adele.”

“Nice.” They shook hands. “Nice,” he said again.

“Gonna tell me your name?”

“I'm Lieutenant Bainard.”

“An army man.”

“Marines.”

“Ooh. Scary.”

“Korea kinda was.”

“You're braggin' now.”

He laughed. “You're pretty fast.”

“My boyfriend's mom says that.” She scowled. “Bitch.”

“Wanna go?”

Adele looked at him.

“Said you don't care about your daddy's team.”

“I care. He's the best man in the world. It's my boyfriend I wanna kill.”

“Come on with me anyhow.”

“Where?”

“Does it matter? You know I'm respectable. I'm R. J. Bainard.” He raised his hands and turned the palms upward to show they were clean. “Could be your chaperone.”

“I seen a few of them was worse'n their sons.” If further deliberation occurred to her, it didn't show on her face. Adele stood and strode down the bleachers and out of the gym in a manner almost royal. He waited before following on the assumption that she wanted him to—to wait and to follow, that is.

He was driving one of his father's Cadillacs; it felt like a carriage to her when he opened the door to invite her inside. He took her dancing and drinking. Secure that she was running the show, Adele expected him to make a move before the night was over. Her wariness when he parked on a side street was that of an athlete confronting a challenge. She knew her way around the back end of a date. She knew how to say yes and no, how to deploy her body to amaze and intimidate. In a clinch with a boy she held all the cards, nervous but never afraid.

Except R.J. wasn't a boy. He knew he didn't have to take no for an answer. He reached over and grasped her wrist. Gentle at first, but still odd—that he took her wrist not her hand; bones, not soft flesh, in his grip. “Okay,” he said. “We're gonna do it now.”

He drove her home afterward. At curbside he tried to kiss her goodnight. Her snarling rebuff warned him that she might do something reckless. “Call you tomorrow?” His breezy tone was a reflex toward charm under pressure. She bit back defeated tears, got out of the car, and climbed her front steps like any teenager home too late.

*   *   *

A
DELE NEVER WOULD
have told anyone if she'd had time to collect herself. She tried to lift the latch quietly, to cross the floor with a weightless tread as if literally lightened by what she'd lost tonight. But ambushed by her mother's angry relief to have her home safe, she lost the will to lie.

Under the bright hallway bulb her red eyes and beginning bruises on her upper arms couldn't be explained away. The truth blew out like a drowning man's last air. “He raped me, Mommy. I'm sorry.” Mary Billodeau's expression curdled, for her daughter was now a certified tramp. The next question came from Adele's father, who'd fallen asleep in his chair while compiling stats from tonight's basketball game. To hear “R. J. Bainard” in answer was as stunning to Frank as the violence his daughter had suffered. He took her in his arms. His gaze over her heaving shoulders was directed far away. “Jesus Christ, forgive me.”

Before going to wash off R.J.'s filth, the girl and her mother exchanged looks so probing the moment would stay with Adele all her life. The understanding was that they would never speak “rape” again. It would only hurt Adele's future in this town and in this house—hurt, too, it didn't need to be said, Mary's management position at Block's Home Supply. Adele got beat up by a boy—that was the story. It happened more than people admitted, and Mary trusted that in the eyes of God a woman is ennobled for enduring it.

Frank helped his daughter undress for a bath under a quilt he draped around her. Seeing the abrasions on her skin brought a wave of fury. He yanked her from the edge of the steaming tub and threw her clothes at her. “We're going to the doctor and we're going to the police. They gonna see you like he left you.”

“No one'll believe it,” Mary said.

“Look at her!”

He dragged Adele out the front door. “You're hurting me,” she said.

His face looked distorted in the light from the kitchen window. “You swear it happened like you said?”

“Daddy, it did.”

He shook her by the shoulders, her head snapping back and forth. “You swear it was R. J. Bainard?”

“Why's it matter him?”

“It matters!”

She tried to embrace her father for both their sakes but he wanted an oath from her, something solid he could defend and lean on, like a wall to a wounded soldier. “It was him, Daddy. I wouldn't lie.” He lifted her into the cab of his truck and closed the door with grim resolve more frightening than if he'd slammed it.

On the drive to the doctor's house, Adele's head lolled with the road's rhythm. She hurt between her legs, inside her jeans. She studied herself sluggishly. How had R.J. removed her jeans? They fit so tight, she'd had to lie flat on her bed to zip them before going out. Uncertainty seized her. The liquor that had clouded her night threw confusing clues. A teenage dossier of feels and fingerfucks made shame the surest thing.

The doctor, a white-haired gentleman whose office was decorated with Norman Rockwell prints that he could have modeled for, examined Adele through her clothes. Nothing broke or bleeding, go home and rest with a wet cloth over the eyes. Outside in the waiting room he told her father, “You wanna claim her boyfriend thumped her, I'd say you got a case.”

Frank remembered his argument with R.J. earlier that day and accepted that his only honorable course was to kill him; the thought was exhausting, like last chores to do before bed. First there was more to ask about his daughter's condition, if he could get the words out. He couldn't.

“He raped me,” Adele whispered in the next room.

The doctor's wife, who attended all her husband's examinations of women, was folding towels by the sink. “Dear?”

“R. J. Bainard raped me. In his car.”

“Do you know what you're sayin'?”

Adele's eyes tilted upward to keep tears from spilling. “I know what's rape.”

The woman handed her a robe from a hook on the door. “Bottoms off. Put this on.” She summoned her husband. “Girl says there's something more.”

He examined her closely this time. Wincing as he straightened his back, he closed her robe and asked without looking at her, “Were you a virgin before tonight?”

Her mouth crumpled. “I've had … I've let them…”

The doctor's wife cut in. “Have you gone the limit, dear? He needs to know.”

There was a split-second interval, as between the plunger and the dynamite, before Adele answered, “Never.”

Frank was brought in to hear it from his daughter's mouth. He asked to use the phone to dial the chief of police at home. It was late. The Chief was a recent appointment by the Lake Charles City Council, brought in after a long stint with the sheriff's office in Pinefield. There he'd gained a reputation as a lawman who'd bend the rules for those that deserved it and never for those who didn't, exactly the discretion the elite of Lake Charles preferred in their public officials.

Hollis Jenks, yawning and scratching his hairless head, listened to Frank without urgency until he heard R. J. Bainard named as the perpetrator. Though new in his position at the department, Chief Jenks was aware that the Bainards were big in Lake Charles and that sex accusations against an heir to the Block's retail chain would reverberate statewide. He told Frank to stay put until he and his deputy arrived to question his daughter. Showing keen understanding of how things worked around here, the Chief then called Richie Bainard, whom he knew by reputation if not yet personally, to tell him what had happened and that his son better get his story together. It was a short conversation on account of Richie smashing his handset through the telephone dial.

Richie had composed himself by the time he addressed reporters outside the Block's headquarters after Adele's story came out. He was lavish in praising Mary Billodeau, assuring that he bore no ill will toward the woman on account of her crazy daughter. Bonnie stepped forward to add that if Mary wished to stay on as manager of the Lake Charles Block's, the company would welcome it. Abelard Percy, the family lawyer, formally denied all charges against R. J. Bainard. The accused, out on bail, stayed home.

*   *   *

A
BE
P
ERCY LOST
sleep and gained weight as he became ever more nervous that this case would crown his career. He wasn't a trial lawyer. State law permitted him to conduct the defense if his client so desired. Richie, who was paying the bills, did; R.J. didn't care. Abe took it on out of loyalty to R.J.'s late mother, whose death he blamed himself for.

He deposed Adele Billodeau gently, presenting his questions like a benevolent uncle seeking to clear up a misunderstanding. He knew he'd have to attack her in court. She must admit to drinking that night, to having welcomed the prospect of backseat foolery with a handsome older man and semi–war hero. Her thighs and pubic area had been bruised; her jeans and underwear, stained from when she'd put them back on after intercourse, were otherwise clean and not torn. A minor point alongside other evidence, Abe planned to highlight it on grounds of common sense. You don't remove pants that tight without a struggle or help from the girl. She should have thrashed like a deer in a trap. She should have seized the moment of his trying to get her pants off to break free and save herself, had she wanted to. Her reputation suggested she hadn't.

Adele began to doubt her own memory. From a distance she saw R.J. on a street corner one afternoon. In bed that night she remembered how, before he turned scary, he'd kissed her neck, his hand warmer than the skin of her breasts as he'd caressed them under her blouse. She might have let him go further had he kept that tender tack. She squirmed under the covers almost feeling his embrace, almost tasting his tongue. R. J. Bainard on a winter night in her seventeenth year—why not? She'd pleased enough boys other ways, it seemed silly to withhold, not least to satisfy her own curiosity, the prize contained inside her.

And she felt sorry for him. Dropping offhand clues of melancholy and solitude, he'd behaved nicely through much of that evening. Her deepest dread was that she may have invited the assault, tempted him somehow. Had she ruined his life even more than he'd ruined hers? She went to her father with her fears. Frank shook his head fiercely. “Bastard raped you. Never doubt it.”

“It's just sometimes I wonder if boys think with me it's okay.”

“I told you he done it. Now drop it.”

“He's not the first to try.”

“Goddamn you, girl!” Frank raised his fist before burying it in shame behind his back. He leaned into his daughter, pressing roughly against her to force from inside his chest the secret he didn't want to reveal. “R.J. done it in revenge against me.” His voice was spooky at her ear. “I am so sorry for that.”

He'd told no one about his affair with R.J.'s stepmother. Nor had he followed through on his impulse to kill R.J. out of fatherly duty. He'd rationalized his lapses in honorable terms. Adele had suffered for his misdeeds, but Mary, his wife, was unscathed. Richie had retained her as store manager—finding out about Frank and Angel's affair would surely change that. Wouldn't it be better if Richie and Mary never learned of their spouses' betrayal, if the whole lousy business faded away quietly and R.J. was convicted on evidence already at hand? Frank thought it a fair hope until his daughter's self-blame broke his heart and forced him to come forward. He sat down with state prosecutors and explained that R.J. had somehow discovered his and Angel's affair and threatened to take revenge. He gave the same statement to Defense Attorney Percy. He resigned as Wildcat coach and after a difficult dialog with his wife, packed a bag for a room in town.

Abe telephoned Richie with these revelations, prompting a savage reaction that gratified Abe with its vision of the Bainard world collapsing. Richie's vow to Abe that he would see Frank Billodeau dead was a forgivable reflex. It turned out that Frank was exactly that by dawn the next day. From the sprawl of his body beside his truck outside town, investigators judged that he'd been leaning against the radiator when he put the pistol to his head. He left no suicide note, though the care he took to spare his family from finding his body suggests contrition for disappointing them so.

It shattered Adele. She couldn't face a trial supported only by a mother she distrusted and lawyers she didn't know; she decided to drop the rape charge against R.J. It never happened officially, however. He jumped bail before she notified the court of her change of mind. Informed about it afterward, she was so offended by his gutless flight that she decided to let the charge stand and make him run like a dog for the rest of his life.

Frank's testimony would have sealed the verdict—that was R.J.'s thinking when he bolted. The decision proved overhasty, since Frank's suicide and Adele's second thoughts came less than twenty-four hours later. It also proved tragic following another call from Abe on that same confused day, this time to tell Richie that in light of the new evidence the prosecution, citing a motive, would base its case on R.J.'s hatred of Adele Billodeau's father.