Turtle Baby (25 page)

"Here," he said, leading her across the street to what looked like a park full of little houses. "I used to play in here as a boy. We can sit in the shade until you feel better."

Bo restrained an urge to tell him she wouldn't feel better until she was no longer carrying an absurdly coquettish umbrella when there was no rain. Sitting on the ground beneath a large magnolia, she leaned against the whitewashed brick wall enclosing the area. The old bricks were cool and smelled of the moss growing in their mortar.

"The Ellen Lincoln, 1895," she said to herself. "The Hannah E. Schubert, the Ethel Maude ..."

Atop one of the little houses, Bo noticed, was a draped statue whose head had fallen into the weeds below. Headless, it nevertheless seemed to be staring into the sky where gray clouds were gathering. On the black iron gates guarding the space she noticed iron faces of lions, their mouths open in silent ferocity. From the mouth of one dangled a dead daddy longlegs.

"Andy," she said quietly, "this is a graveyard."

"Lafayette Cemetery Number One," he agreed nervously. "At sea level burials must be above ground because the groundwater would float anything ... It doesn't matter. Why don't we go back to the hotel, Bo. I'm not doing well at caring for you, am I?"

Smoothing the legs of her navy knit slacks, Bo remembered too late that dark colors absorb heat. Good thing the matching top had been at the cleaner's. Her white cotton shell could no longer be described as "crisp," but at least it wouldn't parboil the flesh beneath it. Near a trash can beside one of the little house-graves a faded yellow ribbon hung limply from a wreath of dead flowers thrown there. Bo thought she could smell the flowers, rotting.

"Yes, the hotel will be fine until my flight to Shreveport for the interview with Dewayne's friend in prison," she answered. "And this is something I hope you'll understand. Sometimes I just feel a little, well, overengaged with things. It crops up when I'm too tired and for a zillion other reasons. When it happens, all I need is to be let alone. This is one of those times. I'll be okay after a while if I just have total peace and quiet, don't have to talk or be polite or even be aware that there's anybody else around. Can you handle that?"

"Yes," he said with reassuring confidence, and helped her to her feet.

Bo was glad he hadn't said, "Oh, you don't have to be polite with me," or "Don't worry, you won't even know I'm there." Just being in the same room with somebody else, even if they were perfectly quiet or even asleep, was at times a sort of low-velocity drain on her psychic resources. Bo wondered if the magnetic field generated by bodies was supposed to drain mental energy from everybody who happened to be around, or just from those already weakened by psychiatric stress.

"Did you say you used to play in here?" Bo asked. "Doesn't seem like a fun place for a kid."

"It was prettier then," he answered. "My family's house is just around that corner."

"Oh, I want to see it, Andy. Another fifty yards in this heat isn't going to make any difference."

Andrew's gray eyes were liquid with concern. "I think we should return to the hotel immediately," he said.

"We will. We'll just walk by your childhood house on the way. I really want to see it."

With the crumbling tombs behind her, Bo felt somewhat better. The air felt cooler, too, or at least darker. Peeking from beneath her umbrella, she noted that the sky was uniformly gray now, and a light breeze rattled the stiff, almost plastic magnolia leaves littering the ground. Impossible not to think the sound was like old bones moving. Brittle bones, fragile and forgotten. Like Chac's would be in the Tijuana graveyard. Like everyone's would be, eventually.

A sign on the cemetery's brick wall announced that the superintendent of cemeteries was someone named Clementine Bean.

"Oh, my darlin'," Bo sang softly, "Oh my darlin' Clementine, you are lost and gone forever ..."

"Bo?" Andrew's face bore telltale signs of panic.

"Sorry." She smiled, pointing to the sign. "Just one of those inappropriate responses to stimuli we of the straitjacket set are prone to. I'm taking my meds, Andy. Nothing major's going to happen. You can relax. Now which one's your house?"

"There," he said, indicating one of the traditionally galleried facades half hidden by a spreading oak rooted in a small front yard. "Twelve twenty-one. It's been painted, but other than that it's just the same."

Bo didn't miss the note of resigned bitterness in his voice. The boy who played in a graveyard had not been happy in this house. Behind the cast iron railing of its four-pillared lower gallery, Bo saw two long windows, their deep green louvered shutters closed. Had they been closed thirty-five years ago when a social-climbing Cajun couple lived here with their children, Andrew and Elizabeth? He'd told her he joined the Marines and went to Vietnam to get away from them. Beyond the second-story gallery the shutters remained open, and Bo could see rivulets of condensed water running down the interior faces of the tall, old-fashioned windows. An air-conditioner hummed.

"What was the worst thing?" she asked.

"That my sister Elizabeth and I were supposed to be their tickets into a world that didn't even know they existed," he answered quietly. "Just one more piano recital, fencing match, debutante ball, or school award, and they'd be accepted into what they thought was 'society.' Except they never were, and so to them we were failures. Mon dieu," he sighed. "What a waste."

Deciding that a serious rally was in order, Bo took his hand and looked hard into his eyes. "In my terms you're as far as it gets from failure," she told him. "I think you're wonderful."

In his smile as he wrapped his arm around her waist Bo felt something breaking, falling away. Like a film of glass.

"Then I am." He laughed. "And we'd better get to the trolley. Hear that thunder?"

Turning left onto Camp Street, Bo stumbled on the uneven brick sidewalk, set in a herringbone pattern now outlined in moss. In the odd, prerain light everything seemed bathed in grayish gold, like a faded daguerreotype. Set in the rumpled brick design was a gleaming circle the size of a dinner plate, embossed with a moon and nine shooting stars. It seemed incongruous, even magical there beneath a delicately overhanging crape myrtle hedge.

"Andy, look at this," she said.

"I know. When we moved here I was only about five, and I thought they were giant's coins stuck in the sidewalk. It was a real blow when I found out they were only water meter covers."

"They're not; they're giant's coins," Bo insisted. "And we're going to get wet."

A filament of lightning threaded the eastern sky, followed by distant thunder. No birds could be heard, and in the dimming light the pink petals of a huge crape myrtle in the lawn of a tattered Greek Revival mansion appeared magenta, then charcoal gray. Bo allowed the deliciously moody imagery to flood her mind. Why not? Hadn't Dr. Broussard suggested that she should respect her own experience? This experience was suffocatingly hot, lush, and fantastical. Bo memorized the details in case she wanted to paint them someday. But how did you paint air that seemed made of transparent mercury?

The streetcar still named Desire rumbled beneath the dense canopy of oaks shadowing St. Charles Avenue, its headlight feebly yellow in the gloom. As Bo and Andrew climbed aboard, the first dime-sized drops of rain made whispery thuds against the windows.

On the bus ride from the tiny Shreveport airport to Wade Correctional Center in the middle of nowhere, Bo sifted images of New Orleans and wondered why the city was so appealing. It must be an innate artistry, she thought. A blatant celebration of mood, facade, presentation.

In the hotel room after Andrew had left for his conference, she'd listened to cracking thunder and watched the city deluged with rain. An umbrellaed woman in a beautiful long skirt striding the length of a brick wall had been a painting. Everything in New Orleans was a painting, a scene, a play of style and texture. Its doorways, courtyards, balconies—all iron-laced and dripping with rain—suggested secrets, slow corruption, a sad, accepting wisdom. These lay beneath the perennial gaiety, she mused. It was a distinctly European atmosphere, and one that had resonance in her mind. The same could not be said of her feeling for Tijuana, and in that moment she'd understood why.

The world south of the U.S. border, while influenced by its Spanish invaders, had retained a distinctly un-European mythos. Its gated courtyards and baking, lizard-scratched walls hid something quite different from the world-weary sophistication of New Orleans. Something unknown to minds nurtured by Western European ideas, and therefore frightening.

As the bus pulled through two cyclone fences topped and lined with razor wire, Bo wondered how much that disparity would inhibit her ability to understand what had happened to a Maya singer in a Mexican bar. She would have to try harder, she decided. Really breach the barrier between her reality and the one in which Chac and Acito had lived. She would start now.

Climbing down from the bus, she took note of where she was. A prison. Dewayne Singleton had been sent here after bombing out in two others closer to home. His prison master record sheet and conduct report, faxed to San Diego from the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections in Baton Rouge, had said he was a discipline problem. Not surprising.

What was surprising was that he'd been judged criminal, when the cause of his troubling behavior was an illness. Bo wondered where the defense attorney's head had been during Dewayne's most recent trial. Who wouldn't suspect a psychiatric disorder in somebody who stole insects and then sold them as vitamins? Louisiana, Bo remembered, wasn't exactly on the cutting edge of psychiatric care or public defense.

In a cement tower overhead, two guards watched the razor wire. One carried a riot gun, the other an M-14 rifle. On a path between the stacked spirals of shrapnel a row of men in jeans and white Tshirts filed noisily into a side door. Names and numbers were stenciled down the sides of their pants legs and across the backs of their shirts. The bright red stenciling, Bo observed, matched almost exactly the red-orange vincas planted in tidy, geometric arrangements beside the battleship gray cinder block buildings. She wondered if they'd hired a decorator to coordinate the color scheme.

On a southerly breeze Bo sniffed evidence that Wade Correctional Center maintained its own hog lot. She hoped the hogs had a traditional mudwallow, because even in

sunlight flies and mosquitoes were omnipresent, droning and whining in the sultry air.

Inside, Bo showed her CPS ID badge to a guard in a blue-black uniform with red stripes down the pants legs. A decorator must have planned this refreshing use of red accents, she grinned to herself. Or else they were using discarded costumes from the chorus of The Student Prince.

"This way," the guard roared as if she were not the only person standing in the twenty-foot-square lobby. "The Imam's been brought up. I'll stay in the room if you want."

"No, that's all right," Bo replied. "But what's an Imam?"

"The prisoner you requested an interview with. The Muslim dude."

Bo sat in one of the plastic bucket chairs surrounding a narrow table in the tiny interview room, and waited. Soon a second door opened at the back of the room and a large black man in a white skullcap entered and sat down across from her. Even in prison jeans and T-shirt he exuded a sort of immaculate dignity, tinged with contempt. He looked straight through her and said nothing.

"Hi," Bo said, extending her hand across the table. "My name's Bo Bradley. I'm an investigator from Child Protective Services in San Diego. Dewayne Singleton is connected to a case I'm investigating."

"Yes," the man replied softly, and did not take her offered hand.

Oh, shit, Bradley. Remember the guy's a Muslim. In his view women, especially white women, are on a social par with rabid dogs. You'll be lucky to get two words out of him.

Bo retracted her dangling hand and wondered how to proceed. The Imam merely sat and gazed at a point above and behind her head.

"Look," she began, "I know that you've been brought here against your will to be interviewed by a creature you regard as loathsome. I'm sure it's terrible for you, but this is the way it is. Dewayne Singleton is in California and may or may not have poisoned a child that is legally his, and murdered his wife. For what it's worth, I don't think he did either. The baby, a male baby, by the way, has no one in the world now but Dewayne, who has a psychiatric disorder and has eloped from a hospital. I need your help. I need for you to talk to me about Dewayne."

The man appeared to be considering her words, although it was hard to tell since nothing about him moved or changed. He didn't sweat, didn't even seem to be breathing. Finally his eyes focused on hers. The experience was transparently distasteful.

"Mr. Singleton's conversion to Islam was very dramatic," he said in well-modulated English. "I suspected a problem of psychiatric nature, but even that cannot stand between a man and God. Mr. Singleton was devout. There was no conversation between us about a child, although he did say that he had a wife in Mexico. In Islam he came to understand his responsibilities to her. If what you want is my assessment of him, I will say that in my personal opinion he was not capable of the deeds you describe. Will that be all?"

"No, it won't," Bo answered, stifling an urge to reach across the table and pull his white cap over his nose. "I need to know if he said anything about his wife before he escaped from here. I need to know about his family, particularly. You're his spiritual leader and the last person to have any close contact with him. A baby's future is on the line. Can't you just lighten up and talk to me?"

The Imam remained motionless.

"No," he said.

Bo sighed, facing yet another cultural barrier closing her off from an elusive truth.

"What are you in here for?" she asked bluntly, expecting no answer.

"Murder," he replied in the same, soft voice. Nothing in his face betrayed the slightest interest in that, or in anything else Bo might say.