The Do-Right (25 page)

XXXVIII
XXXVIII

SHE SAUNTERED INTO the bait shop at nine o'clock in the morning, the boats that were going out already on the bayou. Just driving around, she said. Her husband traveled: he was in and out. Didn't take her with him, and she liked to see places. What could Mr.…she peered up at the sign…Mr. Pettit tell her about this place?

Little nervous-acting but she had feathery red hair, the shade that'd always snapped his neck around. The shade he liked best in the magazines, whether the woman or the girl or the child was photographed or sketched comic book-style, red-orange hair falling over the chains or the rope. The man picked up a sack of Fritos from the display stand, strolled outside, fished her a Coke from the cold drink box and popped the cap off. “For free,” he said. He set up a lawn chair that had been folded next to the door and offered it to her.

She smiled but sat down on the steps looking up to him and ate the Fritos right there, licking salt off her fingers. He sat in the chair, shook out a Pall Mall and lit it.

“Can you blow smoke rings?” she asked, her lips testing a little smile. She was holding on to some sunglasses, but she didn't put them on.

He manufactured a smoke ring, and the smile turned into a laugh. “Look at you! I admire that trick.”

He lifted up his chin and described the type of fish they
had around here, the weather. She know about hurricanes? Where was she from originally? Didn't sound like here. No, she said, Oklahoma, and bit slow into a Frito. It interested her hearing about hurricanes, he could tell, and fact was, nobody'd been much interested in anything he said for some years now.

She took out some Juicy Fruit, offered him a stick, but he was liking the talking. This woman here, she probably thought she was smart. So many of them did. But one that looked like her, she could be smart for a while for all he cared. He gave her a history of hurricanes going back to Galveston in 1900. Course he wasn't there then—he paused for her to smile, and she did—but he'd heard the story enough. She just leaned back on her elbows on the steps, head cocked, listening. A damn boat was coming in, the choking Evinrude making him have to raise his voice as it brought the fool to the dock. He gave the man his deposit back hastily, out of his own pocket. He was afraid she'd get up and leave.

She didn't. He finished telling her about the Seawall, and then he asked her how a man might see her again.

“I'm a married woman,” she said. “I'll always be a married woman.”

“Don't mean you're dead.”

“Near enough.” She looked at her nail polish and looked at him over it. “My husband, he's an older gentleman.”

He took that in, meaning she didn't think he was an older gentleman, though he clearly was, older anyway than her—at the same time he took in the ring, gold band, no rosette of sparklers on her finger. She didn't much sound like she was from Oklahoma. Clip to her speech. But the important part was that red hair, the bangs spilling across her forehead, the sweep of it onto her shoulders, red red red, and that she didn't walk off while he was talking.

“My husband is out of town until tomorrow. He's closed his office while he's gone.” She said this like she was just holding up her part of the conversation. Wasn't even looking at him. Surprise drove back his shoulders. He'd heard liars report lines like this but none had ever been directed at him.

A cloud shifted, and the sun did its Bible pose, sending out separate, dazzling rays. That just made it all better.

She ruined it a little when she added that her husband sometimes changed his plans. That her husband carried a gun. He didn't like how that sounded. But the rays lit her up, and in the glint from under her long black lashes—she sure had the eyelashes on her and those eyes—he caught her drift. This was play-like. This was a bored woman's game. He heartened. “Don't make a hill of beans to me,” he said.

She said she could see that. He was the kind of man who'd walk straight in the front door, not sneak in the back one. “You look like you can handle yourself.”

It was the sentiment the man had waited all his life to hear. He wanted her phone number, but she took his, writing it down on the inside of the Juicy Fruit wrapper. She smiled at him. She had just the one night alone. Maybe she'd call this evening, maybe she wouldn't, she said. She couldn't tell yet.

His gut clenched. He felt like somebody was giving him a Santy Claus present, then snatching it back before he had good hold of it. He wanted to say something smart but couldn't think of the right thing, so he settled for holding his jaw tight. As she got up, she swept a hand behind her neck and flipped the red hair off her shoulders. Then she thanked him for the Coke. Sashayed to her car, a new white Chevrolet. Waved. He just watched her.

The man sat out on the porch as the day burned on, in a lawn chair surrounded by some zone repelling time and the
store behind him, the bayou in front of him, the rotten old boats and their tinker-toy engines, always going haywire. He had a son who'd died and a wife who'd died, a daughter who didn't talk to him, and two grandkids that didn't talk at all.

A pretty woman had told him he was a man who could handle himself.

Wrote his telephone number on a gum wrapper.

Red hair. Eyes like bluebonnets.

XXXIX
XXXIX

THE AMBULANCE GUYS pounded the stairs, running up the gurney. They left it parked in order to surround Delpha with their medical attentions and careful voices. Not soon enough for Phelan, they lifted her onto it, said they'd be taking her to the closest hospital, Hotel Dieu, and he could ride along. Knowing he couldn't, Phelan squeezed her hand, loathe to let it slip from his. Her eyes shut.

He'd stood back for the swarming homicide squad, handed over the book to some unfamiliar detectives and was quarantined on the plaid sofa until he'd answered the same questions five or six times. Once they said he could go for now, he gladly put distance between himself and what was left of Dennis Deeterman. He jogged past patrolmen holding off a Channel 4 news crew, whose microphone he batted aside.

Phelan took up residence in Hotel Dieu's waiting room and played the scene in the office over and over. How it must have been for Delpha. How it could have gone. How it did go.

A kid popped a potato chip bag with a
smack-bam
, jerking Phelan's head up. The kid's mother seized the hair top of his head and yanked him, yelping, into the chair beside her. People wandered out rattling change in their pockets, wandered back in with candy and coffee.

Phelan got on the pay phone. Couldn't reach E.E. at work, couldn't reach him at home. Talked with Maryann
until a banker-type behind him said, “Playing through, pal.” Phelan said goodbye, and the banker seized the receiver, dialed, ripped off his tie, and crammed it into a pocket. Snarled, “Get down here, you piece of shit, she's hanging on just for you.” Slammed down the receiver and marched from the waiting room.

Families, singles, couples sitting there cast furrowed-brow glances toward the exiting banker. People looked at each other and then somewhere else.

Phelan sat back down again, but stood up any time a white coat appeared in the doorway searching out next of kin. He hunched forward, elbows on knees. Unwelcome pictures flooded. He should have been there,
could
have been there in the office instead of pigging out on goddamn nectarines.
Can it
, he told himself,
you got cops down at your office wading in Dennis Deeterman's venomous blood, which he will never ever use again. Only thing that matters now is Delpha pulling through
.

Close to six o'clock, a slight, baby-faced doctor with Afro sticking out from his white cap gave Delpha Wade's brother the news that his sister was out of surgery and expected to survive.

“Can I see her?”

“Not yet. She's gone back to sleep again. Take it easy on the visiting for twenty-four hours.”

Phelan's processing mechanism had a lag in it. “What?”

“Just a precautionary measure. Calm down, Mr.…” The surgeon consulted a clipboard. “Wade. Twenty-four hours of solid rest. Come and visit tomorrow evening.”

“But that sounds like there's some doubt that she'll—”

“No, no, she'll recover just fine.”

“Swear.”

The doctor's gaze tightened. His professional demeanor
gave way to the man behind it: he had a chest without heft, but he hefted it. “Your sister was stabbed, Clyde. All kinds of bad come with a wound like that, physical and otherwise. You're talking to the doctor that sewed her up, and I have assured you she will recover. You want another color doctor, I can send one out. And I'm a surgeon, not a sorcerer. Some winged monkeys fly through the window, carry her off, that'll be out of my league.”

Phelan was waving both hands. “No offense, no offense, no offense, promise you. Just I'm kinda…I'm all…she's not my sister.”

“Oh. Well, OK then, all you gotta do is believe me.” The young doc bummed a cigarette to take back to doctorland.

Phelan called the station. Fontenot crowed, “She got that tahyo, I tell you, that girl—”

“Self-defense. I wanna hear E.E. say nobody's gonna arrest her or anything.”

“
Alohrs pas, cooyon
. Nobody's touching that girl. Is the doctors fixing her up good?”

Phelan blew out his breath. “She'll make it. Don't you ever go home, Sergeant Fontenot?”

“
De temps en temps
. Feed the dog. You want the chief.”

“Yeah.”

The sergeant informed him that E.E., a Bobcat, twenty men with shovels, and a rig of lights had set up in the woods back of Deeterman's white ranch house. They were there along with County and some State, and what they expected to find left E.E. in no frame of mind to be interrupted.

Phelan thanked him and hung up the phone. Located a name in the phone book, jotted the address and number. He lit a cigarette and went to blow out the match when a man with a cigarette clenched savagely in his teeth loomed in front of
him. Phelan held still, lit up the banker, too. Burnt his finger,
shit
, and the phantom finger set up a commiserating howl.

He swung out of Hotel Dieu's parking lot, wended his way through the downtown and back onto I-10 to HWY 69, leaving the freeway out by the LVNA canal. He passed the water-processing plant, paralleled the embankment that held back dark water. Found the street and turned. Big lots in this neighborhood, an acre, acre and a half each, brick ranch houses set back, nice lawns, oaks, dogwoods, shrubs. Chemists could afford these places. Plant managers could afford them. Lawyers, company owners, they could afford better.

He pulled into a driveway with two cars. '66 Ford Falcon with a primered fender. Last year's Impala 4-door, white.
For Sale
sign planted in the yard. Wind had risen, blowing his hair into what felt like peaks. He raked it down. This time, if it was needed, he had the right card. Several of them, as a matter of fact.

A tall guy, longish hair, answered the doorbell. Young man, he noted on closer inspection, it was the graven expression that conveyed age.

“Good evening, sir. I'm Steve Russell. Real estate.” Phelan extended a card. “Would you be the owner?”

The young man automatically took the card, answered no, called, “Mom. Real estate guy.” He handed over the card to the woman who approached his shoulder, but he didn't leave. Stood there, slightly in back of her.

The woman, dressed unseasonably in black slacks and a close-fitting black T-shirt pushed up at the elbows, glanced first at the card and then out at Phelan.

“Evening, ma'am. Like I was telling the young man, my name is Steven Russell. I see your house is for sale. You may
be happy with your agent, but if you're not, I'd like to offer my services. Is there anything else I might do for you, Mrs. Robbins?”

She hadn't introduced herself, but any respectable real estate agent would have learned the owner's name. He wanted to use her name, the real one.

Wouldn't have known her in a million years.

A hundred, anyway. The dead, pale-brown hair she brushed back as she looked up was almost as short as a man's, chopped pieces on the crown, shaggy in front of her ears. Glasses rested low on her nose, and—a feather swiped his spine—he was not looking into the leaky dull-brown he'd looked into at Leon's. Nope, how'd she do that? Her face, thinner now, was dominated by her eyes, and they were blue as cobalt.

And alert—she knew him, all right. Soon as she spoke, it was a lock.

“We're satisfied with the company we've engaged, Mr.… Russell, but I wouldn't mind hearing what your firm offers. I'll show you the grove around back. My husband designed and planted it.”

“I'd love to see it.”

“Mom, the realtor we have's fine.”

“I'm sure he is,” Phelan said. “I only stopped by—”

“Excuse me,” the young man said extra-softly. He turned from Phelan to his mother. “Thought you needed to go over to Margaret's, Mom.”

“I've got time to talk to this man for five minutes. It's OK. Go on and finish packing.”

Mrs. Robbins led Phelan around the side of the house to the back yard. There was no yard. He found himself gazing on a fairy forest that stretched far back to a wooden
fence. Red brick pathways, lit by glow-lights in the grass, wound under the trees—must be fifty of them: fruit, pines, hardwoods, drooping willow yonder, nearest to him the broad waxy leaves of a magnolia, blooming its candlelight white. Fireflies darted and flickered among the trunks. The dampness here was cooler, breathing, murmuring, swaying, full of contrasting, leafy scents.

“Most every kind of tree that grows well here and some that don't. That one to the west side is a sequoia. Ten years old.” Tension squelched the pride in her voice. “What do you want?”

“I'm a simple man. Had a little spare time and wanted to meet the woman I'd worked for.”

“You met her.”

“Lloyd's pictures worked out for you?”

“Yes, well enough, and I have no idea what you mean.” The large eyes held him fixed until he broke off the contact and inclined his head, studying the pattern of the brick.

“Assumed that. Your husband's logbook—who ended up with it?”

“Margaret brought it to me as soon as it showed up again. Once the sale went through, the logbook couldn't incriminate anyone. She knew I'd want it. Because it was Charlie's work.”

“Plato Willis is having bad dreams about bacteria. Who got which kind, Mrs. Robbins, and did Wallace get any?”

“Persistence
is
your strong suit, Mr. Phelan.” She glanced at her watch. “You have more bacteria in your own mouth than there are people in the world.”

He wasn't going to get any more. The breeze cut through his hair. Involuntarily he turned back for a last look at the grove. Found himself drawn to strolling into it, mosquitos be damned. Silly, given the circumstances, like he shouldn't be here in the
first place and in the second place, this woman wanted to forget she knew him. Retroactively. But look at all this—he took in the waving branches, orchestra of murmurs, cut-lace shadows, the tiny auras of light. Out of the rise of insect din, he distinguished a tree frog's
ek ek
. Rain, maybe. Despite himself, he said, “Your husband, he was an amazing guy.”

The woman collapsed from the middle. Phelan lunged, but she was suddenly sitting tucked, forehead on her knees and arms squeezing round, contracted into a tight package. Her head moved rhythmically, lifting and falling onto her knees, an odd, silent version of beating your head against a wall.

He held back till he couldn't, then he reached, and she allowed him to steady her upright. “I haven't found anything else yet that accommodates these ghastly…moments.” She glanced back. “I have to go now. And so should you.”

The son was walking toward them. He called, “Hey, Nixon's on TV swearing he never had a clue about Watergate.” He seemed to be taking a wary inventory of his mother. When he drew even with them, he laid a loose arm around her shoulder. Said, softly again, to Phelan, “Full up on realtors” and accompanied his mother back into their house.