Turtle Baby (26 page)

"I appreciate your time," she said, rising and moving toward one door as he moved toward the other.

The encounter had been a perfect void. An absolute absence of connection, providing not one shred of help. An expensive, tedious waste of time. Bo fondled the pack of cigarettes in her purse and thanked an oblivious universe that she hadn't been born in Pakistan.

"Miss Bradley," the Imam said from the other door where a guard stood ready to escort him back to wherever he came from, "in the Qur'an are many repetitions, many ways of saying only one thing—that there is no god but God."

Bo was sure she saw the tiniest twinkle in his eyes before the guard ushered him away, and the door clicked shut.

The Qur'an, she assumed, would be the Koran. And there were many repetitions in it. So what? There were many repetitions in the Bible, the Talmud, and the Yellow Pages, too. Was he trying to tell her something, trying to be helpful? Or was he just being facetious in his inscrutable Muslim fashion?

Bo called a cab, which would come from the town of Minden, thirty miles away, and stood in the hot shade of the roof overhang, smoking. Were there repetitions in this case, all pointing to one thing? The only repetition she could see was, literally, poisonous. A baby and his mother, poisoned. Different poisons, but obtained from natural sources.

Exhaling, she watched cigarette smoke drift through razor wire. Smoke could not be cut, and so merely floated through the murderous metal as if it weren't there. Bo thought the answer to the puzzle might be found in the same way. If she could just change her own perspective into something entirely different. If she could just think like Chac, and understand the meaning of the Maya folk tale.

Instead, she thought about Dewayne Singleton. His conduct report said he escaped from a farm crew working outside the fence cleaning ditchbanks. Had the ditches contained a poisonous plant that grows wild in streambeds? And why had he run to California? The heat must be getting to her, Bo guessed, because the thought of Dewayne brought with it an empty gray feeling. The feeling she got after tearing the house apart looking for something only to remember it wasn't there anymore.

Going back inside the prison's cement-floor lobby, she breathed the weak air-conditioning and tried to think about nothing until the cab came.

Three hours later she awakened from fitful napping at another steamy airport, this one identified by a member of the cabin crew as Lafayette, Louisiana. The home of Andrew's sister, she remembered groggily. Part of her elaborate, failing investigation. Only a few miles from Franklin, where Dewayne Singleton's family lived without a phone.

Elizabeth was waiting for her, looking a great deal like Andy would look with an extra fifteen pounds and a sex-change operation. And a measurably different taste in clothes.

"I'm Liz Barrileaux," she told Bo through an unaffected hug, layers of gauzy lavender material draping her well-endowed frame. "I don't know what you've done to my brother, but it's a damned miracle. Welcome to Lafayette."

The woman dressed like a 1960s folk singer, and exuded the unsentimental warmth of somebody who has no illusions and enjoys life anyway. Bo liked her immediately.

"I didn't know your name was Barrileaux," she said. "Andy's only told me you're a psychologist, and that you've got three kids."

"Two kids and a clone of Miss Manners," Liz chuckled. "Our oldest, Jeanne-Marie, is her Uncle Andy all over again. Born in the wrong century. We were terrified she was going to be a nun just so she could spend her life observing an elaborate etiquette, but she's finally fallen in love, thank God. Gorgeous boy with the brain of a small reptile. She's only seventeen. The boy won't last, but the inclination will, we hope. Stoney secretly ordered a case of champagne the day she told us she wanted to be called "J" because that's what the boyfriend calls her. Say, am I boring you?"

"No." Bo grinned. "I've just come from a color-coordinated prison with a hog lot. Hearing normal stuff about normal people makes me feel less like dancing naked on the baggage carousel. Who's Stoney?"

"Gaston Barrileaux, father of my children. He would've been the mother, too, if he could've figured out how. We have a nontraditional relationship. I earn money; Stone does everything else. Far from 'normal.' Have you had anything to eat today?"

Following the woman to a battered Volvo station wagon in the airport parking lot, Bo was surprised to remember that she hadn't.

"No," she answered. A gray sky glowered at her personal incompetence. People with psychiatric problems were supposed to take care of themselves. Exercise. Eat right. Be constantly on guard against lapses in routine that could pave fools the way to dusty death, and worse.

"Bummer," Liz Barrileaux intoned while driving at breakneck speed through what seemed to be a nondescript middle-sized town. "I don't suppose I have to tell you that you know better. Fortunately there's some kind of twenty-grain soup in the fridge. Gus—that's our fourteen-year-old—is into being politically correct, only eats things that don't bleed. He made the soup last night out of lawn clippings or something. It'll hold you through a nap until Andy gets in from New Orleans and we can find a restaurant that serves real food."

Andrew's sister, Bo decided, could give Erma Bombeck a run for her money if she ever tired of the psychology business.

"Don't you see clients on Monday afternoon?" she asked Liz.

"Nope. I teach at USL until one thirty Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Only see clients Tuesday/Thursday. Also evenings and weekends. Jeanne-Marie's got a scholarship to Smith, but the other two are going to require money. Stoney's picking up a few bucks, too, doing historic restorations. He practices on our house. Wait'll you see."

Bo relaxed, admiring an enormous oak in the yard of a large red-brick church.

"Biggest damn oak tree in the country," Liz mentioned. "Close to five hundred years old. Has lights on it at night and its own social club called the Live Oak Society. Real snobby. Only oaks over a hundred years old can join. Dues are twenty-five acorns."

"You're not serious." Bo chuckled.

"Yes, I am. You're in the South here, honey. Eccentricity's a way of life."

In a few minutes the car made a swooping turn into a narrow driveway, nearly demolishing a cardboard sign taped to a grape stake pushed in the ground. "Three Twenty Seven Stevenson" it announced in perfect Times Roman letters painted hot pink.

"Angela," Liz sighed. "Our 'surprise baby,' as they say. She's only eight but already planning to join her dad in the architecture business. Right now she's obsessed with typefaces, designs these house number signs all day. Says she has to 'live with' a design for a while before painting it on wood to sell to the neighbors."

Bo grinned. "I think that color could use a bit of forest green outline," she suggested. "Just on the verticals."

"My God, another one." Her hostess groaned. "I'm not letting the kids near you until you've had something to eat and a nap. They'll adore you!"

Three hours later Bo awoke on the hide-a-bed in a book-lined den over Liz's office, a converted single-car garage. A spiral staircase snaked around a brass pole, connecting the two rooms. Taped to the pole was a sign saying "Welcome" in dalmatian-spotted Old English lettering. The musical pounding rain above suggested that Gaston Barrileaux had practiced the early-South art of tin roofing on his own house. Bo wished she had a tape recorder so she could hear it again and again. Especially at the office, she grinned, when Madge was talking.

From some distance below drifted numerous voices, including that of Andrew LaMarche, laughing more frequently than was his habit. After popping a Depakote and freshening her makeup in a cypress-paneled bathroom with an Italian tile floor, she went downstairs. The living room, deserted, held more books, two desks, a couch and overstuffed chair. There was no TV.

Tracking the voices, she entered a breezeway off the open front door. Paved in flagstones, it led to a detached family room in which six people sat at a table playing Monopoly. This room also boasted no television, Bo observed with approval. A man who looked like a brown bear appeared to be winning the game, given the piles of miniature money tucked under his side of the board.

"Bo!" Andrew called, delighted, "you're up."

Bo noticed something just under the surface of his bon vivance, hidden behind knitted brows and a shadow deep in his eyes. He knew something she didn't know. And it wasn't good.

The bear stood and wrapped her in arms the size of lawn mower tires.

"I'm Stoney, the brother-in-law," he growled fondly through a curling black beard topped by a moderate handlebar mustache. "You must be the Irish filly that's hauled Ole Doc here down from his ivory tower. Helluva job."

In a blue-striped dress shirt and jeans held up with red suspenders he reminded Bo of Dickens's Ghost of Christmas Present.

"And these are the kids," Liz interjected, "although you'll have figured that out by now. J, Gus, and Angie."

Shyness, Bo noted, was not a characteristic of the Barrileaux family. The youngsters flocked to her, asking questions about California, movie stars, graphic design, and the ecology movement as Andrew beamed and put away the Monopoly equipment.

After fifteen minutes Stone clapped his hands and said, "Hey, how about some chow?"

"Laissez les bon temps rouler," Angela giggled, and then raced out the door to the car.

"That means 'Let the good times roll,' " Andrew explained as he hurried Bo through a light rain. "It's a Cajun thing."

"I can see that," Bo answered. Then she whispered, "Andy, what's going on? There's something you're not telling me. What's happened?"

"We'll talk later," he said tersely.

At a restaurant called Randol's Bo inhaled a bowl of corn and crab chowder, then couldn't finish her crawfish etouffee. After several rousing two-steps on the restaurant's raised dance floor with Andrew, Stoney, and then Gus, Bo felt her social obligations were adequately met.

"Liz," she whispered as Andrew waltzed with Jeanne-Marie, "I don't want to be rude, but the reason I'm here is that I'm investigating a case. Andy knows something he isn't telling me, no doubt because he thinks it will upset my fragile psyche. I'm afraid I'm running out of patience. I'd like to go home."

"About time," Liz answered, fanning her glowing face with a napkin. "My brother's going to lose you if he keeps pulling this protective crap." The words were tinged with sadness, not anger. "He can be a royal pain in the tail, Bo, but he's a good man. And I probably shouldn't say this, but his level of pompous nonsense invariably goes off the scale after he's been in New Orleans. Did he tell you he always visits his daughter's grave when he's there?"

Bo shook her head. "Sylvie's grave? He didn't mention that."

She remembered the two-year-old who'd died so long ago. A child he'd never seen, whose small ghost had directed the course of his adult life. Medical school, then a specialty in criminal pediatric trauma. Child abuse. He wanted to save the rest of them.

"And here's something a little lighter, in case you need it." Liz grinned conspiratorially. "Our name isn't really LaMarche, it's Lagneaux."

"What?" Bo said. "Why ...?"

"Dear old stuffed-shirt parents changed it so they'd seem less Cajun. But deep inside, your Dr. LaMarche out there in the mother-of-pearl cufflinks is a Cajun boy named Jacques Lagneaux who used to sit on top of graveyard mausoleums with a curtain rod, pretending he was back fishing in a bayou." She adjusted a wide bracelet on her wrist and smiled at Stoney and Angela on the dance floor. "A terrible grief can make people forget who they are," she sighed.

"Wow." Bo nodded. She had no idea what she could do with the information.

Later Andrew provided more, germane not to himself but to a poisoned mother and baby.

"I phoned my service this morning from the conference," he began, "and there's a great deal of news. First, Acito's test results are in from the lab. He isn't HIV positive, Bo. We're not out of the woods; it could conceivably turn up later. But the likelihood of that is very small. It looks like he's going to have a life!"

"All right!" Bo grinned, sighing with relief. "But why didn't you tell me that before dinner? We could have celebrated. And what's the rest of the news?"

Andrew clasped his hands between his knees and stared at several shirt cardboards littering the floor, covered with alphabets drawn in Bodoni type. "There was a message asking me to call Detective Reinert."

"Yes," Bo said. "I told him that was the only way to reach me, in case he got the lab report back on the water in my desert jug, or something else broke on the case that I'd need to know about. Which is it?"

"Both." Andrew LaMarche's need to exercise control had never been more in evidence. "I'm afraid the news confirms the identity of the killer, but Bo, there's absolutely nothing we can do about it. There's no way to prove it, no way to prosecute. It's just one of those situations that slips through the cracks. And there's something else ..."

Bo found sitting in Stone Barrileaux's oversized recliner suddenly unbearable. Struggling out of its oxblood leather depths, she paced up and down before a coffee table made of an old paneled door mounted on two stubs of what had once been an Ionic column.

"Something else! You haven't told me anything yet. Do I need to call Reinert myself to find out whatever he told you? Who do you think you are, Andy? And what in hell are you trying to do?"

Andrew stood up from the blue plaid couch where he'd been sitting on the edge, and then sat down again. His face bore signs of misery. Bo was not appalled at the extent to which she didn't care.

"I didn't want you to be upset," he began. "I wanted ..."

Bo felt her ears moving, flattening against her head as her nostrils flared. "You do not control whether I am upset or not," she pronounced in a deliberately sibilant voice. "Can you understand that? You ... do ... not ... control ... me. Not in San Diego, not here in your sister's house, not anywhere! Now, are you going to tell me what Reinert told you or not?"